[attach id=577818 size="medium"][/attach]

Driven by the ongoing digital revolution and demographic, political and social forces, almost 90 per cent of HR and business leaders rate building the organisation of the future as their highest priority. In its 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report, ‘Rewriting the rules for the digital age’, Deloitte issues a call-to-action for companies to completely reconsider their organisational structure, talent and HR strategies to keep pace with digital disruption.

“Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate and these innovations have completely transformed the way we live, work and communicate,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

“Ultimately, the digital world of work has changed the rules of business. Organisations should shift their entire mindset and behaviours to ensure they can lead, organise, motivate, manage and engage the 21st century workforce, or risk being left behind.”

With more than 10,000 HR and business leaders in 140 countries weighing in, this is Deloitte’s largest and most extensive Global Human Capital Trends survey to date. The hallmark study reveals that leaders are turning to new organisation models. However, as business productivity often fails to keep pace with technological progress, Deloitte finds that HR is struggling to keep up, with only 38 per cent of HR professionals rating their capabilities as “good” or “excellent”.

“As technology, artificial intelligence and robotics transform business models and work, companies should start to rethink their management practices and organisational models,” said Brett Walsh, global human capital leader, Deloitte Global. “The future of work is driving the development of a set of ‘new rules’ that organisations should follow if they want to remain competitive.”

As the workforce evolves, organisations are focusing on networks of teams, and recruiting and developing the right people is more consequential than ever. Survey respondents point to talent acquisition as one of the biggest issues organisations face, with 81 per cent of companies citing it as “very important” or “important”.

Ultimately, the digital world of work has changed the rules of business

However, while Deloitte finds that cognitive technologies have helped leaders bring talent acquisition into the digital world, only 22 per cent of survey respondents describe their companies as “excellent” at building a differentiated employee experience once talent is acquired. In fact, the gap between talent acquisition’s importance and the ability to meet the need increased by 14 percentage points over the last year.

It is critical to take an integrated approach to building the employee experience, with a large part of it centring on ‘careers and learning’, which rose to second place on HRs’ and business leaders’ priority lists, with 83 per cent of those surveyed ranking it as “important” or “very important”.

Deloitte finds that as organisations shed legacy systems and dismantle yesterday’s hierarchies, it’s important to place a higher premium on implementing immersive learning experiences to develop leaders who can thrive in today’s digital world and appeal to diverse workforce needs.

The importance of leadership as a driver of the employee experience remains strong, as the percentage of companies with experiential programmes for leaders rose nearly 20 percentage points from 47 per cent in 2015 to 64 per cent this year. Deloitte believes there is still a crucial need, however, for stronger and different types of leaders, particularly as today’s business world demands those who demonstrate more agile and digital capabilities.

As organisations become more digital, leaders should consider disruptive technologies for every aspect of their human capital needs. Deloitte finds that 56 per cent of companies are redesigning their HR programmes to leverage digital and mobile tools, and 33 per cent are already using some form of AI applications to deliver HR solutions. “HR and other business leaders tell us that they are being asked to create a digital workplace in order to become an ‘organisation of the future’,” said Erica Volini, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and national managing director of the US human capital practice.

The trends in this year’s report show signs of reinvention on all fronts, including jobs themselves. Organisations should approach external talent, robotics, cognitive tools and AI systems as the ‘new, augmented workforce’.

This year, 41 per cent of respondents reported having fully implemented or having made significant progress in adopting cognitive and AI technologies within their workforce. But, only 15 per cent of global executives report they are ready to manage a workforce with people, robots and AI working side by side.

While many jobs are being reinvented through technology and some tasks are being automated, Deloitte’s research shows that the essentially human aspects of work – such as empathy, communication and problem solving – are becoming more important than ever.

This shift is not only driving an increased focus on reskilling, but also on the importance of people analytics to help organisations gain even greater insights into the capabilities of their workforce. However, organisations continue to fall short in this area, with only eight per cent reporting they have usable data, and only nine per cent believing they have a good understanding of the talent factors that drive performance in this new world of work.