In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by the sponsors on this series to discuss the importance of democratising strategic workforce planning (SWP) insights.

Joining him, are strategic workforce planning experts, and Co-Founders of the revolutionary SWP AI platform, eQ8 Alicia Roach and Chris Hare. They have been at the forefront of driving innovation and excellence in SWP, making them the perfect guides to navigate the complex terrain of strategic workforce planning and the strategies needed to democratise it.

In this episode, you can expect learn more about:

• The latest developments in the dynamic HR tech landscape and their implications for SWP;

• eQ8's innovative new product designed to democratise SWP insights and the motivations behind its creation;

• The concept of "upstream thinking" and its crucial role in SWP;

• The potential pitfalls organisations face when they don't embrace democratisation;

• The holistic approach HR and people analytics leaders should adopt to effectively democratise SWP;

• Strategies for communicating the urgency and benefits of SWP to leadership teams;

• The future of democratised SWP and skills-based planning, along with advice for staying ahead in this evolving field;

• Tips for staying adaptable and responsive to emerging HR tech trends without becoming overwhelmed.

Don't miss this opportunity to gain exclusive insights that will propel your employee experience to new heights. This episode was brought to you in partnership with eQ8, a strategic workforce management tool. Explore eQ8's cutting-edge solutions at eQ8.ai/Insight222.

Additional Resources:

• Chris Hare’s article on upstream thinking: https://eq8.ai/blog/unsung-heroism-of-swp

[0:00:00] David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome two of my go-to experts on strategic workforce planning, Alicia Roach and Chris Hare, former practitioners themselves, and the Founders and co-CEOs of eQ8, an HR technology platform for Strategic Workforce Planning, or SWP.  In today's episode, we are going to be delving into the critical topic of the why and the how of democratising strategic workforce planning.  We also discuss the role of HR can play in empowering business leaders with the tools and knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their workforce.  We will also explore the potential pitfalls organisations may face with regards to SWP, and discuss the approaches HR and people analytics leaders can adopt to effectively democratise workforce data and gain C-suite level buy-in.  So without further ado, let's kick off the conversation with Alicia and Chris. 

Alicia, Chris, it's a pleasure to have you both on the show.  Alicia, you joined me last year on an episode discussing the intricacies of strategic workforce planning.  And Chris, today is your debut on the show.  Please, can you remind listeners about maybe your backgrounds and what you do at eQ8, and the progress that eQ8 has made since Alicia and I spoke about 15 months ago now?

[0:01:34] Chris Hare: Sure.  Alicia and I are deep practitioners of strategic workforce planning.  It's something that we love, it's kind of our life's work.  It's been a terrific kind of past year, I think, since Alisha last spoke with you.  And David, I know you're quite into music.  For us, this is our music.  It's been a terrific year because we've gotten to spend so much time with people across the world who are also passionate in this space.  I would say though that there's kind of two tempos happening here.  We've got folks who are also practitioners and they're just looking for greater enablement in the space, and that's been a great area for us to spend a lot of time and focus; but there's actually many more who are kind of new into the space and they're just trying to figure out how to get started.  And there's just so much noise in the broader system around skills and all the different things that we could be doing, I think some people are still exploring the strategic workforce planning space.

Alicia came into the area back in the early 2000s from a corporate perspective and was working from finance, coming into HR, trying to answer a fundamental question for an airline, "We're buying billions of dollars of airplanes, will we have enough pilots?" and that was a really clear use case.  But we can see across that, again, that broad spectrum of the two-tempo folks, their businesses are changing.  And they're changing very rapidly, and they need a way to face into that and open up a discussion, but many of them aren't sure exactly how to get started.  So, we've been spending a lot of time, particularly in the last few months, thinking about that issue, how to get people started.

[0:03:23] David Green: Yeah, that's really good.  And obviously, you mentioned you're both deep practitioners in this space as well, and also you mentioned Alicia's previous life at a rather large airline in Australia.  I wonder which one that could be!  But look at her LinkedIn if you want to find out, everyone.  But how does it help you as former practitioners, I know you did consulting first, and now you're building technology; how does that help the two of you in working with customers to solve their problems?

[0:03:52] Chris Hare: I think it's crucial because we're not talking about a piece of tech that replaces tech that people already had, or a process that people knew really well and we've just taken that and put it online.  This is a new way of thinking.  And the customers that we come across, across those two tempos, even the practitioners, they're still trying to earn credibility in this space.  SWP is a new way of thinking and many of their senior executives, for instance, have never been on the journey.  So, whether we're working with deep practitioners or people who are new to this space, they all need a bit of a helping hand as well as a platform to help them do it.

[0:04:33] Alicia Roach: And I think it's important because I think we can get particularly, I think there's a skills frenzy, there's a tech frenzy as well, and rightly so.  Technology is cool, and I'm sure we'll go into a bit of that.  But in the tech frenzy, we kind of have to step back.  And you can't just plug and play a tech and go, it's a magic button and it's going to solve all of my problems.  For us, it's kind of a three-legged stool.  We see a platform as fundamental, yes, for strategic workforce planning, but you also need to have the right process to support how you're going to do that.  You need to really bring it together with other elements, and just having tech for tech's sake can miss some of the other supporting elements that go alongside for success?

[0:05:19] Chris Hare: That's right.  That third leg is really philosophy, so having that desire to look forward and think about the future and make decisions that are going to future-proof the organisation, as opposed to being very, very agile and just reacting as fast as you can.

[0:05:37] David Green: So Alicia, I know our listeners are always keen to stay up to date with the latest developments in HR technology.  Could you give us a sneak peek into some of the key innovations you've observed in the space over the past year?

[0:05:50] Alicia Roach: Yeah, it's a good time to ask this question because we're hot off the heels of HR tech and UNLEASH and no surprises, skills dominated as did AI.  So, I think it's fairly representative of what's been going on over the past 12 months, But I think we need to kind of step back again with both of these things and ground it a little bit.  I think with AI, it's great and it has its uses.  And I think people are kind of going a bit like, "yeah, we know AI, but what's it actually going to do for us; what problems is it actually solving?"  And we can't, as vendors, just go, "We're just dropping it into our product" and tick the box, we've done our bit there.  I think what I've really started to see, and I saw an HR analyst say this over the past week, utility over novelty, and I think that's really important.  I think that really brings us back to a good place and where HR should be, in looking at all the tech frenzy, and that also brings me to skills. 

I think the skills frenzy has been around a few years now.  I think it's not brand new, but it looks like it's here to stay, and rightly so.  It's important, and I think people are starting to now ask the right questions about skills.  And, they may have scraped their workforce to do skills inference, they may have looked at the labour market insights to understand what's in the market and predict some sort of future external skills that will be in demand.  But I think what people have found with where they've gotten to in their skills journey is that a lot of it's interesting but not necessarily actionable.  And so people are kind of, I think, looking to that next level of -- and, it's what we've always said in people analytics, David, it's the, "So what?  So what's this actually telling me?"  And then, "Now what?  Now, what do I actually need to do about this?"  And I think that's where we're really seeing the call to action in HR tech, is it needs to compel us to do something, enable something for us, for our businesses, because there's so much cool stuff in tech, but it really comes back to what are we trying to solve for; what are we trying to enable for our businesses?  And I think people are really realising that now.

[0:08:00] David Green: I'd love to understand from you, very quickly, this skills question.  Why is there so much talk about skills in your view, and obviously, as former practitioners that have worked in the space?

[0:08:12] Chris Hare: I think there's a real fatigue that organisations have had with the high degree of change trying to, through Herculean efforts, just keep hiring against that.  They can see that they need adaptive people and by the time they found someone who fits the DNA of the organisation, they want to hang on to them.  But the roles that they're doing today versus that same title role two or three years from now is going to be doing something fundamentally different.  And I think the leading organisations can see that and that just managing just based on roles is too generic. 

But I think it's a new frontier.  And so, there is some flailing around how to get a handle around this, and I think it's twofold, actually.  I think there's a little bit about what is the best way to get a grip on skills within the HR community, to have a good conversation and to plan actions; and then I think there's a whole other section around, how do we have this conversation with business leaders who aren't just sitting here and reading the same materials that we're reading day in and day out, how do you have a coherent conversation with them?  And there is a risk that if we go too far down the bits and pieces around skills, we'll lose them in that conversation, they won't understand the tie to their commercial issues that they're facing day to day.  And so there's these tension points, but I think overall the move around skills is for a good thing.  It's to take the people that we've got and take them on a journey.

[0:09:48] David Green: Which leads quite nicely, I think, to the next question, Alicia.  I know that you've recently released a new product at eQ8.  I understand it's a product designed to help democratise strategic workforce planning across an organisation.  Please can you share more about the product and why you decided to build it?

[0:10:05] Alicia Roach: Well, as you know, David, as you know me, I'm probably one of the biggest SWP evangelists getting around on this globe.  I passionately believe in this stuff.  I have seen the impact it has when it's done properly.  To me, it seems like a no-brainer, and something that I've really struggled with is, why is not every single organisation doing this?  It's so impactful, the workforce is their biggest asset, biggest cost.  We've heard all of that, and it's never made sense to me why it hasn't just become so much more mainstream.  So, we actually did some research on this earlier this year on the state of SWP, together with Aptitude Research, I know you know Madeline from there.  And indeed, it confirmed only 14% of orgs take a strategic long-term view to workforce planning, and I think it's around 18% actually have a skills-based approach to their talent planning.  And from your own space, I know you guys are seeing this too.  I saw something on myHRFuture, where it's something like 90% of orgs want to be doing skills-based workforce planning.  So, why aren't they? 

So, we looked a bit further into this and the research, together with what we've found since launching our own SWP tech over the last few years, it just kept coming back with the same few recurrent themes and hurdles that keep coming up for people.  And it's usually around people, so capability so, "We haven't done this before, we don't have a specialist, we don't have an expert, we don't have a team, we don't have the time", that kind of a thing; data, "Oh, we've got to get all this data perfect and in place, or processes to support that"; and cost, "We don't have the budget, we don't have stakeholder buy-in". 

So, we're creating a product to overcome that, which is in beta testing right now, it's super-exciting, and this will help people who maybe just don't even know where to start with SWP or what it looks like.  And it only requires some basic data points, like how big is your workforce, what's your current turnover rate, and we do everything for you from then on.  We guide you through the end-to-end SWP process, from translating strategy into workforce implications, scenario planning, action planning, all the things that you'd expect, but in a really cool UX.  It's so fun.  I mean, I know you're probably rolling your eyes and going, "Yeah, but you already think SWP is fun", and I do.  But this is like next level fun.  It's more like a B2C UX, so it's really fun and engaging, it feels like a game.  You swipe left for this strategic priority, swipe right for this action.  It's really fun.  It's really engaging and really accessible.  And it even has wombats, so that's cool.  Who doesn't love wombats?  A nice Aussie animal!  

I think as well, what's really cool in this democratisation piece, so this isn't just for an SWP person or even a people analytics person or even an HR leader, it's for all of them, but it's also for business leaders.  So, this is putting it in the hands of anyone across the business so they can answer, "Well, I've got this huge thing happening, this huge digital transformation agenda", or, "There's some external stuff coming our way that's going to impact our revenue targets.  What are the workforce implications?  What are the show-stopping skills?" and that puts these answers in the hands of the business leaders who are navigating this stuff.  And that is really why it's such a game-changer.  You don't have to have any expertise.  You don't need to have anything.  You can just get going, and we're so excited by it.  We're getting some really early feedback from the market in the beta process that's reinforcing that.  We had an HR industry analyst say, "It's the coolest thing seen in HR tech in a long time".  So yeah, we're very excited.

[0:13:48] David Green: So, we're going to move a little bit from technology now to philosophy, so we're coming over to you, Chris.  We're going to call you Homer today as our philosopher!  So, in one of your recent articles on upstream thinking, you highlight how strategic workforce planning is hard to explain but crucial to do, and I think Alicia has just explained exactly why it's crucial to do as well.  For the benefit of listeners, and again, we'll highlight the article in the show notes, Chris, could you briefly explain this concept in the context of strategic workforce planning?

[0:15:09] Chris Hare: Sure.  And for many of your listeners, they're doing lots of work in the space around people and around items that have long tail impacts.  And SWP in particular is one of those things that there's work that we're doing now that will have some tangible impact now but has a lot of impact over the future.  Part of what I was trying to express in that article was just that at times, it's hard.  And I think it's hard in the SWP space, but I think it's harder in the broader HR space.  We're doing great work in things like employee value proposition, diversity and inclusion, wonderful things around culture.  And along with those, SWP is exactly as you said, it's hard to explain sometimes, it's hard to get broader business attention.  We get the yeah, yeah, yeahs and they know they need to do it, but they don't understand the wonderful business impacts in the way that we do, and SWP is like that.  It's crucial, it's crucial to have a future-based conversation and know where you're going. 

Really, the epiphany that I had, because I could feel this contrary pull around why aren't people in the broader community just grabbing this, the way Alicia kind of expressed, and it really is because this muscle that we're working on is upstream.  You know, what's a hero for people?  One of the analogies that we quite gravitate to is the idea that the three of us are sitting by a river and we see a child struggling in the water.  If you dive in, David, and you bring that child to the riverbank, you're going to be a hero.  We're going to be patting you on the back.  And we see the next child, maybe I'll have a turn, maybe Alicia will have a turn.  By the time we've gotten to 20 of those, we're all going to be pretty exhausted, but we'll be pretty proud of ourselves. 

What we should do though is one of us should walk up the river bank, up river, and see who's throwing these kids in the water.  If you can solve that, if you can figure that out, you're not going to have to save 20 more kids later that afternoon.  But there are going to be 20 theoretical kids, no one's going to be able to point to them.  So, unlike earlier when we were getting a medal for what we were doing, because you could tangibly see, and I'll put this in the workforce sense, "We were able to slash 10% of the workforce, so that saved us $5 million, yay".  That's tangible and direct.  What we're doing in strategic workforce planning is going, "We actually managed to find the right amount of productivity and shifts in skills and reshape the workforce for next year.  And that actually realised $50 million of revenue that we wouldn't have had the capacity for".  But that direct line is not as clear. 

This is the conversation we're trying to have, who's the bigger hero; the one that does the decisions that have long-term effects that are a little harder to see, or the immediate impact?  And the overall kind of sense that I want folks to get from this is, the work is valuable.  But it's not just about shifting how you're thinking about the workforce, it's how your leaders think.  They are also rewarded for saving the drowning children.  And we adapt very rapidly as humans to be able to do whatever the environment throws at us, and we'll preserve that environment.  We'll create a system where we're constantly heroes, but we'll burn ourselves out.  This is about shifting that thinking.  And I think as folks start to enter into this space, it's going to be really important.

[0:18:49] David Green: Putting all that together, Alicia, what are the pitfalls that organisations face by not democratising strategic workforce planning?

[0:18:58] Alicia Roach: Yeah, so by not democratising SWP and therefore not necessarily doing SWP, orgs are really missing the S, the W and the P.  So, what I mean by that is, the S is really about that strategically planning for the future, lifting the gaze out of the day-to-day and that daily struggle that Chris just talked about, that upstream thinking, that scenario planning, that understanding what if this happens, and importantly, getting that critical alignment across business leaders for where the business is heading and how it's going to get there. 

The W, understanding that link of people to purpose, what's it going to take to achieve our strategy?  What workforce segments and skills are critical?  Who needs to have them; to do what, when, and to what level of proficiency?  That is a fundamental piece that's missing, that link, in many organisations.  And again, just blows my mind.  And then the P, the plan, the last part of SWP, that's creating that coherence around what we're doing, not just as an HR function, but with anything that touches the people in our organisation, whether it is a technology enablement, or whatever, we need to distil the thousands of things we could be doing into the most impactful things we should be doing, that are enabling us as a business to achieve what we need to. 

So, organisations that are not democratising that, that are not answering these questions to their business leaders, are missing some fundamental parts.  And that's why we see this reactivity, this knee-jerk kind of play that many orgs are stuck in, and they just react quickly and call themselves agile and pat themselves on the back.  But it's exhausting, and it's not making the right decisions, and it's not creating a coherence, and it's not socially responsible.  So, we're not doing the best by any of our stakeholders across the board, and that's what orgs are missing out on by not doing this. 

[0:20:51] David Green: Yeah, and I'm just thinking listening to you there, Alicia, it's reminding me of the episode we did last year when we started talking about the Bs of workforce planning.  I can't remember how many were there, six or seven, but it was quite a lot of Bs.  But if we think about it, workforce planning informs all of that.  So, whether we buy talent or buy companies to close a closed gap; whether we build by learning and actually build using relevant learning that actually the business needs moving forward, and that people want as well to develop their careers; whether we borrow, whether that's borrow from outside the organisation with contingent workers or consultants, or frankly borrow from within the organisation as well, which I guess brings us to the talent marketplace craze that we've got at the moment.  There's bridges there. 

I'm going to let you talk about the other Bs, but I think briefly, because we can refer to the episode, but I think basically workforce planning informs all of those, which ultimately are the HR programmes that most organisations are delivering to the organisation as well.

[0:21:52] Alicia Roach: Absolutely, but only by having that line of sight.  And I'd just say, on the Bs, I think everyone's got a version of the Bs.  I think the most we heard, Chris, was maybe someone's got nine bees; we've gone with six; some people have any other version.  But, it doesn't really matter what number of Bs you have, it's having that line of sight to the future versus where you are today is the only way you can work out what balance of Bs you can have in the mix, because the reality is you can't just click your fingers and materialise the skills overnight.  Upskilling, reskilling, cross-skilling, borrowing, building, these things take time, and so you need that line of sight.  Well, what are the critical skills we need in one year, two year, three years so we can start bringing our organisation on that journey?  And that takes planning. 

This is, again, why it just blows my mind because we have an asset, we have people, we need to bring them on the journey.  And so, we need to have that coherence of how we're doing that.  And the only way of doing that is by lifting our gaze and looking to the future.

[0:22:56] Chris Hare: That's right.  And I think it is about creating the foundation for the people plan, but it also informs tech that will enable people and business process improvement, and some other things.  The ROI is so high on build and on other initiatives besides just hiring, but the problem is you can't do them as fast.  And so companies that live quarter to quarter, or dare I say, many who live week to week, they're not able to look forward enough to see that.  So, they have a menu of skills, and I think you hit on this, you touched on this very briefly, with learning and development needs to be targeted, it can't just be the menu of items, but you can't do that if you don't know where you're going.

[0:23:40] David Green: Yeah.  And nine Bs sounds like a hive to me.  Sorry, that's my dad joke for this episode!  I think we're seeing in many organisations that we're working with at Insight222 now, that companies are combining people analytics, people strategy, and workforce planning together, which seems sensible to me, and putting it at the right hand of the CHRO and getting exposure to the business, whether that's the leaders or the business unit managers.  I don't know briefly if that's something that you're seeing as well. 

[0:24:13] Chris Hare: I think that is the best practice.  I think housing those things together gets you a real engine room.  When you don't have those combined, particularly that strategic piece, you end up with a group that's producing lots of dashboards that don't really move the needle.  So, there's lots of information rolling around, but not a lot of action.  You need that cohesiveness, as you say, in the right hand of the CHRO to kind of put all these different insights together on a platter and make it very easily actionable.

[0:24:45] David Green: Chris, staying with you, obviously we've talked about technology.  It's one way to help democratise strategic workforce planning, but there are other factors, obviously, that contribute to its success.  We talked a little bit briefly about philosophy and process.  What would you say HR and people analytics leaders need to be doing, on top of investing in tools and tech, to help achieve the democratisation of data across the board?  We may have touched a little bit on it there with where you house it as well.  I'll let you explain more.

[0:26:06] Chris Hare: If I think of those two tempos I talked about at the beginning, deep practitioners and HR functions that are very mature in this space, and HR functions in businesses that haven't gotten anywhere near this kind of stuff, the thing they have in common, and we've talked a lot about a lot of different aspects of this space, and it can seem like a lot to people who are still exploring; but let me simplify.  Forget all the different things that we've just talked about.  If you start a conversation about the future, you don't need tech, you don't need a lot of whiz-bang things to do that, but you need to have the desire to get your leaders talking about the future.  And I think for far too long, we talked about the HR being a strategic partner, for far too long, HR has assumed those conversations are happening.  And by the time they're hearing the need to quickly hire, the need to do that, they assume that it's been a well thought-out plan and their job is to go execute quickly. 

I'm here to tell you, in all the scenario discussions that I've had, I don't think I've had one where I've seen leaders are totally aligned and know exactly where they're going and share the same view of risks and share the same view of trajectory.  They could have all signed up to the five-year plan.  But the problem is the five-year plan sits at a broad level.  The five-year plan doesn't break down into a value chain across everything and go and say, "This division is increasing by 20% and that one's down 30%.  By the way, it depends on customer behaviours at this midpoint.  And if transformation initiative delays by six months, this is what it means".  It's not integrated in that way, and therefore it's not driving the right behaviours and the right kind of discussion. 

So, HR, facing into the kind of paradox around all these different moving parts, just simply needs to open up the conversation.  Now that conversation is about the future, and it's drawing in hopefully some quantitative aspects to get people engaged.  We don't want it to just be a kumbaya, where do we think the world might go, maybe.  If it's qualitative, you're going to lose some people along the way.  But if you've got a small number of data points like, "Are we going to grow by 20% or decline by 20%?  What are customers going?", those kinds of things, it opens up that future conversation. 

Again, it's not something that HR has to bang on the table and do every day.  But certainly once a quarter, we can stop for 90 minutes, two hours with the leadership team and say, "Let's revisit where we think this organisation's heading.  Let's revisit how we best serve customers".  That's really, I think, where people need to go beyond the tech.  If you have that kind of conversation, which underpinning that are these concepts of demand and scenarios, you're 70% of the way through what strategic workforce planning really needs to get going.  Sure, over time you can get more mature and you can add more aspects to that conversation, bringing in skills, bringing in more quant, but just have the conversation about the future and you're ahead of the game.

[0:29:26] Alicia Roach: One thing I'd just add to that, because I think it's so interesting, as well as not having seen leaders in a scenario discussion align, one other thing that's been really amazing with the many customers we've worked across the globe is, every organisation has quite a comprehensive transformation and digitisation agenda.  And no organisation that we've come across has a centralised view of, firstly, what all those initiatives are, and secondly, and more importantly, how they're going to impact the different workforce segments in different ways.  And so that's why we just see such huge rates of failure.  I think the famous one from the Harvard Business Review was 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail, and that's like $900 billion a year, and that was a couple of years ago, of wasted money.  And that's because orgs just don't have that line of sight.  We've got all these moving parts, but they're going to impact different segments in different ways.  They're going to require different skill sets, not just to stand them up, through the project of this, but to operationalise it. 

Also, really missing a trick in getting that line of sight.  And I think, that's just, yeah, a huge opportunity and something that, again, back to Chris's point, just having a conversation around what is on our transformation agenda?  What are the enabling skills for this?  What's it going to look like when it's operationalised?  What's it going to do to our customer journey?  And therefore, how does that shape and shift the customer facing roles?  Just some of these basics that are surprisingly not that well thought-through, or that's often thought through in the business case lens is, how many heads can we cut by bringing this tech?  And yeah, that's just very myopic.

[0:31:17] David Green: And I guess if we're talking about the future, there's always going to be an element of uncertainty and I guess that's where the scenario planning that you spoke to, Chris, really comes in, isn't it?

[0:31:25] Chris Hare: That's right.  And because it's so uncertain, David, I think, and I'd be interested in your views around this, having you speak to so many leaders in this space, it's almost like, back to that paradox kind of comment from Nick, it's almost like, "Oh, that's hard and difficult to solve and there's no certainty that we will solve it.  So, I'll go back to my people space and my listening space because at least I can get some tangible things there and I can be in my domain knowledge where I feel comfy".  But the problem is, the organisation is aching for this and somebody has to grab it.  And we saw during COVID, when there were huge amounts of uncertainty, HR all of a sudden got a different type of mandate.  Let's not lose that.  Let's use that to say, "This future is uncertain, but we got to talk about it, folks".  We can't just kind of put our fingers in our ears and just see where we end up, because we're going to end up in a ditch.

[0:32:20] David Green: How can HR leaders better communicate the urgency and long-term benefits of a strategic workforce planning to leadership teams, who may be more focused on immediate priorities, and sometimes that's understandable?  And again, if you're able to share some of the companies that you think are doing this well, you might not be able to mention them by name, but maybe you can mention what industry they're in or something. 

[0:32:42] Chris Hare: Sure.  So, let's think about twofold answer in this space.  I'll use shorthand for purpose, it's about revenue; and second, it's about being a responsible employer.  So, let me start with the revenue side of things.  Too often, when you hear strategic workforce planning, it means different things to different people, and it's a headcount, bidding exercise, it's a hiring plan.  Ultimately, most people are stuck in this mindset that it's about optimising costs or maybe enhancing profitability, and it's the wrong mindset.  SWP, the reason it's SWP is it's enhancing revenue and capacity.  It's about customer and what is our purpose and how are we going to help customers. 

Often, for the organisations we work with, a lot of them are seeking increasing sales.  They're facing competition, the consumer choices are changing, how people expect to buy from them is a little bit unknown, but they're executing large transformation initiatives.  And if they mess that up, if they don't get the right people in place, they're not going to be able to serve customers and they're going to lose them; they're very hard to win back.  One of our customers is a large humanitarian organisation.  They're not trying to win revenue, they're trying to save people's lives.  And if they don't have the capacity adequately to deal with the uncertainties that are happening in the world, if they don't plan, if they just wait and see what happens but they don't build the capacity in the right way, that has dire effects, and we're not talking revenue.  So, I think it's really important that our people analytics and HR leaders understand this is a different type of play here around the capacity of the organisation to achieve its purpose.  And people are going to be the make or break of that. 

The second thing I'll say is, most of the organisations, again in that two-tempo thing that have practitioners, have thousands and tens of thousands of employees.  You cannot be a responsible employer if you can't look five weeks ahead on what you're doing.  Sure, you can bring in, Alicia, you made the comment to me earlier today, gig economy people, that's separate; contractors, that's separate.  But you could see a world in the future, David, where you have a choice of working in two banks, and one of them you know does strategic workforce planning and the other one's agile.  Which one do you feel more comfortable that you've got two to five years potentially with?  Probably the one that can actually think about the future a little bit and think about your place in it.  That's the one that I would want to work in.

I think that we're not there yet, so it probably seems like a long bow, but I could see in the future where that's an ESG criteria, "Do we think about our customers, how we're going to sustainably serve them with our employees?"

[0:35:47] David Green: So, coming to you, Alicia, again we're going to go into the future now, you're pretty good at doing this, how do you see democratised strategic workforce planning and skills planning evolving in the future, and what advice would you give to practitioners listening to this to help them to stay ahead?

[0:36:06] Alicia Roach: Yeah, so I'll start with the last part first.  I think the advice I would give is to just get going, don't wait.  I think a big thing we live by and try to instil with our customers is progress over perfection.  By the time you wait and build your perfect skills ontology or get the perfect HRIS and supporting data and processes, some of that stuff can take years.  And the world's moved on very rapidly and probably hasn't made the best decisions around the workforce.  So, I think just get going, start that conversation with leaders that we talked about.  And I think, we can get a bit like, "Oh, hang on, what is strategic workforce planning?  Too hard", basket, "I need a whole kind of infrastructure around that".  But it's back to that conversation. 

If we just boil it down into what we're actually trying to do here, it's going to, our CEO, "Hi, Sarah", or Joe, our CTO, "you've got a digital first strategy for your organisation.  You're trying to transition customers to digital channels to meet your significant revenue growth objectives by 2025.  Okay, so this means for our HR strategy that we need to evolve our workforce's technical and digital capability.  What does this mean for our strategic workforce plan?  It means we need a clear and coherent set of actions.  So, that might look like, well, we need to upskill the current CX team with A, B, and C skills over the next 18 months, hire Y number of full-stack engineers by 2024, engage said UX freelancers for 12 months from the gig workforce to deliver this specific project, because we know we can't hire those skills permanently and we only need them for a defined period", and so on. 

So, that's really what we're trying to get to here, is that coherent set of actions that enable what our organisation is trying to achieve.  And so hopefully, you can see how critical that is for the org in having that line of sight.  And that's why I just, again, urge people to just get going because our leaders are screaming out for this kind of support.  It's interesting to go, "These are the top ten skills that people are going to need in 2027, resilience, agility, etc".  What does that actually mean for us as an organisation?  We can't go out to our TA teams and go, "Hire me", this is one of my favourite things to say, we can't go, "Hire me 700 resilients.  I need 1,000 leadership".  Skills need to be grounded back into what they're enabling for our business.  And this is really how organisations will stay ahead in this space. 

I think, again, we listened to one of the other podcasts earlier this week with the Genpact leader who rightly articulated, and I think we interacted on LinkedIn over this, but the role of the CHRO is to make sure the organisation has that talent at the right place at the right time, which we know is SWP.  And if you don't get going on this, if you don't stay ahead in this space, either someone's going to roll through and solve this problem for your business leaders, "Hello, management consultants in a room with org charts and Sharpies", or your competitors are going to be doing that, and that's not good news for anyone.  So, I really think getting going with this, getting those conversations started is how you stay ahead. 

Then, where it's heading, yes, we're in the skills-based, talent-management frenzy at the moment, but I think where this needs to head for organisations is beyond that.  Skills in and of themselves need to be grounded back into that business problem and need to be grounded back into that business cadence.  So, as we're going through our strategic planning cycles, our financial planning cycles, as the world shapes and shifts overnight, how are we quickly able to revisit our baseline, not reacting quickly, but responding coherently?  And that's where the future of this stuff sits.

[0:39:52] Chris Hare: That's right, and I think we see our role in the future of those things in helping that democratised space.  Instead of making SWP this more complex thing that only management consultants and wizards and very complicated enterprise software can do, how can we just enable that conversation that creates the context around business change, skills, and people?

[0:40:13] David Green: We've talked a lot about the constant influx of new tools and solutions.  So, again, thinking about the HR professionals and HR leaders listening to this, what advice would you give about how to stay on top of HR technology trends while avoiding being overwhelmed?  It's easy to be overwhelmed.

[0:40:33] Chris Hare: That's right.  Well, and Alicia, you'll no doubt help me here.  I'm going to add one, David.  I thought you hit it really well, what you said at the very start of this, around thinking of what we're trying to do first and then going to tech; I think that's crucial.  The other one I'll add to this, sequencing.  It's a sequencing issue.  There's lots of shiny toys and neat things out there, but we've got to figure out the order that we're going to drive a sensible conversation.  How do we see the forest to then pick off the trees?  So for me, it's a big sequencing issue, and I think in some of the HR functions that I've seen where they've cobbled together a lot of different things, they've gone through a few years of permutation of information overload, and as you know, that then falls back into people's pet projects and the loudest voice wins.  I think people analytics and that tie again to strategy has been excellent at extracting out some of the noise, looking at some of the symptoms that we're trying to solve for and helping elevate that strategy conversation about, how should HR pick off this discussion. 

So, for me, it is massively a sequencing debate that HR has to have within itself to then figure out the problem is going to solve, in what order.

[0:41:53] David Green: I don't know, Alicia, if you've got anything to add as well.

[0:41:56] Alicia Roach: Yeah, just quickly, I agree.  We've got to look at what we're solving, what we're enabling for.  But I think when we do that, we need to go back and look at the cause of what is actually causally going to address this.  Because what we see, unfortunately, is a lot of tinkering with the effects.  So, as Chris said, we've seen a lot of orgs go on their tech frenzy and they end up with the latest and greatest, but then they wonder why they're finding themselves facing the same problems 12 months later.  It's like, "Oh, but we just did that org restructure last year and we did another one six months ago, then we restructured the IT centre of excellence last month, but why haven't we been able to deliver our CX change programme?"  Or, "We implemented this new workforce management tech, but why do we still have 400 open requisitions that we can't fill?"  Or, "We created our skill inference approach, but we still don't know actually what skills we need to enable our digital transformation in three years". 

All of those examples, we're tinkering with the effects.  We're deploying what we happen to have, we're moving around what we happen to have in our restructures, we're analysing and baselining what we happen to have in our skills influence, which is useful, yes, but it's not going back to what we need as an organisation, what our business needs to do what it is trying to achieve.  And that keeps coming up again and again for these organisations until they go causally and look at how we are kind of fundamentally creating that root cause analysis of what we're trying to solve for.  And so again, I know I'm kind of going around in a long way here, but yes, we need to solve the business problem and enabling our business, but we need to make sure we're doing that in the right way.  And I think that's where we can get a bit blinded and overwhelmed.

[0:43:43] David Green: We've come to the last question, believe it or not.  I've really enjoyed the conversation.  And given the time of the evening in Australia, maybe you're both popping for a glass of wine or something afterwards.

[0:43:54] Chris Hare: That's right.  David, any time with you is always invigorating.  So, we're not tired!

[0:44:01] David Green: So, before we get there, obviously in every series we have a question that we ask each guest, and this series, funnily enough, we're looking at planning for the future success of an organisation, so this should be right in your sweet spot.  What is the role of HR in helping companies plan effectively for the future of work?

[0:44:19] Chris Hare: This is such a great question and I think it draws a few threads together from the things we've been talking about.  We talked a bit about upstream thinking and the fact that leaders need to get themselves out of this, let's just fight the fire over and over and over.  Let's put in the code that prevents next year's fires.  We talked a lot about the pitfalls around not having the right skills in place, not having the right people, the uncertainty for our own employees, and ultimately, revenue costs.  We talked about the need for conversations to happen.  Who's going to drive those?  For me, I think the answer to this question is HR has a crucial role in sponsoring the conversation.  Nobody is saying, "HR, go off into your corner and come out with the answer".  HR's so good at that in its domain knowledge spaces, that's awesome.  That's not what's needed here. 

We need organisations to face into the paradox, and we need HR functions that are good at coaching and sponsoring crucial conversations that aren't happening.  That's what will make HR a strategic transformation partner, and that's what will help HR have a mechanism to get leaders thinking about the future so that HR can create its own people plans, so HR can create a sensible approach to help the organisation achieve its purpose, whether that's for customers and driving revenue or for citizens or for humanity.  Whatever that purpose is, HR can't just sit on the sidelines and hope that the leaders work it out and then they just go execute what the leaders worked out.  They've got to sponsor an upstream conversation.

[0:46:05] David Green: Great.  Alicia, is there anything you'd like to add?

[0:46:08] Alicia Roach: I think I'd just throw it back to something that just sprung to mind while Chris was talking.  We speak to a lot of organisations, we've done our own research over the years, and we say to organisations, "Do you know what workforce size, shape, skills you need today?"  And most organisations are like, "Not really, no".  And then we go, "What about in three years?"  And it's pretty much zero organisations have any clue.  We say, "Well, do you think your organisation is going to change and look different in three years?"  And 100%, every organisation knows it's going to change and look different in three years, but they've got no line of sight of what they need today, let alone what that needs to look like in three years.  So, it's like, how are you going to get there?  How are you actually going to be able to navigate; because what is your organisation?  It's the people in it, and that's what's shaping and shifting here, that's the change we're talking about.  And so that's really looking to the future, is having that line of sight.  And so for me, that's exactly what Chris has said.  That's where the conversation needs to centre around.

[0:47:08] David Green: Yeah, get ahead, be successful.  I mean, that's probably a nice way to end it.  Alicia, Chris, thank you both for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  I really enjoyed the conversation.  Can you let listeners know how they can find you on social media?  And I do recommend that people connect with Alicia in particular, on LinkedIn. 

[0:47:25] Chris Hare: In particular, I totally agree! 

[0:47:30] David Green: And find out more about the work you're doing at eQ8 as well.

[0:47:31] Alicia Roach: Yeah, so definitely LinkedIn.  I'm a pretty avid LinkedIn-er.  I love engaging with the content on there, but also our website.  We've recently changed that so it's got a lot more cool stuff, resources, research papers, calculators, all the fun things.  It's a whole world of SWP.  So, yeah, you can find that at www.eq8.ai.

[0:48:00] David Green: And any wombats there as well?

[0:48:02] Chris Hare: Not yet, but they will be coming.  They will be coming.  I think wombats are going to be a key theme for us.

[0:48:09] David Green: Good!  Alicia and Chris, thank you very much for sharing the in-depth complexities around strategic workforce planning and why it's so important for companies.  So, thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you again soon, hopefully.

[0:48:22] Chris Hare: Thank you.