IP Australia’s approach to workforce planning
This article was submitted by IP Australia.
As a cost recovery agency with a niche workforce, achieving the HR mantra of right people, in the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, is core to our operational and strategic success.
This year, IP Australia is looking ahead at the future of work, including impacts on the workplace and workforce with the review and refresh of our Strategic Workforce Plan.
HR’s role in knowing what the right skills and capabilities are, where, and when they’re needed, and how we’re going to deploy talent is only possible through robust people data and analytics – enter the Workforce Planning, Insights and Reporting (Insights) team.
IP Australia – leading the charge
Over the past four years, IP Australia has been growing their capacity to support executives in data driven workforce planning and decision making. The first step in the process was moving the workforce data function into HR and aligning it with workforce planning. IP Australia also committed to growing the reporting capacity to cover data collection and the employee lifecycle.
With strong data foundations, the workforce planning team was able to uplift capacity and broaden its analysis of the workforce to deliver operational and strategic workforce planning support across the agency.
The benefits to organisations
With so much hype and new buzz words circulating around the changing landscape of the workplace, having the ability to see what is impacting your workforce and using it to make informed decisions on where to focus HR initiatives and interventions is exciting. For example, while the Great Resignation was keeping executives up at night, HR data and Australian labour market analysis was able to show this risk wasn’t being realised at IP Australia. So instead of pre-empting resignations and ramping up recruitment activities, we were able to focus on our retention levers. We embed our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) with existing staff and emphasised our offering in planned attraction campaigns.
The integration of the workforce data function and workforce planning has seen the Insights team deliver a greater understanding of long-term retention and strategic attraction of specific technical skills, gender wage gap analysis, and if working remotely really does impact promotion opportunities (hint: not at IP Australia!).
The value to the organisation is already speaking volumes with data insights, research and evidence now embedded in everything the team deliver across all products, including analysis of HR data, annual operational workforce planning, critical role identification, and succession planning.
Results
The Insights team were recently recognised at the annual Director General Awards for their hard work, dedication, curious and innovative mindset, and their ability to take complex workforce data and make it meaningful to the current work environment. The team was acknowledged for its strong desire to provide strategic and operational support to the Executive, and to use workforce data and analysis to inform decisions to make IP Australia the best workplace it can be.
Future focus
Thanks to the integration of data into the workforce planning approach, the team anticipate and provide sophisticated analysis more effectively to support strategic decision making. The Insights team are now working on continual uplift of IP Australia’s workforce planning products to provide the best fit for purpose service to the business, including a review and refresh of IP Australia’s Strategic Workforce Plan.
Do you have a case study of success that you think other HR professionals in the APS could learn from? Please reach out! APSHRProfessionalStream@ato.gov.au