Bringing certainty to management
Engineers know that you can’t control what you can’t measure. Developing future business strategies is pointless without an accurate assessment of the current business environment. Understanding the issues is especially critical to forward-thinking workforce management. Here are some questions that any utility or plant manager should be asking—and be able to answer:
- How deep is my organization’s knowledge, and where will wholesale employee retirements create gaps in it?
- Is my firm capturing the knowledge of senior employees long before they give notice? If so, how? Am I confident that the processes in place are capturing and transferring the right kind of knowledge?
- Which metrics are being used to gauge the capability of my workforce?
- Are my organization’s business processes modern and adaptable to changes in business climate?
- What kind of personnel should I be looking to hire?
- Are company training programs instilling the skills needed to improve business performance?
These questions can be answered by a workforce analysis. It helps organizations identify and quantify existing workforce challenges, forecast future workforce needs, and correlate them to business needs.
A workforce analysis leverages strategic and tactical tools for isolating the existing skills of an organization and measuring the depth of knowledge within it. The analysis then relates specific skills to the business reasons for each performance requirement of a job position. A workforce analysis also provides the following information:
- The strengths and weaknesses of a workforce.
- Trends in attrition numbers, and their impact on mission-critical business skills.
- Key areas in need of training, process improvement, and knowledge capture.
- The depth of knowledge within each job class, and the importance of each task performed by workers to achieving business goals.
- The organizational learning rate—a measure of a firm’s ability to boost its productivity through experience and to transfer knowledge between locations.
- A map of the strategic skills and knowledge gaps that have the biggest impact on accomplishing the organization’s mission.
A workforce analysis delivers exactly what management needs to act with certainty and precision.
Here’s the first of three examples. At one company, an analysis that correlated the company’s skill levels to its attrition rate concluded that if nothing were done to reduce attrition, skilled workers would be unavailable to perform 63% of employee tasks within five years. In this case, the rate of skills attrition outstripped that of retirements. Interliance Consulting pinpointed the nature of the problem, identified the most-endangered skills, and delivered to management a tailored program for solving the problem.
At a second company, workforce analysis revealed a connection between the organization’s learning rate and loss of skills. It found that high attrition rates in certain departments would reduce skill levels within those departments by 31% over five years at the current learning rate.
At a third firm, an electric utility, the challenge was worker uncertainty. Through interviews, the workforce analysis found that the average O&M employee was less than 50% certain of his or her ability to perform all tasks required by the position. Interliance took this workforce analysis one step further. After breaking down employee uncertainty by position, the consultant delivered a report containing the following information:
- The relative levels of certainty for every plant department and job description.
- How those certainty levels would change over time.
- Which skills were most vulnerable to loss.
- The department needing the most attention.
Those results were then correlated with statistics on the frequency and location of the reported problem. The exercise enabled Interliance to suggest changes in the utility’s knowledge capture, skills development, and process improvement initiatives.
Workforce analysis to the rescue
The product of a workforce analysis is a business case that quantifies the value of knowledge and skills and the cost of losing them. Some consultants are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for vaguely worded and therefore unworkable “strategic solutions” to general problems involving knowledge capture, training, or business processes. By contrast, a workforce analysis delivers specific proposals and rigorous analyses. In many cases, implementing the suggested plans has saved companies millions over time.
Another big plus of workforce analysis: It doesn’t take an eternity. Some consultants spend years dissecting the woes of a single production line, racking up thousands of billable hours in the process. By comparison, a typical workforce analysis costs much less because it takes only about six weeks from start to finish.
—Brad Kamph (bkamph@interliance.com) is president of Interliance Consulting Inc., a 20-year-old developer of workforce, knowledge management, process optimization, and performance measurement strategies for energy companies.
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