The HR world has been disrupted. It can no longer work in a silo — HR is an essential part of all areas of your organization and needs to be part of every business decision.
Human capital is boundaryless — and for organizations that know how to make the most of talent, the future holds endless opportunities.
No one knows this better than Simona Spelman, U.S. Human Capital Leader at Deloitte. In the company’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte explores what it means for HR to become boundaryless, how organizations can adapt to this new way of work, and how it transforms the workforce for the better.
Spelman recently sat down with Eightfold Co-CEO Chano Fernandez to discuss these trends and offer insights on prioritizing human performance. [Ed note: Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.]
Related content: Simona Spelman, U.S. Human Capital Leader at Deloitte, shares findings from their recent 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report.
Chano Fernandez: You produce a longitudinal study on global talent topics, the Global Human Capital Trends. Give us a little bit of background on how this report has evolved over time.
Simona Spelman: When we started this report in 2011, our mission was to capture the leading trends to help organizations understand the evolving world of work, workforce, and workplace. Over the years, that mission has really remained true. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a few major shifts in human capital trends.
The first, and perhaps the most important, is that we’re moving away from thinking that these leading trends are just HR issues. HR issues are business and C-suite issues. The conversations happening in boardrooms are around what is happening to the human in this new wave of work.
The second shift that we’re talking about is the rise of the worker and worker agency. This year, we did worker and executive surveys to understand the perceptions and if they varied. You’re not going to be shocked, but there was some disconnect so we dug into that a little bit.
And third, looking at our trends over time we see a shift from an organization-centric view to an ecosystem-centric view. It’s all about the workers — gig workers, contractors. I think what’s most important, and what I’m most excited about, is that this year we introduced the concept of human sustainability. It’s creating value for people — not just well-being but things like equity and opportunities to learn new skills.
Years ago we talked about the power of the organization. Now we’re [talking] about boundaryless HR.
CF: Tell us a little bit about the term boundaryless HR and how AI is at the center of it.
SS: Boundaryless HR tackles the shifts that make human performance a shared accountability for all. We’re seeing HR move from being a specialized, siloed function to co-creating and integrating across all functions.
Today’s business problems are increasingly complex, and they demand multiple disciplines to come together. In our study, only 15% of executives strongly agree that their organization values the work performed by HR. That’s staggering, right? It can get better, and the way that we’re going to be able to move that dial is through boundaryless HR.
All of HR today is built around the notion of jobs rather than skills. AI can now identify skills of workers inside or outside of the organization and flexibly deploy them to the evolving, working needs. We see tremendous human and business impact. Empowering the identity of projects and interests through talent marketplace can unlock tens of thousands of hours of untapped productivity by removing the boundaries of typical jobs.
Related content: Simona Spelman, U.S. Human Capital Leader at Deloitte, talks about why focusing on the human factor of HR is essential.
CF: How does GenAI impact the employee life cycle, and what does it mean for the function of HR?
SS: GenAI can help automate some of the HR work that professionals do right now; therefore, you’re improving efficiency and cost. You’re answering questions with QA chatbots. You’re automatically generating reports. You’re processing HR transactions that are triggered by data.
Secondly, you’re improving human outcomes, and that includes effectiveness. It includes work outcomes and workforce experience. GenAI can automatically call up information for call center workers. It can generate first drafts of job descriptions, policies, and training for professionals.
Third, AI performs activities for humans that are time-consuming or difficult to scale. Using AI, the top 100 prospects for a job can be identified and sent hyper-personalized invitations to apply. It can offer learning based on individuals’ unique preferences and pace. You can develop new skills to advance AI solutions. With all of the potential and capacity that this AI-enabled technology has created, it makes it an exciting time for HR professionals.
CF: What are the most important trends you noticed in this year’s report?
SS: A focus on the human factor is key to making progress with boundaryless HR. We found in our research that leaders know that these trends are important — 74% of them said as much. But here’s the other statistic: only 10% are actually doing something about it. That’s mind blowing.
Those who can bridge this gap from knowing to doing on this year’s trends are more likely to produce better business and human outcomes.
Human sustainability has to be at the center of everything. It’s the ability for an organization to create value for people, as human beings, not just as workers. It’s important that when you are done doing whatever you are transforming that you leave your humans with greater health and well being, stronger skills, employability, and good jobs. You can’t lose sight of that.
The bottom line is human and business outcomes together drive performance.
CF: What do you think is standing in the way of better understanding human sustainability?
SS: Old thinking is getting in the way of unlocking human performance. The proxies of the past allowed organizations to measure progress against traditional boundaries of work. It was traditional boundaries in a much simpler world, but work is now increasingly boundaryless.
The workplace is no longer a specific place, and many workers are no longer traditional employees. We think of and measure how organizations should operate as a monolithic, one size fits all culture when most organizations are made up of an abundance of microcultures.
We use employee engagement to evaluate relationships, but what we should really be measuring is trust. We use the proxy of productivity to measure worker activity without fully understanding what a desired human or business outcome is. We measure hours worked, calls completed, or wedges produced, but all of those metrics were part of an industrial revolution.
We’re in a different world, and we have to acknowledge that our work is far more complex and human-focused than ever before.
CF: If we can’t use some of these old practices, what do we do instead?
SS: This is a question that’s been asked of us by many leaders around the world who recognize this need for new metrics. Interestingly enough, 17% of respondents say that their organizations are “very effective” at evaluating the value created by workers and know how to unleash that value.
Here is the good news: in this era of human-centered work, new sources of data and intelligence and technologies, like Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence, can help organizations shift from measuring things like productivity to measuring human performance.
CF: One topic at the core of this is skills. We’re seeing more organizations looking at skills for making decisions around work and workers, but across certain industries, there is a deficit of skills. How can skills create better insights for us going forward?
SS: Organizations should consider getting creative about sourcing for skills rather than just considering job experience in a tight labor market where there are skills deficits. This is a great example of how AI can drive talent intelligence.
By using AI to understand the capabilities workers have that are correlated to their success, even if these workers have never had a similar job before, organizations can open up doors of opportunity and movement to millions who previously could have been shut out.
There’s an example of a telecommunications company that needed machine learning skills. To find qualified employees, they analyzed the profiles of thousands of workers who identified themselves as machine-learning experts to understand the aggregation of skills, experience, and pathways taken to develop these skills. They created an algorithm to search and hire for those skills, increasing the talent pool by at least three times. Once you start thinking that creatively, it really does move the dial.
CF: A lot will depend on the quality of the skills data that we’re getting. Have you seen anything in the research that challenges these outcomes?
SS: We need to make skills data transparent. The issue is making sure that how we collect that data, how we share it transparently, and how we use it responsibly creates benefits for both the organization and the worker.
With AI, data transparency and verification are advancing, especially the notion of detecting skills in the flow of work. We wrote the transparency paradox, and it’s all about how transparency can help. But transparency can also hinder. Workforce trust in a world where nearly everything can now be transparent is important.
Our research reveals that workers are open to sharing their data, but many want to do so only if their employer clearly tells them how their data is collected and used. They also want to know the benefits that come with it, like new opportunities for growth or fairer pay or promotion.
To maintain this trust, organizations need to harness the power of the new sources of data, and AI has to be part of the conversation.
CF: What do you see organizations doing so their workers can learn about generative AI?
SS: There’s something you should read about in the trends called imagination deficit, which is the gap between increasing technology capability and human creativity and applying it.
The only way to deal with that gap is to focus on creating digital playgrounds where people have the ability to practice, to get confident, and to focus on imagination, curiosity, and empathy – those are the skills that are going to be required.
If you can create those digital playgrounds for people, you can potentially get ahead of all this.
CF: Any final thoughts to share?
SS: No matter where you sit in the organization, think about the power you have to close that knowing-and-doing gap. You have the power to bring human outcomes and business outcomes together to drive that human performance.
If you can help solve this, your organization can and will create value for all of the people that it touches, and think about how powerful that would be for all of us.
Watch this entire conversation with Deloitte from Cultivate ’24, now on demand.