Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation of People Management Associations surveyed more than 5,500 HR professionals in 109 countries recently, asking them to project worker shortages in several professions: manufacturing, utilities, construction, technology, trade, hotels and restaurants, financial services, real estate, health care, and education. The participants projected shortages in the U.S. in all professions by 2020 and they anticipate very high talent shortages in construction, trade, and real estate. By 2030, they expect very high talent shortages in every profession except manufacturing and utilities, which should see high talent shortages.

In other words, everyone is going to need talent that’s going to be very hard to find, so what is your organization doing to prepare for this eventuality? How good is your succession planning process? Are you developing bench strength for key positions? How do you manage career progression for your workforce? How do you recruit, hire, and retain new employees? How do you manage your workforce to ensure continuity?

And how do you become more diverse? The country is becoming more diverse which means more diverse customers and more diverse employees. How do you manage that? As the Baldrige Criteria ask, “How do you ensure your organizational culture benefits from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?”

These are strategic questions that need to be asked and discussed during your strategic planning meetings. The aging population will affect your organization. To be prepared, you need to talk about what an aging population means to your organization and how you can be ready for the transition as the massive Baby Boomer generation retires.

(The HR survey was in “New Priorities for Employees,” Suzanne Woolley, BusinessWeek, September 13, 2010.)

To read more about managing your workforce, click on these articles:

• Best-in-Class Workforce Planning
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging
• Succession Planning at P&G
• Climbing the Corporate Lattice
• Workforce Well-Being
• Measuring Training Effectiveness

In “Growing within the corporate lattice” (Star Tribune, November 2, 2009), Pam Moret describes a new career path that doesn’t always mean moving up: You may move diagonally or even down to gain knowledge about a different part of the organization. As a result, you become more valuable to your company while making yourself more employable. You increase your options. You learn and grow, tackle challenges, and advance your career. You become a more engaged employee.

Moret encourages you to take responsibility for your personal growth and development including identifying what is really important in your life and career, examining the need for work/life balance, and evaluating your strengths and weaknesses and how best you can serve your company. “The lattice model encourages taking on different roles to learn more about the company and expand your skills and expertise,” she writes. It also offers multiple paths to success rather than the one at the top of the corporate ladder.

One process that can help you take personal responsibility for your career is the Personal Performance Excellence Framework developed by Oriel and described in “Making Performance Excellence Personal.” As Moret concludes, “It is up to each of us to grow, manage and shape our own careers and organizations.”

Help grow our community  

• Flexibility: Offer telecommuting, shift exchanges, and compressed work weeks.
• Diversity: Diversify by race, age, gender, orientation, disability, religion.
• Equity: Promote equity in pay and access to positions and promotions.
• Sustainability: Reduce carbon footprint by working “greener.”
• Care giving: Allow for flexibility and compassion.
• Wellness: Provide sick days to allow the sick to be sick.
• Multigenerational. Promote a diversity of generations.
• Social spaces: Engage consumers through social media and revenues grow 18%; don’t, and revenues drop 6%. Read the study.
• Retention: Provide mentoring, professional development, career advancement planning, and continuing education.
• Practice: Everyone, top to bottom, follows policies.

The article in which this list appeared (“The Work-Life Tip Sheet: 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace,” by Deborah Frett, Huffington Post, October 22, 2009) quotes a Harvard Business Review article that cites a study from the University of New Mexico (patience, we’ll get there) that measures the stock market’s response when a Fortune 500 company announces a work-life program: The stock goes up 4.8%. Just on the announcement. And then, when you actually implement the program, employee satisfaction typically improves, which bumps up customer satisfaction, which increases revenues, which can also boost the stock price.

That’s a pretty good business case for creating an organizational culture that values employees—a core value of the Baldrige model.

Help grow our community 

The best way to evaluate how well you are creating an engaged and satisfied workforce is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.

The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your workforce focus, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

1. How do you determine the key factors that affect workforce engagement and satisfaction and assess performance on them?
2. How does your culture promote open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce?
3. How does your organization benefit from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?
4. How does your workforce performance management system engage employees and support high-performance work?
5. How does your learning and development system address your organization’s core competencies and strategic challenges, action plans, performance improvement, innovation, ethics, employees’ needs, knowledge transfer, and reinforcing new knowledge and skills on the job?
6. How do you manage career progression and succession planning?
7. How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs including skills, competencies, and staffing levels, and prepare your workforce for changing needs?
8. How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new employees?
9. How do you manage and organize your workforce to accomplish the work of your organization?
10. How do you ensure, improve, and measure performance on workforce health, safety, and security, and how do you support employees through policies, services, and benefits?

To read the world-class responses of Baldrige Award recipients to these questions, click here and then click on the award application summary you wish to review. Go to Category 5, Workforce Focus, to learn about how the organization values its workforce.

Help grow our community