Strategic Workforce Planning 
Background
Our client is a global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions. Their 70,000 people are passionate about building progress across our 70 markets and four business segments: Cement, Ready-Mix Concrete, Aggregates and Solutions & Products. Their annual revenue is 6 billion with 120 manufacturing sites worldwide.
Challenge
Since the merger of two different companies, the Talent Management function instituted the key talent processes enterprise-wide. To grow in maturity, there was a need to go beyond the processes and achieve talent outcomes or “ready now talent.” This required creating a talent culture and incorporating talent enablers, one enabler being the ownership of senior leaders for all talent initiatives. The point of focus for this project was the manufacturing sites worldwide with a greater focus on their mission-critical sites.
Process
Human Edge partnered with our client to create questions they wanted answers to and hypotheses to test. The team analyzed, classified, and found connections between disparate data sets from different sources, i.e. HR data, finance data, and business performance data. The process was iterative and included several check-points to make sure that the hypotheses were relevant.
In order to determine the strength of their leadership pipeline, some key questions were posed below.
- How strong is your talent pipeline for critical roles?
- How strong is your overall talent pipeline?
- How strong is your talent pipeline for diverse talent?
Human Edge thus provided a one-off solution to offer LafargeHolcim the first insight, while a sustainable solution was built in the second phase. This sustainable solution consists of an attrition dashboard, professional software, which allows them to easily refresh the data at any moment in time without having to rely on external sources to analyze the data.
Outcomes
In turn, the talent analytics insights were leveraged to have a meaningful discussion with senior leaders on the key talent risks and determine the biggest business exposure and mitigate future risks.
Through Human Edge’s talent analytics our client gained valuable insights into where their competency gaps were and in which areas they needed to invest in order to drive business performance and talent outcomes.
Our client decided to assess the plant leaders further and build software with the help of Human Edge that enables them to analyze their own disparate data sets in the future.
Here are some of the invaluable insights our client gained through the data analysis:
- Employee performance and identified high potential talent pool size drive business performance.
- High performing sites have twice the number of high potential talent identified.
- Leaders have not set the performance bar high enough to develop high potential talent.
- Competency gap analysis shows major risks in key roles and Health and Safety.
- Succession pipeline shows risk at Plant Manager and Quality Manager Role.
- Increasing retirement risk (mid/long-term) for Plant Managers.
Lessons Learned
Analyzing a company’s talent pipeline is critical to understanding their strengths and their risks. Here are some critical lessons we learned in the process.
- Not all data is needed to get started. Use what you have.
- Clean the data as you need it, however, ensure it’s all formatted the same way before starting the analysis for accuracy and efficiency.
- Test your hypotheses but don’t be afraid to be surprised by the data.
- Also, let the data show you the insights that you would have never believed.
If you would like to know more about how to evaluate the strength of your talent pipeline please contact us here for more information.
