(bright music)
- Hi, Andrew from SACS, and welcome to video number three
in our six part video series
on workforce planning for the new normal.
These are the topics that we've dealt with so far,
what is the new normal, workforce considerations,
what is workforce planning?
And in this video will be talking about strategy
and role clarity to give you some really clear ideas
about how to achieve clarity about strategy
at an organisational level, but also role clarity,
what makes people clear about their own jobs.
Now, this is a really crucial question,
because when people talk to me about workforce planning,
my first question ism workforce planning for what?
In other words, we need to know
what we are trying to achieve organizationally
and right down to the level of specific jobs
to understand the sorts of capabilities,
the sorts of backgrounds the sorts of experience
that we're going to need in our workforce
to be able to deliver those outcomes.
Many organisations lack clarity in this respect.
In subsequent videos, we'll be talking about things
like the SACS model of workforce planning
and leading you through some really specific examples
about how to lead workforce planning
and also what type of person copes with challenging times,
which is a really important aspect,
because workforce planning is so much
about change management
and about managing change effectively.
The value that you get out of workforce planning
is heavily determined by the clarity of your strategy.
Workforce planning for what is all about,
what are we trying to achieve
and what workforce will we need to be able to achieve that?
Many organisations think that they have strategy,
but what they have is vision or tactics.
What you find is that workforce planning really puts
the asset on strategy.
It clarifies what an organisation is about,
because the nature of workforce planning causes people
to enter into questions like,
what are we really here to achieve?
And therefore, what kind of workforce we're going to need
to be able to achieve that.
If you can't forecast the businesses
that you are likely to be in in the future,
then you're certainly going to start able
to build a workforce plan
that will service the needs of the organisation.
Virtually all of the workforce planning projects
that SACS has worked on in our history today
has caused us to help the organisation
that we're working with to clarify what their strategy is
or perhaps to operationalize what the strategy is.
What you often find is that organisations
have a high level conceptual statement
about what they're about, and then they'll have work plans,
which are really specific
at the individual work group level,
but it's really a common complaint about organisations
that they don't have good linkage
between that high level stuff, conceptual stuff,
and what does that mean for me?
And that's why many organisations run
into a challenge where their employees don't understand
how they support the corporate objectives.
Clarity, in fact, comes from outcomes.
And this diagram here shows you a kind of a cascade
of the strategic intent of the outcomes of an organisation,
the outcomes of a group or a division,
the outcomes of a branch,
which is part of a group or a division,
and then individual outcomes.
Now you'll see that we use this acronym, RWO,
real-world outcomes.
We invented that.
Real-world outcomes is the concept of,
what outcomes do we need to achieve
that actually makes the world a better place?
Now, those outcomes can be internal outcomes like profit.
They can be external outcomes like customer satisfaction,
but if you want people to have clarity,
what we know from the world of psychology
is that clarity comes from an understanding of the outcomes
that I need to achieve, and that's a very different thing
from the way that most jobs are defined
in the current world of HR right now,
because many organisations have
what's called task-based job definitions.
So, to do this job,
you need to do this, this, this, this, and this, tasks.
So to use an example, if I need to write a report,
a task-based definition of writing a report would be,
I've got to speak to people
about what this subject matter is,
I've got to sit at the computer and do research,
I've got to type,
I've got to then consult people by showing them draughts,
and those sorts of things.
That would be a task-based perception of writing a report.
An outcome-based perspective on writing a report
would be to say, the report needs to have happy recipients.
In other words, they need to be satisfied
with the quality of the report,
and this is how we're going to measure it.
It also might be
that the report will change something in the real world.
It will influence people to do something differently.
It might change policy
or it might change an individual's viewpoint.
It might cause somebody to support us to do something,
in effect to become an advocate for us.
So, outcomes tend to give
a very different perspective from tasks.
Psychology research says that outcomes are far better
at creating clarity than tasks are.
And so this is a really important point.
In fact, there's good, strong research
that task-based job definitions
don't create very good quality at all.
There's been research where organisations
that have outcome-based job definitions are far better
in creating clarity than task-based job definitions,
but some organisations
that have had task-based job definitions,
(indistinct) classic list of duties or responsibilities,
they've been compared with organisations
that have no job definitions.
And, in fact, there really isn't a great deal of superiority
from a task-based job definition
to no job definition at all
where you just understand the job
by virtue of your interaction with leaders, let's say.
So that's an opportunity,
because what we are really saying is that an organisation,
if it wants to achieve clarity,
should define what it needs to achieve
in terms of these real-world outcomes.
Real-world outcomes can be very specific
and should be a maximum of probably five or seven
with maybe at the organisational level up to 20 metrics.
Now, this is crucial and very few organisations have this.
You can imagine if you are trying to build a workforce plan,
how can you build a workforce plan
if you don't know what this organisation is about?
I mean, for instance,
if you're an organisation that's seeking growth,
then that might require quite a different skillset
than one that's seeking the highest margins possible.
If you're a not for profit,
and you don't care about how big a profit you make,
but you certainly may not want to make a loss.
That can be an extremely different thing
from an organisation which is seeking to grow at all costs.
Different skillsets are necessary for that.
That's why this is important.
And that's why when we measure the levels of role clarity,
this is at the individual level here.
When you measure levels of role clarity in many employees
in organisations across Australia and New Zealand,
you find that they don't have very high levels
of role clarity, because it's all been based
on a list of tasks rather than a list of outcomes.
Now, another benefit of outcome-based job definition
is that it sponsors initiative in the employee.
If I tell you, if you happen to work for me, and I say,
you must do these things,
then that's an extremely different thing
from you must achieve these outcomes,
because saying that you must achieve these outcomes
tends to sponsor a spirit of initiative,
in other words do what's necessary
to achieve these outcomes.
Whereas if I ask you to undertake a series of tasks,
what that tends to do is it sponsors
an atmosphere of obedience or of compliance,
which is really not what organisations are after these days.
The new normal is going to require us
to have levels of initiative.
So defining jobs in terms of outcomes is far more effective
in achieving that.
By the way, research also so indicates
that people who have their jobs defined
in terms of outcomes
tend to have higher levels of morale and engagement.
And that psychological energy is so crucial
to making people change ready,
but also bringing out productivity in them.
This is what an outcome-based job definition looks like
at the individual job level,
five to seven defined and measurable outcomes for each job.
You might wonder why five to seven?
It's from the research of two guys
by the name of Locke and Latham, research psychologists,
and these research psychologists, Locke and Latham,
undertook in excess of 30 years of research
into what kinds of goals work for human beings.
Now, the concept of outcome-based job definition draws
on this idea that outcomes define as goals
can be very effective for guiding people
to pursue what is necessary in their jobs,
but what Locke and Latham were able to discover
is that by having too many goals,
that's in fact as bad as having no goals at all.
So too many goals when they are piled
on top of a person, simply lose their relevance.
So it seems that for most people,
what Locke and Latham were able to discover
is five to seven of these goals seem to be what's necessary
to create a high level of clarity.
Imagine you come to work,
you know your organisation stands for these five things,
and here is how it's going to be measured.
My team stands for these five things,
and here is how it's going to be measured.
My job stands for these five things or seven things,
and here's how we're going to measure them.
That's what creates clarity.
And that's what many organisations lack.
So if you are going down the path of workforce planning,
we would encourage you to reflect
on this first and foremost and make sure
that you do have clarity
about what the organisation is seeking to achieve.
Now strategy into accountability,
this creates a governance structure at all levels.
So if you've got a set of outcomes,
which are measurable at the organisational level,
well, there's no question about whether the organisation
has a achieved its objectives.
If that applies at a divisional level, at a branch level,
and ultimately at an individual level,
it gives you an accountability framework,
which can be used to tie the objectives of the organisation
from its highest level strategic objectives
down through its work plans to the goals
and responsibilities of individual staff members.
And that creates greater psychological clarity for staff.
And we encourage people to avoid myriad KPIs.
I must say going back to task-based job definition,
one of the things that I've seen
is I saw a job definition once that was 12 pages.
And when I counted up the responsibilities of that job,
it was four or 500.
Now, obviously that doesn't create clarity at all.
A small number of outcomes that a job needs to achieve
is a great way of creating clarity for the employee.
And not only that,
it has the wonderful advantage that they can remember them.
Clarity comes from less, not more.
So our recommendations for XYZ Corporation,
so this is an organisation that I introduced
in the last video, which is to say this is a company
that needs to undertake some change
and is thinking of workforce planning
in order to achieve this.
We would recommend
that they undertake an outcomes assessment
based on the new strategy that they've adopted,
that they would identify key outcomes
at an organisational division team and personal levels
and build an accountability framework
to develop all of that.
And we would suggest that this is done
with very active engagement from the staff,
and they will also need to probably concurrently
undertake workforce planning to ensure
that the workforce necessary
to deliver the strategy's in place.
So the concept of clarifying your strategy
is to allow you to say, what employees do we need
to deliver this strategy?
And that will help to build
a much more effective workforce plan.
The next video in the sequence will be video number four,
and that will be all about
the SACS model of workforce planning
where we define what workforce planning is
and give you some really practical examples
of how workforce planning can be used.
We'll also use some war stories
from our own history of consulting
and how workforce planning has been implemented
to really make the whole concept come alive for you
and be as practical as possible.
Click on the link to join me for the next video.
(bright music)