CHRO Challenge Know Your Own Employee (KYOE) - There can’t be a more challenging time than now to understand your employee’s psyche! Psychometrics must become your talent management functional differentiator. Deep Insights that measure personality fits, conflict patterns, socio pathology interfaces, disruptive behaviors, integrity challenges, cultural alignment, performance typology, Social adaptability, cross culture adaptation, achievement orientation, communication effectiveness, discovery through feedback are surely influencing talent management solutions to think differently and will no doubt be a minimal business condition for a CHRO to possess and to receive real time pulse of his/her organizational realities.
CHRO Challenge - CHRO’s need to speak Employee Experience - Corner offices, disconnected leaders, cubicle-based, 9-to-5 work culture of the past is fast receding", so CHROs need to help close that gap between traditionalists and the needs of the millennial. Employees seek engagement through active participation and control over their own issues and challenges.
Figure – Strategizing the Digital People Organization - Top concerns for CHRO
CHRO Challenge Employee Experience is a Talent Agenda. Experience is for all time and CHROs ability to provide their employees with continuing experience will always be a Level 1 priority - Creating & sustaining an optimized high performing organization is best achieved when business strategy effectively converges with Human resources strategy, a talent management goal, to achieve fundamental objectives that pertain to talent management, performance, productivity for enhancement of shareholder value.
CHRO Challenge Disruption & Convergence - "From a business perspective, these digitized aspects are converging to bring together a commitment to offer your staff a comprehensive talent management attitude. Investments are required in a Digitized Talent Thinking, (not software or APPs but a digitized culture) is strategized to offer a globally benchmarked Business - HR function supported by a digitized cloud enabled platform with all of best in class digital capabilities including offering functional best practices, Analytics, Mobility, Social & Cloud, with the opportunity for the Chief Human Resources Officer to drive business performance by effective utilization of resources.
CHRO Challenge - Business HR versus Tech HR - For a CHRO a fundamental shift in their outlook would pertain to understanding the sharp difference between Business HR versus Tech HR, CHROs would need to seek talent solutions that seamlessly integrate with the digital world. Analyst reports are indicating that our appreciation of BUSINESS HR has to be greater than TECH Software driven approach to acquiring a talent solution. The disappearance of IT identification of a talent solution is fast on the horizon. Unlike traditional enterprise software’s, HR and talent systems no longer boast of complex IT software’s, but speak more of functions, features and HR value add. Admin control now rests with the employee and human resources. In TCS Talent Management solution it is Maestro, (workflow process orchestrator) and MIY Cockpit. The sales speak today is about human resources transformation not technology change, gadgets, devices or jargons from IT wiz kids. Human resources professionals responsible for people engagement are seeking solutions that can speak their language and the language that their staff can relate, beyond gadgets and toys, to understand and use seamlessly, by bringing internet of things closer home. A TCS 2015 report on Internet of Things, states, "Gadget trends come and go, with only a few starting real tech revolutions. Thus, it is natural to be skeptical about the latest gadgets-gone-gaga trend: the Internet of Things (IoT). By this broad phrase, technology companies mean the digital hardware and software that is being embedded in items ranging from cameras and coffee makers to mattresses and multimillion-dollar aircraft engines. The technology also includes the communications networks (the Internet and wireless) that let such digitally endowed ‘things’ report their condition to businesses and consumers. Technology researcher Gartner projects that there will be 4.9 billion ‘connected things’ (or ‘smart-connected products’, as Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter refers to them) this year. And we haven’t seen anything yet, according to Gartner. It predicts the number will grow five times by the end of the decade, to 25 billion connected things, including a quarter billion vehicles".
CHRO Challenge - Mobile Apps Versus Talking Mobility is no longer a differentiator. It is a new normal. One of the most demanded APP today is the emergence of mobile apps as the primary technology platform we use. Try using an application on an IPAD. If it doesn't work the solution has a problem. Vendors are no longer making mobile app as a web enabled application. Anything and everything has to be an APP - All thinking has to articulate itself into an APP - Coffee on the GO "It is all about APPification", says Bersin. Market is speaking of a unique way by which DEVICE uniqueness should be maintained. "Organizations will be able to anticipate employee needs and more effectively plan how work gets done,” says Morgan, who authored The Future of Work. “Ultimately all these things boil down to data that can be collected and shared. Also, when employees use these enterprise-level social network platforms through their devices to share ideas, passions and feedback, using special Apps, they can help shape their own learning and consequently their career paths. Employees can attain leadership positions the same way so many people have through public social channels, says, Morgan, "If you’re an employee who gets hired in sales but is passionate about creative design, you can participate in those creative design groups and discussions via your company internal network".
CHRO Mobility Challenge Millennials are determining these attitudes. for example be always available - Mobile devices are the future. As referenced earlier, by 2019, mobile devices will capture more daily online time than all other devices combined. This online time is more than just email, messaging, and social networks. More than 50% of YouTube’s views already come from mobile devices, where the average viewing session is over 40 minutes” write In, Oracle “Future-Proof Your Learning Management System” paper authors June Farmer and Kautul Mehta. They continue further, “.It’s critical that a modern learning management system enables your workforce to access learning courses and content on mobile devices so they can learn anytime, anywhere. A modern LMS will also help those learners on the road or in remote locations who can use a native mobile app—even when they’re disconnected.
CHRO and Focus on Communication - “Millennials who grew up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the like are now the fastest-growing portion of the labor force. They are accustomed to constant connection and information access and engage in more open sharing than generations past. And they are carrying these expectations and habits into the workplace. Meanwhile, the last several years have seen an explosion of social media tools designed for use inside companies — everything from wikis and microblogs, to multichannel platforms such as Yammer, Slack, and HipChat, to employee feedback tools such as TinyPulse. With workers who increasingly expect to have their voices heard, and with tools to enable that, it is now possible — perhaps even paramount — to build more conversational firms. Conversational firms differ from conventional bureaucratic ones by having a far more open communication environment. Executives use multiple platforms to share information with the entire workforce. In the past, corporate leaders sat behind closed doors in large private suites. Today, many sit side by side with employees in open workspaces. In the past, workers toiled alone in cubicles, waiting for formal meetings to speak with their managers and colleagues. Today, they turn and chat with the managers and colleagues sitting right next to them, while conversing with others on digital chat systems that connect the entire organization, and with yet others in lounge areas and cafés built to promote informal connection and dialogue. These changes are surface manifestations of a deeper transformation under way: Long-held assumptions about corporate communication and hierarchy are breaking down. Social media tools allow more open communication up, down, and across the corporate hierarchy. They encourage employees to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas and opinions, writes in, “A New Era of Corporate Conversation” Catherine J. Turco in MIT SMR 2016. She continues, “they saturate the workplace with digital tools and physical spaces designed to encourage dialogue. The result is an ongoing conversation that transcends the formal hierarchical structure. Forward-thinking leaders are already managing their organizations this way”.
CHRO Challenge Self-Control - 2013 McKinsey Institute research, reports, "Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural user interfaces (e.g., voice recognition) are making it possible to automate many knowledge worker tasks that have long been regarded as impossible or impractical for machines to perform. For instance, some computers can answer “unstructured” questions (i.e., those posed in ordinary language – that a CHRO can ask and be answered, rather than precisely written as software codes or queries), so employees or customers without specialized training can get information on their own. This opens up possibilities for sweeping change in how knowledge work is organized and performed. Sophisticated analytics tools should be used by the CHRO, to augment the talents of highly skilled employees, and as more knowledge worker tasks can be done by machine, it is also possible that some types of jobs could become fully automated".(See Marshal K - http://bit.ly/2f3BxtG).
CHROs Challenge need to become Tech Savvy - CHRO’s are required to consequently leverage advances in technologies, data proliferation, newer delivery models and commercials options to manage their global and diverse talent base to help mitigate an overriding competitive and business trauma in a global business environment.
CHRO Challenge priorities for Health & Wellness - After all which enterprise would not like to invest in a staff wellness program that focuses on employee health, fitness and care? These allied skills and competencies in turn influence enterprise wide employee concern, training focus and self-learning opportunities. In many ways this demonstrates the need of employees to be in control of their own learning destined to help them qualify and be continuously employable as a critical 2020 driver.
CHROs Challenge as Innovators – They would need to be aware of the Innovators of the HR market place such as Grovo (Micro Learning), Floqq (Free video courses and Tutorials), Vodeclic (fast, video-based online learning), as well as marketplaces including Udemy (Specialist On Line Content), Pluralsight (Expert Led), General Assembly and Big Think (video content expert), are contributing to the disruption of the traditional knowledge - learning content market and should immediately become the attention of CHROs. It is integrative, delivery friendly, language agnostic, compatible with learning styles, expansive platforms, futuristic, stylish, sophisticated and knowledge intensive to ensure that multiple platforms begin to talk to one another seamlessly.
CHRO Challenge - Social is collaboration and CHROs would need to find out of box solutions to help staff manage their need for socialization together with their need for achievement. CHRO’s may have to find ways to integrate Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus to everyday lives of an employee. CHROs who are not actively engaged in Business Oriented Social Collaboration tools be it TWITTER, Instagram, Linked IN, MYOpportunity or On Line Connections are not in touch with today’s reality. If as a CHRO you can’t even get your own employees to follow you to hear what you have two say, how can you expect the market to follow you and be inspired. As a CHRO you need to be a face to your potential talent pool. You have to be active talking your CEOs language.
CHRO Challenge - Developmental Feedback - CHRO’s need to realize that feedback/feedforward is another fast changing digital dimension. Testing, assessments and Feedback are fast growing employee experience areas. Innovations in encounter experiential feedback (virtual group), self-discovery platforms (Strength Finders), self-report assessments (Knowledge – skill gap assessments to enable learning pedagogy), culture assessment tools fort globalization, sensitivity, diversity management (TINYPulse (Real time surveys), Glint, CultureIQ, (Culture feedback) Culture Amp (employee engagement), all forms of testing and certification (psychometric, personality, aptitude, managerial effectiveness, coursera, career - vocational inventories, skill gap bridges, conflict management etc.), learning are some critical disruptions in the way we now do recruiting, retaining, skill building, leadership pipeline, learning, engagement, retention etc.
CHRO Challenge - Labor. "As former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove lamented in 2010, the unintended consequences of cost management (outsourcing, globalizing, third party manufacturing, contracting, gig economy, UBER, LYFT, Airbnb ) this were to undermine job creation in the United States, even as employment growth among U.S. trade partners in Asia skyrocketed. The markets vs. hierarchies concept, originally pioneered by the economist Oliver E. Williamson, suggested the conditions under which one could operate purely by contracting on an open market as opposed to requiring some kind of organization (a hierarchy) to accomplish one’s goals. Hierarchies are favored, in his formulation, when uncertainty is high, various parties face a risk of opportunism in market exchanges, and information about what is being exchanged is asymmetrically distributed. in “Is Your Company Ready to Operate as a Market?” Rita Gunther McGrath - MIT SMR 2016. She continues, “How does management attention need to shift as the world moves more toward market forms of organizing? Clearly, we are moving from a business world dominated by hierarchies, in which assets are controlled by a company, to a world of markets, in which assets can be accessed when needed. The conventional relationship between buyers and suppliers then shifts to more complex configurations in multisided markets and ecosystems. Networks become a primary vehicle for exchanging information of all kinds. Increasingly porous organizational boundaries mean that information is less likely to be hoarded. And increasingly, customers are looking to organizations for complete experiences rather than product and service features. Managing in such a complex environment requires not only traditional management skills such as planning and controlling, but also new ones, such as negotiating complex agreements, quickly detecting the unexpected, accelerating organizational learning, and fostering the creation of trusting relationships among groups and collaborations who may be only temporarily associated with one another. And this all takes place at an accelerated pace of change for which many will be unprepared. The lines between a defined managerial role in a traditional company and an entrepreneurial role in these newly emerging market contexts are definitely blurring. Practically, what does this mean for managers looking for a new way of operating? First, the assumption that change is the unusual thing and stability is the normal thing is worth challenging. Today, leaders need to identify, as early as possible, the patterns that deserve their attention and make constant course-correcting adjustments. Instead of being precise but slow and reinforcing existing perspectives, leaders need to be comfortable with making roughly right and fast decisions and with challenging the status quo. Instead of just using traditional management tools such as net present value, managers need to be more discovery-driven and options-oriented. And they need to remember that one of the most valuable gifts colleagues can give one another in a complex environment is candor about what is really going on out there”.
CHRO Challenge - Organizational Scanning - CHRO’s need to identify SCAN tools that help them keep a helicopter view of their enterprise folks. CHROs need to use Social and informal learning, Integrated network recruiting, candidate relationship management, social recognition, real-time employee feedback, engagement sensing, learning agility, on line testing, culture assessment, fit gap analysis, succession sensitivity, competency cultures and socially connected person to demonstrate their adaptability with the changes in the digital world".
If you can meet with triumph and disaster with equal contempt and yet keep your peace, you are perhaps better placed to lead as a CHRO in a world of digitized disruption. Firms today are beginning to realize that they attract and hire top intellectual talent only for them to manage and supervise yet another team of knowledge workers through the organization structure. This imposes upon senior management time and talent to focus on making such knowledge workers to work hand in hand with colleagues to experiment and innovate, to work in teams that have goals that cut across functions and job competencies. The wide use of collaborations and their consequent effectiveness has proven beyond doubt the success of making people work in structured as well as unstructured environments with only their goals in perspective.
The work force in turn having realized this potential are willing to take additional responsibilities, willing to be empowered and consequently operate with enhanced command over what they know (as knowledge) and its application in untested areas. The primary challenge of an entrepreneur is to motivate top talent; to seize opportunities by utilizing their human resources effectively, writes, Day, J.D. Wendler, J.C., 1998, in The New Economics of Organization, in 1998, Mckinsey Quarterly.
Figure - CHRO Expectation Mapping
Ganesh Shermon
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