This blog by John Pessima from the Faculty of Business and Law, will help them rethink their business processes and the critical capabilities needed to understand and address undesirable talent situations.
Workforce challenges are a common occurrence in organizations large and small. Increasingly many such problems are becoming inter-connected with other talent value anchors within organizations. However, the process such organizations follow in sensing and formulating their workforce challenges is critical to their competitiveness, profitability, and growth. Developing the right insight with the right access to the requisite tools and involving the right stakeholders can help people managers understand the causes of success and failure in talent management change programs. This blog uses the recent case of P&O Ferries, analysing some of the pitfalls in their approach and actions they would have taken to avoid government and public outrage against their workforce management decisions.
P&O Ferries staff redundancy actions have caused justifiable outrage. The company attracted public and parliamentary attention after firing 800 workers via video message and replacing them with low-wage agency staff. What understanding did P & O Ferries have about their staffing profile which informed these huge redundancy decisions beyond initial cost savings?
In its corporate social responsibility report published 2019 and in subsequent years, the cruise shipping line reported winning several recent awards for outstanding service, giving credit to its motivated and service-oriented staff. Many of those same staff were dismissed via video message early this year.
The COVID pandemic affected nearly all organizations worldwide, and we have seen the response vary greatly across the globe. Organisations with effective disaster preparedness strategies in place seem to have managed the crisis successfully without attracting public attention; for P&O Ferries, this was not the case.
This blog shows how findings from new research at the University of Portsmouth on problem-sensing and talent management could have helped P&O Ferries avoid the uproar from staff, the public, workers unions, and the British government.
Insights from the study show how the company could have approached the redundancy situation from a range of perspectives, giving a holistic view of the key business challenges, probing detailed employee data and analytics to access insights on performance, the workforce demographics implications, etc. Companies may think that finding a short-term loophole in the existing labour laws by firing more expensive staff, and replacing them with low-cost staff, is a viable solution - but such action has long-term consequences.
In conclusion, the study provides practical approaches for other companies to address existing and emerging workforce challenges. It will provide guidance on which people data can best help in understanding problems, both in the interests of workforce development and productivity and sustainability of the company. It recommends capabilities and approaches that can be deployed to defend well-informed decisions and minimize public scrutiny, particularly relevant in the existing challenging global context.