Environment Scanning Simulation

Scanning your external environment is an important early step in the strategic workforce planning process.  The good news is, you don’t need a lot to get started scanning your marco-economic environment.

A PESTEL scan (or analysis), generally conducted as a group or key stakeholder activity, helps organisations to better understand the macro-economic environment in which their organisation operates and identify the key assumptions, constraints, and influences under which any major activity (in our case the strategic workforce plan) is being developed.

In this activity, your Industry group will use the PESTEL acronym to scan the external environment and, identify as many macro-economic factors as possible to be taken into consideration as part of any future SWP activity.

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The organisational strategy needs to be clearly articulated and understood before SWP process can commence.

Groups will work together to take a predeveloped list of strategic objectives and translate them into language that is relatable, practical and usable. Groups will need to identify any objectives that drift into the ‘how’, as opposed to the ‘what’ and discuss within the group (and facilitators) how they treat them.

We focus on strategy as it is the highest order of direction linking various divisions of an organisation.

Often workforce initiatives are good business practice and improve operational excellence but do not directly enable the strategic objectives of the enterprise. Strategic success requires the right workforce strategy which means putting strategy first and acquiring the capability required to execute that strategy.

By truly understanding the strategic objectives of the organisation, and the drivers behind them, we are better able to identify any gaps in the ability of our workforce to enable strategic success.