Case Study - Strategic Planning
I was delighted when I began to work with a regional water utility, who had been in business for decades and still operated in many ways as it had years ago. It had a family feel and a warm culture.
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When the organziation's HR department and strategy began to mature in a new way to capitalize on acquisition opportunities, there was a lot that was still unknown. How could we take the data we had and turn it into something actionable? What did we need to plan for to align with the overall organizational strategy?
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Partnerships with the HRIS database manager and director of compensation and benefits were key. I spent time with both of them learning about past and current practices, why they were set up the way they were, and what data they were collecting. I also spent time with the HR directors for each of their three business lines to get more detail on their workforce, their challenges and their concerns.
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With that, I asked them to give me a simple data dump of everything they had, and with that data I began with an analysis. My initial questions were around the workforce itself: who were they? How old were they? How many were union vs. non-union? I produced a series of charts and analysis that revealed a handful of important, actionable insights.
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The first insight was of an impending retirement crisis. Their workforce skewed older - many of their key workers were union members who enjoyed their work long enough to stay in the same role for many years - including those who were in role for nearly twenty. These workers were either nearing or already eligible for their union retirement packages, and if the timing of their exits was not carefully managed, nor their successors, it could create a destabilizing event for the company.
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The next insight was in regard to their potential successor pool. Because the senior roles were populated with very long-term workers, the more junior members of the team, members of the Millennial generation, were leaving the company to pursue promotion and advancement opportunities elsewhere. They were waiting too long for their next role to open to them, and they weren't being developed to take those next roles on.
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The result of the above revealed another insight: a pocket of churn - rapid turnover, backfill and resignation - that was well hidden by long tenures in much of the rest of the company. Their successor pool was leaving too quickly to be ready for the next generation of leadership.
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As a result of this data, I made some strategic recommendations. Firstly, a robust succession planning process would be necessary, but not sufficient, to solve for their problem. They needed to find a way to keep more junior staff on the hook, even in the absence of obvious advancement opportunities. The devised strategy, and subsequently launched project, was a business resource group dedicated to creating those connections between staff.
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This group provided learning and development, mentorship and networking between the senior and junior members of the team. Immediately, they began to create connections with one another that weren't present before. The senior team felt that the juniors weren't curious about what they did, or interested in learning from them. The juniors felt the senior team were distant and insular. Given the opportunity to get to know each other more, the culture shifted quickly to one of inclusivity and mutual respect.
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The group not only provided new network connections, but also began the process of knowledge transfer. Senior members of the team were hosted for lunch and learn meetings, where they discussed some of the key aspects of their work. Junior team members taught back as well, showing different technologies that could prove useful in innovating. After two years, the company bestowed a high-profile award on the group for the impact they had.
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Another outgrowth of this data work was focused on why people were resigning. Through exit interviews, stay interviews and staff-facing conversations, I was able to uncover some cultural issues that were creating a work environment that wasn't worth investing a long-term career in. Additional recommendations for the HR leads were made for future people planning, including staff to target for coaching and management training.
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In the long term, the company was subsequently equipped for monitoring of retirement risk, and SuccessFactors was leveraged to maintain and report out on information resulting from the succession planning process. Armed with better information, they were able to initiate a cyclical human capital planning process to keep the HR team in lockstep with the company's leadership.