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The Agile Enterprise: Crafting a New Approach to Workforce Planning

Does your workforce strategy have you ready for tomorrow?
By: | October 2, 2018 • 5 min read

With disruption lurking at every turn, organizations need to create a more agile approach to future-proofing their workforce.

Does your workforce strategy have you ready for tomorrow?





To prepare for this tomorrow, we propose that organizations and human resources embrace workforce shaping. A new approach to talent identification, acquisition, and development, workforce shaping calls for HR to partner with the business to visualize future scenarios, enabled by data models and market signals, of how the enterprise itself might evolve. It also requires looking at how specific functions might change, down to the task level, and then determining the workforce capabilities those changes will require. How, for example, might the organization’s business model have to adapt to meet evolving customer expectations? How will automation impact current employees’ tasks? What skills and capabilities will tomorrow’s employees need to thrive in this new environment? Armed with answers to questions like these, companies can begin to hire employees capable of adapting to whatever tomorrow brings.

The emergence of this need requires a completely new role within the HR organization and an evolved relationship with the business. Unlike strategic workforce planning, which is typically owned by HR, the business leads workforce shaping.  As a facilitator, HR’s dedicated workforce shaper serves as a consultant to the business units, bringing methodology, workforce knowledge and people analytics to help business owners adapt their talent strategy.

KPMG Workforce Shaping HR must be as nimble and agile as the workforce it is intending to build because with this role arises a need to embrace and expand out-of-the-box skills and thinking. It requires a deep, strategic-level understanding of industry and marketplace trends that will translate into ascending job skills and a potentially transformed workforce.

Enterprise credibility is always at stake for HR, but technology can help. In the form of sophisticated analytics, HR and business leaders have the ability to test their theories and predict talent needs more precisely than in the past. Partnering with strategic analysts who have a keen sense of the business’s needs and goals can help convert those findings into strategy, helping leadership build a business case for a stronger, more ready workforce.





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