Deloitte Predictions for 2017:Everything Is Becoming Digital

(Jan.13, 2017, /HRoot.com/)The following are the top 11 predictions that come from Deloitte’s lastest report Predictions for 2017: Everything is Becoming Digital.

Prediction 1: Organizational Design Will Be Challenged Everywhere

For more than 100 years, companies have been set up for scalable efficiency. We build functional teams that run product design, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing, finance—all with a focus on scale. Today, in the world of rapidly changing markets, and digital products and services,

the traditional concept of “scale” and “efficiency” no longer applies.

In 2017, companies will discuss and struggle with this mightily, and some of the changes should include:

·  Formally creating small team structures

·  Radically reducing the number of job levels to incent people to strive for results and learning, not just promotions, as they move from job to job

·  Changing reward systems to reward team success, not just individual success

·  Redesigning goal management, so that goals can be updated quarterly, not annually, and goals are transparent and shared publicly

·  Promoting young professionals into leadership early, so they can rapidly contribute to team success

·  Teaching managers to manage “projects” not “people”

·  Providing “career coaches” and “sponsors” instead of “managers” to help people to grow

·  Creating always-on learning, and a culture of exploration and discussion to enable continuous invention

·  Sponsoring hackathons and other collaborative development programs to let people at all levels contribute

·  Implementing information systems that deliver real-time dashboards and reports, so that all teams can operate with the same insights and perspectives

Prediction 2: Culture and Engagement Will Remain Top Priorities

In 2017, the topics of culture and engagement will remain top of mind for business and HR leaders around the world.

What exactly is organizational culture? Quite simply, it is the reward systems and implicit behavior that takes place when nobody is looking. Part of culture is defining a purpose for your organization.

Prediction 3: Real-Time Feedback and Analytics Will Explode in Maturity

This leads me to my third prediction. Driven by the need to understand and improve engagement, and the continuous need to measure and improve employee productivity, real time feedback and analytics will explode.

The feedback tools market is now more than $300 million in size and growing at more than 100 percent annually. 21 Most major HR software tools are now embedding pulse survey tools, activity streams, and other techniques for feedback. For 2017, it is critical for companies to build a strategy to automate and instrument your entire range of employee experiences—and develop what I like to think of as a “feedback architecture.”

Prediction 4: A New Generation of Performance Management Tools Will Emerge

Today, driven by the power of innovation,dozens of new companies are trying to reinvent the performance management tools market.

Over the last 15 years, companies have shifted from a very top-down, process-driven approach to employee performance management (and annual appraisals) to a much more agile, continuous, feedback-based approach. This revolution is still in its early phases, with most companies implementing things like regular checkins, OKR (objectives and key results) or agile goal practices, continuous coaching, and even models in which employees have one “sponsor” and another “project manager.” This new world is being invented before our eyes.

Prediction 5: A Focus on “Human Performance” and Wellbeing Will Become a Critical Part of HR, Talent, and Leadership

In many ways, the entire topic of human performance comes down to this simple picture of the work environment. Are people healthy? Do they have habits and information to stay energetic and well-rested? Do they feel focused and do managers help them to focus? And, of course, do they have the skills, support, training, and coaching to do their jobs?

Prediction 6: Focus on Employee Experience Will Overcome Process Design in HR

Many HR departments have started renaming themselves. Some call themselves “people operations” and others call themselves things like “people and culture.” The message here is not to simply find a way to seem more strategic, but actually change the identity of what HR organizations do.

In 2017, the disciplines of design thinking, experience design, and digital app design will start to go mainstream within HR. While companies have been redesigning their buildings, benefit plans, vacation policies, and other various programs, they have not necessarily been focused on what each individual employee

experiences.

Prediction 7: Digital HR and Learning Will Help Us to Reinvent L&D and HR Systems

Over the last five years, companies have invested billions of dollars into integrated, cloud-based, core HR systems. Yet new research from Cedar Crestone shows that, despite this investment, employees are still far from satisfied with their HR systems and solutions. A solution is right before us. HR organizations now have to learn how to “be digital,” not just “buy digital products.”

Digital solutions in HR (and learning) mean several things.

·  Hackathons and MVP (minimal viable products) work to get new apps and programs out the door quickly, with iterative improvement over time.

·  Adoption of digital tools and design.

·  Increasing transparency.

·  Standardizing platforms.

·  Bringing heterogeneous platform experiences together.

·  Moving HR teams around.

·  Data-driven everything.

Prediction 8: The Leadership Market Will Start a Steady Process of Reinvention

One of the most important things HR organizations should do is to make sure that the organization has a ready supply of strong, well-aligned leaders. Leadership development (which is more than a $14 billion industry 33 ) remains a high priority for HR and continues to be a challenge every year. The older models of leadership in which leaders were expected to set strategy and lock down goals are simply not keeping up. So many of the traditional leadership models are being reinvented.

Prediction 9: Diversity, Inclusion, and Unconscious Bias Will Become a Top Priority

The topic of diversity has been on the HR agenda for decades. Once considered a compliance program, it has now become a business strategy. In 2017, HR organizations need to put this topic high on the agenda—and make sure that your organization is capturing the right information, sharing it formally,and developing a holistic inclusion and diversity program which touches all of your talent practices.

Prediction 10: The L&D Function Will Continue to Struggle

We started our research in the early 2000s by studying e-learning and the rapid adoption of learning management technology. But what has really changed for 2017 is the fact that today L&D should embrace “self-directed learning” and truly build a “l(fā)earning experience” that helps individuals at all levels to learn all of the time. This means adopting microlearning and an open video learning platform:

·  Highlighting the issues of learning culture for leaders

·  Prompting people to look at job rotation and continuous onboarding programs

·  Helping leaders to understand that coaching, developmental assignments, and career conversations are the foundation of building a learning organization

Prediction 11: The Future of Work Is Here and HR Is in the Hot Seat

The essential issue we face in 2017is the rapid commoditization of AI technology (speech recognition, natural language processing, sensors, and robotics) and the impact that could have on almost every job. The real “future of work” issue is all about making jobs “more human”—redesigning jobs, redesigning work, and redesigning organizations so that the “people side” of work has even more importance and focus than ever.