Firms will fail to maximise the commercial potential of new technologies unless they first get their people strategies right. Contributor Peter Cave-Gibbs, Regional Market Leader for technology – Korn Ferry.
In the ‘old-world’, technology was a neat industry vertical, like the industrial, consumer or life sciences sectors. In the last decade however, technology has taken on another dimension, permeating all sectors horizontally to becoming both a driver and enabler of change.
This year we have fully arrived in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Companies across sectors are increasingly turning to technologies within this bracket to automate tasks and better understand the reams of data that exist within their organisations, all with the aim of gaining the upper hand on their competition.
What does this mean for talent?
There are numerous studies forecasting a dystopian future where we’re all replaced by robots. Oxford University recently published a paper estimating that 47 percent of jobs in the US are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years.
On the other hand, evolutions in technology are fuelling a bitter talent war, as businesses across sectors squabble over the relatively few individuals able to develop and apply advanced technologies within their organisations. This has led the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, to warn that, with the coming of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, the UK will need a complementary skills revolution or risk mass unemployment.
Korn Ferry’s recent Future of Work report reiterates the seriousness of the problem, forecasting that by 2030 the global labour-skills shortage in the TMT sector will reach 4.3 million workers. This is equivalent to 59 times the number of employees of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The tech skills crisis is being aggravated by the fact that many of today’s business leaders suffer from a technology blind spot. Faced with increasing pressure to improve performance and generate greater returns for shareholders, CEOs are turning to technology, but failing to consider whether they have the right people to use it or work alongside it.
Where does this leave organisations?
In a world being rocked by digital disruption, an organisation’s ability to respond quickly to unforeseen market shifts can be the difference between survival or obsolescence. With agility increasingly key to success, business leaders need to consider how their talent strategy both embodies and drives this.
Traditional talent strategies, which recruit based on role, will simply not do when capability is critical. Instead, organisations will need a talent strategy that allows them to harness the gifts of talented individuals and unleash them in a way that will deliver real market advantage. This is less about “management” and more about “liberation”.
To highlight this, a recent report from Korn Ferry, Reimagining Talent Management, looks at how businesses can anticipate and mitigate the impact of disruption – technological, social or economic, through changing their approach to people.
Reimagining Talent Management
Business leaders must become more future focused when it comes to talent. Whether an organisation is already feeling the full force of disruption or whether this is imminent, it’s imperative that business leaders, and by extension HR teams, begin to build relationships with talented individuals that they may need in future. Nokia provides a prime example of this approach. Here the team scans the market for potential people they might hire in the future to keep their network “open and vibrant”.
Forward thinking organisations are also working to align talent teams with the strategic planning function within their business, enabling them to gain a fuller understanding of market conditions now and in the future. Equipped with this knowledge, talent teams can build a more informed picture of the people needed to steer and support the business going forward.
Organisations can search for talent in untapped sources, but unless business leaders have considered how their organisation appeals to diverse employees, they’ll still find themselves fishing in a limited talent pool. Turning to the tech sector as an example, poor gender diversity within technology organisations has been well-documented. If employers within the sector want to broaden their talent pool, they need to position themselves as more accommodating, a move many are already making.
In a similar vein, employees today and millennials in particular, want to work for an organisation that’s agile rather than bureaucratic. Organisations of all sizes and across sectors need to contemplate their employer brands in a way they didn’t need to five years ago, to ensure they’re appealing to people of all demographics.
There no question about it, digital transformation is now key to business success – but this starts with people, not technology. People provide the skills and strategic thinking critical to making the implementation of any technology a triumph. It’s down to people whether technology is adopted and whether it really generates ROI.
