Workforce Planning and Job Architecture for Business Growth

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another episode of “Help! My Business is Growing,” a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business is eventually going to end up in your finances, and to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. Well, the question is, how in the world do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in.

Kathy (host):
To help to build a successful business, you need to have the right people in the right roles at the right time. I know, easier said than done. That is why there is a powerful strategy known as workforce planning to help you out. It’s a smart approach that helps businesses predict future workforce needs so that you can hire and retain the best talent. So what we’re going to be talking about in this episode is, what is workforce planning exactly? How does it work? How do you do it? How do you bake it into your business, and how do you know that you’re doing it right?

Kathy (host):
You can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode’s show notes. These are resources that you can really use to dive deeper into each section of the podcast and actually read through it and save it for future use, if that helps you. So this is a resource for you to help you in your workforce planning.

Kathy (host):
My guest today is Carol Fraser. She specializes in workforce planning and strategic HR leadership, offering cost-effective fractional HR executive services with a track record spanning diverse industries. Carol helps organizations anticipate talent needs, optimize workforce deployment and drive sustainable growth so that they can thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Join us.

Kathy (host):
Carol, welcome to the podcast.

Carol (guest):
Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, thanks so much for being here. I was on your podcast. Now you’re on my podcast. We’re going to be talking about workforce planning, and that is something that I get asked a lot as a fractional CFO: when should we hire? How should we hire? And I am excited about this, because now I have an expert in workforce planning. So let’s first start here. What exactly is workforce planning?

Carol (guest):
Workforce Planning is a full view of exactly what are your inputs, what is the full career experience, and then what are the outputs? So just as any strategic plan, you’re always going to do things like a SWOT analysis to figure out what your competitors are doing. You’re also going to do anything related to financials. You have to think about who’s going to help you get the work done, and that’s going to end up being your workforce. So your workforce is directly linked to your strategic plan and to your financial plan.

Carol (guest):
What you’re trying to do here is ask yourself, if my priorities in the business are X, Y and Z, and my financial budget for X, Y and Z is A, B and C, what do I need to achieve those? And when people generally come in, and I find that it’s a good way to at least start a conversation, they come in with their past practices, like “I used to work at X, and this is how many people we had doing this,” and that’s fine and dandy, and it’s not to say that it’s wrong, but every business is unique when they’re doing their business, where they’re doing their business.

Carol (guest):
So unless you are 100% the same cookie cutter of a company that you were at before, with the exact same talent and skills and competencies, you need to stop for a moment, take a pause and ask yourself, what’s available to me in the marketplace? How much am I willing to pay? Do I want to build or buy my talent, and what is it that I want to create as an experience to retain that talent?

Carol (guest):
You don’t need to have all the nano stuff worked out, but if you don’t start with a broader vision of what people strategy looks like, then you will fall prey to what I’ve seen the majority of the time: all of the outputs, which are recruiting, which are training, which are employee engagement, all of that stuff fails at some level because we’re not able to literally draw a solid line back to the people strategy, which directly links to the business strategy and the financial strategy.
Here is the corrected transcript:

Kathy (host):
So Carol gave us this really great PDF, which I’m actually going to link down in the notes as well. It talks about the inputs and the outputs that she just talked about, and the inputs have five categories: the strategy and priorities, which are talked about the employee experience, job content, internal data from key stakeholders, and external market data. Can we talk a little bit about this? Because I think this is super, super important. Because, as you said, there are so many things that people focus on, like recruiting and the compensation and the training, and you can have the best training in the world, but unless you are actually putting the resources into that planning, into the strategy, it’s just not going to work. And I see this in the businesses that I work with as well. So can we talk about these inputs one by one?

Carol (guest):
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to move from right to left. When you’re thinking about your external market data, when you’re talking about people’s strategy, you need to really ask yourself, what is out there in the marketplace right now, and what is happening? For now, for example, right now we are at the lowest employment rate ever, and trying to find the right talent is very difficult, while there might be some components where people are doing layoffs. And so we think that there is a surplus. There are significantly more open roles than there actually are people to fill them, and so we can’t fall prey to what the media tells us. We have to do a little more digging and really understand so what is the external market data telling us? Because I may not need all those people who were laid off based on my business. So I have to figure that out.

Carol (guest):
Then when I come to the internal data from key stakeholders, now, this is your board, this is your PE firm, these are your owners, your founders, you need to figure out exactly what it is that their expectations are going to be out of the people. If we skip that step, what ends up happening is, at least in my experiences, I’ve worked with public, PE, VC, and founder funded, each one of those ends up in a very myopic view, and when failure happens, which is fine, because we learn from failure, unfortunately, human behavior is we go to blame, and so we will always want to make sure that, just like when you’re building a dashboard in IT, you get the BRDs, the business requirement documentation.

Carol (guest):
So what you want to do is you want to get the internal stakeholders’ information. What does good look like for you in your experiences? Now, again, this is data collection. All inputs are data collection to figure out how you’re going to map this out. Then you go to job content. Now this comes to a look. If I’m an engineering company, I need engineers, right? If I’m a sales company, I need salespeople. So when you’re thinking of job content on an input level, you need to ask yourself, what are the big rocks that I need for my product or for my service? And you don’t need to get down to levels just yet, but you do need to identify who needs to be there full time, who needs to be there part time, who needs to be a consultant. What are these people going to do in my business at stage one, two and three, because workforce planning is something you look at every year.

Carol (guest):
And so then when you come over to the employee experience, you take that job content and you go, okay, so how many of these people are employees? What kind of experience is? Are they going to have, or do I want to create? Many times people skip this step, they just skip it. They don’t even take it into consideration, and they jump over to outputs, and they wonder why they have an attrition rate that doesn’t bode well for them, and they can’t reach their goals, because every time you lose somebody, you lose all that IP, all that investment of your time, energy, effort, knowledge. So we ask people in workforce planning, you don’t again, need to know all the details, but what is it that you would like people to feel? How do you want people to talk? Where do you want people to live? Is it a remote environment? Do you want to do teams? Do you want to do Agile? There are all of these things that play into an employee experience, and then you take all of that, and I almost should probably make the graph have strategy and priorities at the top of everything, because then you need to make sure that you understand do those things fit with your strategy and priorities. You could go left to right or right to left. I just like to explain it right to left, but you really obviously need to figure out what your strategies look like, and then you can tweak some things along the way.

Kathy (host):
And you know, if someone’s listening to this and they say, “Well, I have a smaller business. My business is on the smaller side. I’m really struggling when it comes to hiring and retaining the employees.” And this sounds very complicated to me, like, where would you suggest that they start? Because there’s a lot of components to this, and obviously every single one of them is important. But if you could say, “Okay, this is the most important one. You have to make this happen before you do anything else,” what would it be?

Carol (guest):
I think it’s going to need to be defining what kind of people you need in your organization and at which levels. So I would probably lean towards the job content. But that’s not just a job description, and when we get into career experience, I’ll explain that, but I would look at that. I mean, I’m working with a very small nonprofit. I think there are now 12 employees, but I started with them when they were seven employees, and they don’t need to have all of this.

Carol (guest):
What we’re doing is we’re saying today, in the next 1, 3, 5 years, so we’ll start with one. This is what our jobs are. We put this together. You know, in startup mode, everybody wears lots of hats, so everybody’s got a lot of things in their job description. The minute that you start to grow a little bit, we do need to just take a breath and say, “Okay, so does it make sense for John to be doing this, this and this, or is that really three separate jobs? And can we figure out, are we at the point where he takes a whole job over here and then these two jobs become part-timers or consultants, instead of constantly piling more things and only creating unicorns?” Because when those unicorns leave more balls drop because they’re handling more things.

Carol (guest):
So all I say when I’m talking about workforce planning is that second word – planning. You have to start to think. I think John doing seven different roles is perfectly fine right now, when I have five employees and I’m only at $8 million, but for me to get to 10 or 15 or 20, I have to plan for that. And John, we have to ask John, “By the way, John, which one of these seven things would you prefer to do and do you do well?” Because I don’t want to give John something that, even if I think it’s mission critical, but John sucks at it, then we’re going to lose, lose.

Carol (guest):
So those are the things I would say. When I say people strategy, I’m saying, let’s figure out how we prioritize all of those functions and then plan accordingly. And then as far as the external market data, I mean, yeah, it’s great to have a lot of that stuff ahead of time, but that’s stuff that you can do in real time. And let’s face it, currently, socio-economically, it changes every week. So it’s really hard to say, “Yeah, we did our research, and we looked at comp surveys, and we looked at all of our competitors,” who knows what’s going to happen in six months. So I would say that those are some of the key things on inputs that you have to put down on paper and really hold yourself to that. Because if you start wavering on the inputs everything below it just starts falling apart.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, and that’s a good point of finding these unicorns. Because if someone has been with you from the get-go, from the beginning of the company, and they have more responsibility piled onto them, they have kind of grown into that role, and they know the whats and the whys. It is very hard for someone who doesn’t know the organization, who doesn’t know the business as well, who just started, to expect them to have all that knowledge and all that experience, that the person who you’ve had before, who’s been with you for years and started when you were at the beginning stages of your company, to be as effective and as good as the person who you’ve had before.

Carol (guest):
Exactly. And that’s whether you’re a $5 million company or $5 billion company. If it’s not well documented, and we don’t have some way to transfer that knowledge, we’re inevitably setting ourselves up for failure as well as that individual, because whatever we don’t have written down, we’ve lost that IP completely. Never mind whether or not that other individual was able to absorb it and function and perform with it. But if we don’t have it written down at all as an organization, we’ve lost it completely.

Kathy (host):
Yep, so let’s say that right now, you know, we’re recording this in springtime, so I like to do springtime as the time for the strategic planning. We’re looking at, how are we going to grow the business? We’re looking at the future a lot more. And I do it from a financial perspective, but I need to know, like, how many people are we going to hire? Which type of people do we need? How are we going to budget for them? So if you are starting to do a strategic plan in the springtime, and a part of that is workforce planning, what are some of the questions that you need to ask yourself as you’re going through that plan?

Carol (guest):
That’s, I think, a great segue to the second part of workforce planning, which is around that career experience. Because within career experience is job architecture. And this is where it can get very, very granular, or it can be very broad still, but this is where you’re going to be talking about on a role basis, not the people, right? We haven’t done the talent to task assessment yet, but on a role basis, how many people, at what level, and how many of them do I need to screw in a light bulb? What’s the job complexity, what’s the autonomy? What is the leadership? Perhaps there are key things there that are outside of my physical job. My job is to do X, Y and Z, but now I need to ask myself, so at an entry level, and this is why I think job architecture is a friend to finance, because now I’m able to say, “Well, given what we need to get done, we need more people with a complexity that’s lower or a complexity that’s higher.” And now that we’re able to identify that, we’re able to say, “Okay, lower complexity, no leadership roles, our bands or our compensation says X, higher complexity, even on an individual contributor level, the compensation is saying Y.”

Carol (guest):
So it’s a lot easier in job architecture when you map out by department and by function what the entry all the way up to maybe the executive level looks like in each one of those departments. No, you do not need an incumbent in every single one of them, but what you’re doing, it’s a lot easier to then do that talent to task assessment, to say, “Well, I’ve got John here, and he has capacity, and I know he can do more. So going forward in my projections, we’re going to be looking to promote him in six months, and I’m going to bring somebody in lower so the market’s saying I need this much money for a replacement for John, and I need this much money to promote John.” The more you can look at it from a detailed and more objective standpoint, the easier it is to budget.

Kathy (host):
I agree, because in finance, I’m a part of those conversations, but I’m definitely not going to be out there and say, “Well, this is how much this particular talent is going to cost you, and this is what you need.” That is really on the side of someone who is doing the HR function in the business, and obviously the business owner. And it’s interesting, you know, I am looked at, it’s like, “Okay, tell us what type of people do we need?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, you tell me. I can put them in the plan, and we can figure out, can we afford them, and when can we afford them, and how this is going to look in the long term. But really figuring out what type of people do you need in the business, that is the conversation that we need to have with someone who is doing that workforce planning for you,” and I think that’s where the finance and HR function really go hand in hand.

Carol (guest):
Yeah, when I think about job architecture as well, this is where all the outputs from the job architecture are key, because now I know what do I need for learning and development if I’m going to start to shift as we grow, right? Decision making, responsibilities change as an organization grows. So where, if you’re somebody who had started with them, you have full autonomy to sign a check, because I trust you, but when you get bigger and that line of sight gets pulled away, now I’m asking myself, “Okay, so do we want to put parameters in on who can sign a contract, who can put a PO in,” and all that stuff. Now you’re looking at decision making. And decision making could also be, who do I hire, who do I fire, who do I transfer? Or it could be, do I have the authority to change my pricing? Do I have a range that I, as a CSR, can give a discount? Even the CSR, a customer service representative, can be empowered with decision making. But it’s through job architecture and through the culture of an organization that you decide who gets what.

Carol (guest):
And when you have job architecture as well, you are ensuring that the entry level in ABC department and the entry level in MNOP department have similar characteristics, so similar complexities, similar decision making, and even if it’s not like for like, and it might be a little bit higher over on this department, on MNOP, but the idea here is you’re now categorizing so that you understand which roles you actually value more. And it’s totally okay to value roles more than the other, because if your primary business, like I said, is engineering, of course you’re going to value engineering more than you’re going to value customer service. You need to build a product.

Carol (guest):
So those are the kinds of things within a career experience and within the market data, because that’s also within career experience. You’ve got job architecture, you’ve got career path, and that’s what I was saying about how maybe an entry level admin is a little bit lower than an entry level engineer. Obviously, they’re not going to be like for like, and then you’ve got the market data. Now, market data is a great thing. I’m a certified comp professional. It tells you trends. And too often organizations go, “Well, I have a comp survey, and it says it pays this.” Okay, remember that data is a year old. We have to remember that the data is a year old. It’s directional, and some jobs don’t move. And that’s why you look at it year after year. Because if I can look back at three years of data and see, okay, it’s only moved like 3% a year for that particular job family, I’m not going to have to adjust very much. But if all of a sudden, AI, for example, becomes a hot commodity, and I had in my IT team or in my tech team, they were not valued as high. Now I need people who have this, and it’s a premium. So those are the things that you’re doing. You’re validating your current practices, and you’re setting yourself up for the future. You always want to have a comp band that can look into the future at least three years, so that you’re only wiggle rooming of maybe like 2 or 3% on the ends of the bands. Otherwise, for you in finance, you’re gonna pull your hair out if I were to walk up to you and go “This entire job family just went up 20%!” You’re like, “Hold on!”

Kathy (host):
Yep, yep, exactly. And I want to go back into what you were saying. For listeners who are not familiar with MNOP, can you define what that is?

Carol (guest):
Oh, I’m just saying, I was just using the alphabet. Okay, so it’s like, ABC Company, XYZ company, just two different kinds of companies. So like, for example, in the nonprofit that I’m working with right now, the small one, we only have two departments. We have our programs department, and we have our funder management department, right? And then, of course, we do have operations, and I feel like a lot of times those are a lot easier because they’re traditional roles, but that all depends on funding, right? So those are some of the things that maybe people, even when you’re in a startup mode, or you’re looking for investment, how you organize your company has obviously a lot to do with your budget. So maybe today you only have two or three departments, because you have everybody wearing those multiple hats. But it’s a great exercise, and again, you don’t have to enact it, to at least map out what does your future state look like? Where’s the North Star? Where do we want to go when it comes to people and all of the services and products that we’re offering? So that we’re mapping ourselves accordingly.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, and that is one of the things that I keep pointing down. It’s like we got to plan. We have to plan. We have to plan. And we want to make sure that we have a couple of scenarios – the worst case scenario, the one that’s most likely to happen, and the best case scenario. And I think this is where it really shows how everything that you do in the business is going to end up in the finances. Because if you do not plan this well, it’s really going to affect the business. Because if you have a lot of growth happening, and you’re not planning this on your people side, who is going to manage all that business coming in? You’re going to be missing a lot of revenue if you don’t plan for this. So if you have planned a lot of growth, make sure that you’re planning for the people side as well.

Carol (guest):
Yeah. I mean, too often in those hyper-growth stages, this is where burnout happens, because they’re trying to get the same amount of people to do more work. And even if there was capacity before you brought in that work, human behavior – and this is why you want to get somebody in HR who understands the human behavior side of it, not just the operations – human behavior is you learn how to fill your time, whether it’s a little bit to fill all of it, or a lot of it, to fill all of it. And when you go through those changes and those shifts, it’s a mindset shift, it’s a time management shift, it’s a prioritization shift, it’s communications around the entire thing. I’m not saying that you have to constantly bring on more people if you want to get more out of the resources you have, then the priority, the outputs of your workforce planning is going to be around culture and training and resource management, and, you know, staving off burnout. Those are the things that you can – you have your people do more with less people, but you’ve got to find the way to motivate them, recognize them, and engage them to do so, and then equip them with the tools to take on more work and not just feel as if I got everything thrown at me. And that’s why I put communications around the whole thing.

Kathy (host):
And this is where the systems and the processes and the right IT tools come into place, because you can do a lot more with less people if you give them the right structure.

Carol (guest):
Exactly, the tools matter. Yes.

Kathy (host):
So I am curious what you’re going to say to this – when people are doing the workforce planning, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see them making, and how do we fix those?

Carol (guest):
The most common is, we talked a little bit about it, is the employee experience and that whole career experience. So they’re solely relying on their own personal past experiences. And that is a very small viewpoint. That’s, you know, who they’ve dealt with, how they’ve dealt with it. And let’s face it, a lot of times these small companies are new founders, and even ones who are serial founders, like myself, it’s brand new because the difference of business and timing and the people who are working with me now – everything is a different ingredient. So they forget the employee experience. They rely on their history to make decisions. And I’m not saying that’s bad, but just have somebody stress test it. And then they forget the career experience side. But so they don’t bother to look at how many people at what levels to screw in a light bulb. They may say, “I know I want a VP, a manager and three individual contributors.” Okay, so now let’s ask ourselves, what level, or, you know, what is the job complexity? So how much autonomy are you going to actually give that VP? And then let’s ask ourselves, so are our individual contributors decision makers? What does that look like, or how are we equipping them to do that? It’s really easy, and it doesn’t take a long time. I like to workshop it in a day. I don’t think it’s a really long thing to do. It’s really asking the right questions and asking it in the right order, and then opening up for dialog so that everybody can learn along the way. Workforce planning needs to be owned by everyone in the organization who’s a decision maker. If they don’t take ownership for their department and understand how they all fit into the organization’s success, everything that comes out of career experience is what everybody right now is talking about, which is, what’s the quiet quitting, or what’s the quiet firing, or all of that stuff. It’s because that career experience was completely missed. Because when you have that job architecture, you can clearly say, “Here is where your growth path is, and your growth path is dependent on this level of revenue coming in.” So if I show you now, and everybody’s transparent with their revenue numbers to the entire company, well, we made our goal this month. We didn’t make our goal this month. You’re more easily able to connect. “Well, if my growth path is there and I need to learn these skills, and it is dependent upon revenue at this level, I’m hearing this, oh, my God, I’m getting there faster. I haven’t done my skills yet.” So you now put some accountability on the individual to say, “But I told you how you could get there. I’m telling you every month that we’re getting there, and I’m reminding you, if you want to go that career path, you need to learn some additional skills.” All of this really helps to show people how they fit into the success of an organization. Now some people call that culture, but I am a systems person, and I know as a CFO, you’re probably like, “Yes, all of these to me, are systems.” Being able to have something that’s codified is a way to give some to empower your employees and to empower your leaders to manage those employees. In absence of that, you end up with a lot of subjectivity, and it becomes this flag waving in the wind, and you don’t really know what good looks like on any given day. And all of that does definitely lead to a strong culture within an organization. But coming in and just saying, “I want to help you with your culture,” I back up and go, “Where’s that foundation? Is it on sand, or is it on something more sturdy than that?” Because that’s where I feel if I had a system, and it’s just again, human behavior – people like order. It’s just the way we are. It’s the way that we’re built. And if you can give people order, their stress levels come down, their potential for burnout comes down, and all of it’s pretty easy to put together, and you just got to keep it as a living document, because people don’t stop moving and growing. So every year you look at your workforce planning, one of the outputs of workforce planning is succession planning. And the best way you can do succession planning is you need job architecture. How are you going to say that somebody’s ready for the next level in six months, a year, two years? If you don’t know what that next level truly encompasses? It’s not what the incumbent is, it’s what does the business need at that next level.

Kathy (host):
And if someone is listening to this and say, “This sounds very complicated to me, and I am a small business, and I don’t know what the next day is going to look like, really. So planning is really difficult for me.” What would be your response to this?

Carol (guest):
I would say, let’s find out what future looks like for you. And I totally get, as a four-time founder, I get every day looks different. Something is in your head, though, you have a vision. You started your business with a vision. What is the vision that you ultimately would like to see your business get to? I am here to help you visualize what that looks like from an asset perspective, your employees, your assets. What is it that you would like to see your business become? I’m not saying you need it today, and this is something that can be very iterative, but you do have a vision. You didn’t start your business going, “I’m just me, and it’s just gonna be me forever.” And if you didn’t, you’re a solopreneur. God bless you. But if you’re somebody who is a small business who needs other people to deliver results for your company, a little bit of workforce planning goes a long way.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that’s really good. And you’ve talked about the employee experience. Can we talk a little bit about that? What does that entail? Is that performance reviews? Is that culture, all of the above? What is in the employee experience?

Carol (guest):
Yeah, it’s all of the above. Like I mentioned, if you have a clear understanding of what your role is, besides your day-to-day jobs, we always call them either soft skills or competencies, or anything that is not like “I take my screwdriver and I turn a screw.” Those other things, those attributes to your role, if you think about responsible, accountable, consultant, informed – what am I accountable for? What am I responsible for? When you think about those types of things, and that’s all within the career experience, all of that lends to your employee experience. So since the input was employee experience, you need to define, “I want everybody to be a free spirit,” or “I want everybody to know exactly what order looks like.” That’s the employee experience you’re trying to create. Your job architecture will mirror your input, the employee experience, and thereby your outputs will then also mirror that. So if you’re a laissez-faire kind of an organization, and you’re saying, “We leave our managers to do whatever they want,” then the autonomy component of your job architecture is high, and so is the decision making. The complexity may not be super big because you’re not caring so much about the order of things, and again, it could be, because that’s your service. If you are a mindfulness coach and you have all mindfulness practice, and you need to kind of ebb and flow with the energy, then that’s going to have a very different employee experience than an engineering firm. So those are the employee experience that your job architecture will mirror that. But that’s why we need to define that first, so that we’re building a job architecture that does mirror that, and then on the end of it, with all your outputs, if you’re a laissez-faire and you are ebbing and flowing, then you leave learning and development to when it’s good for them, versus “I am going to put down as your goal, you have to learn X, Y and Z this year, because in my succession plan, you’re moving to the next spot in the next 18 months, and we’ve had that conversation, and you’re on board and you’re engaged” and all that kind of stuff. So it’s definitely mindset and how you want to operate your organization. All of that lends to the employee experience.

Kathy (host):
And can we talk about the difference between the job architecture and a job description? Because I think that might be some confusion between those two.

Carol (guest):
Yeah. So I like to say that they’re not the exact same, but they help each other. So in the job description, you’re usually giving an overview of who that person reports to, what that role’s main responsibilities are. We call those essential functions, right? What the essential functions are, so that we know that you are at least meeting the needs of the organization of that role, and then you also have down there, usually technical skills and then some education and experience. Now people have expanded their job descriptions, and for many good reasons, to include things like competencies, like values of the business or the behaviors associated with those values, and for good reason, because if that is what you value, and that’s what you want the employee experience to be, if somebody isn’t espousing or showing the behaviors that align to your values, that is – if you’re defining that’s part of your job. It’s part of your job to behave this way, because those are our values, then absolutely put them in your job description, because you want to hold them accountable to that. But if you’re one of those people who’s like, “Well, you know, our values are embedded in our processes and they’re embedded in our communications and they’re embedded in our practices,” then you may not need to have that necessarily in your job description, because that’s the way somebody works. It’s already taken care of, but if they’re holding them accountable, it is lower because you have systems in place to hold them accountable to those behaviors.

Kathy (host):
Yeah. So the job architecture is essentially you’re looking at it from more of a broader view, versus a job description you’re looking more from a detailed level?

Carol (guest):
Yeah, and the job architecture really helps us to look for like for like. So is a VP – and I do try to encourage organizations that if you’re going to call somebody a VP in engineering and a VP in sales, those roles, especially at that level, that leadership level, need to have very similar complexity, autonomy, decision making, leadership – they need to be very similar to have somebody have so much more as a VP versus a VP of sales. Let’s say VP of engineering, VP of sales. It’s really unfair, because if I’m called a VP and somebody else is called a VP, I would think that we’re the same. And this is where you get disengagement. So if you’re holding me as a VP of engineering at a higher requirement than the VP of sales or the VP of customer service, so nomenclature in your head is “That’s not fair.” So this is where you get job architecture to say, “Okay, then maybe, if we’re not necessarily holding them at the same level, but we do know that we want the VPs in our company to be at this level, then maybe we now define that that person’s a director.” But look, I know sales, and we do this all the time, your external title versus your internal title. But the job architecture is an internal document, and it’s a way to show the complexity of a role, the valuation of a role, the career opportunities of a role. All of that, again, is internal to engage and be sure you have good operations. So that is where job architecture, I think, really helps out, because now you’re able to truly define if somebody is a chief of human resources versus a chief of marketing, those two people better have the same level of complexity. And if you’re not holding, let’s say, the HR person at that same level, why not? Now here comes the subjectivity. “Well, you like that person, so you decided not to hold them to that same level of complexity and accountability,” and that’s where we start to go, “Okay, I’m not saying that you can’t have any subjectivity, but we just want to know, what does good look like?”

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, Carol, if someone is starting to do workforce planning in their business, and they have no idea where to even start. What would you say is the one small thing that they can do in the next week or two to get them closer to their workforce planning?

Carol (guest):
Okay, so the one thing to get closer to workforce planning is identify your gaps right now. Where do you feel you are not comfortable or killing it or knocking it out of the park? I start with comfortable and then knock it out of the park, because if you can easily identify, like “I already know that I’m not good here,” then it’s time for some planning, and that planning may be “In six months, when you close this deal, we’re going to go there. We’re going to hire that person.” The gaps tell you how your business has grown or where your business is unable to grow. And if it’s people related, that’s the first thing you want to do is figure out “My vision was, I was going to be there. I’m here right now, and what is holding me back from getting there?” Outside of revenue – we always try to say, “Once you get all the monies,” because I get it, money is definitely a control. Once you get all the monies, you then want to be prepared, because you don’t want to be behind the eight ball when you are out there selling and signing that contract. You want to know that you have planned and identified who’s going to go in there? Because now you’ve got the money in and you want to hit the ground running, because every minute that you’re not meeting the customer’s expectations is a loss for you, period.

Kathy (host):
And it’s a loss in brand recognition. It’s a loss in your name. It can be a real big problem. Carol, this has been a delightful conversation. I’m really glad we did this. It opened my eyes to a lot of the workforce planning items that I didn’t think were possible. So I’m really grateful that we did that. Where can people find you?

Carol (guest):
You can find us at www.cfoet.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My tagline is “Awesome HR Exec,” so if you were looking for that or “Carol Fraser” works too, and feel free to drop me a DM. You can email me at carol@cfotalent.com.

Kathy (host):
And Carol also has a podcast. Carol, you want to talk about the podcast?

Carol (guest):
I do. So my podcast is “The Fractional Edge,” where we talk about workforce planning, and how something that you could consider as part of your workforce planning are fractional executives. Many times, owners and founders try to do it themselves, and I get it. I’ve been there, but it really sometimes requires an outsider, and I couldn’t afford a full-time marketing person, but I can afford a fractional marketing person, and that person is going to give me insights and expertise that I don’t have. So whether it’s five hours a month, 20 hours a month, 50 hours a month, it really all depends on the need of the organization. But we try to explain to our CEOs, PE firms, founders, owners, executives – it’s okay to not have to hire somebody full time. So think about workforce planning in a more creative way. So if you have that gap that you – the first thing you ask yourself, “Where’s that gap?” Could you fill that gap with a fractional expert? And it’s not just finding a freelancer on some of these websites. I say those are great executors, but part of the reason that you have that gap is probably a gap in strategic vision for that function, and that’s where I think that you could listen to our podcast, find the right person. I like to think of it as if you wanted to know what somebody would look like in an interview, go listen to my podcast because I ask them, as an HR person, a lot of questions that you probably would have asked them as an owner. So you could always go and listen to what my podcast is saying. You’re like, “I think I like that guy,” and you could reach out to me about that guy too.

Kathy (host):
That’s awesome. Carol, yeah, I highly recommend you go listen to her podcast. There’s a wealth of knowledge on there. Carol, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.

Carol (guest):
Absolutely. I really appreciate being here.