CASE STUDY SUSTAINING TALENT WITH STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING SOFTWARE AT THE E

Question

CASE STUDY SUSTAINING TALENT WITH STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING SOFTWARE AT THE ENERGY RESOURCES CONSERVATION BOARD At the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB), an independent and quasi- judicial agency of the Government of Alberta, a key challenge for this not-for-profit organization includes recruiting and retaining talent. The ERCB regulates approximately 1500 oil and gas companies and manages a budget of approximately S175 million. Given the demographic profile of the ERCB's approximately 1000 employees, the ERCB expects the departure of 300 employees due to retirements alone in the next five years. In addition, the ERCB has an estimated average loss of 80 people per year for other reasons. To address the looming labour shortage, the ERCB undertook a strategic workforce planning (SWP) initiative. According to Susan Cassidy, Manager of Human Resources at ERCB, "SWP is about determining actions we need to take today to provide the workforce we need for tomorrow. It is taking the steps today to ensure we have the right people, in the right job, with the right skills, at the right time." Part of ensuring the ERCB can meet workforce requirements of the future includes going through a process of SWP and analyzing how technology can assist in that process in a strategic way, a challenge often faced by HR departments.29 As Ms. Cassidy indicates, "Data collection is an essential component of workforce planning. Collecting data and turning it into management information that can be acted upon is the essence of SWP." Acquiring the appropriate software was a necessary step to achieve this level of data collection. The ERCB solicited request for proposals from potential outside providers and settled on Aruspex, a niche pro- vider of SWP. Costing about $85 000 annually, Aruspex software works to collect relevant data, creating scenarios and generating reports to help address develop- ment plans and sustainability strategies. Essentially, Aruspex "provides more than anecdotal evidence-it provides good information that is creditable. The adoption of strategic workforce planning suggests a shift from "man- power planning," which includes headcounts and forecasting used for budgetary purposes, to strategic planning, which looks at replacement and succession from

Explanation / Answer

SWP is one of its kind of approach for an organization to prevent losing out on resources in an accelerated pace every year and quarter. Coming up with surveys and strategies, it really helps one organization to save attrition and go with the flow of data in order to retain the valued employees and thereby save costs to deploy new resources every year alongwith bearing training costs.

ERCB is really benefitted of the Aruspex tool which helped with the data repository to prevent employee loss and it was a successful attempt to mitigate the outflow of employees other than the natural cause of retirement with age.

The other aspects that the IT can contribute the HR departments to run smooth transactions are learning of the trends and patterns of employee needs and satisfaction survey in order to help them have a better understanding for employee engagement and have the employees stick to their jobs in a dedicated manner , thus attaining 100% on job satisfaction and better output and turnovers.

The areas as leave management, Comp and Ben structurizing, all can fall under the radar of IT engineering to design and implement effective tools to have a sufficient data inventory to research upon and establish strategies accordingly.

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