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Most organisations still plan only for the traditional workforce: headcount/FTEs. Yet 30–50% of real work flows through the extended workforce – contractors, SOW vendors, gig platforms and, increasingly, AI-enabled delivery forms. Featuring the author of The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, David Edwards, this roundtable advocates whole-workforce SWP and introduces a practical framework for meeting business needs faster, more optimally and at lower cost.
We’ll explore how to practice smarter fulfilment: making explicit, repeatable choices between worker types before demand hits. The discussion is anchored in workforce risk: the risks of today’s workforce mix to strategy execution, and the risks (and mitigations) that come with different mix decisions.
But there’s a second truth organisations often miss: you can’t run a blended workforce while treating some of it as second-class. Worker experience is not an HR nice-to-have; it’s a performance variable. Poor extended worker experience can drive early churn, widen productivity gaps and create reputational damage. As AI acceleration increases the need for specialised, non-FTE capacity, the ability to plan and govern the whole workforce without de-humanising parts of it becomes a competitive imperative.
This is a working session, not a lecture. Expect provocation, peer exchange, and practical takeaways for immediate use.
Learning outcomes:
- Design a whole-workforce operating and fulfilment model: map strategic work; choose default fulfilment routes before demand hits.
- Grade governance by performance and risk: lighter checks for teams that plan and deliver well; tighter controls where risk or performance issues exist.
- Apply a consistent “human experience” lens: understand how treatment affects churn, productivity ramp-up, and brand reputation across worker types.
- Plan and track benefits: Cost of Labour trend, time from plan to work started, plus quality, retention/rotation and risk outcomes.
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