3. Scenario Planning and Risk Assessment

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• Try to consider the top scenarios that may affect your organisation and weight the likelihood of occurrence - this assists you to review options sooner rather than later and to challenge assumptions.

• Compare the current workforce strategy with what you may require in the future and create an action plan for change.

4. How to Address Recruitment Gaps

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• Build rather than buy – develop your internal team using succession planning to allow you to fill vacancies from your existing workforce.

• Redeploy – Use different teams with spare time to deliver projects.

• Restructure work - Consider short or long terms organisation changes.

• Improve retention – Be the place people are dying to work for.

• Improve attraction – As above!

• Use Contingent Workers – Consider freelance or agency workers.

• Find a new labour source – Keep abreast of which countries we can utilise for new entrants.

• Outsource – Could another business do it better than you?

• Collaborate with others – Working with other stakeholders or even competition to consider your options.

• Automate – Make better use of technology to reduce your workforce requirements. While many roles and processes cannot be easily automated, even small changes can free up your workforce.

• Relocate work – Could you “offshore” the project or department Do we want to be advocating this? I think that it has been discredited and many organisations have made a ‘big play’ of the fact that they no longer do it.

• Apprentices?

• Build links with colleges and universities.   

The outcome of Brexit is still very unclear at this stage. The very best you can do is to be slightly ahead of the game with plans in place and at least know where your organisation and HR Team stands.