How Long Has This Been Going On?

Dan L. Ward

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING (SWP) is really about survival—having properly qualified people when and where you need them to achieve or sustain a desired outcome. This need to bring assurance to the future is fundamental to human nature. Families and tribes have a survival instinct to continue the family or tribe. Chiefs, shamans, hunters, farmers, artisans, and craftspeople all develop techniques to pass down their legacy from one person to the next to ensure the continuity of the “tribe.”

The largest early artificial structures thus far discovered are a series of twenty circular stone structures in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey, called Göbekli Tepe. Göbekli Tepe was created by people who were believed to be nomadic hunters. The discovery of these large “public works construction projects” has challenged assumptions about how early these types of community activities began in human culture. Radiocarbon dating confirms that construction began around 11,000 BC and continued over 3,000 years. It would be incredibly naïve to imagine that these buildings were constructed by people who spanned the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages without some sort of rudimentary planning. (I hope some reader will tackle this topic for dissertation research!)

As communities grew, the risks from not passing on their inhabitants’ legacy also became more intense. The more you have, the more you have to lose. The preservation of culture and heritage became more complex. As humans, we became increasingly sophisticated in our tools and techniques to preserve our way of life. Strategic Workforce Planning evolved as part of this path of creating tools and processes to ensure the continuation of a way of life, whether it is centered around a tribe, a community, a society, or Joe-Bob’s Well Drilling Service.

Societies sometimes exhibit behavior that can be likened to schools of fish, swimming en masse in one direction, then another. A management theory becomes popular and organizations race to be the first to adopt the latest fad. Management is a competitive sport, and managers seek new tools and techniques that will enable their team or organization to be more effective—to continually improve and to be better this year than last.

This, of course, leads the consulting world to always seek a new differentiator—a product or service that will fill managers’ desire to improve. Old techniques may be polished or burnished, repackaged, and sold in their new and improved version. Slight variations can provide substantial, if temporary, advantage as fundamentals are fine-tuned and retuned to specific circumstances. Skeptics may gloss over the differences and call them buzzwords, but if simple benchmarking and copying were sufficient to ensure success, there would be few failures.

If your e-mail in-box looks like mine, you receive a variety of promotional literature every day. Vendors want to sell you tools and techniques that will make your life better. (My brother once told me he received an ad for software that would “cut his workload in half.” He ordered two copies, but sadly, neither copy provided the promised workload reduction. He has to work just as hard and is out the cost of the software.)

For those of us who have been in this line of work for more than three decades, it has been surprising to see the number of people who currently take credit for having “invented the concept of Strategic Workforce Planning.” It is not unusual to see claims that are along the lines of “up until now, no one has ever conceived of or successfully executed workforce planning.” Sometimes, these claims include appropriate caveats that allow them to be factual within a specific context (e.g., “the first time workforce planning was ever done exclusively using Excel 2010 and PowerPoint”). Workforce planning actually has a long and robust history. The tools have evolved and many process variations exist, but the underlying fundamental has existed since the beginning of human culture: We think about the future in order to anticipate our needs and reduce our risks.

One challenge we must acknowledge at the very beginning is that we deal in an area characterized by ambiguity. Workforce planning is not accounting. We do not have anything like GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) or a common definition of terms such as ROI (return on investment) as financial managers do. There are few if any standard terms with universal agreement on the part of workforce planners. This lack of commonly accepted definitions and processes has made our field more chaotic than necessary, but it is what it is.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a variety of academics and researchers, such as Bill Pyle and Eric Flamholtz, attempted to establish formal definitions under the discipline they called Human Resource Accounting (HRA). Some companies attempted to identify and even amortize their investments in people, but the general consensus of the period was that the payoff was not worth the effort. In more recent years, SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) has tried to standardize definitions for HR as a field with some common approaches underscored by the certification processes. Much progress has been made, but there is still a lack of consistency in workforce planning terminology.

Up until the 1970s, much of the work in this area was referred to as manpower planning. “Manpower” as a term was trademarked by the company Manpower Inc. (Manpower Inc. allegedly requested that the U.S. Department of Labor rename its Manpower Administration. The Labor Department apparently complied. In 1975, the Manpower Administration became the Employment and Training Administration.) My graduate degree program in Manpower Economics from the Manpower and Industrial Relations Institute at North Texas became Applied Economics.

Eric Vetter published the most commonly quoted definition of manpower planning: “getting the right people at the right place at the right time.” It does not appear to have been in print prior to his book, published in 1967. His full definition is very comprehensive:

The process by which management determines how the organization should move from its current manpower position to its desired manpower position. Through planning, management strives to have the right number and the right kinds of people, at the right places, at the right time, doing things which result in both the organization and the individual receiving maximum long-run benefit.

It is a four-phased process. The first phase involves the gathering and analysis of data through manpower inventories and forecasts. The second phase consists of establishing manpower objectives and policies and gaining top management approval of these. The third phase involves designing and implementing plans and action programs in areas such as recruiting, training, and promotion to enable the organization to achieve its manpower objectives. The fourth phase is concerned with control and evaluation of manpower plans and programs to facilitate progress toward manpower objectives.¹

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous articles and several books had been published with some shared better practices. The majority of processes in print had the common elements shown in Figure 1: Analyze the current supply, project what will remain of those resources in the future, prepare a future demand forecast, compare the supply and demand to identify gaps or surpluses, develop plans to deal with those gaps or surpluses, and execute the plans. I developed my first version of Figure 1 for a Human Resource Planning Society conference in 1980, and it was already a mature concept at that time.

Two decades earlier, a group of federal agency employees in the Washington, D.C., area began meeting over lunch to share techniques for more effective manpower planning. The informal group quickly expanded to include academicians and businesspeople. By 1966, they became more formal in their meetings and called themselves the Manpower Analysis and Planning Society (MAPS). The founders included Morton Ettelstein, who led manpower planning at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Dick Niehaus, who led workforce research and planning activities for the Department of the Navy.

FIGURE 1. COMMON ELEMENTS OF BEST PRACTICE MANPOWER PLANNING PROCESSES.

James Walker participated in several MAPS meetings as an invited guest, including a 1976 study of workforce planning practices jointly sponsored by MAPS and the Scientific Workforce Commission (now called the Commission for Professionals in Science and Technology). Jim, who was then leading the HR planning practice at Towers Perrin, took the concept of MAPS back home to New York City. He pulled together a small group of people—strategy leaders from Fortune 100 companies—who agreed to create a national version of MAPS. The New York group began meeting in 1977 and officially kicked off as the Human Resource Planning Society (HRPS) in 1978. According to Jim, MAPS was the prototype for HRPS and became the first HRPS affiliate.

The MAPS group continued as an expanded discussion group of functional experts, but they never created a formal structure. After several of the key members retired, no one took over the effort of organizing regular meetings, and the group faded away. By the mid-1980s, there was no regularly sponsored venue in the D.C. area for people strategists to get together. In the late 1980s, the group was reestablished as the Human Resource Leadership Forum, which continues as an HRPS affiliate with more than 200 active members from D.C.-area employers. Today, there are twenty HRPS affiliates in North America and similar organizations aligned with HRPS in Europe, Asia, and South America.

Jim Walker was in the forefront of moving HR from personnel administration to people strategy and HRP (human resource planning). His founding of HRPS in 1978 has been recognized as one of the ten most critical events in the evolution of HR. The migration from manpower planning (MPP) to human resource planning was much more than semantics. MPP was often done in a vacuum. HRP put people planning into that larger context, as shown in the common elements in Figure 2.

HRP was usually strongly joined to a business planning process. Business planning has also been in and out of favor. Jack Welch wiped out the strategic planning department at General Electric and replaced it with strategic marketing. HRP disappeared with it.

Workforce planning surfaced as an alternative—not quite as “integrated” as HRP was, but reminding us that we always need to “get the right people” and do it in the context of the organization’s infrastructure.

Scenario planning began playing a more critical part in the discussion. Instead of planning for a specific strategy, we looked at vectors. We asked more strategic alignment questions, such as: How do we better prepare to respond to those things we cannot possibly predict with any accuracy? What are the implications of internal and external factors? This was similar to HRP, but not necessarily formally linked with a business plan, as seen in Figure 3.

Due to the lack of integration, workforce planning fell short. Strategic Workforce Planning began emerging and resurfaced some HRP issues. A workforce plan cannot stand alone. It has to exist in context. Some new elements also crept in, with popular phrases including outsourcing and core competencies. The planner was now asking questions, such as:

FIGURE 2. THE EVOLUTION OF SWP, WITH A CONCENTRATION ON HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING.

FIGURE 3. THE EVOLUTION OF SWP WITH A CONCENTRATION ON WORKFORCE PLANNING.

Who does the work?

Does it have to be an employee?

Does it make sense to outsource noncritical aspects of the work?

Does it make sense to outsource even critical aspects if someone else can do them better?

How do you plan in a matrixed environment?

What are the pros and cons of virtual organizations?

Strategic Workforce Planning (see Figure 4) is our hot buzzword these days. It will not be the last one applied to our field. Ideas evolve and terminology drifts. In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter proposes that ideas compete just as vigorously as living creatures compete. It really is a matter of survival. Sometimes the drift in terminology reflects a true evolution of thinking and/or process. Other times, it may be more cosmetic than real and merely reflect a need for vendors to differentiate their products.

At Texaco, we created The Texaco Guide to Strategic Workforce Planning in 1994. It was not SWP the way we are thinking about it now, but it was very close. The title may have been slightly ahead of its time, but the common mind-set among experienced practitioners was that individuals exist within a larger talent context. A plan is no stronger than its weakest component.

FIGURE 4. THE EVOLUTION OF SWP WITH A CONCENTRATION ON STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING.

We have all seen great plans, beautiful products that sit on a shelf. Was it really a great plan if it was not used? Scenarios are not supposed to be exact forecasts, but aren’t plans supposed to provide effective guidance?

Eleven thousand years ago, our SWP ancestors developed a process to get people in the right place at the right time to quarry large limestone blocks, move them to a destination, and stack them in large stone circles, decorated with stone art carvings in such a way as to produce permanent stone structures at Göbekli Tepe. We can only guess how it was done, as these events predated written instruction, but it seems reasonable to think the process was pretty simple, with people drafted as needed. If we accept this site as the first enduring evidence of some sort of rudimentary workforce planning, Figure 5 shows a theoretical historical time line of key points of evolution.

Five thousand years ago, a construction project was even more grandiose than at Göbekli Tepe, as heavy stones were shipped many miles and stacked in precise ways to form pyramids. The written records do not describe the workforce planning techniques involved, but we are aware that staff recruiting techniques were fairly harsh, involving wars and slavery. Management techniques were also apparently pretty abrupt, with beatings and executions routinely used as a motivational technique.

Today, we have to work a little harder to get the people we need. Skills and competencies are more diverse than they used to be. Motivation is a little more challenging—we no longer use whips or swords in the workplace. Employees have a lot more freedom to walk away from work they do not enjoy.

FIGURE 5. A HISTORICAL TIME LINE OF KEY EVENTS IN STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING.

Today’s projects involve a wider range of skills than cutting stone into blocks, moving blocks from the quarry to the worksite, and stacking blocks in a precise way to get the final shape we want. The job descriptions are usually pretty complex today. Moreover, the definition continues to evolve, as shown in this version, from Wikipedia:

Strategic Workforce Planning is the framework applied for Workforce Planning and Workforce Development, where the links between corporate and strategic objectives and their associated workforce implications are demonstrated.

We can be sure the field will continue to evolve. Terminology will change. Sometimes, it will be a distinction without a difference, but occasionally, we will see breakthroughs that could be game changers. As workforce strategists, we can choose to be on the cutting edge, or by default, we will end up on the cutting floor.

Reference

1. Eric W. Vetter, Manpower Planning for High Talent Personnel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1967), p. 15.