Revolutionary HR Tech: Part 3 - Beyond Workforce Planning - #HRevolution

Note: For the rest of this week, (or longer if I can't manage to get it all done in time), I am going to run a short series of four posts inspired by a session at last weekend's HRevolution event in St. Louis that I facilitated along with the fantastic Mike Krupa. 

In the session, we asked four teams of attendees to imagine, envision, describe, and articulate a new (or at least new to them), kind of revolutionary HR technology solution that would improve or enhance some aspect of HR, talent management, recruiting, strategy, etc.

The teams were each given a context to work in that roughly correspond to the major sub-types of HR technology tools today: Administration, Talent Management, Culture/Brand, and finally Insight/Analytics. The teams came up with some really clever and thought-provoking ideas in a really short time, and I thought it would be fun to share them (as best as I can recall them), here and try to keep the HRevolution discussions on this topic moving forward. We will consolidate all 4 revolutionary HR tech ideas into one paper that we will post here and on theHRevolution site as well.

Ok, let's hit the third HR tech idea - from the 'Insights' team, an idea for a new technology that I will call 'Beyond Workforce Planning.'

For a while now HR technologies to support workforce planning have existed, so the category itself is not a new idea. But at HRevolution the 'Insights' team took a revolutionary approach to envision what truly transformative workforce planning technology might look like one day. Here are some of the capabilities and features of a 'next-gen' workforce planning technology as imagined at HRevolution:

1. Continuously updated and dynamic - most workforce planning tools rely on point-in-time scenario planning and a defined set of assumptions that result in a kind of static or fixed result. A revolutionary workforce planning approach would be be continually evolving as inputs to the plan change, external factors update, and the technology itself 'learns' how business and people conditions impact the workforce plan.

2. Deeper integration with talent acquisition technology - while many workforce planning technologies that exist today can and do 'talk' to the ATS for example, the Insights team imagined a more robust level of integration where assumptions on time to fill and expected labor costs could be enhanced or even replaced by actual data from the ATS and other recruiting technologies. These too should be continuously adapted to reflect current market conditions and the overall results and recruiting outcomes the company is experiencing.

3. A window to the outside world - I think the most interesting aspect of the Insight team's ideas for a more modern, revolutionary workforce planning technology was their idea for a tool that could leverage a more expansive set of external data points and measurements as inputs and influencers on the workforce plan. No organization, and no workforce plan and strategy exists in a vacuum: things as disparate as macro-economic trends, weather conditions and forecasts, politics, demographic shifts, increases or decreases in competition - these and numerous other factors all play a role in how the organization will perform, and the human capital needed to fuel that performance. What if the revolutionary workforce planning tool could overlay these kinds of data elements and trends on top of the more traditional elements like expected sales growth, retention rates, and expected compensation increases? In addition, this modern workforce planning tool could run sophisticated analyses to inform the HR analyst just which external data elements are most correlated, and possibly predictive of workforce needs, capacity, and costs. It would be really cool I think to have workforce planning and the outside, external world mashed up in order to make better HR decisions.

Ok, now the vendors who make Workforce Planning tools can chime in below in the comments and tell me that we are all crazy at HRevolution. And we just might be.

So that is the third Revolutionary HR tech idea, stay tuned for the final installment of the series to see what the Culture team cooked up.

Final note: Big, big thanks to our HRevolution 2015 sponsors - Globoforce, Quantum Workplace, and The Arland Group.