Lantern or Lighthouse: Guidance System for Strategic HR Planning

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Sailing in the seas of workforce performance and development at times seems like a foggy and treacherous journey. We hear the waves crashing against rocks such as high turnover, engagement and culture unrest yielding low to no productivity. If we hit those sharp rocks our ship’s hull can rip open causing our precious cargo of high reliable quality, customer satisfaction, and positive financial performance to become lost to sea. The multi-directional winds such as market demands, increasing competition, regulatory requirements and population demographic shifts compel us to move forward.

The good news is HR has had a lantern or a lighthouse to see what’s ahead before running aground. The lighthouse is a great focal point when you know the direction to go. A solid integrated mission/vision along with engagement insights has always enabled organization to stay the course. The lantern is a useful in foggy conditions that enable us to shed just enough light to push on. Pulse surveys, exit/stay interviews, and performance meeting check-in’s shed enough light to know which step to take with workforce development initiatives.

But the even more exciting news lies within the exploding technology advancements, modern HR capability growth and key people strategies. These developments promise to give us better insight and our way forward, like never before. These advancements promise to be brighter and more intuitive piercing through the most ambiguous people related organizational dynamics.

Here is an intriguing strategic workforce planning potential:

Organizational Guidance System (OGS)

Dave Ulrich recently shared the time is now for an organizational guidance system. An OGS goes beyond the scorecard (past performance), dashboards (current information), and predictive analytics (what might happen). It functions as a unified set of organizational diagnostics that can be measured to determine current state in light of desired outcomes (remember our precious cargo) such as customer, financial and business outcomes. It would then offer guidance and an array of intervention options in order to attain the desired outcome. Read about the effort here.

An OGS would offer information along four pathways:

Talent: How well do our workforce practices enable an exceptional employee experience?
Organization: How well do we identify and create desired capabilities such as right culture, collaboration, efficiency, etc.
Leadership: How well do we invest in creating a leadership brand that delivers on promises to customers?
HR: How well does HR deliver valuable insights for business, customer, and investor/financial outcomes?

Instead of balancing between 7-11 different systems to pull data just to spend time understanding the information and formatting it in a way that is clear to others, having a unified lantern or lighthouse guiding our decisions is the way to go. If the following can be within our fingertips, embracing emerging HR Technologies is a must.

Workforce optimization and productivity
Human capital cost management
Workforce planning as a continuous intelligence model
Human capital data driven decision making
Enhanced organizational collaboration
Improved employee and candidate experience
Competitive positioning through the workforce

But a top way to miss the boat is to have internal suffocating or silo’d controls that stifle adopting creative approaches to new technology and data analysis advancements. The ability to have intuitive workforce insights that will enable optimization and competitive positioning seems be within our grasp. The best time to navigate otherwise choppy waters is now.

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Tresha Moreland

Tresha Moreland is a 30-year organizational effectiveness and strategic workforce planning expert. She partners with business leaders to develop workplace strategies that achieve best-in-class results. She has held key organizational leadership roles in multiple industries such as manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality, and healthcare. Tresha is the founder and principal consultant of HR C-Suite, LLC (www.hrcsuite.com). HR C-Suite is a results-based HR strategy resource dedicated to connecting HR with business results. She has received a master’s degree in human resource management (MS) and a master’s degree in business administration (MBA). She has also earned a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), Six Sigma Black Belt Professional (SSBBP) Certification. She is also recognized as a Fellow with the American College Healthcare Executives with a FACHE designation.