At times like this, working to ensure the long-term resilience of your workforce may seem like a “nice to do” activity rather than an essential one. In addition to the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are facing uncertainties on a range of other fronts too:
- Political – Brexit and immigration controls, and the impact that these will have on the availability of labour, particularly at the lower and mid-range levels
- Social – a growing and increasingly diverse population
- Technological – “big data”, artificial intelligence and cyber security
- Regulatory – challenging Ofgem and Ofwat determinations, and the need to produce workforce resilience plans for the next price control period and a further 10 years
On a positive note, as a result of having to face these challenges head-on, businesses are learning much about both their workforce dynamics and what their future workforce and operating model may have to look like.
So, in the middle of a near-unprecedented amount of uncertainty, coupled with the imminent impacts of Brexit and future immigration controls, how is your business preparing for the post-COVID/ Brexit future?
While it is understandable that workforce planning for the long-term may not seem like a priority at this time, it is actually the perfect opportunity to gain maximum value from the whole exercise – getting your workforce strategy ready to take advantage of whatever the future holds. But if capacity within your HR team is holding you back, then Energy & Utility Skills could help take away some of the stress.
Over the past two decades, Energy & Utility Skills has worked with over 50 of the UK’s major utility businesses, as well as with businesses in other sectors and as far away as Hong Kong, to better understand what a sustainable approach to strategic workforce planning might look like for them.
Through our unique approach, we help our clients:
- Review the supply of people already in the workforce
- Predict the volume of future vacancies that will need to be filled across the business, in each job role, over the next 10-15 years – identifying where and when pinch points may occur
- Better understand the external labour market so that they can:
- benchmark their current workforce against industry averages and assess the extent to which their workforce reflects the communities that they serve
- make an informed judgement as to best resourcing options open to them given likely demand for similar skills and the supply of such skills in their locality
- Develop a fully-costed resourcing strategy that will fill each vacancy with a competent person in a timely and efficient manner
- Assess the impact that different futures may have on their future resourcing strategy and the financial cost of delivering it
We provide each customer with a bespoke and highly robust set of analyses using only the workforce data that they already have at their disposal. We then produce a range of actionable recommendations that will not only give them a detailed and fully-costed resourcing strategy for the next 10-15 years for each-and-every job role, function, department and business unit in the organisation, but provide them with a sustainable approach to workforce planning that can be maintained on an annual basis within the existing HR function/ capacity.
This approach can provide valuable confidence to both internal and external stakeholders that the business has a robust and sustainable plan to ensure they have the skilled workforce required to meet future challenges – whatever that future looks like.
We also support collaborations of like-minded businesses. For example, working with the UK’s regulated utilities to produce workforce resilience plans at an industry-level for price control periods (e.g. RIIO-2). This also works for vertical supply chains, where resourcing strategies are developed so that all partners collaborate on skills rather than compete.
Our workforce planning lead, Rob Murphy, has more than two decades’ experience of producing high-quality labour market and workforce insights. He leads each business through our unique strategic workforce planning framework and ensures that the maximum value is gained from not just the data outputs, but also from going through the process of doing strategic workforce planning in such a comprehensive way.
Here’s what some of our previous customers have said about us (click to expand):
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If you would like to have an informal discussion about workforce planning, please contact Rob Murphy on 07834 751608 or rob.murphy@euskills.co.uk