Gergo Safar 0:00:07.8: 

Good afternoon everyone. Are we ready to talk about strategic workforce planning? Yes! I'm very mindful that we are heading towards the end of the day, and then I'm sure you have networked a lot with everyone and you've heard a lot of inspiring case studies. By all means, if you feel like standing up or walking around or put your feet up or taking notes, taking pictures, just do that. Whatever makes you feel comfortable. Chip in with your experience, with your comments, so that we make it as conversational as possible. A few words about me, so over the last 25 years of working, I spent it in eight European countries across a variety of industries. Starting in consultancy, then went into finance, mergers and acquisitions, and then actually with the turnaround going into all variations of HR role, all leading up actually to my current strategic workforce planning role at BT Group. BT Group, as I said, hopefully doesn't need much of an introduction. If you do need an introduction, it's one of the leading telecommunication companies in the United Kingdom, with a global presence, but with a primary focus on the UK market. As a matter of fact, if you live and work in the UK there is a high probability that you have been using our services, either being one of our 30 million customers directly, or using a public Wi-Fi, or actually working safely from your office because your organization is using our cybersecurity products. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:01:51.5: 

The ambition of BT is to be the UK's most trusted connector, which takes me to our refreshed strategy, which stands on the three pillars of build, connect, and accelerate. Building infrastructure everywhere in the UK, and then connecting people, businesses, devices, and the combination of all of that, and providing not just connectivity to our customers, but also all sorts of variations. Mariam quoted some quote about nearly 90,000 FTE direct labor, and if you add up the subcontractors, the number actually goes beyond 100,000. Predominantly based in the UK, but we've got a large presence in India and Hungary, as well as smaller sales offices across over 100 countries. The scale of BT and the problems we are solving for actually requires quite a robust and dynamic workforce planning. You can see on the right side of the slide the type of problem we are solving for is not unique to us. I'm pretty sure that a combination of it, all of your organizations are wrestling with. Some of it is about how your business model is evolving, and what is the competition on the market? What is the competition on the talent market? How much are the skills disrupted for your current and the future workforce? How the technology is impacting the workforce. I've been speaking for five minutes and I haven't mentioned AI yet, so how is AI impacting the workforce? How do you optimize your workforce globally so that you meet the cost challenges as well as you put skill competencies in skill hubs? 

 

Gergo Safar 0:03:51.8: 

As well as, last but not least, also the expectation of your workforce is changing as well. All these complex challenges require us to have a workforce planning which is robust, dynamic, as well as multi-dimensional. The journey of BT on strategic workforce planning. Some of you may have thought that, oh here he comes. He's going to tell us a fairytale about how great they are doing strategic workforce planning, and we are not doing it because it's so difficult to hack. No, I'm not here to tell a fairytale story. I'm here to tell a very real story about all the sweat, the tears, the joy, the excitement, and most importantly the learnings of our journey. How did we establish strategic workforce planning, and how did we measure it along the way? I did the start of the strategic workforce planning in BT around five years ago, and because they're a technology-driven company, our industry probably felt the skill disruption and the skill challenge a bit earlier than some other industries. In BT, we have a long history of headcount planning and people cost planning that goes much further beyond that point, and there was some sporadic strategic workforce planning, but we started around four years ago when we started systematically across all of the divisions to think about, what kind of skills do we need in the future? How much of it do we need? Do we have it or not? If we don't have it, how will we get it? What are the best ways to close those gaps? 

 

Gergo Safar 0:05:32.8: 

That's also around the time when we engaged with Anaplan and put the workforce planning model across all of the divisions on Anaplan. Most recently, in the recent years, one or two years ago, we put the strategic workforce planning models also on Anaplan. We introduced a scale taxonomy which is actually the currency of our planning, and ever since, this is actually what I'm most proud of. It's not perfect, but every iteration is better than the one before. We are improving step-by-step our workforce planning practices, and in the most recent years our shift about this classic demand and supply gap analysis actually shifted towards planning the actions on the back of the workforce plans. The North Star in this space is about this integrated workforce planning, multidimensional workforce planning, which is also a dynamic one. So, let's get you involved. If you have a paper, just grab it, if not, just your phone. Just write down for yourself, you're thinking of what strategic workforce planning means for your organization. What is the biggest challenge you face with strategic workforce planning? I'm not going to check, so don't worry. I can see a couple of sinking faces. It's like, oh my God, what do I write down? 

 

Gergo Safar 0:08:11.3: 

All right. Okay, let's go on, and if you still want to finish your answer for this, again, this is going to be for you and for no one else. Strategic workforce planning, I think we all agree that intellectually, any of the organizations agree this is needed and this is an important exercise. If you look at the Gartner survey which came out at the beginning of this year, strategic workforce planning is amongst the top five priorities of all HR leaders. If you look at the other statistics from the World Economic Forum of how quickly skills get disrupted, and how quickly do they need to be renewed or replaced? Some of the statistics on the top-right corner from Droup indicates about the growing gap between the total demand and the total supply of certain skillsets in certain locations. Which means that overall, organizations are looking for very much the same skillset, and we are all fishing in a relatively small pond for certain skillsets. How do we actually position our organizations well in that relatively small pond? Before I go on, obviously strategic workforce planning, in its clearest definition, this is about translating the strategy into people plans, and long-term people plans, not just immediate headcount plans. I'm sure you all have seen that description that it's about having the right people with the right skills and the right mix at the right time, at the right place, at the right cost. Hopefully I haven't missed any of it. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:10:09.4: 

What you don't often see is actually the bottom box here. This is as much about the actions on the back of those demand and supply gaps. I think we all have been guilty at some point in our career in strategic workforce planning of focusing very much at the front end of the process, where we identify the areas that we want to focus on, we quantify the demand, the supply and then the gaps. We have great conversations, whether we agree or not, what's the accuracy of those data, and we under-indexed the tail end, which to be fair, that's the most important bit actually. As long as there are no actions coming out at the end of it, everything else that you did remains an intellectual paper exercise. Just to quote Lee from in the morning, what could go wrong? If it's so important, everyone agrees that it's needed, why is it so difficult to establish strategic workforce planning in an organization? Why is it that no board needs to be explained, that, oh, you need a CapEx plan, you need a cash plan, you need a revenue plan? Why is it that many boards need to be explained that they need a workforce plan? Without actually asking what did you put down as the biggest challenge you face in your organization about strategic workforce planning, I do suspect that some of them actually will fall under this category of difficult to get buy-in from the business. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:11:59.7: 

How do I keep it actual? How do I keep it dynamic? How do I make it action oriented? What kind of skills do I need as a strategic workforce planner? What's the tooling? Which one do I need when? How do I connect them? What's the time horizon? Again, what's the impact of AI on my job, as well as on every other job in the organization? Does it resonate, or anything violently missing? The value, yes. Exactly, which for me goes hand-in-hand with the business buy-in. Ownership as well, yes. Where does the job get done? 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:12:47.8: 

It's pretty short term. Business is still very short term when making decisions, particularly in this environment and costs. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:12:54.0: 

Yes, absolutely. It's the never-ending debate of, as I said, intellectually everyone agrees that we need long-term workforce plans, we need long-term business plans, but I need to make the money this year. If I need to prioritize resources, budgets, then more often than not organizations default to the short-term plans. In the interest of time, I propose to focus on three of these ones. On tooling, what does actually dynamic planning mean, as well as like I talked about, how do you make your workforce planning action oriented? Of course we are on an Anaplan conference, so I'm making the assumption that all of us have some interest in the tooling landscape around strategic workforce planning. Actually I got this illustrative graph, so I'm not here for you to see a full comprehensive picture of who provides what, but in my learning, it took me years to actually understand which tool is doing what. What requirements are they fulfilling? How do I connect them? In which order do I procure them? It's a very difficult landscape to understand of, what's the right order of the tools? Which one do I need, which one do I not yet need? Also, what's the tool that connects this information? 

 

Gergo Safar 0:14:32.0: 

This is actually where Anaplan as a modeling platform helps us to connect all this information, and then as you heard in the morning, help you to make decisions on the back of that data, help you to identify different scenarios, and take care of the more complicated job of this endless version tracking of spreadsheets and inputs, who overwrote which function. Things that actually took most of our time before, and there is the modeling platform which actually solves for those problems. I spoke about the action orientation. Remember the definition of workforce planning, which is about the right everything and then the solution is on the back of it. I sense a bit of a competition amongst organizations about who can come up with more 'B's. Have you heard all about the B programs, like Build, Buy, Borrow, Bind? I think one of the public sector organizations came up with 15 'B's. I don't even know how will they remember all of them, let alone actually act on them. Most of us actually, the key question is, do you build a skill or do you buy or borrow that skillset? How do you retain a skillset? How do you bind certain skillsets in the organization? Within these 'B's, there are multiple variations. If you have 100 units of investment, do you put it into an upskilling program which per definition is like if you invest it into a data scientist, the data scientist stays on the track, but we'll have an improved skillset? Or, do you invest into a frontline colleague who is aspiring to become a service designer? 

 

Gergo Safar 0:16:52.5: 

With other words, reskill them and then redeploy them in a different area. Do you go out to the market, hire that skillset, or do you just actually temporarily borrow it from a third party provider? Do you invest it into talent entry programs, which is a combination of buying and building? Because you don't buy a ready skillset, you buy the potential and then build those skills up in the organization. The chart is illustrative, but it shows an example where the highest return on investment was in the upskilling space. I'm not suggesting that will be the answer for all of you, but you need to look into the actual and the notional benefits and cost of all of these programs. Sometimes it will require us to make assumptions about those benefits and costs, and see which one has the highest return on investment. In this particular case the upskilling program was, because it's all about the impact your programs leave and the return on the investment of those programs. Last but not least, about dynamic planning. Just out of interest, if you hear the word dynamic planning, what pops to your mind? Anyone? Because I think for many of us, we envision these real time plans where an input changes and then immediately every plan gets recalculated, which mightn't actually be necessary, for example, if you do capacity planning. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:18:45.6: 

For example, in our case when we plan for the 999 services, obviously those workforce plans, which is an operational workforce plan but needs to be real time because we have to manage the peaks. In the long-term workforce planning, you don't always need actually this real time. Nevertheless, you need to move away from this static, for example, annual review. No matter what happens in the world, I'm doing my strategic workforce plan in November, period, end of conversation, has to be in November. If you introduce, I don't know, an AI tool in December, then bad luck, you missed the deadline, it doesn't get factored in until the next round. For me, dynamic workforce planning means event triggered, and of course you need a few things for that. First of all, obviously the business needs to be ready for this, because the inputs don't always come straightaway to your workforce planning teams. The business needs to share, what's happening on the market? I need to reflect on that, so this relationship needs to be built up. Of course, you need to build up the strategic workforce planning capabilities as well in the organization, and you need to have the technology. This is where actually platforms like Anaplan can help you, because then you have an enabler which actually allows you to update your workforce plans as and when is needed. Of course, the access to data is also a key enabler. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:20:34.4: 

Again, to demystify, for me dynamic planning isn't about real time updates. For me it's about making sure that you have the courage and the infrastructure to sometimes actually throw away what you had before and redo the whole exercise. Which is not a very easy thing, because we don't like to admit that something is no longer relevant for us. In the interest of time, I think this was the main part of the presentation. I wouldn't be true to my consultancy background if I did not want you to walk away with five messages. In fact actually they wanted three, but allow me five this time. The first one is, never underestimate the need to agree with your organization of like, what does strategic workforce planning mean for us actually? Don't assume that the answer will be the same from everyone, and don't assume that it doesn't change over time. This was one of my biggest learnings. I made assumptions around this and I thought that whatever I think strategic workforce planning is, everyone else is seeing the same. Do clarify it, and do revisit that definition. Learning number two, which is again a learning we went through in BT. You don't need to do strategic workforce planning for the whole of your organization. I know that the pressure will be there for from your board to say, well, I'm responsible for the whole company, I need to see a whole company picture. If you want to do it properly, you pick priority areas for strategic workforce planning and you do it there. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:22:37.0: 

It doesn't mean that you won't need to make assumptions for some of the other parts of the company to satisfy this whole company view request, but if you wanted to do it properly, you only do it for areas where it matters. Tooling remains a key enabler to scale, not to start. If anyone says to you, you can't start it until you have all the tools in place, well, you saw how many tools need to be in place to do it properly. You can actually start it without. Of course, if you wanted to do it fast, if you wanted to do it dynamic, if you wanted to do it at scale with multiple use cases, then you will need the tooling. I think my mantra is number four. It's like everything else, what happens at the front of strategic workforce planning about demand and supply analysis and the gaps that comes together, doesn't really matter until you have actions on the back of it. You iterate those actions and then you sometimes you trial and error and say, okay, this upstream program didn't bring in what we thought to bring in. Let's pivot to another program. The return on investment and the engagement with the colleagues is what matters at the end of it, and that's the ultimate measure of our success, and again, making it dynamic. 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:24:17.5: 

Thank you very much for sharing your experience. 

 

Gergo Safar 0:24:19.2: 

Thank you. 

 

Unknown Speaker Safar 0:24:19.8: 

Any closing comments?