Workforce Readiness

What workforce readiness means

Workforce readiness (جاهزية القوى العاملة) is the capability of an organisation’s team to carry out what will be required of it in the coming period with the numbers, skills and organisation it has available. It is assessed not as an average across the period but at the moment the work is required.

The definition rests on three things the team holds at that moment: the numbers, meaning the people available to do the work; the skills, meaning what those people know how to do; and the organisation, meaning the way the people and their skills are arranged across the departments and roles in which the work will fall. Workforce readiness sets the combination of the three against a defined requirement, so it is readiness for something specific: for the volume and the kind of work that the organisation expects in the coming period.

The last part of the definition sets the time at which readiness is assessed. A team can be adequate on average over a period and still fall short at the point in that period when the work arrives. Workforce readiness asks about that point. Its subject is the moment at which the work is requested, not the average of the months around it.

The questions that measure workforce readiness

Workforce readiness is measured through four questions. Each one tests a different part of the team’s capability against the requirement of the coming period.

1. Number. Do we have enough people for the expected volume? It compares the people available with the volume of work the organisation expects in the coming period.
2. Skill. Do the people we have know what the coming work requires, and not only what the current work requires? It looks forward: a skill that serves the work done today answers the question only if the work ahead calls for the same skill.
3. Distribution. Is the capability located in the departments that will need it, or somewhere else? It concerns where the people and their skills sit. Capability held in one department is not available, as it stands, to a requirement that falls in another.
4. Continuity. What happens if the people who fill the critical roles are absent? It tests whether the work of those roles can go on without them.

Three of these questions can have reassuring answers while the fourth brings workforce readiness down as a whole. That is what makes workforce readiness a composite state rather than a number. A strong answer to one question does not offset a weak answer to another, because each question tests a separate condition on which the coming work depends.

The number question has a neighbour in capacity planning, which converts the workload expected in a defined period into the working hours that workload requires and compares the result with the hours available in the same period.

How workforce readiness differs from workforce planning

Workforce planning is a process that builds capability over time. Workforce readiness is a state measured at a moment, and the question it puts is whether the organisation is ready now for what begins next month.

The first is construction, and the second is a check on the result of that construction before the real test. Workforce planning works across periods, building the capability the organisation will need. Workforce readiness takes the capability the organisation holds on a given date and asks whether it is enough for the work about to begin.

When workforce readiness is examined

Workforce readiness is examined at points where the requirement of the coming period is about to change, or where the capability of the team has changed:

• Before a known peak season. Discovering a shortfall late can be costly at that point, and because the season is known in advance, the check can be made before demand rises.
• Before a product launch or entry into a market that requires new roles. It asks whether the team has people to fill the new roles that the launch or the market entry requires.
• After a restructuring. It can change the distribution without changing the number. The headcount afterwards can be the same as before, while the people sit in different departments and roles, so the number question keeps its earlier answer and the distribution question has to be answered again.
• At a technical change that removes one skill and calls for another. It applies when the work stops depending on a skill the team holds and begins to depend on one the team may not hold. The number and the distribution can stay as they were while the answer to the skill question changes.

What raises workforce readiness

An order that can save time is to begin with the question whose answer is worst, not with all four at once. The four questions point to different responses, so the weakest answer decides which response comes first.

Where the weakness lies in distribution, the response is redeployment, not hiring. The capability exists in the organisation but sits in departments other than those that will need it, and redirecting it to those departments addresses the gap that the distribution question found.

Where the weakness lies in continuity, the response is documentation and the preparation of alternates through succession planning, which identifies the critical roles in an organisation and prepares ready replacements for them before they fall vacant. Documentation records how the work of a critical role is done. The preparation of alternates gives the role someone who can take it on if its holder is absent.

Where the weakness lies in skill, the choice is between upskilling the people already in the team and hiring people who hold the skill, and that decision is taken on cost and time together. Upskilling develops the skill within the existing team, while hiring brings it in from outside. On the hiring side, the cost can be expressed as cost per hire, the average an organisation spends to fill one position, and the time as time to fill, the number of days between opening a requisition for a role and the day the person appointed to it starts work.

What distorts the measurement of workforce readiness

One way to distort the measurement of workforce readiness is to measure it by number alone, because a count can be the easiest of the four answers to gather. A headcount answers the first question only. It says nothing about skill, distribution or continuity, which are the other three conditions on which the coming work depends.

An organisation that has its full number of people but lacks one critical skill can appear ready in the report and still falter in execution. The report shows the count, and the count is complete, but the gap lies in a question the report did not ask. It comes to light when the work that needs the missing skill begins.

The single reassuring number that does not examine the four questions is what closes the question of workforce readiness before it has been examined. Once a figure is accepted as the answer, the three questions it did not test can remain unexamined until the work itself tests them.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.