Deloitte’s yearly Human Capital Trends report arrived early this time – a second time in 2020 – identifying key trends as we enter 2021 and urging HR to be the architect of the future of work.
One concrete change effected by the COVID-19 pandemic is the faith that HR is guardian of the workforce and has the ability and mettle to guide employees and organizations through a disruptive time.
Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends titled The social enterprise in a world disrupted: Leading the shift from survive to thriveOpens a new window – which dives deeper into its 2020 Global Human Capital Trends, published in May 2020 – calls on HR to rearchitect work disrupted by a crisis never experienced before.
The report finds that executives’ confidence in HR increased this year. Those who were “not confident†in HR stood at 26% in 2019 but dropped to 12% in 2020. This means HR has the potential to stand at the helm of changing the narrative of the future of work. It must go beyond reimagining how work can be done to implementing systemic changes that will cater to the following workplace trends for 2021.
Designing Work for Well-Being
The only way employees can perform their best is when well-being is designed into work and not provided as an afterthought. Executives surveyed for the report said that sustaining remote work would include designing the work such that employees have access to digital collaboration tools, autonomy, and scheduling and meeting freedom – which has the underlying theme of incorporating employee wellness into the flow of work.
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Unleashing Worker Potential Through Reskilling
The report recommends empowering employees with the freedom to choose how they want to upskill and reskill instead of telling them what to do. The course here may be to guide and not prescribe an upskilling approach. Deloitte itself has introduce the concept of opportunity marketplaces – which help employees find mentors, identify opportunities for professional development, and networking, among other things.
Building Superteams
Superteams as described by Deloitte in the 2020 Human Capital TrendsOpens a new window report referred to teams made up of humans and technology including artificial intelligence. Now, this need has become all the more prominent as we look to 2021, where leaders are armed with the knowledge they need to remain agile in the future, they can use this information to rearchitect work in more human ways. This allows humans and machines to learn from each other and bring the neurodiversity needed to elevate an organization.
Before the pandemic, 29% of HR executives said that they would be focusing on workforce transformation and reimagining work. This number has increased to 61% in 2020.
Governing Workforce Strategies
When the pandemic struck, companies that had the right workforce data performed better than those who didn’t. This ties in with knowing each employee’s skill set and how to redeploy their skills for new jobs that the pandemic demanded. Collecting workforce data can augment workforce transformation efforts, and Deloitte’s 2021 report confirms that companies have gone from preparing for foreseeable changes to sudden, disruptive changes by starting to focus on the right data. This data includes assessing how many internal and external workers are a part of the organization, which workers are at risk of leaving and why, and more.
47% said that their organizations planned to focus on multiple scenarios in the future, up from 23% before the pandemic. Ensuring workforce readiness to adapt to these changes will be critical as we enter 2021.
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HR as the Architect of the Future of Work
Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends focus on thriving, not just surviving. Many organizations have already proven their ability to do this when they went from manufacturing paint to manufacturing sanitizer – adapting easily in the middle of the crisis. Now, HR has the potential to “drive differentiated value,†while ensuring that the organization is distinctly human so that it can thrive in a world of disruption.
“Making this shift depends on an organization’s becoming—and remaining—distinctly human at its core, because today’s environment of extreme dynamism calls for a degree of courage, judgment, and flexibility that only humans can bring,†says the report.
Optimizing, redesigning, and then re-architecting work and employees’ journey through the organization will be the way forward in 2021.