When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: People Attributes

Enabler / Inhibitor — People Attributes

Definition

Organizations have evolved from demographic hiring in the industrial age that presumed to secure the required strength, intelligence, and shared values by hiring someone of a certain age, gender or ethnicity. Today, most organizations depend on hiring processes that validate years of personal attributes; including, work experience, degrees and certifications, and other job-specific qualifiers, followed by some assessment of personality and temperamental “fit” during an interview process. The process is often corrupted by attempting to match personal attributes to poorly articulated Job attributes and personal assessments of candidates often tainted by bias.

In a platform-based Talent Marketplace, technology will enable vast access to individuals who offer descriptions of their unique combination of attributes. Early signals of this activity are reflected in LinkedIn Profiles composed by individuals about the experiences and capabilities they choose to put forth that are substituting for traditional resumes.

New knowledge, skills, and aptitudes will also be needed by all players in the system. Managers, HR professionals, and agile workers will engage through:

• Clearly articulating their own capabilities and matching the required ones;
• Enhancing organizational and individual brands that develop mutual attraction; and
• Rapidly forming teams with changing and diverse members.

Dimensions

We define “people” as individuals who:

• Are part of the “extended enterprise” (i.e. the enterprise ecosystem = the organization and the value chain partners it is directly collaborating with plus the network of employees);
• Have their own social and professional network of personal contacts;
• Are actively engaged in the marketplace.

We define the key attributes of people as:

All tangible and accessible information from and about an individual which is relevant to enable both the individual and the organization to effectively participate in all marketplace-transactions.

The attributes of people are therefore characterized by the following set of dimensions:

• The attributes need to be tangible, meaning: accessible by others as well as transparent with regard to how the information was gathered and by whom. This includes that the information needs to be meaningful, timely and reliable.
• The attributes may originate from an individual — which means the individual provides and owns them — or about an individual, which means the information is provided and owned by others. This may include information gathered and processed by machines.
• The attributes need to be relevant — there is a purpose behind gathering them (organizational or marketplace or individual goals). If they do not support this purpose, there is no need to capture them.
• The attributes need to enable both the individual and the organization — they need to prove relevant for both parties.
• The attributes are ultimately a means to enable individuals and organizations to effectively operate in the marketplace and better collaborate in achieving their goals. The organizational goals are understood as strategic goals broken down to manageable initiatives and assignments. The individual goals are understood as career and employability goals

People Attributes in an Agile Environment

Agile environments utilize attributes of people to a much greater degree than stable ones to empower employee- and leader-decision making. To enable assignments and talent brokerage, the basic attribute set of people in a marketplace environment is focused on people’s…

Aspirations with regard to the engagements they are looking for

• Functional area (e.g. marketing, sales, finance)
• Location (e.g. city, country)
• Type of work (e.g. remote, on-site)

Availability

• Timeline (e.g. preferred start date, end date)
• Time consumption level (e.g. hours per week, days per month)

Skills and know-how

• o Technical skills
• o Areas of knowledge mastered

Past and current engagements

• Timelines
• Customers served (industry, function, etc.)
• Key partners (industry, function, etc.)
• Locations
• Budget ownership
• Team members
• Team leaders

Professional reputation

• Experience
• Key achievements
• Key skills strengths
• Endorsements (peers, partners, customers, etc.)
• Areas of expertise
• Network
• Promotions
• Recognition (awards, patents, publications, etc.)

The benefits for individual include

• Building and evolving a professional brand (inside and outside of the organization)
• Increased employability
• Accessing a broader range of opportunities and hence more choices
• Predictive development of capabilities relevant for future assignments

The benefits for the organization include

• Ability to identify individuals that fit best to current and future assignments
• Visibility on current/past expertise and capabilities and future gaps across the talent pool providing the ability to dedicated development interventions
• Transparency of professional reputation of leaders, teams and individuals

What will it take to transition your organization?

It is important for an organization to understand where it currently falls and desires to be on a spectrum of levers that impact how the transition to an assignment-based environment will be shaped. Below are a few areas to consider and our view on their evolution’s direction from a stable into the agile future state. The future state depends mainly on the business model, business strategy and the market environment of the organization.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

People attributes by themselves, however, do not make an agile environment. Interdependencies with other enables and inhibitors is a given. How you structure people attributes influences and is influenced by these at different level. Below is guide to the relative importance and dependency of both internal and external enablers/inhibitors. The company’s journey and current environment impacts where it wishes to focus to become more agile in its approach to people attributes.

A people attribute based environment will

• Require a fundamental redefinition of reward and recognition systems, since it will call for a new balance of flexibility, risk and security: which means that compensation is not following a stable growth path anymore but rather will vary depending on the ‘market value’ of people’s skills and reputation and the ‘market value’ of the assignment to work on. In addition, there will be a need to design new rules to ensure a level of security balancing market volatility.
• Drive transparency of the professional reputation of all market players (people, managers and organizations) since it will become the key “ticket” to an assignment and the key “ticket” to the best talent. We will also see much more frequent and regular public endorsements and “feedforward” ensuring reputation is kept current and based on broad whilst relevant input.
• Be closely tied to the introduction of assignment attributes: both elements represent the two elementary sides of the same coin named marketplace
• Support more multi-sourced ‘on-the-fly’ / ‘on-the-job’ types of training and learning — self-driven and owned, with learning agility becoming an even more important capability. On-demand content curation will be driven by AI. And AR/VR (soon to come) applied to specific assignment learning requirements will become a game-changer in multiple L&D areas.
• Disrupt the employee lifecycle as we know it: since the ‘lifecycle’ restarts with every new assignment. “Retention” will be replaced by affiliation; “career” by a professional journey; and “succession planning” will be replaced by understanding and attracting talent pools.
• Enforce the role of the manager to shift dramatically: temporary assignment/team-leads without ‘owning’ people anymore, high adaptability to varying contexts, agile assembly and formation of high-performing teams; outcome and strengths-focused coaching.
• Drive and depend on a culture that is fueled from within the teams rather than the corporation — based on mutual trust and an outspoken two-way ‘contract’ between people and the organizations they engage with

We also identified four external drivers strongly influencing people attribute based environments:

• The overall talent market transparency will provide visibility of talent and opportunity on a global scale — which also means that competition — in some areas of work — will shift dramatically. We will see the rise of shared talent-pools and the definition of professional portfolio based and driving people attributes. This is also an area where we see a strong need for cross-national regulation — which at the same point in time is not going to keep up with the pace of technological innovation.
• Raising consumer expectations already impact the expectations of people with regard to their relationship with employers and their work preferences. This trend is going to rise and analytics-inferred recommendations and automation will play an increasingly important role.
• Emerging technologies such as new collaboration plays (incl. AR/VR end-devices) and blockchain powered marketplaces will drive increased flexibility and ownership of the workplace configuration, as well as new decentralized and customized experience levels.
• Finally, the rapid growth of social media applications like LinkedIn (employee focus) and Glassdoor (employer focus) will drive transparency of the professional reputation of employers and employees and accessibility of talent and work, as well as new forms of analytics including social graphing and network vibrancy.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is equally important to assess hazards and hinge factors that could disrupt a re-imagined approach to assignment based environments. Here are some key areas for consideration:

The potential risks are dependent on the business environment (for the organization) and the talent market environment (for the individual). The more volatile and unpredictable these environments become, the higher will be the risk of not being able to respond to those changes and becoming vulnerable to competitive threats.

From an organizational point of view — especially when looking at larger and geographically diverse organizations — it is about readiness to utilize more detailed information about people’s attributes and activities by leveraging employee data traces and using data analytics to support organizational and individual decision making.

A marketplace approach provides potential risks mainly with regard to the organizational culture required to make it work such as

From an organizational point of view — especially when looking at larger and geographically diverse organizations — it is about awareness and conscious change of the cultural and organizational attributes. By listening frequently to the voice of the organization and the individuals belonging to it — and by inserting systemic interventions, the mindset of all stakeholders will be aligned with a marketplace direction.

Transparency

People attributes transparency may conflict with individual confidentiality concerns (e.g. data ownership, opt-in/opt-out choices) and public legal regulations (e.g. data privacy, data protection). Individuals should own and control their data and be informed about the value and the return for them in making them available and visible.

A way to address this would be a “reputation-blockchain” approach which would allow individuals to fully own their proven people attributes and decide on the type and amount of information made visible depending on the transaction.

Reputation

As professional reputation (and the transparency about it) plays a key role in creating trust and initiating relationships in the marketplace, it will become critical to ensure that talent with little or poor reputation is provided with options to address and change it.

The Role of the Manager

In an assignment-based environment, managers will have to set their people free to navigate the marketplace and make their journey through different assignments and leaders. Managers will have to transition to a much more consultative, coaching and counseling role.

Transformational Trajectory

How could the journey from a stable world into an agile one unfold?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

• Analyze and understand the business environment (VUCA / Disruption / Challengers / IoE Innovation)
• Identify the impact of emerging External Talent Marketplaces / Contingent workforce / Multi-generation presence at work
• Assess and review the internal organizational structures
• Leverage Talent and Employer Market Transparency (LinkedIn / Glassdoor / Upwork)

Diagnosis

• Fully leverage the power of Big Data — People Analytics
• Add intelligence and insights to traditional analytics
• Identify strategic interlock — business needs and business case
• Initiate early experiments with a rapid prototyping approach. Understand emerging technology and digitalization impact (VC world / military)
• Introduce an experience focus
• Perform systemic risk assessment

Incubation

• Focus on early marketplace adopters
• Ensure and develop technology savviness and utilization / infrastructure and data model
• Execute agile adjustments on go-to-market cycles — experience driven
• Influence / adopt regulatory environment
• Initiate and leverage external partnerships
• Introduce a light and flexible governance

Transformation

• Scale, scale, scale
• Provide variance and enable choice / customization
• Culture meets strategy for breakfast everyday
• Open up to external marketplaces
• Technology infrastructure and eco-system is running smoothly

2020+

• Staying hungry …
• Permeable Marketplaces are established and have become the main operating system of a network of organizations
• Value proposition of the organization vs a freelance world is established and working

Questions to Get Started

In an environment where many factors are changing at once, here are a few simple questions to help assess whether moving to a people attributes based environment is a primary area for an organization to focus on or if other enablers and inhibitors must be addressed first…

Customer / Business Strategy

What level of agility and flexibility does your business model / your business strategy require from your workforce? Are you facing an increased number of short-term high-priority customer requests? What level of cross-functional / cross-geo collaboration and innovation does your business model / your business strategy require?

Organization

Are you looking up LinkedIn when you try to find out more about the professional background of someone in your own organization? Are you struggling to describe — in an aggregated form — the strengths (expertise, skills) of your organization? Are you able to identify the best person in your organization to work on a specific business challenge?

Employee Experience

Was your organization facing mass-layoffs in the near past — and if so: were you made aware early so you could prepare? Does your organization provide you with a relevant and current map of development / career opportunities? Does your organization provide a transparent single-place-to-go showing all open jobs / assignments?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation… View the entire article here