Samantha Rich is the Head of Group Resourcing Practice - Human Resources at AXA UK and in this article she explains the company’s approach and experience of strategic workforce planning.

AXA UK is a good example of an organisation taking steps to address the area of workforce planning. Although AXA were recruiting over 4000 posts per annum in 2008 there was little workforce planning, forecasting or modelling. In today’s current economic climate it is more critical than ever that cost savings are made across the business and, as a consequence, AXA HR has been investigating ways to become more efficient and cost effective. One of the initiatives was to look at the resourcing and recruitment forecasting processes and strategy and the potential to drive greater value through effective workforce planning. However, we didn’t simply want a talent management tool. We realised we needed to create a completely new process and end service to the business.

AXA’s HR strategy is to be a strategic partner and work closely aligned to the business - acting as an enabler to help reach and deliver the company’s goals. A role of Senior Resourcing Partner was therefore introduced into each of the four UK Business Units to focus on workforce planning. Working with both operational recruitment and HR Business Partners this role provided dedicated resource to an area that was struggling to get organisational attention. Previously AXA’s resourcing practice has been quite reactive and there has been little co-ordinated approach to recruitment campaigns. The budgets available in the business were set based on historical data rather than on more robust predicted headcount. AXA had limited ability to match supply with demand internally and had only had a Long Term Capacity Planning (LTCP) process in place in its customer service areas.

The steps AXA have taken to improve workforce planning are threefold: Firstly, we’ve identified critical data inputs drawn from the recruitment candidate tracking system, payroll, training and development and budget systems and Business Unit plans.

Secondly we have invested in a strategic workforce planning tool - developed by activ8 intelligence - that uses predictive technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to support scenario modelling and ‘what if’ analysis. This tool is called a8i Horizons and is an integral part of the workforce planning process.

Using AI, the tool provides scenario modelling and a ‘what-if?’ capability. It has the ability to view a different model at all levels of our company by specialism and by role. It includes a confidence indicator to provide an independent view of the likelihood of future based on historical data and to increase processing efficiency.

Thirdly, we have identified a number of business issues to focus on initially (rather than a whole organisation roll-out) so that this approach to workforce management gains credibility with line and HR alike and early successes are delivered.

Combined with HR Business Partners, Resourcing and Business intelligence it will:

• Enable identification of workforce to achieve AXA’s strategic ambition
• Provides information to help the business balance the recruitment cost/quality trade off and optimise their budget spend
• Provides economies of scale cost saving
• Robust headcount budget planning
• Identifies impact of external factors and any potential issues
• Provides data on the people impact of M&A, model mergers
• Provides data to support planning for other teams eg group property, learning and development, IT

We found several key differentiators of the tool that were important to us including the ability to collect data in one central place, predict recruitment trends and it gives us the ability to run different future scenarios.

The results that were saw significant. For instance, Horizons was able to predict who would leave the organisation within a specified time frame and isolate the reasons for their doing so with a 77% degree of accuracy. This level of insight allowed the HR team to make decisions about which interventions were best deployed to retain key talent. It also provided accurate intelligence with which to make resourcing decisions and, in fact, time to hire was halved for some roles.

Many of these benefits had a huge impact for HR with the commercial value it can offer the business now being seen as a tangible asset and perceived as a proactive and strategic business partner instead of a cost centre that impeded the business units.

HR now has the intelligence needed to backfill the talent pipeline and reduce the risk of unfilled roles and a more proactive approach enables the use of recruitment channels to be optimised. Finally, gaps in succession profiles can be identified early enough to allow remedial action to be taken before business performance is impacted.

Naturally, the overall business is also seeing genuine commercial benefits from the development and individual business units now feel fully supported by the HR function. There is a joint commitment to the management of talent budgets and variance and variance forecasts specifically related to talent can be used to inform decision making so that smaller interventions can be made earlier if required.

It will now be possible to ensure that the right people are in the right role at the right time to ensure maximum productivity and customer service levels and the resourcing budget held by the business units is being used so that maximum return on investment is generated.

Crucially, the talent management process is fully supporting both the financial and strategic objectives of the business which is set to realise cost savings of over £1million per year!

Although these changes are by no means the finished article yet, the approach taken illustrates the importance in ensuring that actions are focused on issues that matter to the business. This approach is expected to demonstrate a tangible Return on Investment (ROI) and has already identified savings through coordinating more effectively around recruitment campaigns, working with ‘at risk’ pools to maximise placements and thereby reducing recruitment and redundancy costs and improving the retention of key people.


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