PD SPOTLIGHT ALEX HAGAN
When it comes to workforce strategy,
you need the right tools for the job
T
his story is littered with examples of confident, but wrong – sometimes hilariously wrong – predictions. In 1946, the studio head of 20th Century Fox said that television wouldn’t be able to hold any market it captured after six months, because people would get sick of staring at a plywood box every night. Just three years earlier, Thomas Watson, the president of IBM, famously said that there was a world-wide market for “perhaps five computers”. In 1973, Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying “I don't think there will be a female prime minister in my lifetime”. Before the decade was out, she was elected to that role. In retrospect, it’s easy to see the technological, political and social shifts that rendered these predictions wrong, but it’s harder to see the changes that will prove our current mental models wrong. Many people and organisations continue to make bold and confident predictions about their future today. There’s no doubt that the pace of change has increased dramatically since Zanuck, Watson and Thatcher made their bold predictions. The web browser is barely 25 years old, and it’s hard to think of an industry that the web hasn’t fundamentally disrupted. Twelve years after the first commercially mainstream 36
HUMAN RESOURCES
SPRING 2019
smartphone was launched, the way we date, get directions, hitch a ride, communicate, get our news and learn has been transformed. Today, new technologies are being adopted faster than ever before; whereas it took 30 years for 10 per cent of the population to have electricity and 25 years for the telephone, that figure dropped to just seven years for smartphones and 42 days for Pokemon Go. Against this backdrop of rapid and profound change, however, the process of strategic planning stays the same in many organisations. Strategy, as defined by the World Economic Forum, is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty – and it’s that last part, the conditions of uncertainty, that not only often gets neglected but is increasingly critical in today’s world. In the past 15 years, I’ve advised on and studied workforce strategy in a wide range of organisations around the world. Consistently, several common themes emerge for those who are successful in identifying, creating and supporting a futureready workforce. 1. They refine their people practices with data It’s a well-worn cliché that one size does not fit all. While many ‘best’
practices have evolved over years for good reason, every organisational strategy is unique, which means that not all ‘best practices’ are a good fit for all organisations. When we adopt industry best practice, we’re trying to standardise and be consistent with other organisations. Taken to its logical conclusion, if every organisation is successful at standardising, then no organisation will have an advantage. With corporate strategy, we recognise and embrace the idea that we need to differentiate, with a singularly unique vision and strategy – so why would we strive to be average when it comes to our workforce practices? Not a cliché, but no less real, is that usually the 'one size' that’s right for you won’t fit you forever. Organisations grow out of their practices as their circumstances change, and it’s important to know when that happens. Effective workforce strategy uses data to provide evidence about where people practices are working the degree to which they are working, and whether that’s changing over time. Having a handle on data, which is after all the language of business, is critical for today’s HR organisation. According to The Economist, as of 2017, data has now overtaken oil as the world’s most valuable asset – and like oil,
