Thriving beyond boundaries: Human performance in a boundaryless world

Our 2024 Global Human Capital Trends research reveals that a focus on the human factor is emerging as the bridge between knowing what shifts are shaping the future of work and doing things to make real progress toward putting them into action to create positive outcomes. It’s clear from the responses to this year’s global surveys—over 14,000 respondents from 95 countries—that the more boundaryless work becomes, the more important uniquely human capabilities—like empathy and curiosity—become.

Our research points to the idea that prioritizing human sustainability—the degree to which the organization creates value for people as human beings, leaving them with greater health and well-being, stronger skills and greater employability, good jobs,¹ opportunities for advancement, more equity, and heightened feelings of belonging and purpose—can drive not only better human outcomes, but better business outcomes, too, in a mutually reinforcing cycle. This combination of human and business outcomes is what we call “human performance.” Because it is humans, more than physical assets, that truly drive business performance today. This is needed more than ever by organizations to both shape and adapt to the ever-evolving future of work.

In this year’s report, we highlight tangible ways in which organizations can implement the new fundamentals we introduced last year as they prioritize human performance:

• Thinking like a researcher by leveraging new sources of data and technology to create greater transparency in ways that foster workforce trust, and that are used in collaboration with innately human capabilities like problem-solving, creative thinking, and innovation to explore, play, and experiment with ideas that support the greater realization of value.
• Cocreating the relationship by collaborating with workers to design people practices, microcultures, and digital spaces so they are relevant for them and support human outcomes.
• Prioritizing human outcomes by moving past the industrial-era mindset that led to a dehumanization of both work and worker—for example, viewing the worker as a number, a box on the organization chart, or a cog in the process—to create shared value for workers, organizations, and the communities in which they operate.

The good news is that most leaders already understand that focusing on human performance is key to building an organization that can thrive today and tomorrow. But to close the gap between knowing and doing,² they will need to let go of the mindsets, operating constructs, and proxies of the past.

As for making humans better at work, productivity paranoia—a concern that remote workers aren’t being productive⁹—is on the rise, with 85% of leaders saying the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that workers are productive, despite increases in hours worked.¹⁰ And with more organizations using new technologies and generative AI to measure and optimize human performance, they need to be cognizant of the flaws and shortcomings of the humans that created and use them.

Yet most organizations don’t have appropriate measures in place to capture human performance, let alone optimize it: Only 3% of respondents from our 2024 Global Human Capital Trends research say that their organization is extremely effective at capturing the value created by workers. Since the Industrial Revolution, the increasing scale and growing complexity in ways of working have led to the creation of imperfect substitutes to measure work and performance.

We’ve used the concept of the “employee” to capture the singular notion of full-time staff, not considering the full ecosystem of workers that create value for the organization.

We’ve leveraged the idea of the “job” to document a set of repeatable functional tasks, not accounting for how the dynamism of work today often means work is performed outside of traditional job boundaries.

We’ve focused on creating a monolithic, one-size-fits-all corporate culture to define how organizations should operate, when in reality, most organizations are made up of an abundance of microcultures.

We’ve relied on “employee engagement” to evaluate the relationship between organizations and workers when what we should be measuring is trust—and metrics that benefit the worker. After all, measuring how much discretionary effort workers are willing to expend for their organization’s benefit helps a company, but whether it helps workers is far less clear.

And we’ve relied on the idea of “productivity” to measure worker activity, without fully accounting for desired human and business outcomes and potential future value.

These proxies—imperfect placeholders for what should truly  be measured—were once useful; they allowed organizations to scale when scalable efficiency was the primary means of differentiation, and they allowed organizations to measure progress against the traditional boundaries of work.¹¹ But they were designed for a simpler world, a world of work that’s not constantly reinventing itself, and served as intentional abstractions of what “could” be measured when organizations didn’t have the advanced tools to evaluate what “should” be measured. Today, the proxies that once made it easier to structure, drive, and measure organizational activity are holding us back from applying the tools and learnings of the past decade to inspire the realization of new value in the boundaryless world.

With more data, technology, and tools at our fingertips than ever before, we have an opportunity to redefine how we measure human performance to get us closer to what really matters: value creation for the organization, for current and future workers as human beings, and for society at large. 

Bridging the knowing-doing gap  

The 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report invites you to imagine a world where trust between workers and their employers is the currency of work, and where people are given opportunities to grow and develop those uniquely human capabilities that are so critical to human performance. To imagine what could happen when workers see their organization making tangible progress towards human sustainability goals or providing workers with safe spaces to play and experiment with many possible futures. And where people expertise becomes a capability and responsibility of all, with customized people practices and cultures cocreated with workers themselves rather than mandated and pushed out from a central authority.

The results can be good for the organization, the worker, and for society: more innovation and complex problem-solving. Higher standards of work. Healthier, more committed, purpose-driven workers who feel a sense of ownership over broader organizational goals.

The shift to human performance begins here, at the intersection of business outcomes and human outcomes. But the ability to make this leap requires a mindset shift as organizations let go of the proxies of the past; for example, viewing humans as costs rather than assets, or business practices that reinforce efficiency of activity over value and outcome. Fortunately, our research shows that most leaders are already well aware that these changes are needed. A small proportion of respondents (33%) cited insufficient understanding as the reason for their organization’s inability to make progress to date. Instead, internal constraints, such as capacity for change, limited resources, and lack of leadership alignment were consistently shared as the justification for organizational inertia. With that in mind, fueling human performance and leading in the boundaryless world will likely come from not only clearing the mental obstacles in the way, but the operational ones as well.

Moving past knowledge of the problem and beginning to define and embrace new ways of working is especially important as generative AI and new technologies offer more diverse and accelerated pathways for organizations to create value. These new technologies offer unprecedented transparency into the inner workings of our organizations that can be used to better drive human performance, but they present unprecedented challenges as well, requiring organizations to develop new frameworks of responsibility to ensure they are used in a way that elevates, rather than diminishes, trust.

With human performance as the theme for this year’s trends, each trend provides a set of practical guidelines that can help unlock it and bridge the gap between knowing and doing.

We begin by delving into the nuances of human sustainability, gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between human and business outcomes—the very essence of what we define as human performance. With that in mind, our next trend explores the new metrics that will be needed to understand how well an organization is doing in achieving those human performance goals. Recognizing that trust underscores efforts to bring human performance to the fore, we then explore how transparency can help—or hinder—efforts to build that trust.

Our next set of trends focus on the how: How can organizations drive human performance? We discuss how new digital advances like generative AI are exposing an imagination deficit, and how operationalizing uniquely human capabilities and providing workers with safe “digital playgrounds” to practice using them can help solve it. Continuing the thread of empowering workers, we explore how moving away from monolithic corporate cultures and embracing many diverse microcultures can support autonomy, agility, and workforce experience. Finally, we tackle the shifts that can make human performance a shared accountability for all, with HR moving from a specialized function to a boundaryless discipline that is cocreated and integrated with the people, business, and community it serves. 

Our trends this year include:

Embracing human sustainability. For many organizations, nothing is more important than its people, from employees, to external workers, to customers and community members. These human connections drive the majority of value for an organization, including revenues, innovation and intellectual property, efficiency, brand relevance, productivity, adaptability, and risk. Yet organizations’ current efforts to prioritize these all-important connections appear to be falling short, partly because many organizations may be stuck in a legacy mindset that centers on extracting value from people rather than working to create value for them. Leaders should reorient their organizations’ perspective around the idea of human sustainability.

Moving beyond productivity to measure human performance. Leaders across industries are beginning to recognize the limitations of legacy productivity metrics in the current work environment. Traditional methods of measuring worker productivity as a series of inputs and outputs solely reflect the perspective of the organization. New approaches, by contrast, can and should consider the worker as a human being, with a more nuanced perspective on how they contribute to the organization. But if traditional productivity metrics no longer tell the full story, what else should organizations be measuring to meaningfully assess human performance? The new math involves a balance of business and human sustainability, creating shared, mutually reinforcing outcomes for both the organization and the worker.

Balancing privacy with transparency to build trust. New advances in technology can make almost everything in an organization transparent to almost anyone. Leaders may find this degree of transparency alluring: It offers microscopic visibility into the workings of their organizations and their people. But this newly available transparency can be both a gold mine and a land mine. On the one hand, if responsibly managed, the ability to use this kind of transparency can create new opportunities to measure and unlock human performance. On the other hand, there is significant potential for misuse—for example, privacy breaches, AI-driven surveillance, and efforts to control workers’ every move. Although common wisdom equates greater transparency with greater trust, it’s not that simple. Many organizations are finding that how well they walk the tightrope between transparency and privacy is a key factor in driving trust today, and that mishandling it can severely undermine trust.

Overcoming the imagination deficit. Technological disruption is outpacing the capacity of many organizations and workers to imagine new ways of working that get the best out of both humans and technology. Consequently, many organizations may soon be facing an imagination deficit. To prevent this deficit, organizations will need to scale and operationalize the cultivation of distinctly human capabilities like curiosity, empathy, and creativity, and they should give workers and teams the autonomy to use these to shape the kinds of work they do. Just as importantly, individual workers will likely need these capabilities to imagine their own futures, as AI and other disruptive technologies take on ever more prominent roles in their working lives.

Creating digital playgrounds to explore, experiment, and play. As the pace of disruption accelerates, there is a growing need for safe spaces in which both organizations and individuals can imagine, explore, and cocreate a future that delivers better human experiences and outcomes at speed and scale. Deloitte calls these spaces “digital playgrounds.” A digital playground is not a singular space or a virtual platform. Rather, it’s a mindset and an approach in which technologies are curated with intention and opportunities to use them are democratized, giving workers the opportunity and psychological safety to experiment, collaborate, and explore multiple possible futures.

Cultivating workplace microcultures. According to conventional wisdom, corporate culture should be one-size-fits-all—a fixed, uniform culture that ensures everyone is working in the same way.¹² In reality, organizations typically consist of a diverse set of microcultures—subtle variations in how work gets done in different functions, geographies, workforces, and even specific teams. When organizations embrace microcultures, they can attract and retain top talent, anticipate and respond to changes with agility, and better meet workers’ unique needs.  A key to harnessing the power of microcultures is encouraging the autonomy of various work groups, providing them with the resources they need to establish their own ways of working (while conforming to regulatory requirements), and orienting these localized blends of culture and business strategy toward the same broad, simple organizational guiding principles.

Making the shift to boundaryless HR. Work is increasingly demanding agility, innovation, and collaboration to achieve outcomes. A new HR operating model is not the only solution to respond to these shifts. Rather, a new mindset, along with a new set of practices, metrics, technologies, and more can transform HR from a specialized function that owns all workforce responsibility to a boundaryless discipline, cocreated and integrated with the people, business, and community it serves. Boundaryless HR can develop people-discipline expertise and weave it throughout the fabric of the business, creating multidisciplinary solutions to increasingly complex problems.

The speed at which the boundaryless world is evolving will likely continue to accelerate. While our research shows that many organizations haven’t yet made the important mindset and operational shifts needed to respond to this imminent future, it also shows that knowing is not the barrier. Where organizations are generally getting stuck in the doing: making real, actionable progress toward unlocking human performance. 

But there are reasons to be optimistic.

Our analysis shows that organizations who bridge the gap between knowing and doing are more likely to achieve both better business and human outcomes. As we outline in this year’s trends, organizations now have a window of opportunity to elevate human performance and thrive in a boundaryless world.