QuickHire Seminar

Workforce Planning: A “Road Map” to the Future

by Will Kilburn
Monster Government Solutions

Outsourcing, mission changes, sudden reorganizations-these days, government agencies have to think, and act, more like private-sector companies, especially when it comes to getting the most out of their workforce.

Such a shift was the topic of the latest QuickHire breakfast seminar, “Workforce Planning: A ‘Road Map’ to the Future,” held February 18th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., which featured Stephen Goodrich, the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Organizational Effectiveness.

“Workforce planning is about aligning your human capital with the needs of the organization, and making sure you get the most out of that asset,” explained Goodrich in a pre-seminar interview. This, he was quick to add, is not the same as what he terms the ‘sweatshop mentality’ of maximizing worker productivity at all costs. “It’s not from the perspective of ‘we’ve got to squeeze every ounce of blood we can out of folks’-that’s not it at all. It’s really understanding what your capacity is within the organization, and how do you best utilize that capacity to make sure that you’re meeting your mission.”

The challenge, said Goodrich, lies in thinking of the workforce as an ‘emotional asset,’ with complex and ever-changing needs and capabilities, rather than a static, easily measurable one, such as an office chair.

“Maybe the chair costs 500 bucks, and has value: It serves a purpose, and it depreciates over time,” said Goodrich. “But human capital appreciates. If we all got up and walked out of the room today and never came back, the chair is useless, because humans give it value. We’ve got to spend time looking at the capacity of our asset, its productivity, its competence.”

A major part of the problem, Goodrich continued, is that federal workers often aren’t given the opportunity to grow beyond the narrow boundaries of their job classifications.

“Especially in the government, part of our issue is we don’t change people, we just try to work with the same,” he said. “We have this image in government that we can’t change people, so we’ve got to work with what we have. I don’t think that’s true.”

Fixing that problem isn’t easy, Goodrich said, because determining the value and potential of a workforce is a bit more complicated than doing the same for that office chair.

“They don’t give a lot of thought to that,” he said. “Traditionally, they do just plunk people down, sometimes whether they want to or not, or someone who has a great interest but maybe not the capacity.” Goodrich said that by taking a closer look at their workforce, government agencies can benefit on a number of levels.

“If the agency does it right, they are demonstrating that they’re valuing the workforce,” he said. “Oftentimes you have strategies that come out of this on retention, on succession, on development, on reallocating the workforce in a better way. But you also have other kinds of things, like, ‘well, we can’t optimize our workforce over here, because the work process is so broken.’ There are often a lot of good outcomes linking the workforce to strategic imperatives of the organization.”

Click here for a preview of the next QuickHire Seminar, “Leveraging OPM’s Flexible Hiring Authority.”