As we (at SOAIS) go about advising customers on achieving their business goals or running organizations that are people centric, it becomes imperative to keep up with the global HR trends. The changing demographics of workforce in this century needs business leaders remain on top of what millennials think or want. To that end, the “2018 Global Human Capital Trends” by Deloitte threw up some very interesting insights. A write-up and the detailed Deloitte report can be accessed here. This survey is by far the most respected and has far reaching implications on how HR professionals shape up future looking policies or HR technology providers add product features. What fascinated me were findings like millennials do not consider only financial growth of a company as real growth or definition of employee well-being comprises whole new items like day-care or flexible vacation or finding a way to do their “own thing”.
For the benefit of followers of SOAIS’ blogs, we’ve summarized the 10 human capital trends from the Deloitte report.
The first trend starts at the top with that they call the Symphonic C-Suite
- C-Suite leaders should work together as a harmonious cross functional team to solve complex business problems of tomorrow because HR, Finance, Risk, Production etc cannot be addressed in silos (like earlier days). Everybody’s contribution need to be in sync to address the nine human capital trends which are grouped under three themes.
Power of the Individual – millennials at the forefront
- Gig economy is a huge trend that cannot be ignored (30-35% of the workforce in 2020 is expected to be temp staff) – organizations are yet to build systems or internal processes to manage this change.
- Employee Rewards is yet to keep up with the global trends of continuous performance evaluation. Employees who receive regular small rewards are 8 times more engaged than those who don’t or receive one large reward annually. A meagre 8% of the respondent companies have found ways to have personalized rewards programs.
- Employees clearly want an employment experience rather than a career path – organizations should find ways to provide flexible ways for the employee to reinvent themselves continually.
Society Leadership Vacuum
- Respondents from different countries have different take on impact of the aging workforce – with improvements in healthcare and increased working age of the workforce, organizations need to have find ways to leverage experienced staff.
- Societal impacts are executed better by corporate houses than government. Interestingly millennials like to choose to work for organizations that make a positive social impact rather than those that don’t.
- Definition of employee well-being is a lot broader today including things like day-care, mental & spiritual health. Currently there is wide gap between the employee perception and employee engagement programs. 75% of the millennials want to start their own business or go for further education – organizationsyet to devise strategies to leverage this trend to their advantage.
Leveraging Technology for growth
- AI, robotics & automation is already here – organizations have to think of ways to maximize efficiencies of working with both humans & machines in tandem. Some of these technologies were still in the lab three years ago and now businesses need to see how it impacts their employment patterns and workforce skill gaps.
- Flexible workspaces and new communication tools to remain hyper connected are now available – organizations need to address the challenge of leveraging social media at the workplace for better productivity.
- Most organizations have invested in collecting and organizing employee data for analytics. But only 10% of the organizations are “very ready” to deal with the challenge of data privacy.
Mind-boggling? What will you do make your organization a better place? Let’s talk. SOAIS continues to remain at the forefront of not just tracking global HR trends, but also implementing flexible employee policies to remain an employer of choice and a trusted adviser for its customers.
Source: Summarized from 2018 Global Human Capital Trends by Deloitte