Workforce plans talk about skills gaps, the missing capabilities needed to get the job done or improve performance. TMP’s approach to employer branding emphasizes another kind of gap: between your leadership’s “ideal workforce” and your audiences’ attitudes. No matter how well etched your comprehension of internal gaps, your ability to fill them will rest on “minding the gaps” that exist among leadership aspirations, employee workforce realities and candidate market perceptions.
Both gaps have taken center stage in the Federal workplace. Attention on government as a “cool employer” has shown that Federal employers often lag behind the private sector in planning as well as branding. Yet without insightful workforce planning, agencies cannot prioritize the audiences for their brand. Without employer branding, the best workforce plans can wander amidst statistics without “intention.”
That is why TMP views workforce planning and employer branding as part of a cyclical, circular process in which both disciplines influence each other. Workforce planning initially guides branding from the front end, and the results of branded campaigns shape further planning.
The Need for a Strategic Approach
Suppose you oversaw a government workforce of more than 700,000 people. They range across many different skilled occupational categories, compensation agreements and experience levels. Moreover, the specifics of your mission seem to be in constant flux. You continue to get new directives as the political leadership changes. Finally because of your size, you know that any Federal budgetary measures are likely to have a large impact on your hiring. Now, how do you plan your workforce for the next five years? The next 25?
Such is the situation with the Department of Defense. They must approach workforce planning as a strategic discipline, trying to get the right people in the right position at the right time.
A September 27, 2010 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Department of Defense reveals the difficulties in getting the right people in place. The findings from GAO-10-814R DoD's Civilian Strategic Workforce Plan show that while planning is more critical than ever, DoD has been able to meet fully only a third of legislative requirements from the defense appropriations act. DoD must do a better job “conducting competency gap analyses, identifying the funding needed to implement strategies to develop and train civilian personnel, and assessing progress, using results-oriented performance measures.”
Otherwise congressional and DoD decision makers “will continue to rely on incomplete information concerning the size, composition, and needs of its civilian workforce. In particular, DoD may not be able to determine whether its investment in strategies to improve the civilian workforce is effective and efficient.”
The report continues: “Further, this type of information will likely grow in importance as DoD implements its recently announced initiative to reduce duplication, overhead, and excess and instill a culture of savings and restraint across the department.”
A year ago, Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General (head of GAO) and the President’s nominee for the position, broke these issues into very practical terms. He told DoD leaders that they needed to “determine the appropriate mix of contractor, civilian, and military personnel in shaping its total force for the future, including the role and use of contractors to support deployed forces.” He added that they also “must ensure that it maintains an acquisition workforce that is adequately sized, trained, and equipped, so that it can effectively plan, negotiate, award, and manage the range of contracts needed to meet the department's needs.”
These comments show how Federal workforce planning on its largest scale requires a strategic rather than tactical or replacement approach. Even agencies with much smaller human capital needs must focus on concepts like “appropriate mix,” “shaping its total force for the future” and “adequately sized.” In short, to some degree everyone must at least understand that with soaring deficits, hiring becomes intensely strategic. “Workforce planning” and “branding” become the overarching tools that answer the big question of “who you are” and “who you will be.”
Intent: the core of planning and branding
In 2004, the RAND Corporation National Defense Research Institute prepared a report for the Secretary of Defense, entitledAn Operational Process for Workforce Planning. The report, a user’s guide for workforce planning, explains that “the focal point of workforce planning is to accomplish an organization’s strategic intent.”
Before you can plan your workforce or create a brand, you must have consensus on what your organization intends to be. Sometimes that information may be out front in the form of mission statements and strategic plans. But, as the RAND authors note, it can be implicit.
The TMP branding methodology helps leaders understand the intent of their organization and how it affects recruitment. Since many organizations today find themselves in transition and transformation, it is all the more important to have a working understanding of who you are. This identity can guide the shaping of the future workforce as well as the messages that will attract it.
RAND says that “workforce planning is, at its best, a participative activity,” involving executives and line managers. This same principle defines TMP’s development of an employer brand. We interview executives, conduct focus groups with employees and often engage in outreach with community or academic leaders. The core of a brand and a plan remains the same: the differentiation at the deepest level of your organization from other employment choices.
Discovering the differentiated workforce
In The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact (Harvard Business Press, 2009), Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid and Richard W. Beatty extend the concept of differentiation in workforce planning. The authors argue that strategic workforce planning must aim at a differentiated workforce, where disproportionate human capital efforts aim at disproportionate results. A workforce plan must focus on staffing high performers in those positions most critical to the organization’s goals.
Although the authors use commercial examples of the most strategically essential positions, one case that should ring true with Federal HR departments involves one of the top 5 Federal contractors. Two pertinent key leadership roles are government relations and chief of contract negotiations. Government agencies depend heavily on both of these roles, and the lack of adequate acquisition personnel especially has caused great concern throughout government. In fact, the GAO report mentioned earlier cites acquisition separately within DoD as a situation to be monitored.
The authors are not saying that all roles are not necessary for a team. Workforce planners, however, must carefully triage limited resources. Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006) and the popular movie based on it does not assert that a football team can afford incompetence at any position. Rather it points out the painful discovery that the left tackle, the prime protector of the quarterback, deserved to be a prime strategic asset.
Government has similarly found that previously unsung positions, like contracting officers and specialists, are crucial to strategic intent and thus workforce planning. Workforce planners themselves have a renewed strategic importance to the success of their agency’s mission. And communicating that differentiation is the work of your employer brand.
For more information on how TMP Government can help you link planning with branding, please contact John Bersentes atjohn.bersentes@tmpgovernment.com or 703-269-0092.
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