Future Proof
I have been thinking differently about work
and workforce strategy. The traditional model
of workforce planning has been to quantify
the gap between supply of current employees
and the demand for employees, relative to
the work they’ll be doing in the future. Our
analysis shows that using job descriptions
and competencies alone is a poor proxy for
understanding where work is changing and
how delivery can be optimised. To overcome
this, we built a proprietary work ontology to
profile the specific nature of every job from
a task perspective, using it to simulate how
it will be impacted by cognitive technology.
Rethinking strategy
There are major opportunities to rethink where
we put people, due to technological advances:
do employees need to be in the same location?
Or can there be a new level of flexibility and
remoteness to the way people deliver work?
The extent to which you need to know the
workforce doing some of the work should
be considered. Take the ‘crowd’: how can you
engage people who sit behind a platform to
help with problem solving?
For clients, we’re delivering a methodology
that involves a clever cognitive platform
technology, modelling, computing and
simulating workforce scenarios to help them
determine their optimised size, shape and
texture. That’s creating reflection within their
businesses about how they translate it into team
structures and resourcing models. What does it
mean for recruitment? It may mean no longer
hiring in such high volumes via traditional
employment contracts alone. The nature
of demand for so many of our HR processes
looks quite different when you’re moving your
organisation from very traditional employees
on the balance sheet, to more complex but
integrated open-talent models.
Organisations are no longer looking at this as
something that might happen, it’s happening
today. A single response of “we’re hiring
employees” is no longer enough.
There are firms that are pioneering because
they see major competitive advantage in doing
so. They are growing more sophisticated about
how they segment their workforce, how they
personalise attraction messages and become
more proactive in sorting passive talent pools.
Then there are organisations that see the
advantages of automation and are recognising
that it’s creating challenges for line managers
and leaders: how do you manage blended
Laurence Collins
Partner and
Consulting Leader
for the Future of
Augmented
Workforce Strategy
Laurence is a Partner in
Deloitte’s human capital
consulting practice, focusing
on HR, digital workforce and
people analytics. He leads on
global service capability for
the future of augmented
workforce strategy.
deloitte.com
“We may not need a
particular capability
all the time”
workforces where you might have a contractor
alongside a permanent employee and a bot?
And there are organisations that have been
quite mature for a number of years around
traditional strategic workforce planning and
are realising it doesn’t help them answer the
challenges thrown up by the scenarios of
tomorrow. Their workforce planning models
are no longer sufficiently complex. They’re
looking for the next evolution in their work
and productivity forecasting.
Deloitte, and our industry, are not immune
to these factors. So we’re creating our own
sourcing activities for contractors (associates);
people who may choose to work with us on
specific engagements. We look to understand
their capabilities and experiences as we
would a traditional, permanent employee.
We build networks; share with them the same
onboarding and induction techniques and
wrap quality assurance processes around
them, ensuring standards are commensurate
with the level Deloitte sets.
And that’s creating flexibility in the way
we resource and build teams for solutions to
particular client problems. We can access a
broader talent market, recognising that many
people, particularly in professional services,
like the flexibility to work across different
engagements and not be tied to one firm. In
some of our work, we may not need a particular
capability all the time and see an advantage in
bringing somebody from a flexible resourcing
perspective. We may have a demand for a skill
set that we need to balance with resources
outside of our own organisation. It’s a powerful
and client-advantageous way of working. We’re
offering broader access to talent, within the
quality parameters Deloitte expects.
Initial steps
I’d advise organisations to gain a thorough
understanding of the demands placed on
their workforce: what is the optimum profile
to deliver the types of activity you need? Often
you’ll see signals from within where your
business is under pressure from an open-talent
perspective, such as numerous vacancies you
can’t fill for a particular role.
Use data to baseline the shape, size and
texture of your organisation – in the critical
segments initially. Then start looking at the
nature of the work – tasks and activities – in
line with performance objectives. Consider
advantages of thinking about open talent. At
the heart of this is wanting to work this way.
Issue 2 - 2017
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