- The pace of change has increased drastically for workers, requiring organizations to rethink how to operate.
- Talent intelligence platforms have the power to put HR in the driver’s seat of an AI transformation.
- Organizations future-proofing their workforce are shifting away from traditional career ladders to a skills-based approach with the right infrastructure.
Your workforce needs to change to meet future demands, and the time to make those changes is now.
That’s the message from PwC’s inaugural Workforce Radar research report, which examines the future needs of workforces and provides practical steps business leaders and CHROs can do right now to make those changes possible.
PwC research examined the ways of work in more than 100 organizations, including input from more than 18,000 workers, 2,500 business leaders, and 1,800 HR professionals. The outcomes look at five workforce signals that are key to empowering enterprise-wide transformation:
- Leadership and trust
- Workforce balance sheet
- Talent magnet-talent factory
- Location
- The intelligent enterprise
Eightfold VP of Talent-centered Transformation Jason Cerrato joined Anthony Abbatiello, Leader of Human Capital Consulting Business at PwC, during HR Tech to discuss the requirements for an intelligent enterprise transformation to be successful.
During their discussion, they covered why the need for change now differs from ever before, how AI can facilitate this change, and what makes a skills-based approach the right fit for transformation.
Related content: Anthony Abbatiello, Leader of Human Capital Consulting Business at PwC, shares three reasons why the moment for change now is different than ever before.
Why this moment for change is different
The one constant in business is that it’s always changing, but this moment in time feels different. Abbatiello says one reason is the volume of change the average employee experiences in a single year of work.
“If you look 10 years ago, the average number of changes that an employee went through per year was about one,” he said. “Today, it’s over 10.”
A higher rate of change demands a new way of working. Economic environments are also changing faster, and CEOs are looking to increase agility and resiliency in their organizations.
“We found that 45% of CEOs believe that organizations are not economically viable in the next 10 years,” Abbatiello said.
That’s a major change from Fortune 500 companies operating from a legacy mindset as recently as five years ago.
To adapt, organizations need to fully focus on workforces, from listening to employees’ needs to understanding the skill sets needed and the skills their workforce already possesses. This is not just a strategy, but a necessity for survival in the changing business landscape.
Related content: Jason Cerrato, VP of Talent-centered Transformation at Eightfold, talks about the ways talent intelligence can impact business goals.
How the workforce is changing
As this need for change becomes more apparent, core teams are shrinking. Increased productivity and revenue are needed from workers with fewer team members to do the work, meaning finding the right talent for these roles is critical.
“The nature of work and the expectation continues to increase,” Abbatiello said. “We haven’t seen the amount of efficiency that we’re expecting. And now, with generative AI, it is starting to become more of the practical and pragmatic implementation of all these organizations behind us.”
GenAI can be a useful tool — in fact, 63% of executives in PwC’s Workforce Radar research agree it can be effective and efficient in creating work opportunities — but less than half of workers surveyed agree.
“There continues to be this dissonance,” Abbatiello said. “When we talk to CHROs in our research, most of them are saying, ‘Yeah, we know we need it. We don’t know how we’re going to pay for it. We don’t know what’s the right place to start.’”
“We’re still thinking about it in the old ways versus how do we define the way the CHRO becomes the hero to drive this, to find opportunities to free cash flow, and to create opportunities to get the efficiencies with generative AI,” he continued.
Organizations currently succeeding in becoming intelligent enterprises seek to solve specific challenges using AI.
“The organizations that we’re partnering with at Eightfold that are going on this transformation journey — the ones that are doing this really well — are tying these initiatives to a specific business problem, something that the executive leadership team couldn’t ignore and that they couldn’t solve with their existing tools or their existing approach,” Cerrato said.
They aren’t just improving HR for the sake of HR — they’re looking for ways to transform the business and make HR the leader in this space.
Talent intelligence is at the center of HR transformation
How can talent intelligence, a strategic blend of AI and skills analysis, help drive meaningful business results? It starts by giving you a holistic view of your talent and a comprehensive awareness of your current capabilities.
“Part of [talent intelligence] is looking at [talent] in a more comprehensive, complete way, but also in a more predictive, proactive way to prepare for where the work is going and what the business needs are versus historical tracking of how this has always been done,” Cerrato said. “The other thing is that this is more than just optimizing processes, and the way you’ve done this historically — this truly is transformation.”
Having that better understanding of existing talent via a talent intelligence platform can also help break down work silos and create a more collaborative work environment. It also highlights skills gaps that must be addressed for continued growth and success, which is where this work gets exciting.
“I’ve talked to a lot of organizations that have very constant measures around attrition and retention,” Cerrato said, “but not necessarily development, mobility, and cross-pollination of moving people around. So how do you create that talent factory as well?”
Related content: The future of talent planning demands a skills-based approach. It’s why we created Talent Design to align skills to needs.
Why the right infrastructure matters
It starts with having the proper infrastructure in place. It may require flattening your organization and abandoning the traditional career ladder mindset in favor of skills-based roles.
“The [organizations] that have been very successful have focused on very specific problems that didn’t try to boil the ocean and do everything at once to really prove out how these new technologies and this new visibility could tackle that problem and drive some type of outcome for the business,” Cerrato said.
Shifting to a skills-based approach requires looking at the skills data a talent intelligence platform can provide and determining skills adjacencies and learnability.
It can also help you decide whether to retain and reskill current talent, redeploy talent into new roles that are better fits for their skill sets, redesign the entire organization, or supplement talent with gig or contract workers externally.
“If you don’t have that visibility … this gives you the granularity to have more strategic capability to address it in a variety of ways,” Cerrato said. “There’s no silver bullet but a lot of different dials and levers that you can pull, and that creates agility.”
Let the technology lead
There’s an adage about not letting technology lead the business — make the business lead the technology. After working on the PwC Workforce Radar research and considering the possibilities with AI, Abbatiello says the cliché feels outdated.
“I don’t think we’re there anymore,” he said. “The technology can lead the opportunity to get to the business outcome, but you have to know the business problem you’re solving. And that’s where the bigger opportunity is — around technology.”
Cerrato agreed, adding many business practices will still need to change, from policies and culture to leadership and management styles. AI also brings an interesting new component that other technologies couldn’t before — the ability to learn and grow with your organization.
“One of the ways that this changes [ways of work] is the data becomes increasingly dynamic,” he said. “It’s constantly learning. It’s constantly changing. It’s evolving, and this requires a more continuous approach. The data will tell you what to pay attention to, leaving the status quo, and this becomes a living, breathing, continuous, dynamic thing.”
Read more about how skills-based planning can help you build an organization ready for the future with Talent Design.
