With frequent changing technology and its consumption patterns, businesses are facing challenges to keep up with the pace of changing work trends, while making themselves adaptable, forward looking and solution oriented as possible.
As per the latest Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2015 report, organizations requires dramatic changes in strategy for talent recruitment, retention, leadership and most of all bringing about changes in the organizational culture to become more open, agile and adaptable. This would include keeping the global workforces engaged, motivated and committed to their workplace.
Thoughts of Business Leaders
Considering the issues arising from cultural engagement of employees, to slowly trickling down to leadership issues have been of critical concern over the past some years.
Organizations are still struggling to find a neutral ground to develop effective and long-term leadership programs, which will benefit and engage the current global workforce and groom leaders for the future.
Leadership Gaps
It is the leaders or the managers, and supervisors of every department that bring in strategy, provide direction and engage their employees. But, the problem keeps recurring since people are constantly being shuffled into new job roles. As workforce transitions to new supervisory roles, it is important for employees to realize that it is not a new job but the beginning of a new career.
The vast expanse, duties and responsibilities as a leader include: developing others in your team, leading them by being a role model, inspiring, training and motivating the staff to develop skill sets, which are different from their regular functional jobs.
80-90% of organizations do not invest much into leadership development, training and grooming future leaders. Instead they guide them to undertake leadership courses such as to step up their HR efforts and move the employees to a supervisory role in their career.
Investing in leadership means being open to new ideas, opinions and strategies. Effective leaders bring about changes in strategy and culture, since they are entrusted with a strategic communication role within the organization to amend and make changes as necessitated.
Organizations adapt to a continuous development programs by moving their employees into roles that could highlight their strengths and weakness.
Assign external resources, coaches or provide them with external assignments outside the company in global markets, such as to help them learn new things and bring the knowledge back to company for future development. These actions are initiated by the management at the top – governed by business leaders.
Focus on Learning & Development
Back in the year 2000, when e-learning was first introduced and talked about, to a generation of ’info-learning’ sites like Udemy, MIT Courseware, Coursera, Lynda, Youtube etc. it has changed the paradigm of learning for the general audiences or the ‘consumer’ as opposed to when one enters a corporate setup.
The corporate learning has fallen behind in comparison to the consumer learning environment. Secondly, the Internet and social learning is all about engagement and strategizing efforts to attract unique visitors and offer compelling reason to members to visit the website again.
As the corporate learning environment is still stuck in the early 2000s with compliance and performance issues, learning and development has been the third major focus area for HR Professionals to ensure organizational growth.
People randomly identify and learning new skills online to give their careers a boost as if the ‘Learning Curve is the Earning Curve’. Also, a strong fun learning environment is important to retain and attract talent that would like learn, update and stay with the company over a longer-run.
Also, the training industry lags behind considerably as regards – lack of prior teaching experiences and not possessing the right tools to differentiate themselves and enunciate change.
Organizations have a learning here too as they grow. They have to be aware of the online learning boom and understand how Internet as medium has changed the face of learning to make the programs an interactive, engaging and immersive experience for the learner. These techniques need to be applied to corporate learning programs, to make it seem relevant and interesting for employees.
See: 6 Key Qualities Transforming HR as a Strategic Business Partner
On Demand Workforce: Is HR ready?
Working trends have shifted gears in the recent time to make way for more part-time workers than full-time workforce.
One of the key reasons behind this sudden shift is that people were struggling to make ends meet through working part-time during the recession period that led way to creation of a freelance economy and new gigs for part-time workforce.
People with multiple skill sets have availed the opportunity of bidding themselves to multiple employers based on their skill sets.
Companies are now juggling with the influx of contractual employees or project based employees, those who will not be hired by the HR under employee agreements but would be signed up for work, managed by the procurement departments.
Many companies today, outsource their research and development work and, innovation modeling to think tanks or experts in the field. This trend is soon catching up big time, and HR professionals need to be in the spotlight of issues, considering the huge pool of contractual resources available.
Engagement and Culture
The good old workforce mindset of sticking with a company for a longer run such as 15-20 years is on the phase of disappearing sooner. Old brands and large companies have not evolved their organizations with the current talent management practices.
The multigenerational workforce today, comprising of a majority of millennials soon climbing leadership roles, look for benefits beyond salary and bonuses. They would like to stay with a company that offers work-life balance, flexible working hours, and vibrant workplace culture and so on.
Gone are those days when organizations could rely on their company brand name and forget about it. The workforce today seeks to understand the management and cultural issues within an organization, which is of critical importance to find a new job and ensure personal-professional growth.
Hence, companies are required to be more vigilant and careful about building a strong workplace culture, engaging talent and provision of learning environment to upgrade employee skills such as to stay in sync with global trends.
Performance Management
Performance management and annual reviews as a process is soon getting outdated in the books of HR. Most MNCs and large organizations spend almost 2 million hours a year, on performance reviews and annual appraisals. This does not include day-to-day management tasks that impact sales and business overall.
The definition of best managers has changed over time. Now, it implies to those who make time to communicate with their team on a regular basis, provide genuine feedback and steps to ensure employee career progression.
Some of the big organizations like Adobe have already done away with annual performance reviews. It is their way of helping leaders and managers to coach along, rather than after the performance review to build a continuous learning and engaging workplace environment.
Reinventing HR
The role of HR is changing globally and is no longer considered as a department wherein you interact with people when being hired or when in trouble. 80-90% of HR functionality is based on dealing with talent issues, building leadership, mentoring employees, and to ensure creation of an engaging vibrant workplace environment.
The other administrative functions such as payroll, time and attendance management, benefits calculation, bonus evaluation and analysis are now mostly automated such as to allow HR professionals, more time to assume a holistic strategic consultant role.
Secondly, each organization is unique in its own business culture and processes, and HR practices cannot be copy-pasted from any other company. The need is to innovate and re-engineer processes that will be more aligned with your organizational goals.
HR has to adapt and understand the importance of technology and how it can be used for the organisational benefit. The role of Chief HR Officers (CHROs) is witnessing change and most of these experienced professionals hail from non-HR backgrounds.
People Analytics stuck in Neutral
HR organizations are now looking into people data to understand – where are the employees coming from, need for specific training program requirement to certain employees, jobs history, professional qualifications, interests and educational history.
Companies are now filtering through large pool of employee data to understand and predict their retention problems. This helps in reinventing HR and design employee engagement programs to meet staff requirements. Application of data analytics in HR helps hiring managers’ source passive talent and improves the quality of new hires.
Data analytics as a practice is mostly used in sales and customer service areas to profile high performers and set new goals. HR needs to work alongside IT to rationalize, clean up and monitor talent data. Companies are required to discipline and search for the best solution.
People Data Everywhere: Bringing the Outside In
When companies are building on their data analytics strategy, they need to consider all information provided by external sources such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn to input accurate information into their systems.
For example, companies are truly affected when their top employees leave the company. A lot of the data that is making your employees think of calling quits cannot be found by looking inside your organization, you need to look outside.
Redesigning and Simplifying Work
Heavy information overload is increasing organizational complexity, to make employee lives vexed with work and consequent productivity burnouts, lack of work-life balance etc.
Companies are looking at de-cluttering their processes and simplifying work, such as to attract new hires and retain top talent within the company. This dynamic shift signals HR embracing the trend of agile work and enhanced mobility. Companies now rely on working with smaller teams, wherein culture and trust is not perturbed, savings on infrastructure and compliance required is relatively less.
Companies that are progressing are the ones who do not use extensive systems, but prefer management on single application software that is easy to use, does not require extensive training and saves time.
Ensuring maximized productivity levels is essential, for example, a large manufacturing organization has implied not to help their managers set goals. But to reduce the number of things they do every day.
So the new coaching models require sitting down with your team and enlist activities that could increase sharing of work and reduce workload and tremendous pressure on a team member. So the focus is on accomplishing the most important tasks – dealing with customers, rather than investing extra time and efforts into managing the administrative function. This calls for designing solutions to solve problems in the least number of steps possible.
Harnessing on the Power of Technology
Automated technology tools could replace need for human resource in the near future. However, it is on us to accept the signaling winds of change and look at means of collaboration with cognitive computing. I
t’s not about not having jobs in the future to challenge human potentials, however it’s about embracing technology and learning new skills to stay ahead of the trends and embrace technological advancements.
HR plays a critical role to help employees advance their careers through learning new technologies and motivate talent to adapt to the change.
Source: Deloitte HR Trends Survey, 2015
Image credit: LinkedIn
Content attribution:
Rolling Arrays, a leading provider of end-to-end HR solutions that enable customers to attract, develop, and retain the talent best fit for their businesses. Headquartered in Singapore with offices in 5 countries; having 50+ clients across Asia and proven expertise having successfully executed more than 100 projects, Rolling Arrays is premier HR management solutions consulting firm.
