132 | Strategic Workforce Planning – Why It’s Important and How to Improve Your Skills, With Jen Allen Jardine

Welcome to HR Coffee time.

In this episode, we are diving into the world of strategic workforce planning to learn what it is, why it's so important, how it fits into HR, what it's like to work in strategic workforce planning, and how to develop strategic workforce planning skills.

If you work in a smaller organisation, strategic workforce planning may be one of the many things you're responsible for in your HR or people role.

And if that's the case, I hope that this episode helps get you inspired about ways of developing this skill so you can become more strategic, have a really positive impact within your organisation and prove to everyone there just how valuable HR is as a function.

Or if you're thinking you might want to move away from the generalist HR role you're currently doing, or perhaps you're in a different specialism that isn't strategic workforce planning.

You want to move away from one of those things to be become a strategic workforce planning specialist.

Then I hope this episode helps you too.

If you're a regular listener to HR coffee time, welcome back.

It's great to have you here and I want to take a moment to say a big thank you to you because I saw that HR coffee time was included in Lanteria's list of top ten podcasts for HR professionals last week on LinkedIn.

It's always so amazing to see HR coffee time in those top podcast lists, and I know it's only because of your support for the podcast that it gets included in those lists so often.

If you weren't listening to it or talking about it, no one else would hear about the show.

So I am truly grateful.

Thank you ever so much.

It's brilliant to know that you're enjoying it and that it's helping you if you've never listened to HR coffee time before.

Hello, I'm your host, Faye Wallace, a career and leadership coach for HR and people professionals, and I've made this podcast to help you have a successful and fulfilling HR or people career.

For this episode, we are lucky enough to be joined by a truly brilliant strategic workforce planning expertise.

Her name is Jen Allen Jardin.

Jen has been working in HR for more than 15 years, in both the public and the private sector.

She has been working in public sector strategic workforce planning for six years in both the NHS and in policing, writing the very first strategic workforce plan in the scottish justice sector.

Jen is also a member of the Global Standards and Content committee of the Workforce Planning Institute, working with colleagues to make success with strategic workforce planning accessible to all.

I hope you're going to enjoy learning from Jen as much as I did.

Let's go ahead and meet her now.

I thought a good starting point for us today, because we're going to be talking about strategic workforce planning, or SWP, if we want to shorten it, is to ask you what strategic workforce planning actually is.

I always think it's helpful to start with a bit of a definition.

Absolutely.

And it's not always something that everyone in HR has come across.

So strategic workforce planning is actually part of the business planning cycle, but that's centred on people.

So really what we're doing in strategic workforce planning is taking the corporate strategy.

What is it that the business is trying to do?

And then looking at, well, what people do we need in order to do that?

So we're really looking at our current workforce.

What size is it, what capabilities does it have, what skills does it have?

What have we said we're going to do in the corporate strategy?

And therefore, who do we need to be able to deliver that?

It's not just an HR specialty, though, it is a whole enterprise capability.

So really what we want is for the whole business, including the whole of HR, to think this way when they're applying corporate strategy down to people.

Because without the people, the business can't achieve what it needs to achieve.

And I know that you've worked in some massive organisations, some people listening today might be working in small organisations where actually strategic workforce planning is part of their role, or they'd like it to be part of their role, or they may be thinking, is this something that I'd really like to specialise in?

A question that springs to mind, that I'm really interested in knowing is, in your experience of working for larger organisations, how much of a partnership do you actually have with HR?

Do you sit very, very tightly with HR and work in a very close capacity, or actually, are you not as intertwined as I might think you are?

It does depend very much on the organisation, I would say.

And I do think it works best when SWP is entwined really closely with HR.

So this is one of the debates that we have in SWP quite a lot, because, as with any subspecialty, we have our own in house debates.

But there's a lot of debates about whether does this sit with finance, does it sit with strategy, with corporate strategy, or does it sit with HR?

And you will see different models of that in different places.

For me and the organisations I've been in, it's always sat with HR, and I think that's really crucial, because fundamentally it's an HR discipline because it's about the people and it should be bringing the entirety of your HR discipline together.

So really you should be looking at, if your recruitment activity isn't aligned with your strategic workforce plan and therefore your corporate strategy, what's it doing?

How is it providing that value?

How are we making sure it's aligned with the strategy?

If your training and development is a client of the business and is doing what the business asks it to do, rather than looking critically at what do we think we need to be training for the future, aligning back to the SWP and the strategy, how are we demonstrating that value?

So, for me, in both of the larger organisations I've worked in, so that's police, Scotland and the NHS, it's very much been part of that HR discipline.

But it can't sit alone either.

We need to sit with our colleagues in other HR disciplines, with training and development, with recruitment, with all of our ER and people partnering to make sure we're all tied together in the same place.

If it sits somewhere else, if it sits with finance, typically, and I'm sorry for any finance people who might be listening, we do love you, we do want to work with you, but if it is a finance led discipline, it tends to just become about cost and about the cost of the workforce.

And we miss out a lot of those process innovations about how to make work better, about how to make it more meaningful to retain and keep in the staff that we have, and we lose sight of all of the associated costs with, if we can't keep the people, we can't keep that organisational knowledge.

We not only have to spend more money to recruit people to bring them in, we also have to spend more money doing turnover.

So really, finance driven SWP is out there, but it becomes about the cost of the workforce and it becomes a headcount counting expedition.

And that's not what we're about.

We're about a holistic approach to the workforce that includes every touch point in the employee life cycle and every HR intervention designed to make work better, get our organisational strategy delivered and keep, retain and grow our workforce to where we need to be.

Listening to you talk definitely makes me feel, oh, gosh, this is such an exciting topic, such an exciting discipline to be working in.

I would love to know what actually attracted you to a career working in strategic workforce planning.

So I think with most strategic workforce planning people I've talked to, we all kind of come into this the same way that we fall into it by accident.

So really, when I started in HR.

One of the main frustrations for me quite quickly became how we are viewed in the business and how difficult it can be to prove our value to the business.

We do get this reputation of being sort of pink and fluffy, that we are about either treating people nicely and mother heining people and smoothing over disputes and conflicts, or the HR police.

We're here to be horrible to everyone, have horrible policies that don't let anyone have any fun and kick them out of the business if they look at someone the wrong way.

So that frustration for me was, how do I prove that this function has business value, that the workforce is so critical to the organization that if we don't have look after it well, we don't treat it well, we don't grow it properly, that the business can't function, that's as fundamental as it is.

And really SWP was the discipline that has an evidence base.

So it becomes really clear to argue the case for why these interventions are necessary and what the impact of that intervention or that development or that initiative is.

And it becomes really clear to the business, it's the mechanism for me, anyway, of how it becomes clear to the business of without the workforce, without the right skills, without the right capabilities, this business will fail.

It's not an independent discipline, it's not subservient to marketing.

Without good marketing, customers won't know where we are.

Without the right finances, without funding, we won't be able to.

These things are all important.

Yes.

I don't think HR had the same seat at the table in terms of without the workforce, the organisation cannot compete.

It doesn't matter what we make, what we do, what we sell, what services we provide.

Without our people, we can't do it.

So for me, it was that really clear link between everything I do as an HR professional and the business value it creates.

It was my way of saying HR is meaningful, this is what we need to be doing.

And it gave me the same platform to be able to speak to other leaders in the business and that visibility that I crave.

I'm also very geeky, so I just love data and I love being able to argue the case for.

Well, actually, if you look at this column and you begin to be able to speak in that language that is meaningful to other disciplines and not just HR people.

And really, I've always been a pattern spotter, so I got frustrated with being able to see patterns in the workforce and being able to see, well, this isn't just a retention issue, this is actually an issue about how we deploy our workforce and how we've recruited them, what we've told them during onboarding, and whether that's set up false expectations of what the job is, and it leads to dissatisfaction, which then leads to other issues.

Spotting those patterns has always been like, it's always been my jam.

So this is a discipline that allows me to look beyond just a single HR issue, beyond recruitment, beyond training, beyond onboarding, and look at the whole piece and pull it together into something that really packs a punch.

So that was it for me and.

For anyone listening who's thinking, oh, my goodness, what Jen is talking about just sounds so incredibly amazing.

That's what I want to do.

I think I would like to specialize in it, like Jen has.

What would your advice to them be like?

How do they get started?

Is there some sort of training they should be doing that you think would be a really good idea?

How can you suddenly make that switch?

There is training that's available and I'll come to that in a minute.

But what I would say is the main thing for me is it's a mindset.

Develop that SWPD mindset.

It's like a root cause analysis tool.

So there's a root cause analysis tool called the five whys.

I would encourage HR people to get really familiar with the five whys and begin to ask it.

Ask lots of questions.

When you see an issue or an issue is brought to you, don't settle with the surface issue.

Ask yourself why five times or more.

Don't stop before you get to five and try to find out, why is this an issue?

Why is it expressed in this way?

Why might it be coming out in this department?

Why is it not coming out in other departments?

Why did it only come out at this particular time?

And keep asking, and keep asking and keep asking until you get to a root cause that you're comfortable with.

Spot the pattern, chase it down.

Get into that mindset where you become a critical friend to the business, a genuine critical friend to the business that asks all the awkward questions about, why is this the case?

Why do we do it this way?

Why have we always done it this way?

Why didn't the last time we tried it some other way?

Work and just don't be satisfied with a simple answer.

So get into that mindset and get yourself really comfortable with data.

So data literacy still isn't terribly strong in HR.

We're still talking about it, and I think we're getting better than we used to be.

There's lots of courses available now for people analytics for even data.

Before you get to that, what I would say is, no matter what size of organisation, unit, get into your organisation's data, get into that data, pull it out, play in it, find it, be comfortable in it.

You don't need any fancy systems for that either.

So I'm from the public sector.

We don't have fancy systems.

We don't spend a lot of money on this sort of stuff, but we do have lots of data.

We're huge.

Even if you're a small organization, you have data and you don't need a big system.

Get Excel.

As long as you've got excel and curiosity, you can find patterns in your data that will lead you using that five why's into something that will really show that HR interventions can change the course of the business.

So get involved, get curious, get your data and just get difficult.

Ask those questions.

You can be still as civil and collegiate as HR needs you to be, while also being quite curious and openly so.

And ask those questions.

There is training too.

CIPD, beg your pardon, has just launched an accredited program for SWP, and that's been written with some of the leading practitioners in SWP.

So Adam Gibson in particular has been involved in that program.

He has the book, written the book, literally, on strategic workforce planning.

So that course is really good quality and it is one of CIPD's accredited work streams and you'll start to see a lot more SWP people having that qualification now.

It's very new.

You can get into that and get it involved.

There's an introduction, one if you're not entirely sure that you want to go the whole route of the accreditation, you can go into the introductory program that CIPD has.

I've gone through that and had me look with my team.

It gives you a really good starter for time and gets you sort of gets your mouth watering for that kind of curiosity and those kind of issues you can solve.

So get involved in that and read widely.

Don't just read on people in HR issues and SWP.

Even read up on business strategy.

Read up on change management and project management.

This is a change management discipline and it creates a big program of change.

Have a look at project management, programme management, change management, how to do that, to add that strength to your bow as an HR practitioner as well.

Get curious, get active, get involved.

I love the five whys as a model.

I think it's absolutely fantastic.

So it's great hearing it being talked about and recommended on the show, Jen, and other things that you were mentioning as well.

I thought it would just be helpful to let everyone know that there are some other HR coffee time episodes that might help them with that.

So when you were talking about having a really curious mindset, asking loads of questions immediately, it made me think of episode 119 with Kate, Madison Greenwell, and she talked about how using agile can drive positive change and prove HR's value.

And one of the things that really struck me when I spoke to Kate for that episode was the fact that she was saying, don't necessarily take anything on face value.

Often the real problem isn't what everyone automatically thinks needs to be tackled, and you're in real danger of just tackling what looks like the problem, and then it doesn't end up fixing anything on a long term basis.

And then when you're talking about data and analytics, I know some people will be listening and thinking, oh yes, I love data, and others might be a little bit more like me, Jen, which is where they're thinking, oh, I know this is something I really could do with getting better with numbers and data, and things don't necessarily come to me naturally.

It's something I really have to work at.

If you're feeling more like me than Jen when it comes to that, then I'd recommend at the end of this episode, hopping back and having a listen to episode 58.

That is when I had Angela Moyle, another fabulous person on the show, and she talked about how to feel more confident using data and analytics in your role.

I'll make sure that I link to both those episodes in the show notes.

And then another thing that you mentioned was strategy, and you recommended reading some strategy books.

Well, I have quite a few episodes about strategy now, so much so that I have a whole playlist of them.

And if you go to my website, Brightsky career coaching, and go to the HR Coffee Time podcast page, you'll see all of the playlists on there.

And one of them is all about being strategic and strategy, and also includes lots of book recommendations.

But that's enough of me talking about all the other resources that people might want to go to after they finish listening to this one.

What I would love to move on and ask you now is what you think some of the misconceptions are about strategic workforce planning.

There are a few.

Strangely, it's not a new discipline SWP.

A lot of listeners, if they've come across it, might be noticing it for the first time because it is getting a bit more bandwidth at the moment and a bit more playtime.

And some of that is because our future at the moment looks incredibly uncertain.

Everything has changed in the last couple of years, and we would never have predicted a lot of the things that we've been through in the last few years.

But strategic workforce planning last kind of came to the fore in the eighties, which is, you know, an epic generation and a really good generation for music, if you ask me.

But that last came to the fore in the eighties when greed was good and really it was focused on growth.

So while it's not a new discipline, it's quite misunderstood.

So for me, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is it's about head count, it's about the size of your workforce, how many people do you have?

And it's about conforming to a size of the workforce.

So already we get that awful thing in HR with, it's like, oh, HR's in the room and we need to be quiet, or hrs here.

Who's getting fired.

SWP practitioners have that all the time.

If we come in and we want to make a strategic workforce plan, people often assume it's about reducing headcount and saving money that way.

It's not.

It's definitely not for me.

Strategic workforce planning is never about that.

And particularly if you see cases of mass redundancies.

This is what we seek to avoid as strategic workforce planners.

We don't want to be coming and doing this.

We want to be making sure that we avoid the need for those in the future by making sure the focus is on reskilling, redeploying, and moving our workforce into the areas of growth that we have, rather than discombobulating big sections of the workforce and getting rid of them.

The despair you'll see among strategic workforce planners when anyone announces great big layoffs, you'd know that's not our jam.

The other one really is that it creates a perfect solution.

It can predict the future, and that if you do it, that will be absolutely fine.

We'll all be absolutely perfect.

And there's a lot of us who now are leaning into some of those jokes, myself included, about being able to predict the future or look into crystal balls, because that's not what we do.

Alicia Roach is one of my.

Call her out.

Such a fan girl, one of my favorite people in the SWP world.

And she had a wonderful quote that I thought was so perfect, and I deploy often.

Thanks, Alicia.

Which was, all models are wrong, but some models are useful.

So your strategic workforce plan wouldn't be able to predict the future.

None of us can.

We take the information that we have, and we make our best guesses and we keep making the best guesses.

So very much in that agility, it's an ever evolving discipline and it's a constant one.

We keep looking at the future and we adjust and we adapt.

You're not a once and done, you get this right.

And I know something that everybody else doesn't know.

Absolutely not.

And I think the last one is that it's a separate process and that you just need one expert and you'll be able to do it.

I said a little bit earlier about this is an enterprise capability.

It's a mindset for a whole organization to have.

It may be led by HR and it may be owned by HR, and I think that's how it works best.

But it doesn't mean that you have a strategic workforce planner who writes you a plan with no involvement from the rest of the business, and then you put that plan on the shelf and magically everything happens.

It's something that needs to permeate your whole business, to make decisions in a more meaningful, more strategic, more informed way, and then work towards.

There's an action plan that follows strategic workforce planning that you then need to take those actions to get your workforce future fit and fighting fit.

So the notion of it being a once and done shot that predicts the future perfectly and that no one else needs to be involved in, that's the big trouble for us as strategic workforce planners to get past and get the business involved, get people enthused about, get them to understand there is a role for them.

Difficult to convince people that they want more work, but as long as I think they're involved in that, they understand the future vision of the business and they're enthused about it, they're quite happy to get involved.

So getting over that hump is probably the biggest challenge for us.

And overcoming those misconceptions.

Oh, actually, the other one is just really simple fear.

It's fear of change, reluctance to change and fear of getting it wrong in the future.

So linked to that piece about the inability to predict a perfect future, people are very reluctant to engage in future forecasting at all.

They're very much stuck in the now.

If I can't predict what's happening next weekend, if I am stuck with this vacancy that I've had for months, and that's my focus, I can't afford to talk to you about what might be happening in three years time.

That's like I might win the lottery and not have to work by then.

Getting people out of that fear of looking forward, getting them out of cyclical firefighting.

You don't need to firefight.

If you focus on the future, you can afford to take some of that time away to look at what the future is.

But getting people to come away and to then embrace change is always a challenge.

Yeah, I can absolutely see now why you were talking about change management and how important that is, and that this is all about change.

For anyone listening, or actually even people who are very accomplished at change management, I think, as with all disciplines, there's always more to learn.

Have you got some top tips or resources that you'd recommend about how you can do that effectively?

Like how you get people past the fear so that they can engage really effectively in the process?

I do.

So some of this is actually my book recommendations.

Well, come on to them.

Yes, good idea.

Oh, gosh.

Let's mix things up and have the book recommendations already.

Well, see, this is very much about how to get ready for this.

So I have three book recommendations for you, and two of them are economics books.

One is called factfulness, and it's by Hans and Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronland.

Now, I'm probably mispronouncing that.

Did you apologise?

But it's actually.

It's a lovely, uplifting book, bizarrely, that will really challenge your worldview of is the world going to hell in a handbasket?

Because it can really feel at the moment like the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

And the answer that this book provides is absolutely not.

The world is in a better shape than it's ever been.

And it gives you lots of really lovely examples of how things you may feel are worse from when you were a child or from generations before you are better than they've ever been, and how progress is much better than you think, from business, from nature, from even climate.

Really interesting stuff.

But one of the things it does as well is outlines ten basic human instincts that make us all pessimistic, very pessimistic, and prone to have a distorted view of the future based on that pessimism which isn't actually founded.

So it's a really great one, I think, for building your critical thinking.

It's a lovely read.

It makes you feel a lot better.

But it also will build your critical thinking and improve your decision making, because it will make you aware of those ten kind of biases that you have.

A little bit like logical fallacies, but the ten human instincts you have that will make you view the future more pessimistically than you need to and how you can go about challenging some of them.

I have got that book shockingly on my shelf and I've had it there for ages after it was recommended to me by a friend who's an accountant, so very good with numbers and data and oh, I feel awful that I don't think I've ever open the front cover.

But you have me completely convinced now I know a bit more about what's on the inside.

I'm going to make sure that I prioritize reading that.

Although I seem to be saying that a lot recently with guests, I seem to be having to prioritise an awful lot of reading.

I'm going to have to get quicker at reading, I think, but that's a great recommendation and one that I'm almost certain we haven't had on the show before.

I can't wait to hear what your second book's going to be.

The second one is the first of my economics books, so this one's called Free Economics, interestingly, by Stephen two Stephens, Stephen D Leavitt and Stephen J Dubner.

And it's such a weird and hugely entertaining just romp through drivers of human behaviour.

So it is from an economics standpoint, but it has the wildest studies that you'll ever find.

And lovely if you've ever seen some of those fantastic graphs that just conflate things like cheese consumption with the number of people who died getting wrapped up in their bedsheets.

Correlations that don't mean anything.

If you like a fan of that, have a look at this, because it will tell you the absolutely sometimes unintended consequences of human behaviour.

How what drives human behavior and what the outcomes have sometimes been wildly different than what people expected.

So for me, this is very much key to unconventional thinking.

Challenge unconventional wisdom that x follows yemenite, not always the case.

And challenging conventional wisdom of why people do the things that they do, which is crucial for us to understand in HR.

But really, for me, as an SWP practitioner, challenge unconventional questions.

You know, ask unconventional questions and challenge conventional wisdom to innovate properly.

This one is for you, if you think that way.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

And so what's book number three?

The last one I'm currently still reading.

So this is a bit of a cheat for recommendations, but I have about a million little tabs in this already that have triggered a lot of thinking for me.

It's by John Kay and Mervyn King and it's called radical uncertainty.

And it is a little bit harder reading because they are wonderfully intelligent economists, and I am not an economics kind of person.

HR finance divide I know where I am, but it's a really oddly reassuring.

A reader might take it another way and could read it in panic, but for me, I find it a really oddly reassuring overview of how some of the biggest, most important decisions, way more important than we'll ever make.

As HR professionals, the biggest, most important decisions have been made in an environment with less than perfect information.

So we do have this tendency to think that we can only make a decision if we know everything, if we know all of the potential inputs and outputs, and we know what might happen, and we have every point of data ever.

And that's the only time we make a decision.

And that is death in SWP circles, really.

We need to make decisions and we need to make them in an agile and quick way.

So for me, this really speaks to me about how we crave certainty that doesn't exist and isn't real.

And it's a great thing to kick start you out of decision inertia, that you don't make the decision because you think your information is imperfect.

It'll always be imperfect.

Get comfortable with imperfect data and imperfect information and learn how to make decisions in a really radically uncertain, unpredictable world that we're living in today.

Wow.

They sound like three absolutely fantastic book recommendations.

Thank you so much for sharing them, Jenkin.

Well, we're doing things slightly back to front today, which I'm very much enjoying, so normally I start to wrap things up after the book recommendations, but actually, there's one question that I haven't asked you that I think is really key, and I'll be cross with myself if I don't ask you that.

And it's really about bringing this whole concept of working in SWP to life, because I'm sure that so many people will be thinking right now, gosh, this sounds so exciting.

I can use some of the advice that Jen's given just to become more strategic in my role anyway.

Or yes, perhaps I really want to move into strategic workforce planning as a career and just do that as a discipline.

But what's it actually like?

What actually happens on a day to day basis?

What does this strategic workforce plan actually look like?

What is the stuff I would be doing?

I know it's really hard to give a typical day in the life example because, of course, for all of us, whatever job we're doing every day is slightly different.

But can you give us just a bit of a flavour of what it's like from a practical perspective to be doing the role?

Absolutely.

At least from how I design it, if you like.

So one of the really good things for myself about working in strategic workforce planning has been, it's at quite a senior level, so I'm creating these functions myself.

The reality for me, in some senses, is slightly different from the reality of my team.

But we'll talk a little bit about both, really, because we do very similar things myself and the team that I built at Police Scotland.

So mostly what you'll be doing as a strategic workforce planner is in two places.

You'll be head down in a lot of data and a lot of information and asking lots of questions about it and creating a lot of queries for you to go out to the business.

And then in the second piece, you'll be out in the business talking to your business stakeholders.

SWP needs to be both top down and bottom up.

So when we talk about top down, that's corporate strategy.

What does the corporate strategy say?

Are our priorities, our values, the services we'll be delivering or the products we'll be making, the markets we'll be entering?

But then bottom up is where your HR business partnering kind of view comes in.

And it's very similar to HR business partnering in that sense of, of coming in and asking your stakeholders, your business leaders, your business unit leaders or your specialty leaders, what's happening in your environment?

What do you understand the strategy to mean for you?

What are your HR burning problems?

And I don't necessarily mean your today problems.

What keeps you awake at night?

Is it that you don't have the right people?

Is it that you don't have any people?

Are you struggling to recruit to your area?

Have you become a sort of throughput area where people come in to the business, in your area, get skills and then leave?

Are you happy with that?

Are you not happy with that?

What do you understand about what's happening in your environment?

What do you want to tell me?

What problem would you solve today if you could solve it?

What's your burn line platform?

Now, some of them might be traditional HR issues.

So some of them may be that I have untrained managers who are being terrible with my staff members and not bringing them on board.

And you may hand that over to HR proper for HR to get involved in and to work hand in hand with you, but they may be issues that you work in tandem with other HR specialties.

So recruitment takes too long.

That is a strategic workforce planning problem because it's not enough for us to talk about who do we need.

Who do we need to have?

Are they out there in the market?

Do we pay enough to attract them?

If we can attract them, can we process, is our recruitment process fast enough, agile enough, lean enough to respond quicker than other organisations that we're in competition with?

So really, that's probably three.

I feel like that's a Monty Python spanish inquisition.

Now, I started with two and that's three.

It'll be looking at the data, looking at the issues and coming up with your for yourself, what you feel the issues are based on the data and you're taking a long view, typically on that, not a straightforward view of what's happening right now.

You're looking at patterns over the last three years and making predictions for the next three years.

Then you're going out to the business to temper some of that information.

Here's what I think is the problem.

What do you need to tell me is the problem?

And then you're taking that whole picture.

You're.

Here's what I think the problem is there.

Here's what I'm telling you is the problem.

And then you're going back to your partners in HR to say, here's what I'm hearing from the business and here's what I'm seeing from the data.

Explain to me what you're doing.

What's your plan for this?

Are you aware of this?

Did you know about it?

What can we agree together that you need to be doing with what your function provides, whether that's the training for skills, whether that's the recruitment for the actual people to come in, what are you doing as part of HR to be able to do that?

What actions do we need to take to address any gaps that we have in that sort of activity?

So you're very much a go between between HR and the entirety of the business.

So if you want to be visible and you want to be strategic, get into SWP.

You'll be all over the business.

You'll find out more than you probably ever would have any other time and you'll also be all over HR.

So you'll find out more about the HR silos and disciplines that we tend to have and start knitting those together.

You want to be sort of.

We're back to that crystal ball analogy, see all, know all, get into SWP.

After hearing that, Jen, I feel like there's going to be a boom in applications for strategic workforce planning roles.

It just sounds fantastic and you've brought it to life so well.

I'm incredibly grateful to you.

It's just fabulous to be able to now have this as a resource to share with the HR and people community, because hopefully it's going to get some people even more excited about the work that they're doing or think about other options for their career.

And talking about careers, I know that you have recently left a role and that you're actively looking for your next position.

So if someone is listening right now and is thinking, oh my goodness, we could hugely benefit from having Jen in our organization.

Are you happy for them to reach out to you on LinkedIn?

Absolutely.

Give me a call.

So I finished up at Police Scotland on a high.

We have the team in place now and we're ready to do that.

I'm happy to come into other organizations to look at that, to build new systems, to build an SWP for either the short or the long term.

I love starting new functions and getting people enthusiastic about SWP, so give me a call.

Brilliant.

I will make sure that I put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so that people can easily find you on there.

And I know that you've also very kindly agreed that for anyone who isn't necessarily looking for someone to join their team but would really like to learn more about strategic workforce planning or pick your brains or just have a chat with you, that you're happy for people to reach out to you anyway on there.

Absolutely.

There's a little link on my LinkedIn profile to book and chat with me as well.

So I do sort of two sessions a week on a Tuesday and a Thursday.

I put half a note aside if anybody wants to ask me questions about strategic HR, about design, about people analytics, about my experience in HR generally.

So if anybody wants to, you can either just drop me a DM or you can just book in a session and we'll have a chat.

Fantastic.

Well, all that leaves me to say is a huge and heartfelt thank you, Jen.

It has been absolutely brilliant talking to you about SWP today.

Thank you so much and you're very welcome.

That brings us to the end of the episode.

I hope you've enjoyed diving into the world of strategic workforce planning with me and Jen.

If you were listening to this episode because you're trying to figure out which HR or people career option is the right next step for you, I have a collection of other episodes to help.

You can find them all grouped together in a podcast playlist, which I've called clarify your career goals and explore HR career options.

I'll put a link to it in the show notes for you.

Or you can find it by going to the podcast page of my website and my website is called Brightsky Career coaching.

Then scroll to the bottom of the podcast page where you'll find all the playlists.

The episodes in that collection explore things like working in a contracting role, working as an HR consultant, working in a standalone role, and I am looking forward to adding more episodes to it in.

The future future as well.

For you to make sure you know about future HR coffee time episodes, please do either hit the follow button in the podcasting app you're listening to this in or subscribe to my free weekly HR coffee time email newsletter.

I'll pop a link to the HR Coffee Time newsletter in the show notes along with everything else that I've promised to include in there for you.

Have a great rest of your your week and I am looking forward to being back again soon with the next episode.