Future of human resources
In the future, organizations will need to rapidly assemble and reassemble employees in teams based on changing business needs. But to really drive agility, these teams may also need to include workers who reside beyond organizational walls, such as freelancers, outsourcing partners and strategic partners. This approach will help organizations swiftly gain the best thinking and skills from anywhere and apply them to every project and problem.
Kim Min-su is senior manager at Accenture Korea Management Consulting.
By Kim Min-su
There’s little doubt that we’re living in an era of volatility. New products and services are being developed at a dizzying pace, natural disasters are proliferating, and the stock market is fluctuating to an extent in which we can no longer predict our future. There’s only one thing we can count on: business-as-usual will constantly be threatened by the emergence of disruptive technologies, changes in consumer behavior and customer demands, advances in science, the arrival of new players from far-flung points around the globe, new regulations, price changes, demographic shifts and more. Chances are that whatever organizations did to get where they are today won’t keep them there tomorrow.
As the world becomes increasingly volatile and unpredictable, organizations now must be able to adapt quickly and easily to changing business conditions in order to outperform their competitors. To compete in this rapidly changing economy, HR also must be able to fundamentally reshape itself so that the function becomes a critical driver of agility. In this role, HR will enable a new type of organization — one designed around highly nimble and responsive talent.
Take the surprising rise of Apple in the last decade. Who could have predicted its dominance 15 years ago, when the company had to get bailed out by then-nemesis Microsoft? And consider the financial shock of 2007-2008 that wiped out any illusions of stability for good.
Leaders now know they must make their corporations more agile — or suffer the consequences. In a recent Accenture survey of C-suite executives, CEOs reported that becoming agile is now their number-three business priority; managing change and attracting, developing and retaining skilled talent came in as numbers one and two, respectively. In today’s chronically uncertain markets, agility constitutes a powerful competitive weapon.
Impact on business
As organizations strive to become more agile, they will take on a markedly different shape than the one they have today. They will transform everything to become more responsive and nimble, including their strategy, leadership, organizational structures, marketing efforts, operations and financial processes. For instance, they may opt for a more variable cost structure with more cash reserves, use data and analytics to more rapidly sense and respond to business changes, and model more “what if” scenarios.
But perhaps the most fundamental transformation will occur across all corporate functions and throughout the organization, which in turn redefine how each employee conducts his or her work every day. Agile organizations won’t depend on just a few decision makers at the top. Rather, they will count on their entire workforce, those within and even beyond their borders, to fluidly and proactively respond to external and internal changes. Thus talent - and the function primarily responsible for managing it - will play a central role in driving organizational agility. In the future, organizations will need to rapidly assemble and reassemble employees in teams based on changing business needs.
But to really drive agility, these teams may also need to include workers who reside beyond organizational walls such as freelancers, outsourcing partners and strategic partners. This approach will help organizations swiftly gain the best thinking and skills from anywhere and apply them to every project and problem. Once established organizations develop agility and entrepreneurial behaviors, significant business benefits are likely to follow. By more flexibly responding to emerging opportunities, organizations will be able to create more effective business processes and offerings faster and with far greater ease.
Impact on HR
As organizations reconfigure their businesses to make agility a top priority, this process will create a new role and set of responsibilities for HR. This in turn will reshape the way HR is structured and how talent management and HR services are delivered. In many organizations, existing HR systems are currently impeding efforts to create agile workforces. To enable agility, HR will need to make changes on the following fronts.
HR systems have generally been designed to reduce variability and to standardize behavior, with an eye toward mitigating risk and delivering low-cost, easy-to-manage administrative services. This approach delivers some benefits but doesn’t promote flexibility, adaptive behavior or significantly improved workforce performance. HR organizations of the future will need to adopt a new mission and mandate focused on improving people’s performance and enabling adaptability by helping the organization pull needed human resources on demand.
To meet its new mission and mandate, HR will have to embrace some imperatives that it has traditionally not strongly emphasized in the past. Those imperatives may include fostering internal and external worker mobility or helping people discover and broker unknown talent. To enable talent to flow to tasks where it’s needed, HR practitioners will become experts in identifying and locating talent and matching it with need. To do so, they will begin relying on a host of data beyond the skills and experience profiles used today—including employees’ passions, geographical preferences and competencies.
Recent advances in the integration of with neuroscience have revealed important insights into how organizations can best manage transformation and change. These advances have also shed valuable light on other topics such as motivation, learning and innovation. HR professionals in the future will increasingly mine insights to develop systems that work with human nature to promote agility. In addition, they will use the tools of the scientist, such as empirical study of data, to perform analytics on their own workforces to drive agility. They will use the resulting insights to make evidence-based decisions regarding workforce management, such as how to move resources to where they are most needed and how to stimulate knowledge sharing and collaboration. For example, they may use analytics to determine which types of skills within their company’s workforce correlate most strongly with key business metrics like customer satisfaction or number of patents produced. They can then foster rapid knowledge sharing to strengthen these skills or facilitate the internal movement of people who possess those skills to where they are most needed.
As learning becomes more important to enabling agility, HR will put more emphasis on helping workers constantly acquire or build new skills, and most important, to learn quickly. HR and training departments will be increasingly responsible for not only developing learning and training programs, but also for developing a culture of continuous learning, fostering informal, peer-to-peer learning, and hiring people who have the ability to learn quickly and easily.
Job descriptions in today’s organizations facilitate employee selection and placement by providing clear skill requirements. They also enable equitable pay systems based on similar jobs within and across companies. Moreover, they help organizations clearly delegate and divide tasks, and then measure the performance of the individuals performing those tasks. But traditional job descriptions may become obsolete in a world characterized by complex, integrated knowledge work performed through teams or assignments in a world characterized by frequent change. Already, some organizations are doing away with traditional jobs. Instead, they rely on employees to determine their own roles and tasks on each project, working within the loose limits of general functional or broad work areas only—such as crunching numbers or running machinery. Organizing work in this way can help a workforce continuously adapt and change shape in response to a volatile and unpredictable environment.
Redesigning work will require a corresponding sea change in HR. That’s because in today’s world, nearly all HR practices—including compensation, career development, rewards, training, and performance appraisal—are tied to narrowly defined job descriptions. When an organization can no longer rely on static job titles or organizational charts to determine what talent management processes are relevant to a particular employee, such processes will need to change to fit the individual, not just the job.
To help the entire organization become more nimble, the HR organization itself will have to become nimble as well. It will need to apply many of the practices it prescribes to the entire workforce to itself—such as continual learning and new ways of structuring work that break down silos. This may mean that HR no longer dictates the actions that people must take. Rather, it may need to provide employees and managers with the appropriate talent management and HR resources and solutions that can be mobilized for them to address opportunities as they arise. In this model, the customers that HR serves—employees—are no longer treated as passive consumers of talent processes and solutions, but instead as co-creators of those processes and solutions. HR would thus become highly networked and collaborative.
Bottom line
As agility becomes the new mantra of business, organizations will reshape themselves so that they can fluidly pull resources when and where they’re needed to rapidly respond to changing business conditions. HR organizations of the future will have to reinvent themselves—and the HR and talent management practices they support—to drive agility in their organization. Those that fail to do so may put their organizations at risk of obsolescence.
Kim Min-su is senior manager at Accenture Korea Management Consulting.