By Frederick ASIAMAH
Ghanaian businesses and human resource professionals have welcomed a new report detailing ten trends businesses need to factor into their management of talents.
The report of the Deloitte 2017 Global Human Capital Trends survey was presented to about 30 professionals, mainly Human Resource (HR) practitioners at the 3rd edition of the Deloitte Talent Management Platform (DTMP) in Accra last Tuesday.
The authors of the report, after interviewing business leaders across the world, analyse that the top ten social, economic, political, technological, and cultural issues facing business and HR leaders and employees worldwide are: Organization of the future, Careers and learning, Talent acquisition, Employee experience, Performance management; Leadership and Digital HR. The sixth to tenth issues are People analytics, Diversity and inclusion, the augmented workforce; Robotics, cognitive computing, and AI.
Essentially, the trends in this year’s report identify 10 areas in which organizations will need to close the gap between the pace of change and the challenges of work and talent management.
This year, the survey included more than 10,000 respondents from 140 countries, fuelling the analysis of the social, economic, political, technological, and cultural issues facing business and HR leaders and employees worldwide.
The ensuing report is titled: “Rewriting the rules for the digital age.”
Tech savvy workers
Presenting details of the report, Mr Joseph Olofinsola, Consulting Partner, Deloitte Nigeria, highlighted that technology has advanced and so processes need to advance in order to catch up with technology.
Besides, the majority of employees today are immersed in technology and so are much more advanced; they understand technology. This is why “You need to start rethinking,” he told the business and HR executives.
On the top most issue of “Organisation of the future: arriving now,’ for instance, Mr Olofinsola said “The era when people work as individuals is going. Gone! The organisation of the future is not going to be driven by individuals; it’s going to be driven by teams.”
Therefore, going forward, businesses and HR executives “have to say that we cannot work in the say way anymore; we have to have agile structures.”
When speaking on the second ranked issue of ‘Career and Learning’, his key message to his audience was that “You as HR practitioner should help workers find their career paths.”
When it comes to performance management, “Managers need to move away from being managers and start becoming coaches,” he stressed.
Acceptance
Generally, the HR executives in attendance were in tune with the issues raised, some sharing experiences and lessons learned.
There was unison that HR professionals need to realise that today’s workforce, made up largely of the younger generation, is fast-paced and agile. Therefore, managers need to get agile on the job, otherwise, they are going to get frustrated in their jobs.