Talent Fluidity — Shaping & Reshaping the Workforce is the New Norm!

Shaping your workforce and making it adaptable to the future can be a company’s greatest differentiator and competitive advantage for years to come. This can happen by leveraging predictive and prescriptive insights to build a more agile workforce, securing talent from emerging ecosystems, and re-skilling and up-skilling current workers for their digital future. Bold leaders create a future workforce that can adapt itself to the world as it changes. By focusing on their people, leaders will create a company that quickly executes its digital strategies, forming and reforming itself in this new world of constant change. The next ten years will bring fundamental changes to our working world, and to adapt, employees in almost every role and industry will need to acquire new skills

Most C-Suite Leaders assume their workforce will keep pace with rapidly transforming, digital advancements instead of purposefully designing their workforce to keep pace with these changes. Technology plays an important role but is no longer the competitive differentiator it once was. Instead, the key to workforce agility lies in a strategy that puts people first, enabled, facilitated and powered by technology to amplify and to enable talent workers to work anywhere and everywhere.

Predictive insights not only provide an understanding of future workforce needs but also guide and predict workforce requirements for navigating the predictable future. These insights provide a valuable map to guide significant enterprise transformations and answer key strategic questions:

1. How will you deliver your next impactful deliverable in the form of a product or service?

2. How have you segmented, targeted and positioned your workforce?

3. Have you pivoted your current & future workforce -“A” players occupying “A” positions?

4. What’s your skill map — Skill landscape to drive the value proposition

5. Do you have the workforce to deliver your growth talent agenda, which gives you means and ways to compete and get the competitive advantage

6. How are you prioritizing your people during this transformation?

7. Do we have the right skills, capabilities, competencies, experiences and expertise across the organization?

8. Are we getting the right skills, capabilities, competencies, experiences at the right time and at the right cost?

While predictive insights can help you in planning for a future workforce, it must be continuous, iterative, and remain an open-loop process that factors ‘double-loop learning’ that involves all parts of the organization to remain effective. Having reliable predictions that guide an organization into the future will require constant investment — for data and insight gathering, continuous adjustments to workforce modelling, and breaking down siloed business systems. There is no end, but it provides means for predictive workforce intelligence and to make your organization resilient. If crafted, designed and executed, and scaled across the organization, predictive insights are the first step to creating an agile workforce that by itself gives results in resource-based advantage.

Predictive insights help organizations to pivot and map their future workforce. Boundary-less access to talent and new models of employment help them source it. From new talent marketplaces and job sharing to pooling talent with ecosystem partners, enterprises now have a multitude of options for expanding their workforce model.

The rise of AI and technology will rule out the ‘one role, one worker’ approach and will give way to more fluid and task-based ways of approaching work. The term “employee” will encompass a broad spectrum spanning internal to external, human to machine, and short-term gigs to full-time work. HR Leaders now need to map, craft philosophies and mindsets to address the needs of diverse talent inside and outside the traditional boundaries of the organization.

The growing field of advanced analytics [Prescriptive & Predictive] can help companies predict their future workforce. Emerging talent platforms and ecosystems can help them in gaining this competitive advantage. But re-skilling will help a company best utilize its existing workers to sustain desired business outcomes in a digital world.

Beyond simply attracting workers, workforce strategies of the future need to incorporate new methods of re-skilling, up-skilling and cross-skilling of their talent as automation handles an increasing portion of the workload.

Beyond focusing on a specific set of technologies to workforce approaches, HR leaders looking to drive cutting-edge business innovation will need to invest in technology to reskill/Upskill & Re-skill their Talent. Forward-thinking organizations must provide opportunities that prepare employees for future jobs they will perform — inside or outside the company.

It’s fair to ask why a company would invest a large amount in re-skilling in an era where Generation Z is job-hopping. But organizations must take a more macro perspective: every company is facing
skills challenges, and providing training at scale will ensure the marketplace has a healthy supply of skilled workers. And just as important, this is a critical benefit to workers seeking to maintain his/her marketability. In addition, university graduates who do choose large companies as their employer of choice are doing so, in part, because of the training and development opportunities available.

The future of organizations lies in making their talent “Skill proof” capitalizing on the learning opportunities like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The learning minds can self-select and create their own learning paths. More needs to be done in most organizations to create a breakthrough advantage with existing workers. Organizations need to consider new ways to engage, re-skill and energize the multi-generational workforce of the future. Those that begin now only will be able to beat and position themselves as leaders in the future.

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” — Gloria Steinem

The end of a job is not necessarily the end of employment. Initiating proactive steps to support an agile and relevant workforce will play a large role in the success or failure of a business’s drive for growth.

The implications of the ever-changing environment followed by disruptive technology trends shaping businesses and the workforce are profound, yet organizations have been very slow to respond and take advantage of this scale and momentum. Of the responders, most have not moved beyond pilots to full-scale organizational change.

Many organizations are investing in different kinds of digital strategies to support their increasingly dynamic operations, but when it comes to the workforce, most still rely on a single inflexible strategy.

The leader in an organization needs to employ a more comprehensive and holistic approach to predicting, sourcing, and re-skilling talent. Tweaking is insufficient in a work world that soon will look nothing like it did a few years ago. A more responsive and personalized approach to talent management will ensure that businesses have the right people, with the right skills, supporting the right priorities, to create change at scale. But that scale requires support at all levels, driven by leaders.

Fluid and robust talent strategies, by their very nature, require experimentation on a continuous basis.

Today’s world has leaders who change the face of business while putting their people first. Leveraging predictive insights as the foundation for workforce planning now and in the future, expanding talent sourcing strategies to find the right skills at the right time, and reskilling the existing workforce for better outcomes, are key to the agility most organizations desire. As the newest innovative leaders create this agile workforce — one that adapts to our constantly changing world as a matter of course — they use technology to help put people first.

Leveraging predictive insights as the foundation for workforce planning now and in the future, expanding talent sourcing strategies to find the right skills at the right time, and reskilling your existing workforce for better outcomes, are key to the agility most organizations desire.

So the Human-Techno model would look something like this:

Human technology could be harnessed in the below-mentioned ways.

• Organizations need to constantly indulge in ‘Capability Audit.’
• Discover, experiment, and learn new digital ecosystems and platforms.
• Invest in crafting ‘Employee Experiences’ in all organizational practices, programs, and philosophies.
• Use ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Learning,’ after-action reviews, and double learning loops to make your organization a ‘Learning Organization’ of the future.
• Navigate the new norm through ‘Re-Skilling,’ ‘Up-Skilling,’ and ‘Cross-Skilling.’

With the ‘New Normal,’ it has becomes necessary to embrace talent fluidity and harness human technology to achieve organizational success.

By,

Aravind Warrier, Director- Human Resources, RapidValue