The other day I was listening to Brené Brown. She shared about being asked to address ‘innovation’ at the workplace…without mentioning the word ‘vulnerability’ (her core area of study). She responded, “How?!” It made me smile.
Those who study any social science would know values like vulnerability, gratitude, and compassion are foundational to building trust and driving creativity.
It is such a curious phenomenon that we try to stay at arm’s length from any intrinsic topics when it comes to workplace; and yet, the concept of any organization is built off people. How can we talk about productivity, growth, innovation, and profit without mentioning humanity? Human beings are at the heart of everything we do. In our workforce, in our customer base, everywhere.
I have to admit: One of my main ‘fears’ associated with investing in Whirling Chief was also related to my personal brand. Looking back at my corporate experience, I could see that “successful” leaders were generally perceived as ‘all-work, deliver hard bottom line results, no-play, no-personal investment’ type of individuals. Therefore, I was worried that my brand image as a ‘kick-ass HR professional’ would appear ‘weaker’ by building a platform for professionals to focus on ‘human’ issues at the workplace.
I do wonder from time to time how many of us have worked for a business that valued self-awareness amongst its culture values, and promoted it actively across its leadership and workforce.
…But why would we even want self-awareness in the workplace?
Well, for one, if we know what drives us (from a personal mission perspective), and if we understand our core competencies, we can build on our strengths. At the same time, if we are aware of our tendencies and weaknesses, and have the skills to recognize our thought, emotional, and behavioural patterns, we can better control ourselves and guide others in certain situations.
There is a third reason, though: Self-awareness also drives diversity and inclusion by helping create and preserve a place of safety, acceptance, and collaboration with people.
If we are conscious of what we are good at, while acknowledging what we still have to learn, this allows for others to simply ‘be.’ It opens a space for others to show up and play to their own strengths. That space and unspoken exchange helps build trust and safety, and the continued practice of feedback iteration builds the foundation for improved conditions and innovation.
In our highly competitive corporate cultures today, all of this may seem counterintuitive. Many of us may still operate on the belief that we must appear as though we know everything all the time lest people question our abilities, diminishing our effectiveness as professionals or leaders.
Please allow me to tell you this is simply foolish.
As an I/O psychologist of 20 years, and the owner of a management consultancy that pops in and out of all kinds of organizations weekly, I can say with confidence which organizations thrive: the one that genuinely care about being authentic and making room for one another. Leaders in those organizations are the most humble, the funniest, the lightest, and probably some of the smartest people I ever come across.
So, the question for us really should not be, “Do we want to bring ‘human’ elements to the workplace?” The question should really be, “When are we going to have the courage to?”
At Whirling Chief, we believe traditional ways of working are a thing of the past. Instead, our desire is to explore new and revolutionary business and human resources practices in all their richness and depth. As everything around us evolves with the dynamics of globalization, digitalization and democratization, we look to evolve the concept of work and work practices.
With this focus, we were granted the opportunity to spend time with thought leaders around the world at ILO’s upcoming ‘The Future of Work‘ dialogue in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Future of Work Centenary Initiative presents an important step to gain greater understanding of the changes we are witnessing and to develop effective policy responses that can shape the future of work. The Symposium will be structured around the Initiative’s four “centenary conversations” — work and society, decent jobs for all, the organization of work and production, and the governance of work – and will gather international thinkers and actors who are at the forefront of debates on each topic.
As we would like to present the views of our readers, please comment below and let us know what topics you’d like to hear more of and/or which questions you’d like us to carry forward in the dialogues. In return, we will feed our findings and talk summary back to you later in April.
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Earlier this year, we introduced the concept of a ‘thriving’ organization. What’s a thriving organization? Thriving organizations are those organizations that provide psychologically safe, fun, engaging, and productive environments for their employees, and that are sourced (driven) from their WHY.
These organizations are also often known as being particularly successful at driving innovation and change. Further, these organizations are almost always made up of leaders and employees who thrive at an individual level.
In this video, we discuss how leading effective organizations and change requires leading others effectively, and how leading others effectively starts by leading self first.
For more information on thriving organizations and how to create one, you can check out our videos published earlier:
Numerous articles, reviews, and books have been published on how to create a perfect work environment. Environment seems to be key to success, because without a great environment even great ideas are useless.
In the last decade a lot of companies have embraced the idea of creating innovative office ideas and have moved away from dedicated offices to open floor plans and unassigned seating, where teams from different functions work and meet. Some office floors are being built smaller with glass-walled offices, private conversation rooms, and self-service kitchens to promote frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions.
Executive teams
It is a natural desire of leaders to have their teams around them – even corporate executive teams typically share the same office floor, building, or area, and this is often where the company headquarters is situated.
But should members of a corporate executive team really share the same facilities with their peers, rather than sitting close to their functional teams in the respective regions, countries, or affiliates?
In his article “Does it matter where your top team sits?” Bob Frisch from the Strategic Offsites Group is challenging CEO’s on this. He asks them: “If sitting together increases the effectiveness of your team, doesn’t it decrease the effectiveness of the teams those executives themselves lead?”
Frisch argues that efficiency at the top might cause a cascade of inefficiency elsewhere. It is vital for all global leaders that they maintain the physical link with their teams across the continents, who often are a geographically dispersed workforce trying to compete in their market by building the best functional expertise from around the world. Yet many executives find themselves in endurance leadership mode, running and flying around the world, meeting everyone, and visiting sites in order to create alignment and direction.
New technologies require new collaboration models
With the rise of new technologies and ways of collaboration the way we are interacting in the business context has changed. Skype for business, videoconferencing, and Halo rooms have become indispensable. Several companies are currently working on ideas on how to bring VR technology into, but not only, the boardroom, which will facilitate the communication between those globally dispersed teams.
This idea is also interesting from a talent attraction & development point of view.
Career ladders up to the top team are often directly linked to mobility and therefore limited to those talents who are not restricted in this regard. Yet it would be desirable to profit from a much larger pool of internal and external talents for the succession of executives, wouldn’t it? So then the CFO of a company would be located in Asia, in the same building as the regional finance team, whereas the Global Marketing Head would be situated in Europe, next door to the European Marketing team (and so on).
I must acknowledge that the idea of building only virtual teams is a risky approach, and people will still ask for physical proximity and physical collaboration. That’s why with this approach talents will have to commit to travel frequently to the location of their teams, and will also need to create alignment and direction remotely from an affiliate, cluster, or region of the respective company. With this we will change from a “being mobile to relocate” to a “willing to travel frequently” model. But companies will profit from fishing from a much larger sea of talents (mobile or not [now] mobile).
Assuming that in the future global leaders will more frequently lead from a remote location, rather than from a centralized headquarter, the complexity of how to connect and collaborate with globally dispersed teams remains challenging, and will most likely increase in its complexity.
Variety and connectivity of global leadership
In an IMD article from 2014, Martha Maznevski and her colleagues describe an interesting approach for global leadership and global teams. According to this IMD team many multinationals traditionally focus on differentiation and integration, and try to include both aspects.
When it comes to leadership these two aspects are however less helpful, as to why they suggest the concept of variety (defined by determining the number of different environments in which you lead) and connectivity (the interdependence between the people you lead, or the extent to which you need to bring others to connect and respond to one another across boundaries).
If an executive chooses to create more connectivity between the different areas of their teams, the level of complexity will increase. If well-coordinated, this can also lead to more strategic benefits in a competitive market. But how to cope with higher connectivity in an environment with a high degree of variety?
Maznevski and colleagues propose the TACK model with clearly defined questions, as a guide to leading with connectivity.
The TACK model is mutually reinforcing and doesn’t need to be developed in a sequential way. Most of the global leaders have at least some TACK, but they still need to prioritize to repeat high performance across contexts. Some unmet opportunities might lie in developing one’s own individual global leadership competencies and in increasing mutual organizational support.
The professors suggest four fundamental leadership competencies (perception management, relationship management, self-management, and moral management) and four organizational support factors (organizational structure, technology & presence, performance management, and development) to transform leadership and organizational competencies in companies.
The TACK model provides new ideas for companies to cope with complex questions in the global environment and stresses the fact that leading global teams goes far beyond cultural differences. Finally the TACK model also provides a good platform to start discussion on where members of the executive teams could be located. Last but not least, the TACK model could also provide a starting point to define a new way of global collaboration with a much larger pool of internal and external talents who are eager to see career paths which are not limited by their (private) mobility restrictions.
Hyman started his paper by asking the million-dollar question:
Is democracy at work possible?
I loved his question then and I love it even more today because there is such a craving for more humanity to evolve – in all directions – and a desire to advance the human condition at work as a part of that amazing movement.
If you haven’t read Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990), it has a beautiful opening line which encapsulates how we here at Whirling Chief think about the ‘need’ to evolve work. Senge writes:
“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.
On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”
This is it. This is the magnifying glass we need to focus on ourselves to ask: Is this how we aspire to continue?
Let’s face it: We have adopted the principles of industrialization and economic growth into our work lives, and the icing on the cake is sophisticated people management practices.
From the moment an employee steps into the doors of an organization to the time they leave, they are expected to respond to ever-growing demands of their job definition while operating a million different tools. A gazillion, if an employee advances to management. There is a giant machine we are living in (but not always at the controls) of well-developed leaders and amid global complexities.
The more we talk to people, clients, and colleagues about the idea of democratization at work, the more we realize it may be the dominance of the ‘gain-focus:’ the command and control management thinking, which, 30 years later, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning in our work environments.
Our reality will only change if we willingly and collaboratively step up our game.
Our experience will only evolve if we understand and accept change starts with each one of us, individually.
New practices will only develop if we manage to bridge the gap between human physiology and psychology with business practices of today.
We need our leaders to be our voice. We need our academic leaders to be our foundation to data. We need to step up our game to formulate a persuasive vision of a different and better society and economy – a convincing alternative to the mantra of greed, commodification, competitiveness, and austerity, a set of values which connects with everyday experience at the workplace.
“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” – Eckhart Tolle
We all know someone who seem to ‘bumble’ through life with no real sense of time – almost like a butterfly. These are often the same people who dread replying back to a quick email, leave 20 minutes before a party 60 km away and open the door wearing a dress shirt with pajama bottoms. These people are often late to meetings, late to gatherings…they’ll probably be late for their own funerals. ☺
I sometimes wish I could be one of those people… Then again, perhaps not?
Time management has become such a big topic in business. Everybody is ‘busy.’ You call a friend, ask what they’re doing and they say, “Busy.” You stop by a colleague’s desk to ask a question, they look “busy.” The leaders you run into while getting coffee, on their phones? “Busy.”
Busyness is one of the most widespread diseases of our time. What does it even mean to be ‘busy’ anymore?
When I teach executive education courses and we discuss time management, I ask my colleagues sitting in front of me to reflect on the reality that we have all been blessed with time. I let them ponder this a while. You, me, our next door neighbor, colleagues in the next office, the President of Uganda, Bill Gates, Beyoncé…time is the great equalizer, and none of us gets more or less on any given day.
Then, how is it that some of us feel ‘in charge’ of time and ‘on top’ of our duties day to day, while others feel like they’re always ‘running behind?’
The research data on the topic would suggest it is not actually time that’s our main issue, it is our perception.
Thinker and author, Eckhart Tolle, introduces the concept of ‘clock time’ in his books, for example. Per Tolle, clock time is calculated time purposefully focused on practical aspects of our lives. That said, it is not only about making an appointment or planning a trip: “It includes learning from the past so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals and working toward them. Predicting the future by means of patterns and laws, physical, mathematical” and so on, learned from the past and taking appropriate action based on our predictions. That is an interesting concept.
You can see how this sort of idea of time would be different from the concept of our ‘psychological time,’ which is when we lose living in the present moment (our presence) to focus on our thinking (whether we think of past or future).
In fact, psychological time is often the real source of our suffering over a “problem” in regards to time management. It is usually not the situation itself we are in, but the interpretation, the thinking we put behind the situation, contemplating about possibilities repeatedly that blocks us from effectively using time.
In this regard, our brains don’t help us. Our memory is often distorted because our brains react more strongly to novelty than to repetition. It’s true. Our brain can’t differentiate between reality and perception, and it will choose what’s familiar over non-familiar. Therefore, once we start spending more time thinking about what’s ahead of us, we adversely teach ourselves to give in to our concentration. By doing so, instead of staying in the present moment to focus on a given task, we let our thoughts wander and shrink our precious time.
In a Scientific American article, “Time on Brain,” back in 2011, I read the following paragraph and remember being fascinated by it:
“… When you’re a kid, you wake up and say to yourself: ‘I’ve got a whole day ahead of me. How will I possibly fill it all?’ But when you’re an adult, it’s more like: ‘I’ve got a day ahead of me. How will I possibly get it all done?’“
Isn’t that so true?
You may have competing, conflicting, ever-changing priorities in life, or you may always have a long list of tasks to complete at work. Whatever the situation, the key is to stop and realize the power of Now – to then accept the journey as is, rather than trying to reach an unrealistic, unattainable end goal of ‘no priorities/no tasks.’
If we can do something about what we have at hand, our job is to do it now. If we can’t, then we’re better off leaving the situation or accepting it. There is never a reason to dwell on any situation, thus creating a problem in our mind.
Stop, focus, do. That’s all we need at any given time.
Here comes the second of the 3 video series on Thriving Organizations. Everybody is talking about how to create psychologically safe, productive, engaging organizations. Well, we think we have found the right recipe to share…
In this video, our contributor and co-Founder of WhyNot Partnering, Simon Marshall and our Founder, Sesil Pir are chatting about what it takes to create a thriving organization and are introducing our new Leadership Development Curriculum.
For more information on the topic or related questions, please leave a comment on our site and/or under our YouTube channel.
“Our world is more distributed and consumer oriented than ever before, and mobile technology is a bridge to higher expectations for the ever-expanding middle class.”1
Customers and workforces have access to information and technologies, which enable them to create solutions and experiences that suit their individual needs.
We are living in a shared economy, where innovation and a sense of connection is the currency of this global generation.
The relationship between an organization and its workforce is more complex and dynamic than ever.
Data analytics and technology management both play a major role in allowing organizations to engage with their global workforce for the very first time.
As a people function, Human Resources (HR) is at the center of this global revolution.
Supporting a business to meet its people goals is hard enough, but supporting a successful, fast-paced global business adds multiple levels of complexity to its people operations.
When we speak to business and HR executives through our consulting work, the common concerns we hear include:
Keeping up with scalability and business excellence despite the ever-changing business requirements, especially during rapid growth
Retaining and developing a talented, wholesome workforce (at all levels, including leadership) with global awareness
Acquiring a workforce with skill sets required for the future, including an appetite and curiosity to evolve
Managing a global and growing stakeholder group that plays an increasingly critical role in branding
Dealing with operations management, balancing regional/local requirements, inconsistencies, and tendencies
Of course, all of this is exaggerated with the sociological, socio-political, and economic realities of different regions across the board.
Sierra-Cedar of Oracle has, for several years, published research on the best practices of “going global” with HR technologies.
In their most recent research, they summarize the state of practices around going global with four organizational models that differ in structure, strategy focus, decision-making, and process standardization:
“Multinational – focused on flexibility and local responsiveness, highly decentralized with multiple independent locations, united primarily through financial reporting to corporate headquarters,
Global – focused on efficiency, highly centralized/standardized, with major decisions made at corporate and rolled out to local operations engaged in local markets,
International – focused on learning and sharing, moderately centralized, leveraging competencies and sharing learning from both corporate and local operations,
Transnational – focused on efficiency, flexibility, and learning, combining aspects of all the above; leveraging efficiencies, maintaining flexibilities, and sharing learnings and innovations worldwide.”
Looking at the models above and combining our experience, we recommend three areas for business and HR leaders to expand on when it comes to managing workforce across multiple regions:
Makinga conscious connection between business strategy, technology, and culture,
Evolving people processes and service delivery models based on increased individualized service expectations,
Redefining the future of the workplace through means of technology, providing platforms, and intelligent systems that are driving integration, social responsibility, and sustainability.
To learn more about any of these trends, please do write to us or inquire through our website.
We’ve been talking a lot about the future of the workplace and the trends we will likely see in the coming years, but what does all this mean for the world of employee benefits?
With a diversity of demographics – older workers, Millennials, and the sandwich generations – and the rise of mobilization, digitalization, globalization, and dynamism in general, businesses need to rethink their position in regards to employee benefits.
There has been a fair amount of talk about companies’ need to add more tailored and inclusive solutions to their offerings, but why not challenge ourselves? Let’s ask whether we need to break down and rethink the concept of ‘benefits’ altogether.
Looking at any dictionary or traditional business management books, we find ‘employee benefits’ (also called fringe benefits, perquisites, or perks) are defined as in-kind compensation, provided to employees in addition to their given salaries. The variety may include offerings such as housing, insurance, retirement benefits, reimbursements, and things like sick leave, vacation, social security, profit sharing, etc.
The purpose of employee benefits is described as “to increase the economic security of staff members and, in doing so, improve worker retention across the organization.”
Now read that definition again and ask yourself: “Is this really the purpose of benefits?” If so, this time try asking, “Should it really be the definition going forward?” From another angle, are we really offering employees benefits with the intention of hiring the best talent and/or retain them in the workplace? Do those ‘perks’ really impact an employee’s engagement and sustained satisfaction?
We believe not…
We think the future responsibility of an organization may require embracing the variety and needs in their employees’ lives. After all, we are all human. We have unique needs just as we have unique strengths and motivations, and those needs may evolve depending on the different phases and circumstances of life.
Let’s look at an example: Say we hire an employee who’s about to finish her MBA. Should it really be a ‘perk’ to give this employee time to attend classes and/or reimburse a part of her tuition costs? Stop and think about it… What are the consequences of not recognizing the employee’s current reality? Whether we acknowledge her condition or not, she will have to go through the experience. In the absence of the right sort of support, though, would she not be splitting her attention and focus between school and work? Would she not be stressed? Would her stressed mind, body, and soul not interfere with her creativity, productivity, and level of collaboration? Of course it will!
One of the ‘best’ companies I worked for offered me a five-digit bonus in shares, vesting over a 4 year period when, coincidentally, I was getting married. As grateful as I was for the award, I couldn’t be thankful. Why? Because I felt like their ‘love’ (meaning the show of recognition) was conditional. The recognition was only there if I was willing to stay with the company another four years to collect the shares.
Seriously though, as any of us who got married relatively young knows, one needs cash most during that time because bills seem to come in pairs… ☺ I wanted to shake our executives to say, “No really, I only need 5K in cash vs. 30-40-50K vesting over 4 years right now,” but couldn’t.
The truth is: Benefits should be less about hiring or retention and more about understanding, recognition, and support. ‘Humanizing the workplace,’ we call it; putting ourselves in others’ shoes to recognize their current need and supporting them in the best way possible.
So, then, when it comes to the future of benefits, here are a few of our recommendations in terms of how to reposition yourself:
Recognize changing workplace dynamics: A convergence of forces from globalized markets, changing demographics tonew customer needs, and evolving competition is transforming the workforce. It is imperative for organizations to simply take the time to visualize their future workforce.
Get to know your employees: All individuals are unique, and employees have a vast array of needs and values. Therefore, it is critical that organizations take time to understand employees’ individual attitudes, motivations, etc. Note that there is no way one standard employee benefits package, intended to meet the needs of your entire workforce, can ultimately meet them all.
Design your solutions for integrated lifestyles: Acknowledge and accept that, as an employer, it is the organization’s responsibility to design, fund, and implement benefit and reward strategies best suited to their workforce. Some strategies may continue to involve traditional approaches, in which employers closely manage plan funding and administration; with others, you may need to serve as a “facilitator” by empowering individuals to take more direct ownership of their benefits.
Take a consultative approach and create a dialogue: Whether you take a traditional or a new-age approach to designing your company’s benefits, it will require an increased emphasis on education, communication, and behavioural psychology. Motivation involves three psychological processes: arousal(which initiates action), direction (the path taken to accomplish goals), and intensity (the vigour and amount of energy employees put into reaching the goal). It will be critical for front line managers and service partners to be well trained to drive such conversations.
Embrace innovation and leverage technology: Foster innovation in the plan design, funding, and administration of a variety of choices to effectively support workforces that are global, mobile, independent, and unique. What’s more, invest in technology to make the use of selection, implementation, and change easier on people.
Remember: The right focus on recognition and appreciation can help you create a stronger culture and strengthen relationships. Promote sustainability through humanizing your workplace and practices – one person at a time.
1Source: Boundless. “The Psychology of Employee Satisfaction.” Boundless Psychology Boundless, 26 May 2016. Retrieved 16 Jan. 2017 from https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/workplace-psychology-21/workplace-psychology-106/the-psychology-of-employee-satisfaction-402-12937/
Let’s start the year off right, shall we? We recently interviewed a dear colleague, Don Miller, who is the Managing Director and US Analytics Leader for Organization Transformation & Talent at Deloitte, based in Seattle, Washington. But first, let’s allow Don to introduce himself. ☺
WC: Don, our mission at Whirling Chief is to make work a better place for many. As the world is redefining what it means to ‘work’ and devising new methods of management, will you tell us how you define ‘work’ as you experience it across many organizations?
Don: Holistically, I think that many companies are focused on redefining how work gets done in their organizations. In many cases, this focus is taking precedent, to inform how organizations are structured and organized. On the larger scale, we are seeing many changes in how work is executed, such as the gig economy (e.g., Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.). It is clear that employers and employees are both trying to think through how to define what elements of their career or workforce, respectively, are changing. Employees want impactful career experiences and want to be connected to mission-driven organizations.
The contingent labor trend is also on the rise. More employers are looking to contingent labor to address rapid growth and/or flexible workforce segments. On the other side, more and more talent is becoming interested in the contingent worker career path, provided they have the appropriate benefits and work experience.
Work is also changing via Technology. A couple years ago, Deloitte had a study called “The Overwhelmed Employee.” In that study seventy-four percent of employees reported they find it very challenging to be great at their job, great at home, great with their friends and family, and great in their community – particularly because they are always connected to their work via technology. There seems to be increasing, yet not always necessary, complexity in the way that we work and the connectivity with which we are expected to work. This presents an opportunity for us all to create simplicity in the ways in which people experience work and in the ways people collaborate.
WC: I was going to ask about trends for the future of work, but you already listed some of them. One of the trends that came up was managing workplace demographics. We find there is no one solution that fits all in terms of driving productivity and satisfaction across different demographics in the workplace, but are there any key practices you see that you would recommend for managers?
Don: Yes, our “Global Human Capital Trends 2016” identified the top 10 trends that Global Executives are thinking about. However, I think the top four trends are the most relevant to your question.
The number one trend was around organization design and the rise of teams. The second trend was around leadership and understanding generational differences. The third was culture and the fourth was engagement. These four trends are important because they’re highly interconnected.
Let’s talk about organization design and the rise of teams first. The fact that product- and service-based companies are moving faster and faster and needing to get closer and closer to their customers, they must work in more highly productive ways, and the smaller teams enable them to do just that. You can’t effectively manage teams if you don’t have a sense of strong leadership that understands generational differences, demographic differences, and experiential differences to build the right team. The idea of team effectiveness has become even more important because of that. Leaders not only need to better clarify what is their purpose and vision for a product or a service, they need to be able to align that vision to the organization’s culture and appropriately engage their employees to draw from their experiences and skills to be successful.
How does culture fit in? If your culture and strategy are aligned, your employees are almost a third more profitable, 50% more productive; there is 30% higher chance of innovating over your competitors and 40% higher retention.
With strong leaders, teams, and culture, you are more likely to foster employee engagement at the team and individual levels to create highly engaged teams of employees doing the work they love to do and seeing how it connects to broader business goals.
WC: Many service functions, including Human Resources, are getting a push toward working with data. What’s the impact of working or not working with people analytics for businesses?
Don: My reason for getting involved in this profession was because there was a lack of quantitative and analytic capabilities being leveraged in organizational and talent areas. In the last 10 years, that has certainly played out. Other functions, like Finance, are also trying to move into more digital types of capabilities (e.g., machine learning and robotics/process automation). What I do see as a critical gap for HR are the data management, visualization, and storytelling skills needed to create a high-functioning analytic capability. However, that gap is closing quickly.
One skill in this area is information management – looking at the data or database table to understand how it works, how data fields connect to one another. That’s a critical skill. Another is data visualization. Can one take a given data set and visualize it to help business leaders see the big (people) picture? The third is data storytelling. It is about being able to spot trends, and telling an impactful, and factual, observation about the data in the context of the business to facilitate better decision making. Developing HR capabilities in these three areas can rapidly advance your organizational and talent data analytic efforts. In fact, mature HR organizations are looking into building their advanced data analytics capabilities – predictive modeling, machine learning, and algorithm development.
WC: Deloitte has years and years of data and experience in consulting with organizations. We predict ‘culture’ is going to be a key focus area for business and HR leaders in 2017. Would you agree with that statement? And if so, how do you define ‘culture’ and ‘cultural transformation?’
Don: We asked in our survey last year about ‘culture’ and 86% of our executives surveyed globally said the culture is very important. Eighty-two percent of them reported believing that culture is a potential for competitive advantage; however, only 12% of them reported believing that their company or organization is driving the right culture, and over fifty percent of them are trying to change it.
The hard part for any organization is how to quantify the concept of ‘culture’.
First, culture aligns with your business strategy or purpose (for non-profits). Second, culture has to be shaped by leaders’ actions and decisions. It’s not simply about putting a plan in place, rather it is about leaders walking the halls every day and demonstrating the behaviors that are ‘right’ and in line with their chosen culture.
WC: How do we help our colleagues get clearer regarding measurement? When they say, for example, culture, I don’t know how to quantify that? How do we help them think about the measurements and quantification of data differently than they do today?
Don: We have a solution called “CulturePath” at Deloitte, it breaks culture down to eight categories in two dimensions.
The first is the core dimension of culture. These are the foundational cultural elements that I call the “table manners” that organizations typically demonstrate and are easy to remember. Think when you’re sitting at your desk every day and you look around to see how your organization is behaving – these are certain core areas you notice.
On the other side, there’s the differentiating factors – these are about why people get up and go to work every day: Courage, Commitment, Diversity, and Shared Beliefs. They help us measure the emotional connection between an organization and its workforce.
WC: With the evolution of the workforce, we see more organizations choosing to keep a small core global headcount to leverage more contingent staff for specialized services. Do you see this trend continuing? And if so, are there any learnings you could share for organizations to be effective in engaging contingent staff, and how to best mine their knowledge while still having a positive impact on core staff?
Don: When we think about contingent workers, there’s a couple things to say:
With the contingent worker population growing, it puts more and more talent in a gray area between HR, finance, and procurement. Seventy-three percent of organizations don’t know exactly how much they’re spending on contingent labor. Sixty-five percent of freelancers that work as contingent workforce say their career path is more respected today than three years ago. Finally, forty-five percent of the workforce is expected to be contingent workers by the end of this year.
I guess we can say with confidence that there’s a couple things that need to be managed here: cost and efficiency being one. The other could be around technology and mobility such that people can share workloads anywhere in the world. I think the biggest is around risk control and transparency. The globalized gig economy is requiring employers to understand not only what brings employees value but also how to manage them. I wouldn’t worry about trying to figure out what the bigger gig economy is all about, but I would encourage employers to figure out what their contingent workforce strategy is going forward, with finance, procurement, and HR working together to solve it.
WC: Thank you very much for your time.
For more information on Deloitte Human Capital practices, to receive a copy of Global Human Capital Trends 2017 (coming out in March), or to reach out to Don Miller, you can connect with him on LinkedIn here.
