The future of work is social
When I heard about the 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends I got astonished and super excited. Is that right? My dream is becoming true?
YES, DEFINITELY!
According to Deloitte research the time has come to a profound shift in the way we see the business’ role on the society. “This shift reflects the growing importance of social capital in shaping an organization’s purpose”, and that will change not just the relationships between stakeholders, but the relationships with society and work itself, besides influences the success or failure of that business
Organizations are no longer evaluated only based on their traditional metrics as revenue, financial performance or even quality or cost of theirs products/services. Instead, they are starting to be evaluated by their capacity of creating valuable products and services for the society, respecting environment and stakeholders relationships. The more social impact you are capable to produce, more value you and your business will have, and this is what we call Social Enterprise, where financial performance is more a reflex of the capacity in becoming with good solutions to real social problems than the organizations’ goal itself.
This trend is not coming from nowhere; it started with the advance of technology and the globalization major issue on building networks and connecting people all over the world. In the last years we saw the importance that networks of teams had acquired, helping to increase collaboration and internal integration of the organizations, but now is not just the internal environment that are on focus. Business and their CEOs are definitely aware about how important is to create a ecosystem that helps their development in a collaborative mode. They are more interested about the external world and how it affects their internal environment pressuring them towards social changes that really ask their participation in a symphonic way, a complex and integrated network team operating model.
Another great discover of this research is that actually people today have less trust in their political and social institutions than they have in years. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that people tent to trust more in business than in governments when it comes “to do what is right”. The widespread perception that political systems are less effective at tackling social challenges makes people look to business and their leaders as someone that can fill the gaps that we see every day such as income inequality, diversity, health care, education and so on.
Deloitte Report brings 10 trends for the next years that we should pay hard attention on:
1. THE SYMPHONIC C-SUITE
Becoming a social enterprise requires a lot of effort in terms of managing the external macro trends, what demands a high level of cross-functional vision, collaboration and connectivity from the C-Suite leaders. That’s way the trend is more about the development of a “Symphonic C-Suite” team in which the executives work as a team itself besides doing their work with their own functional teams. The C-Suite is the next level of leadership evolution and will be responsible on leading the organization towards the other 9 trends highlighted by Deloitte Report.
2. THE WORKFORCE ECOSYSTEM
The more the power of the individual grows the more organizations need to rethink their approaches to workforce management, news career models, customized reward systems… Organizations need to listen better their employees to rebuild their strategy on managing the relationship between them and the different segments as this affects directly the delivers for the organizations’ costumers.
3. NEW PERSONALIZED, AGILE AND HOLISTIC REWARDS
As the people feel more empower individually, employees are asking for more customizes, agile and holistic rewards, including an OPEN AND FAIR PAY.
4. FROM CAREERS TO EXPERIENCES: NEW PATHWAYS
This is one of my favorites. We are in the 21st-century, right? So the need of creating a 21st-century career planning for our organizations is essential. The new model of career planning put the experience in the center of the stage. Instead of progression along a job-based pathway, the future organization needs to create a model based on a model that empowers people to acquire valuable and meaningful experiences, exploring new roles, developing new capacities, with the opportunity to reinvent them. Improvements in this area are essentials to attract good talents.
5. THE LONGEVITY DIVIDEND
This is other of my favorites. Can you imagine yourself getting back to work on yours 60s? A totally different company, different role or field… As population longevity is increasing, why not bring them to contribute with your organization? This is a great opportunity to develop news career models, increasing social capital of business, giving opportunity to elderly people and learning from them. Of course this will ask for policies to support extended careers, as wall collaboration between leaders and workers.
6. CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL IMPACT: SOCIETY HOLDS THE MIRROR
Corporate citizenship and social impact are now essential to the growth and survival of the 21st century organizations. Engagement with other stakeholders addressing topics as diversity and inclusion are definitely a main issue to business and a valuable item to society. Leaders and organizations who are able to respond in a positive way to problems as gender inequality, immigration, climate change, etc, can lift their brand value and consequently financial performance. So this is not just a trend but a real commitment to society.
7. WELL-BEING: A STRATEGY AND A RESPONSIBILITY
As life and work can blur a little from time to time, employees are demanding (and lets confess, they are right) better benefits offers that includes a variety of physical, mental, financial and even spiritual health. In the other hand many companies had already recognized the importance of not just a good workplace environment but of a healthy employee. Create and extend benefits for organization’s collaborators is a matter of what I would call Organizational Care, and that’s crucial for the success of any 21st century organization.
8. AI, ROBOTICS, AND AUTOMATION
The advance of technology had changed and will continue changing dramatically the workplace and the relationship that we have with our work and companies. Roles and skills focusing on a “human unique value” tent to be more and more important nowadays. The capacity of solving complex problems, cognitive abilities and what we can SOFT SKILLS are leading the research for collaborators in companies all over the world. Most of the positions that we see nowadays will not exists in the 30 years probably, so how can we develop ourselves to be prepared for the future jobs that which do not yet exist? By training people to create human value to their jobs
9. THE HYPER-CONNECTED WORKPLACE
Witch year that pass more and more communications tools are rapidly entering the workplace. According to Deloitte “seventy percent of respondents believe workers will spend more time on collaboration platforms in the future”, this is not awesome? I have to confess that I’m totally in love by collaboration systems and methodologies cause that, my friend, is what will lead us to real innovations. We are already connected, almost 80% of our day, if not more. Having these tools in the workplace of course will demands from leaders and workers themselves to self-management and probably more a delivery-based model than a time-based model in terms of work. The risk of all that? Of course we have a price to pay, manage this overwhelming connected life, being able to create disconnection once a while.
And the last one:
10. PEOPLE DATA
Later we saw the Facebook and Cambridge Analytics incident of course we all ask ourselves what’s the limit? Are we going to far? Can Data turns into a dangerous tool? Someone’s once said “with great power comes great responsibility”. Is that from Spiderman’s’ Uncle? (LOL) Stan Lee wasn’t wrong with this phrase. Data availability and the powerful analytics tools have created great opportunities to solve some of the most world toughest problems, but it can generate huge risks too, well we already had some examples, right? To create a set of well-defined policies, security and transparency on using people data is imperative, if we are talking about the social enterprise future, social responsibility cannot be forget on creating a new path towards a just and equal world.
