The client’s perspective
A global drug manufacturer with 2,200 employees was growing rapidly. Leadership’s vision for continued growth started the discussion on how the workforce could grow to meet the company’s future needs. As the company began developing these plans, it recognized the value of enlisting experts in workforce planning.
The company’s ideal expert profile would be someone who could help validate their business case and high-level approach for the planned workforce, categorize needed roles, conduct workforce analytics and assist with implementation and change management.
The company chose Eagle Hill Consulting as their guide.
2,200+
employees across global offices
4,000+
customers
1,000+
critical roles identified and assessed
4 WEEKS
for delivery of the end-to-end workforce planning solution
A new view
With a short time to get up to speed, Eagle Hill immediately set to work understanding the business objectives and current workforce expansion plans. Crucially, we learned that while leadership wanted to assess the mission-criticality of specific roles they planned to add, the company lacked a standardized way to make these judgements.
We began by helping determine the types of data required to analyze the company’s workforce plan against industry best practices and recommending the technology tools that could help them do so most effectively.
Drawing on our years of experience and our subject matter experts’ training through the Human Capital Institute, we created a guidebook to steer this phase of analysis and developed a surveying tool that would help automate data collection. This tool allowed Human Resource Business Partners (HRBPs) to quickly and efficiently engage business leaders to segment the workforce.
By introducing this one innovation, Eagle Hill streamlined the process of assessing all 1,000+ planned new positions. Equally important, enlisting the HRBPs in this way encouraged their ownership in the process and strengthened their relationships with business leaders as the workforce planning process evolved.
Once the data collection and segmentation were complete, Eagle Hill analytics experts examined the information from geographic and functional perspectives, creating a visualization of how the current workforce aligned to geographies, business units, and strategic objectives. Drawing on our knowledge of industry best workforce practices, we showed how their workforce compared to similar industry organizations and identified existing and future gaps.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
Ultimately, the global drug manufacturer gained a much more robust sense of their workforce, with minimal organizational pain felt from the process. The visualization tool Eagle Hill created allowed their human resources experts to drill down and get the highly specific information they needed to provide useful input into the planning process.
The company is one on the move, and Eagle Hill matched their pace. A crucial way that Eagle Hill worked quickly (and smartly) to help meet needs on an accelerated timeline was to give the company’s HRBPs the ability to adjust plans without losing valuable momentum.
Rather than deploy an inflexible methodology and toolset, Eagle Hill began with a solid foundation in data analytics and workforce planning, then collaborated to develop a customized approach. This meld of established best practices with the agility to accommodate circumstance positioned the organization to enter the next phase—talent alignment—with confidence.
