Now it's your turn!

This session is a chance to connect with other attendees and discuss a topic in which you all share a professional interest, and hopefully take some new ideas and inspiration back to help you with your challenges at work. 

Choose whichever topic is most of interest to you, or move to an empty table and start a new group. 

1. Working with unstructured, incomplete, or poor-quality data 

A lack of a good data shouldn’t prevent you from commencing your strategic workforce planning journey. Discuss ways in which you can get your SWP project moving when your data isn’t quite where you’d like it. Can you identify some key considerations, actions and safeguards which may be relevant/helpful along the way? 

2. Where should SWP sit in the organisation? 

SWP is considered by many not to be a HR-owned function, although opinion is often divided around this contentious topic. What are the respective views of the table? If not HR, where are some possible homes for SWP in the organisational structure? 

3. How can SWP relieve the burden on Talent Acquisition? 
The war for talent has been described as an economic bubble fuelled by an over-reliance, by organisations, on traditional recruitment methods. How can strategic workforce planning help side-step the war for talent and relieve the heavy burden on Talent Acquisition functions?

4. How is automation affecting your workforce planning? 
Automation represents a potential solution to declining supply of people driven by our ageing population and workforce. However, it may not be the silver bullet many people are hoping for. Discuss some of the pitfalls and common misconceptions around automation. What are the risks and key considerations? 

5. Avoiding common pitfalls in translating corporate strategy into workforce planning 
Some pitfalls of modern organisational strategies include: 

• We don’t actually have a formally documented strategy. 
• I’m sure we have one somewhere, but no one really knows where it lives.
• We have multiple documents that present as ‘strategic’. 
• Our strategy strays into the implementation zone. 
• Our strategy is written in high level corporate business speak… what does it actually mean? 
• Our strategy doesn’t really describe what we’re doing/trying to do. 

Pick two of the pitfalls mentioned above and discuss some counter measures which will help get your SWP project under way.  

6. Should SWP start with the strategy, or with the people? 

• You should put strategy first and develop a workforce to execute your strategy. 
• You should always put people first and do what you can with the workforce you have. 

Which of these statements to you subscribe to and why? Discuss the merits and considerations around both.   

7. Capability vs Skills – what is the difference, and what role do they play in SWP? 
Capability vs skills – describe your views on the difference between the two. How might either and/or both play a critical role in SWP? 

8. Could “critical roles” be better defined, and could there be multiple definitions? 
Critical roles are often described as roles which, if unfilled could prevent our organisation from operating. Can you think of a definition which would help your organisation to improve as opposed to simply continue to operate? Is there a business case for multiple definitions? If so, how might you differentiate? 

9. Talent Intelligence 
The rise of Talent Intelligence - taking an analytical approach to understanding the external labour market and competitor activity - is a field that is growing in importance not just for sourcing, but for strategic decisions from compensation to location to marketing. Discuss how talent intelligence can be used to inform effective strategic workforce planning and give consideration to the following; 

• What are some of the common solutions out there and broadly what can they do? 
• Identify the building blocks/foundations organisations should have in place to ensure such solutions are effective?  
• Are the tools in their own right ‘enough’? Discuss. 
• Where should/could talent intelligence be employed throughout the SWP process? 

10. Artificial Intelligence 
The ‘rise of the machines’ is set to serve as an enabler to many areas of business and life in the coming years. Discuss how AI is being or could be used to inform SWP process inputs and outputs. 

• What do you see as the key connection points to the process? 
• What should we consider when utilising AI within SWP? 
• What types of ‘decisions’ could be replaced and what types of ‘decisions’ should be left to humans?