Businesses need to reinvent with a human focus

New Delhi, 30 April 2019 — In its “2019 Global Human Capital Trends” report titled “Leading the social enterprise: Reinvent with a human focus,” Deloitte examines ways organisations can reinvent themselves on a broad scale including interacting with, motivating, and personalising experiences for the workforce to help build identity and meaning for employees.

The report has significant implications for businesses in India as they strive to drive stronger business results, while focusing on skilling and reskilling large talent pools, building retention through cutting-edge employee experience designs, acquiring and keeping top talent, and leveraging technology to solve people issues. Paradigms around leadership are changing as well. An overwhelming 93% of the respondents agree that 21^st century leaders face unique and new demands. These demands include managing the human-machine interface, dealing with more complexity, and exerting a higher degree of influence. However, nearly one-third of the respondents maintained that it is difficult for current leadership development programmes to identify leaders who can move rapidly into the digital economy.

Organisations need to reinvent themselves to be more ‘human’ by adopting ethos of a social enterprise – an organisation whose mission combines revenue growth and

profit-making with the need to respect and support its environment and stakeholder

network.

“The report not only confirms accelerating growth in the role of social enterprise but also supports the social enterprises’ positive link to financial performance. Increasingly, organisations need to focus on purpose – both at the organisational level, and the individual level. We need to reinvent our structures around creating a meaningful employee experience.” said Gaurav Lahiri, Partner and Leader Human Capital, Deloitte India.

A higher percentage of Indian organisations (45%) measure the correlation between employee engagement and productivity, compared to global organisations (37%). Also, the area that needs the maximum focus is the creation of a positive work environment. Further, providing employees with more autonomy to make decisions is likely to increase their levels of engagement and significantly strengthen the employee experience.

Interestingly, a higher percentage of Indian companies (22%) compared to global companies (19%) believe that they are industry leaders in terms of being social enterprises. It is also worth noticing that most of the global respondents agree that the importance of the social enterprise is set to increase in the next three years.

Completed by nearly 10,000 respondents in 119 countries, Deloitte’s ninth annual Global Human Capital Trends report is the largest longitudinal survey of its kind. Across its three categories of future of workforce, the future of organisations, and the future of HR, the report brings out 10 major trends on alternate workforce, redesign of jobs, leadership, employee experience, teams, rewards, accessing talent, learning, talent mobility, and HR technology.

The future of workforce

The ‘future of workforce’ category has key trends around alternative workforce, redesign of jobs, and leadership. The contract, freelancer, and gig employment workforce, which was considered ‘alternative’ for years, has gone mainstream. Also, a significant increase in the use of technology is creating a need to redesign jobs and roles into ‘superjobs’: jobs that combine parts of different traditional jobs to integrated roles that leverage productivity and efficiency gains from working with technology. Further, to be effective in the 21st century, leaders need to consider adopting a nuanced approach that takes into account the new context, drawing on competencies, such as leading through change, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, and understanding technologies.

The future of organisations

The ‘future of organisations’ category has trends in the areas of employee experience, teams, and rewards. Organisations need to refresh and expand the concept of employee experience to ‘human experience’ at work by putting meaning back into work based on employee aspiration to connect work to the impact their work has on the organisation and the society at large. Also, organisations must refresh their talent practices, incentives, job design, reward, and leadership to the ‘team model’ of working as organisation performance is a team sport. Further, organisations are seen falling short on aligning reward systems with organisational goals. They must close the gap with differentiated suites of rewards that their people value and are aligned with more agile models of performance management. These steps will help meet people’s expectations and needs, and build relations with employees.

The future of HR

The ‘future of HR’ category includes trends on accessing talent, learning, talent mobility, and HR technologies. Organisations need to think how they can continuously access talent in varying ways. They also need to change the way people learn by integrating learning with work, shifting to life-long learning models, and making learning more personal by creating a culture of continuous learning, incentives, and helping people identify and develop new skills. Further, enterprise-wide talent mobility is paramount in winning the war on the home front. There is a need to see mobility at all levels as a natural and normal progression with standard processes for moves between functions, jobs, projects, and geographies. Lastly, in 2019, the organisations need to rethink HR technology strategy considering cloud as a foundation and exploring new platforms, automation, and AI-based tools to complement their core systems.

According to Anand Shankar, Partner, Deloitte India, “Human Capital trends provides significant insights for organisations in India across major Human Resources sub-areas. We will need to leverage technology since it can be a great enabler, but it needs to be accompanied by strong people systems and processes that get purpose and meaning back into people’s work to drive engagement and performance.”

To know more, access the report “2019 Global Human Capital Trends” report titled “Leading the social enterprise: Reinvent with a human focus” on the Deloitte website.