HCM&P can help you solve an immediate business challenge
We help companies understand how their workforces can be better organized, skilled, sourced, allocated and engaged to meet the company’s strategic business goals. We have worked with clients across multiple industries and geographies, using analytics to solve a variety of business challenges and ensuring that investments are well directed to the right levers for immediate and sustainable benefits. The list below describes some typical problems we have solved in partnership with our clients over the last 30 years:
- Solving labor cost pressures. Your labor costs are out of line across the company as a result of pressures from globalization and competitors’ cost structures. Simply cutting pay or headcount across the board will threaten productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. What is the most effective plan for reducing labor costs without undermining the company’s reputation, market strategy, and productivity?
- Transitioning to a horizontal organizational structure. In order to be more streamlined and adaptable in meeting changing market needs, you need to transition from a vertically to a horizontally managed company. This will create not only a flatter, leaner organization but will also create a radical shift in the capabilities, attitudes, performance metrics, development and value propositions of your workforce. How best do you design the new organization and build and empower the labor force needed to accomplish work effectively in this new structure?
- Reorganization producing disorganization. A year ago your company reorganized, striving to be more responsive to your market, but the disruption never settled down. The cost savings and increased market penetration have yet to materialize. Productivity is lagging and customer service ratings have not improved. How do you identify the sources of confusion and resistance in your workforce and how do you implement the right tactics to overcome the inertia and harness forward momentum for the change process?
- Ensuring productive teams. You never seem to have the right people, in the right place, at the right time and cost. You have trouble identifying which people have needed skills, and it often feels as if talent is leaving as fast as you bring it in. Project teams focused on research, design and development experience too much churn and lack necessary personnel, which means many of those projects are delayed, ineffective or cancelled. What are the primary factors causing this workforce volatility? What are the essential steps to develop an effective talent inventory for sourcing teams and ensure a reliable talent supply chain?
- Coping with a shrinking critical labor pool. Your company’s success depends on access to a highly skilled labor pool to fill key roles. Due to increasing competitive pressures and changes in traditional hiring sources, you are facing an increasing shortage of workers with key skills. What steps can you take to replace the supply of these highly trained workers and what adjustments in worker training and supervision might be needed in your organization?
- Losing traction in the market. Your company’s market share is gradually shrinking and your customer service ratings are flat despite introducing innovative new products and service plans. You have invested in good hiring practices for your customer service representatives and clearly defined their job activities and performance metrics, tying these to compensation. What are the factors behind the flat execution and what are the best levers for accomplishing sustainable change?
- Finding innovation under your own roof. Productivity and growth are not accelerating and profitability has been flattening out over time, but a few groups in the company are achieving beyond expectations. You know that home grown innovation has a much greater chance of being successfully transplanted to other settings in your company. Is there some magic you can learn from those bright spots or is it just a serendipitous occurrence that can’t be duplicated?
By using our unique analytical process, we have helped companies across a wide variety of industries—Finance, Electronics, Transportation, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals and Telecommunications—address their business challenges by focusing on the connection to their workforce. We have helped our clients:
- Increase productivity and bring labor costs down by better organizing the work and the job roles and providing the right tools, technology, and support for the workforce to succeed in accomplishing the business strategy
- Build talent supply chains that allow for dynamic, flexible and responsive use of workers to meet the rapidly changing needs of the market
- Improve the quality of products and services by understanding and supporting the levers of workforce engagement
- Find innovative ways of improving productivity and quality of products and services by identifying and rewarding creative work solutions developed by frontline workers.
To understand how we approach your problem and what you can expect from us during an engagement, explore our six step engagement model and associated deliverables.