Kia ora koutou. Great to have you all join us here today.
My name is Craig Griffiths and I'm the Innovation and Engagement Lead here at Alan and Clark, which I'm pleased to say means that I get to spend most of my time spending with clients, applying human centred design or design thinking, which is my area of expertise. I use that to help identify the actual challenges that clients need to solve and how they might best go about doing that. Recently, a number of my clients' work has actually involved workforce issues.
So I'm really looking forward to the discussion. Yeah, great. So I guess we'll get it out the way up front.
So developing a strategy is an art rather than a science and everyone has different views on what a strategy is and what it contains. This means that unfortunately, the answer to what is a strategy is pretty much you'll know it when you see it and this doesn't look like a plan. It's basically a product that provides a clear direction for an organisation, sector or industry.
And it sets the foundation for subsequent planning and decisions which align to your overarching objectives. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you need a strategy because people are always making decisions and you want to ensure that those decisions are actively moving towards where you want to be.
You know, shockingly, a workforce strategy is a strategy, but for your workforce, it usually, but not always, sits under an organisational or sector strategy, but definitely sits in between that and business plans. Yeah, so other than this doesn't seem like a plan, what should you look for to understand whether you've got a workforce strategy on your hands? Well, a workforce strategy has three key attributes. And the first is that it's enduring.
So which means that it doesn't need to be adjusted to respond to short term trends or changes in conditions. It provides that kind of long term foundation for shorter term work plans to build on. The second thing is that it needs to be really insightful.
It means that it's coherent and that it's a reasonable view of the changes an organisation and industry is likely to experience over a given period of time, and what that means for its workforce. It provides planners with the information they need to know to create a series of workforce plans that will deliver the organisations and or sectors outcomes in the long term future. And finally, it's compelling, which means that planners and decision makers trust that they should align their day to day decisions against their strategy.
And they can see that it reflects their understanding of the current and future states of the workforce. Yeah, great. And so today we're going to sort of walk through some of the ways that you can ensure your workforce strategies are enduring, insightful and compelling.
But before we get to that, I think it's important that we sort of discuss what decision making a workforce strategy informs. And so really your workforce strategy tells you what is the workforce that's required to meet my organisation or sector's goals and how do we get there. It outlines how you determine whether to what extent and how you need to focus on attracting, recruiting, retaining or upskilling people to meet future demand for whatever widget you produce.
And I have to say it again, but the process of developing a workforce strategy is an art, not a science. So it's important to recognise that the answer to how should I produce a workforce strategy is going to be, it depends. However, we're aware that it depends would be a pretty useless webinar.
So we're going to explain how you can understand developing a workforce strategy as a process with three distinct but related stages. The first stage is the one you use to understand your context. The second is the one you use to determine what the end state of your workforce needs to be.
And the third is the one that you use to figure out how you're going to get from where you are now to whatever you've decided your end state needs to be. Each stage has different kinds of inputs, processes, conversations, and it produces different kinds of outputs. So you should approach and design each of these stages in different ways.
We're going to share examples of how we've approached each of these stages to give you options that you can apply to your own circumstances, your own industry and your own workforce. Okay, so let's hook into stage one. So understanding the context of a workforce strategy is important because it's what the rest of your overall strategy development process and therefore the strategy itself builds off.
During this stage, you're aiming to understand several key things about your organisational sector. You want us to understand what workforce are you actually designing for? What are the pathways into that workforce? What are the ones through it and out of it at the other end? Who are the key actors and what they can contribute to the development of that workforce? What are the current trends that might affect the workforce and what are the indicators that you can use to predict those trends? And lastly, what are the current risks or issues that might be impacting on your workforce? Yeah, cool. So before Griff and I share how we've approached each of those elements of understanding the context for a workforce strategy, we're going to hand over briefly to our special guest, Mark Williams.
Mark and I sat down a couple of weeks ago for a very interesting discussion about how Waihanga Araroa, the Construction and Infrastructure Workforce Development Council has supported workforce strategy and planning for the, shockingly, the construction and infrastructure sector. So one of the most interesting things that Waihanga Araroa did to help organisations in the sector understand their context was to create the Workforce Information Platform or the WIP. The WIP is a powerful tool that pulls data from a range of sources to answer some of the five key questions that we mentioned just before.
Anyway, enough from Griff and I, we'll hand over to Mark to talk us through why he and Waihanga Araroa created the WIP and how and why they integrated it into the process they ran for the construction and infrastructure sector. All right, Mark, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your experience in workforce strategy? Sure, so three decades in vocational education, the last decade in construction infrastructure specifically, originally with the BCITO, more recently with Waihanga Araroa and that role was focussing on workforce development and specifically, and just at the moment, gun for hire. I think any workforce strategy, if it's going to look forward, needs indicators of what that future state is.
The WIP looks at what the pipeline of workers, and we saw that telling a very different story during COVID to what an economic top-down view gave us. So that gave us a different perspective, different indicator, different outcome. That, I think, is probably the most critical thing in any workforce development strategy is if you're only looking at historical data, you're only looking backwards.
If you want to look forward, find an indicator that's relevant for your industry or your sector or your business. So how did you go about identifying what the core workforce challenges were that a strategy needed to address? Some of it we can bring to the table, like the data that we can pull from IAD and other sources that points to that workforce turnover, but also talking to industry. We did hundreds of industry interviews that came out with the themes.
So when you start looking at those in aggregation, that you can see what some of those common themes are, and you can bounce those back off reference groups. We had strategic reference groups that we could talk to. So that helped narrow it down both to what the themes and issues were, but also what their priorities were.
Yeah, and at the end of that process, what did you get to in terms of, was there a core challenge facing the sector? There was a number of challenges, kind of the ability to recruit, but not retain is an issue. So what are some of the interventions that you can look at to improve retention? Cool, so once you've identified that sort of core challenge, what came next for you? I think looking at what the interventions are, either at a business level or a kind of industry level. So for some of those, where their sphere of influence is within a business, that might be what they can control.
How do they promote people? How do they onboard people? For an industry, that might be more advocacy around the diversity of the workforce, or kind of influencing the training, or even immigration settings and that kind of thing. There is some things that may be advocacy with government, but that's not kind of in their hand. Things that are there, that are tangible, that they can control and implement themselves, then those are things they can work on first.
If that's in your one, two year strategy, then you can look a little bit at the ones that you want to advocate for or influence outside of that in the longer term, but do the things that you can control, and you've got a better chance of seeing a result from. So once you've started figuring out what some of the solutions are, what's the sort of next step after that? I think collectively you need to prioritise both who's doing what, who can influence what. Part of Waihanga Araro's role was to advise government on where it invested its money in training.
So if people leadership was an issue that was collectively agreed on, we advised the Tertiary Education Commission to invest in people leadership frontline management, particularly in scenarios like the recovery from Cyclone Gabriel, where people leadership is an enabler of growth and business development. That's something that we can do. Obviously the businesses have to identify future talent and some of the things that are in their control, and together the organisations kind of see the theme delivered on or see the outcomes come to pass.
So how would you apply what you've learnt in construction and infrastructure to other sectors? I think one of the cool things is what's the workforce that you want to forecast? Often that's core technical roles, but you can look at the whole industry, like what are the finance, comms, other supporting roles. Then look at what data is available. How can you take a census of what does it look like at a point in time? And then what are the future indicators? What things can you track for the construction sector that was project activity one, three, five years out? Perhaps it's population change or something else for another sector.
But what are the indicators that you can look at what does that look like in three years, five years time? Because a workforce plan, if you're only looking at where you are or where you've been, is not going to set you up for a strategy for the future. Great, thank you for that. And now back to the studio.
Right, well, there's obviously a lot of takeaways there. My first one being how confronting it is watching a video of yourself. I was just saying while the mics are off that I'm gonna blame the focal length of the camera.
But my next takeaway is how crucial it is to understand the long-term trends that your strategy needs to address, who the actors in your system are, and who can do what to respond to the trends that you identify. There are other takeaways, which we're going to come back to soon. One thing to bear in mind though is that context can be pretty broad.
So how do you figure out what context you need to be looking at is sort of the obvious next question. So I've previously done work in the construction sector, looking at why people leave New Zealand's construction and infrastructure workforce to move to Australia and vice versa. To identify the important bits of context for the segment of the workforce that we were looking at, we ran a series of one-on-one interviews with people who'd left New Zealand's workforce in the last 20 years.
Based on those interviews, we ended up with a range of indicators that we could use to understand parts of the context for different parts of the workforce. Aside from just pay and work pipeline, which are kind of the obvious ones, we also ended up comparing things like cost of living trends in each country, inflation trends, gender pay gap trends, and changes in quality of life in each country and more. So yeah, there's a pretty broad definition of context, but understanding these factors was really important for the next stage of that work, where we helped construction employers consider how that address attraction, recruitment, and retention in their own workforce strategies.
And just something to note that I think one-on-one interviews works really well during the context phase. It sort of lets people speak a bit more openly about what pressures they're feeling or what they think. Yeah.
Yeah, look, I totally agree with Mark that context is crucial. Data has an important role to play, and it's important that both current and trending data, but also to look forward into, in the case of workforce strategy, the demand and supply curves of both work and workers are particularly important. For instance, if you can see what the demand is gonna be like in 10 years time, and you see that people are joining at X rate, and they are leaving at Y rate, then on the face of it, it looks like you just need to recruit at Z rate to meet future demand.
But that's only really half the story. Our experience is that engaging with a wide range of stakeholders to understand their specific context is critical, because it helps identify and understand those more specific and nuanced issues that need to be addressed. For instance, I'm lucky enough to do a lot of work with Meridian Energy, and a couple of years ago, we were working on a project related to Meridian's process safety culture, so think large scale health and safety.
And as part of that work, we spoke to, as you mentioned, on one-on-ones, we spoke to a number of frontline staff at Meridian generation sites across the country, and through those conversations, we discovered that a number of Meridian's most experienced people, we're talking those with like 40 plus years in the role of service, were due to retire. Now, of course, Meridian had a lot of workforce data, and they knew about that ageing workforce profile, but what they hadn't fully appreciated was the looming issue around knowledge transfer, and how that specifically impacted process safety. So many of those 40 plus year workers had spent their entire careers caring for those same pieces of kit, you know, think generation turbines, and they knew what made them tick, and how to best keep them humming safely.
However, most of that knowledge was in their heads, and with this kind of impending loss of this cohort, that posed a potentially significant risk for Meridian of how to create a resilient system or organisation that can retain that knowledge, and the expertise they need in a world where we're likely to have more digitally native and more transient workforce. So, you know, person to person knowledge transfer wasn't gonna be enough. So as well as that knowledge transfer through coaching and mentoring, and having good job records, and, you know, plans and photos and videos and alike, Meridian realised that they also needed to have or to build data and digital tools, and the associated capability went with those to retain that organisational IP in a sustainable way.
But that's another topic for another day, so yeah. But combining the quantitative and qualitative data here is the key thing. That meant that our understanding of the context was genuinely insightful, because it helped Meridian to understand the changing demographics of its workforce meant for the business.
And it's a great example of how a good contextual frame relies on both the quantitative and the qualitative information. Yeah, yeah. So to wrap up, how do you, what do you think is your key tip for running a good understanding of your context? Yeah, I totally agree with your point about getting in front of people and talking to them about their context.
I think you really want to invest early in engagement with a wide range of people that can identify the things that they think are gonna be really important to understanding why your workforce is currently looking or the way it does, and importantly, what your workforce is going to need to respond to in the future. Yeah. So I think that you need to be open to using a very broad definition of context.
If something could possibly be affecting your workforce now or in the future, you should at least be open to considering it. You also want to identify data and indicators that you can use to model changes over time. You want to be able to predict how changes in the future might affect your workforce.
And the final thing to bear in mind is that the key output from this stage of the process is the information that people will need to inform what your end state workforce will look like. So during the context stage, the focus is on collecting a broad range of specific data and analysing that to understand trends. Now you need to be bringing that data to people and ask them which bits of that context really matter for the future of your workforce.
And what does that look like? What does it mean for the workforce in terms of like five, 10, 20 years out, depending of course on the timeframe for your strategy. This requires a different mindset from you or the person running the strategy as well as stakeholders. Yeah, and so we've had a question come through which our marketing manager has been frantically gesturing at the iPad to let me know.
But it's actually a really interesting question. So it's from Andy and they ask how has the, or how will the government's reinvention of vocational education play a part in training workforce? And the reason I think that's a good question is it sort of demonstrates how a lot of the stuff cuts across all stages of the workforce development, workforce strategy development process. So in one sense, it's sort of, you can say that it's the reinvention and I won't go into specifics because some people probably don't know, but in one sense it's sort of, it's changing who the actors are going to be in the system.
So when you're thinking in your context, you're thinking, so we're not just mapping what the system looks like now with reference for specific organisations, we're sort of, you can think about it in terms of mapping the functions that the system delivers. We'll also sort of get to this, we'll pick this question up again when we come to this sort of solutions part because I think this also is a great way to demonstrate how you know you've got a good solution. So we'll come back to that question, but thank you Andy.
Cool, so right, so back to the sort of determining your end state. So during this stage, you'll be asking people to explore what the end state could look like and ask to answer questions like, what does this all mean for the size of the workforce, where the workforce needs to be based, the capabilities the workforce will need, how the workforce will be organised and managed. The key outcome from this stage isn't just answers to those questions, it's most significantly, it's reaching key, it's reaching consensus amongst key stakeholders on those answers.
And something to note here is that the key stakeholders you need to get to agree can look vastly different depending on whether you're doing an organisational workforce strategy or an industry strategy. For instance, if you're doing an organisational strategy, the key stakeholders you need to get to agree on things are gonna be pretty much internal, depending on your size, obviously. Some businesses are so big, affect the whole country.
If you're doing an industry strategy, suddenly you're needing to involve multiple CEOs from different businesses, a range of different policy makers, industry groups. Yeah, and the list goes on. And I think back to Andy's question, a major reform makes this part quite difficult because the stakeholders are gonna potentially change during the year.
So art, not science, unfortunately. Yeah, I think with diverse stakeholders, the first bit of getting consensus is about providing some information. You need to have that reliable and accurate information that effectively conveys, I guess, the insights from the current state and what resonates so that people can draw their own conclusions from that.
You've got that. If you've done a good job of your context, you've got that information and you can share that so they can make their own, draw their own conclusions. Yeah, and for me, the next bit is making, is getting all those people in the same room and helping them to hash out any differences of opinion.
So if you've been paying attention, which we hope you have, you'll notice that that's a bit of a change from the context phase where we sort of, where I'd sort of talked about a really like one-on-one interviews there. I think once you're moving into this stage, group-based stuff like through workshops and focus groups, that's the way I think you can approach this stage. Yeah, I think the key to getting consensus is ironically diversity.
Because without diversity or consensus, rather, it's just agreement. And that's easy to get when people are all thinking and talking from the same page. On the other hand, when consensus, it demands discussion and shared ownership, compromise, and it aims for outcomes that are workable and supportable everywhere.
And not just a majority or a simple agreement, as I said. Of course, involving those different and diverse groups and their views presents some challenges. But it's infinitely easier and more efficient and valuable to address those at the outset.
On the screen, actually, there are a few tips and tools that we use to get consensus with working with stakeholder groups. So I hope you find those useful. A great example of this is actually our work with Dairy NZ to help address a critical workforce shortage in the New Zealand dairy industry.
At the time of the work, COVID-19, border restrictions, and government visa reductions had doubled the annual shortfall of on-farm roles from 2,000 to 4,000. So it was a really significant hole. As the human-centred design lead on that project, we facilitate a series of 32 on-farm interviews across the Motu and 15 off-farm interviews with a diverse group of stakeholders, everyone from school leavers to training organisations, milk co-ops, banks, and government industries.
And this enabled us to generate around 650 kind of key insights, which we distilled down into 12 themes and 24 design challenges, which otherwise known as things like problems to solve or opportunities to leverage, which we then shared with stakeholders and refined and prioritised, yeah. So that approach really revealed some insights that might not have been otherwise, or might have otherwise been missed through more traditional consultation processes, and particularly around the emotional aspects of farming identity and career aspirations. So talking directly with a broad cross-section of stakeholders helped ensure that the issues and the solutions that identified were practical, implementable.
Importantly, they had really strong sector buy-in, addressing kind of both the structural and the cultural components. Yeah, yeah, and what did you, is there anything specific about consensus building that you learnt from that process? Yeah, a couple of key, well, I talk about, we talk about them in this stage, but I think it's also important to say that a lot of these are relevant to every stage, right? Like internally in terms of engagement, but particularly around a consensus is that embracing that diversity of thought, I know I talked about that earlier, but it is really important. Not only does it help engage a broad cross-section of stakeholders in the co-operative, but it can also lead to some really valuable insights.
So one little tip that I have for that is around make sure that you involve black hatters, variously described as people who might bring a really risk-averse view or kind of a negative view to things because they provide a really powerful counter view and a variable testing frame for discussion. So always look to involve them. And you can sort of have to consciously make sure that you're actually paying proper attention, I find, rather than sort of getting defensive.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is a real discipline. The other one is to engage early and often because what I found is that no one likes surprises, but everyone likes to be asked for their opinion.
So, you know, ask them about it. Being transparent, so making sure that you provide enough opportunity or facilitate opportunities to engage with stakeholders, you know, share information and receive their feedback as those options are developed. This can be particularly powerful as even with the most kind of polarised groups, when you share perspectives, they tend to self-moderate.
So that can be a really good way to do things. Yeah, yeah. And giving stakeholders some skin in the game, right? So rather than presenting things as a fait accompli, you know, like involve them in those decisions.
So for instance, you know, like prioritising options, for instance, one of the things I often do is to give the stakeholders a finite set of choices. So, you know, maybe a top three or top five and give them a set period of time in order to rank those things. Yeah, yeah.
And then last but not least is just the time to have some reflection, time to reflect on it. Because, you know, often these decisions can be big and have some quite far-reaching consequences. So just giving them time to reflect on that and digest that decision.
Yeah, yeah. And I think to your point about being transparent, that's sort of where that bringing quantitative data or bringing new information to stakeholders and giving that to them, that sort of, I guess, demonstrates how powerful that can be in terms of helping to build consensus. Yeah, because, you know, everyone brings a different perspective, right? But if you can help add to that through data, whether it be qualitative or quantitative, it's useful.
But the key thing is that they bring that different perspective and then you kind of mesh those together to get a consensus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So onto our three key tips for how to determine your end, like sort of where you want to end up.
So the main one is really to aim for consensus and like just to make it super explicit, why consensus is important. It comes back to like what the attributes of a good strategy are, like enduring, insightful and compelling. And if you've got consensus, then you've kind of stress tested whether it's insightful in a sense.
And it's much more likely that it's going to be enduring because even like back to this reform of vocational education, like organisations disappear, but often it's the same people working in a sector and they'll be, you know, the term everyone hates, lift and shift. They'll get lift and shifted to whatever the new structure is. But if that person bought into your strategy, they're going to keep advocating for it over time.
So the next key tip, involve as many of your stakeholders as possible. And then the third one is bring your stakeholders the data they need to draw their own conclusions. So now we're going to move to stage three, probably what you've all been waiting for, the steps that you need to take to develop solutions to get you from where you are now to where you've decided you've all agreed or you've reached consensus on where you need to be.
Yeah. So this stage of the workforce strategy development process is about understanding what you need to do to get from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. And setting a framework, I guess, for effective delivery by asking, you know, given the end state or goals, what does this mean for how the organisation, the sector or the industry attracts people? So, you know, what is the value proposition? How it recruits people? So, you know, how are you accessing and securing the right people? How you retain them? So what are the development pathways and talent management tools and the upskilling? You know, do you grow, do you buy or do you outsource your skills? Just to make sure that you ensure you meet the short and long term needs.
Yeah, yeah. And so while you're thinking about those sort of four workforce levers, you should also be thinking about workforce enablers. And these are sort of like other things that factor into the way you approach attraction, recruitment, retention or upskilling.
So there's sort of some of these you can think about include like technology. So what's the technology required to support your, what's the technology that could support the future of the workforce that you've identified? You could also think about sort of what new systems or processes could support the workforce of the future for you. You could think about what management and leadership styles or capabilities or approaches would be required to lead that workforce in the future.
And you can think about workforce management tools and approaches like what are the tools, capabilities and sort of disciplines that will be required to manage that workforce. And then finally, for some organisations or sectors, infrastructure is a really important workforce enabler. So for example, new office locations or new accommodation might be required to support your workforce.
And probably there's probably some people in the audience that are aware of like kind of major infrastructure workforce programmes that are underway in New Zealand at the moment to make it nice to be living in that accommodation to improve attraction. So as I mentioned earlier, we did this large piece of work with DairyNZ and the use of the human-centred design helped uncover insights into those emotional side of farming so that how identity and pride and career aspirations were really integral in shaping those workforce decisions. The analysis that came out of that helped shape several kind of interconnected challenges.
So along the lines of, there was a generational gap. So what are the new pathways for succession and alternative ownership models were needed, that there was some farm resource constraints so that smaller farms required support to achieve those economies of scale through things like resource sharing and staff syndication around the issue of compliance complexity. So that kind of a growing administrative burden and resource constraints demanded collective approaches to resourcing those compliance.
Working conditions, so the traditional practises on dairy farms, they needed to be modernised, including the likes of accommodation and flexible working, taking into account flexible working arrangements. And then skills development. So leadership and people management gaps requires some targeted training around training programmes and in particular mentoring schemes.
Yeah, yeah, and so I think that sort of what Griff has just provided there is like an excellent example of a set of strategic solutions. Although his human-centred designer probably hates me bastardising a phrase like that, but there you go. They're excellent because they enable a series of workforce planners to create a series of plans that respond to those solutions over time.
They encapsulate all of what needs to change, why something needs to change and how that change should be made. And then also they all sort of refer to some of those key enablers that I mentioned earlier. And then you'll also notice, and this is where I wanna come back to Andy's question.
You'll also notice that they're at quite a high level. They don't mention sort of specific actors or organisations in the system, such as training organisations or government departments. And this is a really key part of keeping solutions enduring because as many of you will know, key organisations in whatever sector you're in can suddenly be refocused, disestablished or merged and their functions moved around.
So not mentioning specific actors and structures helps your strategic solutions endure through those changes to systems. Yeah. All right, so to wrap up stage three, as the culmination of your strategy process, your strategic solutions need to embody all those three attributes that we talked about at the start of the webinar.
They need to be enduring, insightful and compelling. They'll need to survive multiple planning stages, which you just talked about, Sean, and different players over time, some of whom you may never even get to talk to during their time or involvement. So Sean, I know you've got a few key tips on this one.
Yeah, so I think my number one tip is, I mean, you don't have to do this, but I think using solution statements, the challenge statement, these, I think it's really helpful. They should encapsulate what needs to change, why it needs to change and how it can change, something that people can pick up and think, yep, I get that and I can see why this is the way forward. I think keeping your solutions at a high enough level that they'll endure through system reforms, through avoiding specific actors or structures is a good way to help sort of keep them high level.
And then I wanted to come back to the interview with Mark. Like he said in our interview, doing some high level prioritisation of your solutions according to what you can directly control versus what you can influence can be really helpful. Sometimes it can be super important to start showing everyone that you're getting runs on the board to demonstrate the value of the strategy you've produced, particularly if you're a person that commissioned the strategy.
That's always something to bear in mind. Yeah. On that, there's a tool that you use in HD or Human Design work that often I adopt what I call a portfolio approach to help with this.
So building a portfolio with a mix of short term and long term initiatives, because one of the really important things about that is delivering on the short term ones helps build momentum and momentum in turn helps drive and maintain engagement. And I'm sure we've all been part of projects where momentum hasn't actually, it hasn't happened or it gets stalled and then the motivation and engagement actually drops off. And when you're dealing with something like workforce strategy, where time is critical, time waits for no one, right? So you need to make sure that that momentum and engagement is continued.
So having that mixed portfolio is a really good way of doing it. So to wrap up, the developing a workforce strategy is ultimately about enabling better decisions, decisions that move your organisation or sector towards the end state that you're looking for. We've shown that the processes are a lot more art than science, but one that can be broken down into those three interconnected steps of understanding your context, defining your end state and lastly, identifying those solutions to get there.
But I think the real power of a workforce strategy lies in its ability to bring some clarity to complexity. It connects data with lived experiences as we talked about with our case studies. It gets consensus on what the workforce needs to look like in the future and importantly, why? And it provides that foundation for coordinated action over time, which is really important.
And if it's done well, it gives that next person or team or generation of planners, the next people coming to pick it up, they can pick it up and understand it, build on it and pick it up and run. Yeah, it's a great summary, I think. So that does bring us to the end of our presentation, but we will be moving on to questions.
So we're gonna go with some sort of ones that we got through the registration portal first, but please do feel free to send through your questions and I will get gestured wildly at to look down at the iPad here. So because of our time limit, I guess just before we get into the questions, because of our time limit, we've had to explain workforce strategy at a reasonably high level. And this is one of those things that it's sort of like infinite depth in whatever way you look.
So we'd really encourage anyone who wants a more detailed or personalised conversation about their specific sector or their business, Mark, Griff and I would all love to hear about your specific challenges and give you some ideas on how you could approach solving them. Yeah, and so again, as a reminder, if you do have a question, pop them in the chat and we'll do our best to answer them. Because we got so many great questions, we've actually, about similar things, we've actually themed them up into some things.
So the first thing is around how your strategy can address limited potential for career progression and mobility. I guess that's something which is quite topical in a lot of sectors at the moment. So Sean, how would you address this in a workforce strategy? Yeah, so for me, I guess I start by thinking about how should I actually think about this? And for me, the way to sort of think about it is around what's the value proposition that I'm offering my workforce? And the reason I say that is because for a lot of organisations or sectors, upwards mobility is really only one way that you can address attraction or retention.
Like there are other levers that you can pull. So for example, you could think about other opportunities you can offer. You like work on special projects or job rotations or secondments.
You can also think about using things like flexible working arrangements to recognise that as people get better at their jobs, it takes them less time to do the same stuff. And rather than just sort of piling on more of the same, you can instead give them an extra day off a fortnight or something like that. So it's sort of turning what seems to be an insurmountable challenge because progression is so important for most people and thinking, okay, well, what can we actually do to address retention, attraction, upskilling and recruitment when we can't pull that lever in particular? So Griff, we had a lot of questions.
Thanks to Angela, Rachel, Mel, Debbie, Dieter, Tracy and Zoe about how people can support and maintain retention in the face of burnout, stress and mental fatigue. What do you think? Yeah, I think this is a, well, first of all, this is a great and really topical issue. There's this kind of, it's an ever present issue and I guess as a society but then also from a business community, we're ever increasingly recognising that importance of mental wellbeing.
Working in consultancy, we have a pretty good understanding, good consciousness of that, right? It's a pretty pressurised environment. But I think it's important to have a couple of things. I think it's really important to have really great feedback mechanisms to understand where your people are at.
You don't want them to be kind of suffering or working on this on their own. Their ability to feedback through formal and informal channels is really important because that's the first step to addressing them appropriately. I think there's also, is where effective workforce planning can have a really important role.
Knowing what you need to do by when and who's got the right, so basically making sure that the people with the right skills are in the right roles at the right time. I think that's a really important part. And possibly at a more practical level, just ensuring that there is this, I guess, after every season of kind of high pressure or high workload, there needs to be a recovery period built in.
You know, like if you think about it, athletes, they do exactly the same thing, right? You know, triathletes have a warm down period. Everyone has a warm down period, or athletes have a warm down period. And it's the same for people at high exertion, even if it's mental.
I read a really interesting post on LinkedIn this morning, and I'll ask Adam and the team to pop it into the chat. It was all about managing energy and how there is actually a tipping point where it goes from being an enabler, stress and kind of pressure, goes from being an enabler to a real disabler, and very quickly too. So I'll get that posted.
And I think just to add to that as well, that I think if you take it right back to sort of the highest strategic level, it's sort of about thinking, well, why are we in this situation? Why is our workforce in the situation that people are sort of burning out and stressed and mentally fatigued? And that's sort of, I guess, one of the key benefits of having a good workforce strategy, even if it's just for your organisation is to like understand what data do we have that we can predict when that's happening? Like what's our peaks and how can we build the rest of our workforce to sort of take the top off that peak maybe, or just make it less likely that you've got people burning out and things like that. It's also a really important contextual factor too, to understand what people's expectations are of that because the younger generation, we're at the kind of later stage of careers, but the people coming in now, they've got a very different expectation of work-life balance. So what's important to them is very different to what might've been important to a few generations ago.
So understanding that context as well is critical. Yeah, and interestingly, the work that I did in the construction sector, that was one of the things that came through quite clearly in terms of the context is that for people who were older, the pay was so much less of an issue than how much free time do I get. For people with families, it was like, is it easier for me to afford a house in New Zealand or Australia? And do I get more time in New Zealand or Australia? And the money became suddenly less important.
So I think- Really interesting trade-off. Yeah, really interesting trade-off. And you can see how when you start to understand those type of things, if you're a business, you can start to understand, okay, maybe we should be targeting recruitment of these people so we don't have to pay them as much, but they're bloody good at their jobs.
They can do it quick. Anyway, I've spent too long on this one. So Griff, we had a whole lot of questions around managing high turnover, and I guess it's kind of related really, isn't it? But yeah, in particular of junior staff.
So how can organisations or sectors think about this challenge? Yeah, well, I think there's actually two ways of looking at this, right? So it could actually be viewed as a positive and potentially a challenge. So the positive is that you're actually enabling people to move through a career pipeline and to grow. And they're actually often, well, they might be reaping the rewards of their efforts and they're actually moving on to other things.
So that can be a real positive. Of course, the downside, well, the other side of that coin is that you have to retrain, you have to get someone else and retrain. As I said before, link back to the upside, there's that cohort that value things other than progression.
Now there's the variety of work, there's the work-life balance, all those types of things. So while it might have some operational impacts for organisation, it could actually be the right thing for your people. So that's always something to keep in mind.
It can also, losing people also too, doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. You know, like this is a little tough kind of subject, but sometimes there are some people that just aren't a fit. You know, and if that is recognised as part of the natural progression of work, then that's not a bad thing for both the individual and the organisation.
And we shouldn't really shy away from those discussions as well. But either way, if you are experiencing a high turnover where you look at that from a positive or a challenging perspective, it's important that the rest of the organisation know that that's a natural part of the development of people. And so that there is a support from the organisation to allow that to happen.
Because if you don't do it, I guess the counterfactual is if you don't allow for that progression, you're gonna lose them anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that reminds me of a piece of work that we're doing together at the moment actually, and won't say sort of too much about it, but basically in that industry, at least it's sort of, a lot of the really successful businesses say their junior staff leaving is actually like a good thing.
Because then if they've given them a good experience while they're with this business and train them up, given them a good experience, that person goes out, and then suddenly that person is actually, maybe bringing work back to the original business or they're telling their mates like, or their kids or whatever, like, oh, you should go and work with these guys. So it's sort of, we're getting a wee bit away from strategy now and down into the weeds, but it's sort of, yeah, it's really interesting. It's all related to the how you treat your people.
It is. And I think that's a core part of it as well. Yeah.
And sort of understanding that you're in state, you want a good workforce. You need to be thinking, okay, well, we need to treat people well, ultimately. Yeah.
So I think we haven't got any more questions come through. So we are, but we are more than happy to catch up with any of you at any time to answer any more questions you might have, or to discuss in detail any sort of challenges that you're facing or, and I guess the other thing to note is that, if you're in a sector that Griff and I don't know a huge amount about, we have a whole lot of people that are in Clark that have worked in a whole lot of, done a whole lot of workforce stuff for a range of sectors. So health is a big one that, so yeah, if you are, I guess, where your point's contact, but if you do want to reach out, please do.
It's free, which is always nice to get some free advice. And I think that takes us to the end. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining us and we'll see you at the next one.
Thanks, everyone. Cheers.
