3 Ways to Upgrade our Humanware
From upskilling employees’ digital competence to refining talent decisions with cloud-based productivity data, executives are ready to work hand-in-hand with HR to invest more in their people to drive growth. Mercer’s Kate Bravery examines the 2018 global trends shaping the workforce of the future, and how HR can leverage digitization to unlock human potential.
In the 1980s carmakers in Japan faced a dilemma; they wanted to automate, but do so in a way that didn’t alienate their workers. The approach they devised is summed up neatly in a phrase now associated with Japanese car manufacturers: “It is workers who give wisdom to their machines.”
This focus on the competitive edge that humans provide – when enabled by technology – permeates Mercer’s 2018 Global Talent Trends Study: Unlocking Growth in the Human Age. This year, people feel apprehensive and excited in equal measure about technology’s heady mix of challenges and possibilities. After years of fretting about disruption, business leaders are ready to take action as we reimagine a new future.
The survey findings reveal are organizations poised to take advantage of human resilience, empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking. In pursuit of new technologies, it has become easy to lose sight of how people connect and collaborate, and what motivates different segments of the workforce. Individuals that say they are thriving report greater internal mobility and exposure to other markets, for example. To drive change, employers are focused on human skills, such as innovation, a global mindset, and complex problem solving that are highly sought-after this year. Indeed, 94% of companies globally have innovation on their core agenda.
This new focus is exciting for HR because it requires and benefits from unprecedented collaboration with the business. From the more than 7,600 voices that make up this year’s report (Board Directors, Executives, HR leaders, and Employees), we identified five trends shaping the workforce:
Change@Speed: The ability to change and change quickly is emerging as a differentiating organizational competency.
Working with Purpose: Embedding a higher sense of purpose into the employee value proposition unlocks individual potential and spurs people to be change agents.
Permanent Flexibility: Flexibility is more than working wherever and whenever; it is also rethinking what work is done, how it is done, and by whom.
Platform for Talent: Organizations are becoming smart platforms for matching skill supply with work demand while maximizing human creativity and ambition.
Digital from the Inside Out: To unlock growth potential, technology must augment the human work experience.
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