Business case 2 – Workforce planning

Situation: Eminent retirement of knowledgeable group-members and not identified as an urgent matter by top management

Outcome: Management approval for proactive hiring new team members and knowledge handover from experts. Additional uses: knowledge-driven onboarding of new hires and personal development from 360 degrees knowledge feedback.

In a specific team in the Dutch Police, the workforce was clearly ageing. The average age of the team was 55 years old, and the team lead was worried because he saw a pattern of many people leaving (taking key knowledge with them) and not many employees with the right skills joining his team. He was worried that keeping up with this rhythm, in a few years his area would have a significant problem and all key knowledge would be gone.

Hiring people for this specific team in the Police with the right skill set was not easy. When he voiced his concerns to the management team it was dismissed for not being urgent.

Together with this team, we ran a GuruScan knowledge booster session and combined it with an age map of all team members. It became very clear that the worries were justified, and something had to be done to ensure knowledge retainment.

Screenshot 2021-06-17 at 11.13.36
Figure: Team expert analysis mapping expertise and closeness to retirement.

With this analysis, the team lead had his situation backed up with data. Now, his superiors agreed completely with the fact that immediate action was necessary to make sure his team would have the right people with the right skills, also in a few years’ time.

Apart from the approval to start hiring, the GuruScan analysis also provided more operational benefits to the team: with the knowledge map it is very clear for current and new team members to find who knows what. Especially new employees indicated they consult the tool almost daily to make sure they contact the right person for obtaining specific knowledge thereby facilitating knowledge-driven onboarding.

Last but not least, the outcome of the analysis is also being used as input for feedback and personal development of all team members. Specifically, the more modest team members found out they were well respected for quite some knowledge by their peers.

 

“The GuruScan Knowledge Booster gave us valuable insights into our team’s knowledge to develop individual employees and the team as a whole. We will definitely repeat this every year.”

(Teamlead, Dutch National Police)

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