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Disrupt Your 2017 Without Fear

5 Trends You Would Like to

Keep in Your HR Pocketbook

Table of Contents#1 Taking Centre Stage: Voice of the Employee (VoE)

Organizations recognize that to truly serve their customers they must invest in creating a great experience for their employees at work.

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#2 Your Workforce is Tending to FluidityWorkers want more choice and flexibility in how they approach tasks, jobs, opportunities to advance in their careers, and define themselves at work – a trend we call “Workforce Fluidity.”

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#3 The Primacy of Employee-Manager Relationships New diagnostic and prescriptive analytics tools will support manager development on a day-to-day basis – ushering in a new era of humanized people “management.”

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#4 HR Agility to Become the New Mode of Supporting OrganizationsHR Professionals: We will become more innovative, nimble, observant, and we will be forced to adapt existing HR processes and practices to create more agile, human-natured organizations.

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#5 Culture Shapes Employee ExperiencePeople entering the workforce in 2017 and beyond tend to be less trusting of authority, making it more important for organizations to gain the trust of their employees.

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17January

WELCOME TO 2017

Hi There!

The year of 2016 was in many ways more bad than good. Then again, that is a matter of perspective. While most of America dreads the Trump presidency, the latter’s family is certainly thankful for the year. Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America sure does have a nice ring to it, and Donald Trump is sure to enjoy it.

That’s merely one example. There’s also the matter of how Roger Federer had to conclude his tennis season prematurely, after Wimbledon and around the end of July. It saw the once dominant force of tennis drop out of the top 10 in nearly fifteen years. That’s right, we were in the presence of 15 years of greatness when 2016 took it away from us.

On the flipside, there is Andy Murray. Great Briton’s finest most assuredly found the spark he was looking for, finishing the year with five consecutive titles. It also saw him ascend to the top of the rankings for the first time in his career, ending the year as such.

See? It’s all a matter of perspective. Wait, you expected a piece on HR? Well, we’ll get to it, of course. But as professionals driven towards progress, a little news on something outside the business spectrum does help lighten the mood.

Introduction

Leaders are required to be clear about expectations, transparent with feedback and trust their people to make the right decisions. That’s right, trust is the new currency of the digital age. On the other hand, predictive analytics enable greater flexibility, moving HR to a more data-driven orientation. Simply put, a liquid workforce is a predictive workforce

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And thus, with that out of the way along with the year 2016, we are compelled to look ahead to what we can expect this new year. We stand steady with some predictions about HR and business. Additionally, let’s not forget that greatness is always a function of putting people first.

It’s an organization’s duty to take care of their people, who in turn take care of customers, who inadvertently takes care of the company itself. It’s an endless cycle of care that empowers and inspires people everywhere to put their best foot forward work wise.


Now, are you ready to move on just yet? Well then, without further ado, here are five trends you must most certainly look forward to heading into 2017.

Taking Centre Stage: Voice of the Employee (VoE)


#1

This does not change across industries, and that’s the most important thing to understand here. Yes, when we say nobody knows your customers better than the employees, you could relate more to the retail sector – shop floor employees.

However, this also remains true in the automobile industry, where a significant amount of blueprint modification hinges on customer experience. Every line of code to advance a software is to replace a sense of incompleteness a customer experiences. We reiterate again, this is an important virtue across all industries.

Many organizations today fail to capitalize on this employee knowledge. Sure, there are surface level discussions, but what of the golden apple of an opportunity to understand customers at a much deeper level?

In fact, Forrester Research [1] suggests that employee feedback provides context for how customers perceive experience with an organizational brand. This could go a long way to help identify gaps in processes, policies, and technology that may keep customers from having the best experience possible.

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Customer Experience Pros; Please Hop onto the Voice of Employee Bandwagon

You’ve heard of the term Customer Experience. It’s very likely the organization you’re a part of deep dives into this intensively. But even the so-called experts here miss the boat when leveraging employee feedback. Needless to say, not all of them do, but you understand our point.


Customer Experience pros do not understand VoE programs very well; if they did, every company would have one.

Per Forrester again,

Business leaders today are more focused on Customer Experience than ever before. In 2016, improving that facet of their organization was top priority. With such a big focus on improvement, the question to surface remains, “Why aren’t more organizations taking advantage of their biggest asset in understanding customers?”

It’s good practice now to not rely solely on customer data; to listen and react to employee feedback becomes a must.

So, how do we go about it?

A well-designed VoE program is a boon to Customer Experience professionals. Forrester again recommends:

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Map Customer Journeys; Identify Pain Points:

Identifying gaps or issues through different points of the customer lifecycle plays a key role here. Even more so,

2 Train Employees on How to Provide Feedback:

What kind of feedback do you expect from your employees, and what information is of prime importance to derive from customers; these are two questions your organization must help answer. Never assume your employees know how to share the feedback you need.

3 Feedback is a Requirement, not an Option

When did you last see a high participation percentage on optional surveys? Make sure that your employees understand that feedback is an important part of their jobs.

4 Try a VoE Vendor

Most organizations wouldn’t have the resources in-house to successfully execute a VoE program. Social networking platforms such as Salesforce Chatter could help you collect unstructured employee feedback to better facilitate peer-to-peer conversations.

At the end of the day, whether you have a structured VoE program or not, one thing remains – listen to your employees.

assessing employee feedback as it pertains to those customer interactions could help develop a plan of action.


#2 Your Workforce is Tending to Fluidity


Are You Able to Keep Up?

#2

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Be it selling products, services or ideas, we now live in a digital world. Business is digital, and opting out of this revolution is simply not an option. It’s here, and it’s here to stay, fundamentally changing every aspect of businesses far and wide: strategies, models, processes, and the workforce.

view people as strategic differentiators. This was something that became part of the Accenture DNA.

Fluidity or the liquid nature of a workforce implies having talent practices that attract, develop and inspire people – all this in a uniquely human way. To take the example of Accenture again, transparency, hyper-personalization, and listening to the people became cornerstones for the organization’s employee experience.

If you answered yes, then congratulations. This is your competitive advantage for 2017 and the years to come. The key is to proactively help people adapt to rapidly changing demands, meaning innovating workforce strategies to be more fluid and flexible.

This was the core idea behind the “Liquid Workforce” trend in Accenture’s 2016 Technology Vision[2] . It’s about the use of technology as an enabler to transform projects, people, and entire organizations into highly adaptable and effective enterprises. Don’t you think it’s time for all of us to catch up to this?

You must remember the People First concept we talked about not too long ago. It’s imperative for digital businesses to put their people first. Human beings are at the centre of the digital revolution, after all. To win is to focus on workplace innovation and

Assume Constant, High Velocity Change for Digital Disruptions


Business goals change on a regular basis, and many organizations require to reinvent them themselves just as regularly. To keep pace, technology helps fuel workplace fluidity and innovation in three areas:

1 Skill Development

Continuous learning is a core competency. Successful organization would always agree to that mantra. With a skills shortage and constant reinvention, employees require learning powered by technology. MOOCs, virtual classrooms, and even boot camps allow employees to reskill rapidly.

Corporate education is likely to replace higher education, and that’s something forward thinking organizations go for as alternatives to fill skill gaps. At the end of the day, we’d be remiss to focus solely on technical skills. Social skills, EQ, and creativity accelerate people to higher-value work incapable of machines.

2 Project Planning

Organizations need teams with top talent to solve the world’s most challenging problems. It’s likely that these deep skills do not exist within the organizations, however.

3 Organization Structure

To sustain a highly skilled workforce and fluid project model, digital businesses must remain equally flexible with their organizational structure. Here, it becomes essential to shift to more horizontal styles of leadership, with more co-creation than managing.

At times like these, it is essential to blur traditional boundaries to broaden the definition of workforce.

This implies finding the right combination of internal employees, consultants, and technology for each new challenge. GE’s Global Brain is an appropriate example, and a glimpse into the future as a buzzing hive of connectivity, technology, knowledge, and access that unites the machine and humans, the digital and the physical unimaginably. These are words out of Beth Comstock’s mouth, GE’s Chief Marketing Officer.[3]

As the future of work transpires to the virtual, the rise of digital reputation may perhaps replace resumes and traditional performance processes.

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To answer that question, yes. Accenture is amid a liquid workforce transformation and on scale with their entire 373,000-employee stronghold. In fact, in operations, the company now possesses 4,000 pieces of automation that’s reduced over 10,000 job roles.

Despite this, the company lost not one person. Accenture went on to reskill their employees to take on higher-value roles in analytics and other hot skills, showing that workplace innovation and strategy can intersect positively. Losing jobs never meant losing people.

This effort required the company to invest over $841M, but that’s just the sort of gamble you ought to take. Bet now. Bet big. Bet big on your people.

Is there anyone living the trend right now?

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#3

The Primacy of Employee-Manager Relationships


#3You’ve probably heard this a lot more than you would’ve liked to. It’s an ongoing discussion, to find the right professional and personal balance between the employee and manager. However, another thing that comes to mind here is a familiar quote.

In conclusion, people today do not want to be managed. They want leaders who inspire greatness and enable open communication; they want someone to coach them into being their best selves at work.

Looking ahead to 2017, it’s smart to expect organizations to increase investment in developing managers to become better leaders. We’re likely to see the benefits of these efforts soon enough. In fact, new diagnostic and prescriptive analytics tools now possess the capacity to support manager development on a daily basis, ushering a new era of humanized people management.

People don’t leave companies. They leave managers

It’s true. During our HR e-Event, The Breakfast Alchemy, Mettl summoned powerful leaders from the IT industry to assess and facilitate a long thought about transformation – From Coders to Leaders.[4]

Here, one of our keynote speakers – Sanjay Kumar, VP – Capability Building and Knowledge Management at ITC Infotech, revealed a grim situation in the employee-manager relationship that hindered leadership transformation.

A HR leader in his own right, Sanjay cited that most managers preferred holding onto their top performers to ensure team gain over organizational gain. This short-sighted view often halted the promise of leadership, and in more dire situations – led to attrition.

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#4

HR Agility to Become the New Mode of Supporting

Organizations

1.1 Brokering & Discovering Unknown Talent

Assuring talent flows where it is needed, HR must up their games and become experts at identifying and locating talent, syncing it to business needs. This would require looking beyond employee skills and experience, profiling competencies, passions and geographical preferences instead.

1.2 Fortifying an Adaptive & Ethical Culture

Individuals now possess greater decision making power, which means that HR must work to instil values in the culture to ensure people make effective and efficient decisions.

1.3 Building a Learning Organization

This would require putting a greater emphasis on helping workers constantly learn new skills through a series of formal and informal learning opportunities.


Business processes today hail from a more stable environment. You know it. The goal was to drive efficiency, risk reduction, and consistency through tight procedures and control mechanisms. You should also know that this stability has vanished.

Global competition, economic troughs, changing customer demands, political turmoil, and supplier upheavals have replaced this stability with a state of permanent volatility. In such a situation, to survive and thrive, companies are in a race to become more agile.

The opportunity of HR in 2017 for this trend is profound to say the least. Talent, and HR’s ability to manage it, is the bedrock of agility. Competitive advantage is here to shift inexorably from the resources a company owns to its ability to mobilize talent, and consequently, HR is poised to become the critical driver of company success in this new competitive reality.

Now, to enable agility, HR would have to dive deep into the following fronts:

New Mission & Imperatives

HR is on a new mission. It centres on improving enterprise performance through on-demand availability of resources. To meet that mandate, a couple of new imperatives are coming to the fore:

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1.4 Science & Fact Based Analytics

HR professionals will now have to use empirical, scientific tools to perform analytics on their workforce to gain insight on how to increase insight. It’s a smart way to do things, that is to move from instinct to insight.


Now, career paths also face a similar level of redefinition. In fact, some organizations have gone onto analyse transfer and promotion histories to build company databases. This is available to any employee through a social media portal, which enables them to connect with others whose career paths they would like to model.

Redesigning Work & Career Paths

Some organizations have begun doing away with traditional job descriptions, relying instead on employees to define roles and tasks within broadly defined parameters.

For example, at Google, engineers could spend about 80% of their time working on their core jobs, while the remainder is spent developing new strategic projects that may eventually evolve the company’s business model.[5]

Alternatively, organizations may define work in terms of small, discrete projects. Microsoft’s moonlighting is one such example, where engineers can work on special projects within the company that lie outside their core jobs.

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Revamping Talent Management Processes

Static titles and organization charts continue to hamper agility. This is something we must come to terms with. At the end of the day, talent management must focus on the individual, not the job. People may be paid based on skills as opposed to titles; that is one option.

Employees could even have to complete learning programs to define their career paths and address changing business priorities. What we’re trying to say, and what you should most definitely know is that talent management must embrace the extended workforce. All this, to ensure that this important part of the equation is functioning at peak levels.


Rebuilding HR Organizational Structures Entirely

To enable business agility, it may no longer be appropriate for HR to dictate the actions of an employee based on a rigidly prescribed career path or specific tasks within a job. You may think this a facet of old, but this is a tradition largely rampant even in the world of today

Agility is a function of treating employees not as passive consumers of narrowly defined talent processes and solutions, but as co-cre-ators of the same. But, to adopt such a model, HR professionals need to become liquid themselves.

How? Well, some companies have eliminated traditional roles such as professionals in centres of excellence and HR business partners. Some new models see HR professionals lead teams with representa-tives from other functions, as well as the business to design talent and implement talent management practices.

The options are infinite. How you go about it is entirely up to you.

Over all, agility is the new mantra of business. It should be your go to in 2017. Organizations must reshape themselves to fluidity to deploy resources and address changing conditions. HR, here, have a unique and powerful opportunity to reinvent themselves to drive agility in organizations. Be certain that this ensures your company’s future ability to compete.

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#5

Culture Shapes

Employee Experience

So, we’ve reached the last one. That was quite a journey, even from the writer’s point of view. But trend #5 is an important one, albeit one that requires little explanation. This means culture, or rather – organizational personality. There’s a lot of beauty in how each company brings something different to the table in terms of how they interact and drive synergy with their employees.

However, at the end of the day, there can be a significant difference between an organization’s mission statement and what employees experience; what really goes on within an organization.

It’s also important to note that we’re treading onto a new era, where the workforce is largely a millennial stronghold. People entering organizations in 2017 and beyond tend to be less trusting of authority, preferring the path of autonomy instead. This makes it even more important for organizations to gain the trust of their employees.

How is this possible? Well, in the simplest of terms, it requires a culture of listening and acting on employee concerns.

Now, the 21st century progressively advances towards technology on an annual basis – technology that continues to learn and become smarter. These smarter, more perceptive technologies are likely to support organizations in understanding their culture at work. This would also go a long way to detect gaps in alignment between employees, the stated mission, and values of the organization.

Additionally, smarter organizations are working towards a course of deliberation and focus on defining philosophies that address how people experience their work lives, and how the organization treats and interacts with their people and customers.

It’s the least we can do for those that continue to evolve our business model and organization as a whole. At the end of the day, a king is nothing without his subjects.

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In September 2013, Nokia announced that they had been acquired by Microsoft. At the time, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop famously ended his speech with the words, “We did nothing wrong, but somehow, we lost.”

This bordered on unfortunate humiliation, especially for a company that used to on a large portion of the smartphone market share before the emergence of the iPhone in 2007. Nokia missed out on the learning and changing, and thereby missed the opportunity to earn big money. In grim words, they lost their chance of survival.

The advantage of yesterday will always be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. To change and improve is to obtain a second chance; to be forced to change is to be discarded. The matter is simple – subdue the market or let it subdue you. This inadvertently makes you redundant and irrelevant to the industry, of course.

The five trends mentioned above is but the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot to look forward to in 2017, and we’re sure to see all of you well prepared to handle it. We wouldn’t mind if you let us help along the way as well.

But, the information is now in your hands. What was the saying again? The ball is in your court. And with that, we wish you luck for the rest of the year. Godspeed!

Parting Note

References[1] https://www.forrester.com/report/Cure+Broken+Customer+Experiences+With+Voice+Of+The+Employee+Programs/-/E-RES120304

[2] https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-technology-trends-2016

[3] http://www.gereports.com/post/81489859586/the-future-of-work-where-the-global-brain-meets/

[4] https://mettl.com/the-breakfast-alchemy/

[5] https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/08/innovate-or-die-why-googles-8020-rule-is-a-red-herring/

https://www.forrester.com/report/Cure+Broken+Customer+Experiences+With+Voice+Of+The+Employee+Programs/-/E-RES120304

https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-technology-trends-2016

http://www.gereports.com/post/81489859586/the-future-of-work-where-the-global-brain-meets/

https://mettl.com/the-breakfast-alchemy/

https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/08/innovate-or-die-why-googles-8020-rule-is-a-red-herring/

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