2023 Human Capital trends in financial services

Taking a page from a research journal, organizations and workers should fan the flames of their curiosity. Rather than tackling financial services challenges by making a choice and moving on, try to frame each decision as an experiment that will expedite impact and generate insight.

Before, workers were expected to fit their skills and ideas into the box of a specific job title. Now, businesses have the flexibility and opportunity to use skills, not jobs, as the baseline for how workforce decisions are made. When unboxed from jobs, teams can more effectively utilize their skills and experiences in ways that advance organizational outcomes.

Similarly, forward-thinking teams are exploring how to use technology in ways that encourage and enable humans to do better work. As digital and virtual technology advances and businesses continue to utilize metaverse experiences, the workplace no longer needs to be a physical space. With greater interconnectedness, location and modality have become secondary to the needs of the work and the workers, prompting companies to think about the work that needs to be done in terms of “how” and not “where.”

How does cocreation compare to collaboration at work? In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, organizations with higher worker involvement in designing and implementing organizational change were more likely to experience positive outcomes. Specifically, those who said they cocreate with their workers stated they were 1.8x more likely than their peers to have a highly engaged workforce, 2x more likely to be innovative, and 1.6x more likely to anticipate and respond to change effectively.

Cocreated relationships between employers and employees starts with negotiating worker data and harnessing worker agency. Traditional workplace models assume that organizations are the sole decision-makers, while workers are expected to fall in line. Now, the workforce is looking for more personalized career paths, full of meaningful work within flexible workplace models. Whereas worker agency might have previously been seen as a threat, leading organizations are finding ways to leverage worker motivation and cocreation to drive mutual and elevated benefits.

Additionally, diverse workforce ecosystems are enormously beneficial, offering a multitude of fresh perspectives on new ideas, unique solutions, and potential problems that businesses may have missed. Organizations that adjust their talent acquisition strategies to better fit the real-world talent pool will have far more access to skills and experiences that can accelerate growth, innovation, and agility.

A big piece of the puzzle in a boundaryless workplace is identifying a collective goal; organizations should create impact not only to their business, their workers, or their shareholders but to the broader society as well. When we create value quietly in the form of developing programs designed to address climate issues, equality concerns, or minimize human risk, we undermine our own ability to successfully drive change.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts fall into the same pattern. Businesses do themselves a disservice when they focus exclusively on DEI initiatives at the ground level. Rather than use DEI as a metric, prioritize it as an outcome. When businesses look toward building equity in how they find, develop, and promote talent, they’re more likely to build a diverse workplace that can achieve equitable outcomes in support of larger societal goals.

When it comes to sustainability, it’s not enough to talk the talk; businesses need to walk the walk. The modern workforce is demanding that businesses ditch the vague rhetoric regarding sustainability and instead focus on delivering observable results. Moving forward, organizations need to focus on hardwiring a drive toward sustainability into the DNA of their business model.

Traditionally, companies have perceived human risk as being the potential risks employees could pose for the overall business. However, in this new way of working, organizations should be expanding their perception of human risk beyond compliance and reporting and instead think of it in broader terms. What are the potential risks to society? How are humans inherently driving or mitigating these risks? The subsequent outcomes could have a material effect on a company’s long-term viability and should be fully understood by all executives, with board members being held the most accountable.

For businesses that get it right, the chaos and confusion caused by these dissolving boundaries will feel a lot more like potential for new possibilities. In turn, a new type of leadership will be required—one that focuses on where you show up, how you show up, and the mindset you adopt to drive work forward. Don’t shy away from using experimentation to develop better solutions, encourage learning, and drive value. Be sure to cultivate strong relationships with your teams to encourage cocreation versus collaboration, and focus on widening the aperture of your decisions to better understand the full impact they’ll have on the broader human agenda.