2018 Deloitte Human Capital Trends

To effectively navigate today’s constantly changing business environment and address cross-disciplinary challenges, a company’s top leaders must act as one. But how can the C-suite move out of their silos and encourage an environment of greater connectivity and collaboration? Read the chapter

The workforce ecosystem: managing beyond the enterprise
Business leaders and Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) recognise the need to actively and strategically manage relationships with workforce segments beyond the enterprise, which increasingly affect how an organisation delivers services and interacts with customers. Organisations are finding ways to align their culture and management practices with these external talent segments — engaging the workforce ecosystem for mutual benefit. Read the chapter

New rewards: personalised, agile and holistic
Employees are now seeking more personalised, agile, and holistic rewards. While companies recognise this overall shift, only eight per cent of our respondents say that their rewards programme is ‘very effective’. Early experiments are exploring how to develop a holistic variety of rewards and match them to individual preferences, across diverse talent segments and on a continuous basis. Read the chapter

From careers to experiences: new pathways
In a 21st-century career, the individual and his or her experiences take center stage. Instead of a steady progression along a job-based pathway, leading organisations are shifting towards a model that empowers individuals to acquire valuable experiences, explore new roles, and continually reinvent themselves.Read the chapter

The longevity dividend: work in an era of 100-year lives
Forward-looking organisations see extended longevity and population aging as an opportunity. Twenty per cent of this year’s survey respondents said that they are partnering with older workers to develop new career models. This longevity dividend enables companies both to address a pressing societal issue and to tap into a proven, committed, and diverse set of workers. However, doing this requires innovative practices and policies to support extended careers, as well as collaboration between business leaders and workers, to tackle shared challenges such as age bias and pension shortfalls. Read the chapter.

Citizenship and social impact: society holds the mirror
An organisation’s track record of corporate citizenship and social impact now has a direct bearing on its core identity and strategy. Engagement with other stakeholders on topics such as diversity, gender pay equity, income inequality, immigration and climate change can lift financial performance and brand value, while failure to engage can destroy reputation and alienate key audiences. Read the chapter.

Well-being: a strategy and a responsibility
As the line between work and life blurs further, employees are demanding that organisations expand their benefits offerings to include a wide range of programmes for physical, mental, financial, and spiritual health. In response, employers are investing in wellbeing programmes as both a societal responsibility and a talent strategy. Read the chapter.

AI, robotics and automation: put humans in the loop
The influx of AI, robotics, and automation into the workplace has dramatically accelerated in the last year, transforming in-demand roles and skills inside and outside organisations. Perhaps surprisingly, those roles and skills focus on the ‘uniquely human’ rather than the purely technical. To be able to maximise the potential value of these technologies today and minimise the potential adverse impacts on the workforce tomorrow, organisations must put humans in the loop—reconstructing work, retraining people and rearranging the organisation. Read the chapter.

Hyper-connected workplace: will productivity reign?
New communications tools are rapidly entering the workplace. But as these tools migrate from personal life to the workplace, organisations must apply their expertise in team management, goal-setting, and employee development to ensure they actually improve performance. Like the outside world, organisations are becoming hyper-connected; can they also become hyper-productive? Read the chapter.

People data: how far is too far?
The rapid increase in data availability and the advent of powerful people analytics tools have generated rich opportunities for HR — but they are now also generating a variety of potential risks. Organisations face a tipping point: Develop a set of well-defined policies, security safeguards, transparency measures, and ongoing communication around the use of people data, or risk employee, customer, and societal backlash. Read the chapter.