Workforce Analytics, Intelligence, Forecasting and Strategy (WAIFS)

Although the unified view and definition of Talent Intelligence that we discussed in Chapter 1 is far more robust I would argue the with so much growth and development in HR Analytics, Workforce Planning, Talent Analytics and Talent Intelligence that potentially the future of Talent Intelligence is potentially a unified Workforce Intelligence function with subsets of Talent Intelligence, HR Analytics, Workforce Planning, Talent Forecasting and Planning, Competitor Intelligence etc all working under the banner of Workforce Analytics, Intelligence, Forecasting and Strategy (WAIFS).

 

What could this look like?

 

Within HR we have a range of teams and analytics offerings that are loosely aligned around the employee lifecycle for Potential Employee, Candidate, Employee, Former Employee with the contextual elements overlaid such as demand planning, external intelligence, cultural intelligence etc. These would (loosely) align as follows:

• Potential Employee
  • Sourcing Intelligence, Recruitment Marketing Analytics
• Candidate
  • Talent Acquisition Analytics
• Employee
  • HR Analytics, Employee Engagement, Workforce Planning, Talent Forecasting, Talent Strategy
• Former Employee (who then becomes a potential employee again)
  • Exit Interviews
• With some elements overlaying at all times dependant on need such as
  • Candidate Listening / Social Intelligence, Location Intelligence, Workforce Intelligence, Competitor Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

These could all be combined to form a holistic Workforce Analytics, Intelligence, Forecasting and Strategy (WAIFS) function that not only looks at the current state and reflective state but also all forecast out and strategic decisions using both internal and external data sets. This would give leaders, our customers, the most complete and robust labour feasibility to date.

 

I would see this splitting into the following main pillars:

• Workforce Data Acquisition & Engineering
• Workforce Reporting & Analytics
• Workforce Products
• Workforce Strategic Intelligence
• Workforce Intelligence Decision Support
• Workforce Intelligence Futurists

 

Let’s dive into these in a little more detail…

 

Workforce Data Acquisition & Engineering

As the name would suggest this function is focussed on “acquiring data” before creating stable and scalable platforms and ecosystems for that data. This data could equally be looking at alternative data sources internally as well as externally. WDAE would be an interesting hybrid function both looking at primary and secondary data acquisition combining the technical and non-technical. Within this I could foresee Candidate Listening / Social Intelligence, Exit Interview analysis, and all scaled intelligence gathering whether that is through web scraping, vendor relationships and API feeds, or mass Talent Acquisition intelligence monitoring etc. They will work with Analysts, Program Managers, and other Data Engineers across teams to understand the workforce management ecosystem, identify corresponding data needs and influence these partners on opportunities for collaboration and alignment.

 

I would also see the WDAE having a strong Workforce Intelligence Skunk works element. Originally the name given to a secret R&D team at Lockheed Aircraft Group Skunk Works is now a name for a usually small and innovative group outside the normal research and development channels within an organization that looks to drive rapid research or prototyping. Within a Talent / Workforce Intelligence team these can be hugely powerful to look at what is possible with the power of the labour market data available to us.

 

The WDAE pillar is there to create the platform, the foundations, and put the correct data model in place to enable the Reporting & Analytics and Intelligence pillars to thrive. They will be experts in data acquisition, architecture and data warehouse management

 

Workforce Reporting & Analytics

Reporting & Analytics often get overlooked for the more glamorous predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence but the reality is that the vast majority of HR and workforce data usage is still very much in the core reporting and analytics space. At present there are a number of teams within the HR arena that look at reporting and analytics for their various customer groups. This could be Recruitment Marketing Analytics, Talent Acquisition Analytics, HR Analytics tying in Employee Engagement, Workforce Planning or Talent Forecasting and Demand Planning.

 

By centralising into one team you can keep the customer focus by ringfencing (if needed) but you will gain on three main fronts, firstly increased economies of scale and efficiency, secondly an increase in career pathing and specialisation options (allowing for reduced attrition, increased employee engagement etc), and finally an opportunity to look at data sets in a more holistic manner that will unlikely to be looked at in siloed analytics teams.

 

How does employee engagement effect talent acquisition channel conversion metrics? How does external candidate or employee sentiment effect recruitment marketing spend? How has increased time to hire effected business performance or attrition? How are we combining talent forecasting, demand planning, recruitment capacity planning and channel conversion metrics to see the feasibility of hitting the forecast plans?

 

Workforce Products

Workforce Products would be a team of Product Managers that act as the intersection of customer demand and technical delivery. They would own scaled products such as self-service tooling, Data as a Service, Always on Intelligence, HR Analytics product suites etc. They are responsible for the full lifecycle of these offerings and products from requirements gathering, data feasibility, build, user experience, product rollout, implementation, go to market strategy and embedding, through to ongoing success and future product iterations and functional developments.

 

This role and / or capability is absolutely vital in ensuring the products and tooling built out are both fit for purpose, address the business needs, align to the strategic goals and most importantly land at launch and continue to be successful post launch.

 

 

Workforce Strategic Intelligence

Strategic Workforce Planning and Talent Intelligence: These are in my mind often the ying and the yang to each other. SWP by design is looking at the organisations strategic goals and looking to establish a strategy with a mix of talent, technology and various employment models (buy, build, borrow for example) to achieve these. Within this understanding the external lens is absolutely critical. What is happening with the skill set in the market? How are competitors positioning themselves and how will this impact? What are the locations we are looking to build into and how feasible is that? What is our early careers program and are universities creating the skilled individuals we need to achieve this? What is the Talent Gap SWP foresee and how do we mitigate this using talent intelligence? These feel a lot like talent intelligence questions do they not….

 

I foresee that this could be merged into a Strategic Workforce Intelligence role combining both roles into one strategic workforce advisor that is fuelled by inputs from Workforce Intelligence Futurists and the Workforce Data Engineering function. This role would be looking at the 3-5year strategic plans, looking at the feasibility and the potential risks. They would be senior strategic trusted advisors fully embedded in their leadership teams long term planning.

 

Workforce Intelligence Decision Support

This is the pillar that I foresee to take on a number of the traditional Talent Intelligence offerings that we currently see such as: Location Intelligence, Competitor Intelligence or Cultural Intelligence. This pillar is focussed on one off decision point support, likely focussed on the 3-18month timeframe. It wouldn’t be driving the long-term strategic thinking but rather the decision points that are already set in the longer-term strategy but where the situation has changed and you may need to reassess and reset feasibility or de-risk the situation.  This would also tie in things such as Competitor Intelligence or Cultural Intelligence that can directly tie into product offerings such as M&A Intelligence where a specific intelligence requirement is needed around this decision point.

 

I would foresee that where you see a repeated need, or a demand that needs to be scaled (for example Always on Intelligence, repeated location analyses etc) then you would look for the R&A to build solutions that are owned by the Product team.

 

 

Workforce Intelligence Futurists

The futurist function is looking ahead and around corners for potential headwinds and scenarios that could derail the long-term planning. They will likely come from a background of labour, applied or behavioural economics or business analytics and as discussed in Chapter 11 in the Talent Intelligence Futurist role they will systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future of the labour market and how it will emerge from the present. They would feed into Strategic Workforce Intelligence looking at the feasibility of buy Vs build Vs borrow strategies and the long term stability.

 

How will the changing demographics effect our workforce? How will automation affect the strategy? How will changing political situations effect the labour market movements and your firms access to talent? How will a changing culture effect access to talent (e.g. increased appetite for gig working, self-employment or remote work)? How is the labour force participation rate effecting our ability to scale?

 

These individuals will also work very closely with your organisations leadership and internal economists to be the conduit and work at the intersection of macroeconomics and microeconomics.

 

This WAIFS function would then engage with and partner with a broader intelligence community be it M&A Strategy, Marketing Intelligence, Organisational Design and effectiveness, Compensation and Benefits, Real Estate Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence etc to look at data synergies e.g.

 

• Real Estate Intelligence would look at Market trends, Portfolio Benchmarking, Market Risk but would also be interested in Location Intelligence.
• M&A Strategy would be interested in Synergy Evaluation, Target Evaluation but could also be interested in Competitor Intelligence, Organisational Mapping, Compensation benchmarking, DEI Intelligence
• Marketing Intelligence would naturally look at product, market and customer insights and intelligence, but could also be interested in competitor intelligence and talent flows

 

Talent Intelligence Centre of Excellence (TICoE)

My final model to think about is a straight-line evolution of today’s current evolutionary path, a Talent Intelligence function that carves itself away from it’s current hosted function and becomes a standalone Centre of Excellence in its own right. This could be a centralised fat Talent Intelligence Centre of Excellence doing full strategic leadership, best practice and delivery, a thin CoE where you provide the strategic leadership and best practice and have the delivery mechanisms embedded within the business locally.

 

The reason I could see this evolving is the conflict around our natural home, is it in Talent Acquisition, Marketing Intelligence, HR analytics, Workforce Planning, Strategy… the list is endless and the arguments ongoing. One of the main reasons for this is that Talent Intelligence is such a broad ranging and holistic function and offering that it impacts each and every area of all organisations.

 

For many years we have heard about the evolutionary merging of Talent Acquisition, Management and Development into a total talent organisation but although we’ve seen some teams reporting into the same leader, any kind of synergistic or symbiotic relationship is largely yet to happen.  I would argue that the reason for this is that is that fundamentally the functions are still working to very different KPI’s, Goals, Visions and timeframes and as we discussed earlier these will all drive the behaviours and mechanisms within a team. This friction means it is proving increasingly difficult to truly merge these organisations. It is for the same reason that I can see Talent Intelligence carving out its own niche. The nature of Talent Intelligence as a function is highly variable from direct targeted decision support, rapid deep dive sourcing intelligence, highly strategic and consultative workforce or strategy feasibility planning. It is this ability to shift business rhythms and to be able to deliver true commercial impact with direct line of sight to both the top and bottom line of an organisation that sets the function apart.

 

How could this work though? I would foresee a Talent Intelligence function that runs in parallel to current talent functions, be it management, acquisition or development. In the same way a business stakeholder would have an appropriate partner from each of those disciplines at a given level, often with an HR Business Partner as a conduit, I would see them having the same relationship with Talent Intelligence. For example, you may have:

 

Operational Talent Intelligence Partners

Working with Hiring Managers at local level benchmarking, decision support, feasibility planning, organisational design benchmarking, competitor analysis, salary benchmarking etc to allow for very customer focussed, flexible and fluid operational and tactical talent intelligence to effect decision making at a local level.

 

Strategic Talent Intelligence Advisors / Trusted Advisors

Working with senior leaders on their future strategy feasibility their work focuses on efforts that solve significantly complex or endemic problems. They are trusted to operate with complete independence and are often assigned to focus on areas where the strategy has not yet been defined. They will influence organizational priorities, business process, also business strategic direction.

 

Both these roles will draw upon the skills and services that run across accounts and business lanes such as centralised delivery support, analytics, data engineering, product etc as discussed in the WAIFS model but in this instance only within Talent Intelligence.

 

One thing that I would see as a large shift from the current state, albeit not from the desired state as highlighted in the 2021 Talent Intelligence Collective Benchmarking Survey, would be to look to move this Talent Intelligence function outside of HR. This is a big change from the other “talent” functions who all currently sit within the HR organisation. I would see this function reporting directly into the C Suite be it into a Chief Operating Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Financial Officer or Chief Strategy Officer depending upon your own organisation’s decision-making mechanisms. The reasons I would position us outside of HR are the following…

 

• Building the external focus, and business credibility, needed to drive a future proofed Talent Intelligence function is very hard whilst sitting in HR who is often seen as an internally focussed function that is fundamentally a business overhead.
• In a similar vein, building out the commercial focus and growth mindset is very hard within a larger HR organisation that is very unlikely to have business growth goals within and of their KPIs, Goals, Metrics, Vision etc.
• Similarly, HR have, rightly so, a naturally risk averse, risk avoidance culture. This is absolutely appropriate for the HR organisation but will limit and stifle innovation in a highly competitive talent intelligence landscape. Being carved away Talent Intelligence teams can experiment more and build out Talent Intelligence Skunkworks teams to really push the experimentation and data exploration.
• One factor that has meant business functions often stand up their own parallel offerings is the flexibility, reactivity and speed that they need teams to work at in commercially focussed, time sensitive and business critical activities. By design many HR processes are not time sensitive, and pace is not the core focus, they are often cyclical and periodic with very clear and definitive deliverables and outcomes. This causes a fundamental culture clash with the time sensitive nature the business demands from modern talent intelligence.
• One of the core aspects of any HR function is that it is formed with equality in mind and that is absolutely essential. However, with a Talent Intelligence lens, your customers and stakeholders absolutely will not be equal in terms of their impact or importance and you need to be in an environment that welcomes and in fact drives ruthless prioritisation as your capacity will never meet your demand.
• Finally, repositioning Talent Intelligence will highlight to the business the power of labour market data. People are often cited as leader’s greatest asset and access to talent the biggest risk for leaders’ strategies yet they have the right talent data at decision and strategy points a worryingly small amount of the time. Seeing a talent analytics and intelligence team that is aligned with their business and ringfenced to their needs will help inspire confidence in the maturity and credibility of the human capital intelligence that can be provided to business leaders.

From: Talent Intelligence: Use Business and People Data to Drive Organizational Performance