Member Login
North America
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Changing regions will empty your cart. Would you like to continue?
Main Roads is responsible for Queensland's state-controlled road network which consists of more than 34,000 km of the state's 177,000 km roads. The state-controlled road network comprises 20% of Queensland's road network, yet carries 80% of its traffic, with a replacement value of $25 billion.
Main Roads has entered a period of rapid and significant growth. The population and economy of Queensland is projected to continue its current growth phase for the next 25 years, having a significant impact on the development of infrastructure, in particular, roads and transport. With responsibility for the state-controlled road network, Main Roads has received significant increases in funding to respond to the increased roads infrastructure required in the coming years.
Main Roads faces a number of workforce challenges in aiming to deliver the new works program and ongoing maintenance, including:
The HR function within Main Roads realised that to support the Roads Implementation Program and other strategic goals, it would need to link workforce and business planning. But there were some challenges in finding the approach to workforce planning that would best suit the agency. These challenges included:
With only two people dedicated to workforce planning (May Leon, Principal Advisor and Sonia Stanton, Senior Advisor, Attraction and Retention), the Department needed to think strategically about how to implement the most appropriate workforce planning process within this context.
Main Roads decided to introduce workforce planning using a decentralised, Train-the-Trainer approach which could tap into the existing pool of HR Consultants/Managers within the business units. The approach described in this case study can be summarised in the following four steps:
1. Determine workforce planning process, roles and responsibilities;
2. Prepare a training toolkit and conduct the training;
3. Collect and synthesise forecast information, develop strategy and finalise a State-wide Workforce plan; and
4. Adjust the process in future iterations.
1. Determine Workforce Planning Process, Roles and Responsibilities
Main Roads divided the workforce planning process into four key components: forecast setting, demand forecasting, supply forecasting, and HR strategy development. Two of these components were principally undertaken by the central workforce planning team (May and Sonia):
The other two components were undertaken by HR Consultants/Managers, but with significant training and support from May and Sonia. The two components principally undertaken by the HR Consultants/Managers were:
2. Prepare a Training Toolkit and Conduct the Training
Adapting a template provided by Infohrm, May and Sonia firstly prepared a workforce planning Toolkit which provided templates and tips for how to facilitate demand forecasting discussions with managers. Then, the trainee trainers participated in a two day "overview" workshop (conducted by Infohrm), which covered the need for and process of workforce planning. This was followed by a half day workshop that focused on the demand forecasting process. Using the Toolkit, workshop participants worked through activities which showed how they would use the templates and techniques to support their client managers in the demand forecasting process.
3. Collect and Synthesise Information, Develop Strategy and Finalise a State-wide Workforce Plan
Over the next few months, about 35 demand forecasting interviews/workshops were conducted throughout Main Roads. If a HR Consultant/Manager did not feel confident enough to run the interview individually, May or Sonia stepped in to assist, though they were only asked to do so in a small number of cases. The demand and supply forecasts were input to workforce planning software that calculated the gap for each business unit and job role. These gaps and associated issues were discussed during an organisational level strategy development workshop. A State-wide Workforce Plan for Main Roads was compiled based on the decisions made at the strategy development workshop. Where relevant, more details about these processes are included in the following sections.
4. Adjust the Process in the Second Iteration
Main Roads is now finalising its second iteration of workforce planning. The second iteration includes several amendments to the process, based on learnings from the first round. A fundamental difference between the first and second iterations is that, during the first round, the Infohrm consultants took the lead role. With experience behind them, the Main Roads project team was able to take a much more active, driving role in the second iteration. This had several advantages, including reduced costs and increased HR credibility.
Other learnings and adjustments include:
Changing the Timing
Initially, May and Sonia tried to link demand forecasting with the business planning process. But, in Main Roads, business planning is essentially a budget process with a 12 month outlook. May and Sonia found that the kind of thinking people do when they are business planning is around the budget, which is not conducive to the longer-term and more imprecise nature of demand forecasting. Also, business managers were under pressure to complete their business and budget plans on time and saw workforce planning as a distraction they did not need.
The workforce planning team found that it was much better to undertake demand forecasting and strategy development after the business planning process was finished, when managers are much more interested in looking at ways of achieving their goals through their people.
Pitching it at the Right Level
In the first iteration, a total of 75 demand forecasting sessions were conducted. This proved to be an enormous investment in resources in terms of conducting the sessions, following up the forecasts with managers and populating the forecasting database. In the second iteration, the workforce planning team (through the HR Consultant/Managers) l conducted demand forecasting at a higher level and encouraged senior managers to consult widely with their direct reports prior to forecasting sessions. In this way, the workforce planning team achieved the same outcomes with fewer resources.
Multi-stage Strategy Development
The second iteration of workforce planning took a much more comprehensive approach to strategy development. In the first iteration, there was one workshop at which the stakeholders were presented with the gap analysis. Infohrm then prepared a detailed report that recommended strategies to address workforce gaps, although it had limited involvement in the implementation of strategies developed.
In the second iteration, May and Sonia calculated the gap analysis for business units and critical job roles and identified some key issues that came out of that analysis. They then facilitated a half-day workshop with stakeholders from across the organisation, including managers from some of the larger business groups, technical experts and HR people. The purpose of this workshop was to get feedback for the initial gap analysis and identify some of the "hot spot" areas. The workshop enabled participants to confirm and clarify some of the findings and analysis from the initial demand, supply and gap forecasts. It had a dual purpose: providing feedback about the outcomes and engaging stakeholders in the process.
Then the workforce planning team ran a second workshop, of one day's duration, involving the same stakeholders. The basic workshop process was:
The main points from the workshop were then emailed to all participants in the week after the workshop, and managers were given time to re-consider the issues, suggest and prioritise strategies. It is these strategies that form the basis of the amended State-wide Workforce Plan.
This approach was deemed a success, as it identified three new strategies which may not have been unearthed using a more conventional approach: "Managers came up with a lot of strategies of their own rather than ticking off what was put in front of them." This approach is also likely to gain greater commitment to the strategy implementation process.
In a relatively short timeframe, Main Roads' approach to workforce planning has moved from an "external expert" model, driven by Infohrm, to an "internal partner" model, driven by the central workforce planning team. In the second iteration of workforce planning, the central team drove most of the process and gained ownership from senior managers to the extent that they not only participated, but did so very willingly and skilfully. In one of the major groups, the business executive has decided to allocate an internal project team to workforce planning. As May and Sonia said: “From our perspective, it is much more meaningful to have somebody in the business driving it and saying: 'You need to get this done.'”
May and Sonia believe some of the reasons for this success were:
“It wasn't easy ... it was challenging at times, and there are still a couple of business areas that have got a bit of a way to go. But these areas are starting to feel some of the external pressures [labour market shortages] and seeing the value that workforce planning is bringing to other business areas.”
From their experiences, May and Sonia can share the following "lessons learned:"
Main Roads found that demand forecasting is a time intensive process, taking three months from start to finish. So, by the time they had done the gap analysis and strategy development, there was hardly time to implement the strategies before needing to start an annual cycle again. So, one recommendation for Round Three is that demand forecasting be undertaken every two years, rather than every 12 months.
Main Roads is currently in the process of obtaining endorsement for the State Wide Workforce Plan. Further, the department is currently engaging in a process of aligning existing and future workforce strategies to identified strategic outcomes, in efforts to effectively prioritise activities and mitigate against workforce risks.