Get Your Ducks in a Row: Aligning your HR Portfolio with SWP

Trying to break those HR silos can make you feel like you're going quackers - but SWP can help bring discipline to your line-up!

I’ve now spent nearly 20 years of my career in HR, and one thing has been almost laughably constant that whole time – talk of HR’s ‘seat at the table’. Why doesn’t HR have a seat at the table? What will it take to get one? Does it even deserve one? Would it be easier to get one if we changed its name/broke it up/followed a particular model™?

Lately, I’ve even spotted individual subspecialties of HR – notably L&D and Org Design – arguing the toss that they would be taken more seriously if they reported somewhere (anywhere) other than HR.

To me, this chat is all driven by one underlying problem – that HR is treated as operational, or as a purely supporting/admin function. And that’s because in most organisations, HR is missing the one thing that brings all its functions together and actually makes them work as a system: Strategic Workforce Planning.

This was really brought home to me in some recent conversations.

I’ve been supporting an amazing SWP practitioner with an application for a Deputy HR Directorship. He should absolutely have been a shoo-in for the role, with exceptional big picture strategic thinking (which we all agree is both in short supply and desperately needed in HR), and naturally his work in HR involved the entirety of the HR portfolio.

He’d created recruitment campaigns and the accompanying governance pathways, reworked significant staffing budgets, created skills maps and training plans, driven HR tech assessments and completed org redesigns. His work in SWP was recognised as leading the way across the group of organisations he worked with.

No brainer, right?

Reader, he did not make it through the first sift. Feedback was given: “Your CV and application read like a really great specialist, but Directors need to be generalists”.

Swing and a miss!

Do HRDs need to be generalists? Of course. But if you REALLY want them to deliver strategically across the whole people portfolio? Then every HRD should be a Strategic Workforce Planner.

SWP is not a strange niche specialism. It is strategy-powered general HR on steroids.

When you have an SWP practitioner, you have someone who can analyse, troubleshoot and solutionise across the entirety of the employee lifecycle – from attraction all the way through retention, development, adaptation, progression, and exit. There’s really no other HR subspecialty that can offer such an elevated overview of the business.

This is crucial for you to understand before you begin your SWP journey – this isn’t a bolt-on to your HR system or a document that you’ll check off and leave under glass. This is a fundamental strategic reset of your entire HR capability.

A successful SWP will align and unify your HR functions to the business strategy. It doesn’t do the work – no HR functions are replaced with an SWP – but it provides the direction, the evidence, and the accountability for the work of all HR subspecialties. It provides the shared language of priority and success to allow HR to both speak the language of the business and provide the evidence of its value.

SWP pulls out the chair at the table for HR to finally take that damn seat.

I’ve also had a conversation recently with another experienced SWP practitioner who was reluctant to sit within HR at all—arguing she’d be taken more seriously reporting into Strategy or Operations instead.

Again, I get it. HR does struggle with credibility in many organisations and SWP can struggle to get traction - but I fundamentally disagree with the conclusion about why.

It’s not that SWP sits within HR.

It’s that HR isn’t being led through SWP.

You can have all your HR ducks in a row - Resourcing, L&D, OD, Reward, ER, Wellbeing - but if they’re not aligned through SWP, they’re still going to be heading in completely different directions.

My colleague chuckled and told me I was a brave woman for trying to suggest that to dedicated People Strategy writers.

Yup.

And I’m gonna keep suggesting it, because I know This Is The Way.

Keep an eye out for my next blog, where I’ll show how those Perennial People Problems can finally be solved by SWP. Vive la révolution!

More soon. Outlook: Clearer.

Jen