Deloitte recently released their 2016 report on the global human capital trends. It’s actually a pretty solid report which surveys 7,000 people in over 130 countries around the world to identify what these trends actually are and what organizations should be doing about them. Of course, they aren’t the only organization to offer such reports but the findings are still interesting and they do quite a good job of putting it all together so. I also just released the podcast I did with the Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte where we explore some of these things. First, let’s take a look at the top 10 trends from 2015 which you can see below:
From left to right it’s quite clear that “culture & engagement ranks” #1 on the list followed by “leadership” and “learning & development” all the way down to trend #10 which is “people data everywhere.” One of the things I really liked about this chart was that it separated the level of importance from the organizational readiness so you could see the gap. Now let’s compare that with the results from the 2016 report which you can see below:
Just in case you can’t see the image the top 10 human capital trends for 2016 are (in order):
- Organizational design
- Leadership
- Culture
- Engagement
- Learning
- Design thinking
- Changing the skills of the HR organization
- People analytics
- Digital HR
- Workforce management
Here are my thoughts and impressions from reading the 2016 report.
Name changes makes things confusing
Some of the themes from the 2016 report came from the 2015 report but were renamed something else which makes it a bit confusing to digest. For example “reinventing HR” (from the 2015) report vs “changing the skills of the HR organization” (from the 2016 report) or “HR & people analytics” (from the 2015 report) vs “people analytics” or “digital HR” (from the 2016 report). I always like to see consistency simply because it makes it easier for business leaders to track changes from one year to the next. I know that the human capital trends report is something that is discussed in The Future of Work Community and the business leaders there do follow it quite closely so making sure that everyone is one the same page is important, simple, but important.
Trends vs fads
In order for something to actually be classified as a trend it needs to have some sort of staying power otherwise it’s just a fad. So when I see something like “organizational design” appear in the top spot while “performance management” and “machines as talent” vanish altogether, it sort of makes me wonder what’s going on here. Now I know both of these things are still very much at the top of the list, at least for the executives that I’m speaking with, so it’s curious to see them vanish. Perhaps, in addition to helping us determine what the top 10 trends are, this report can also help us identify the fads that aren’t worth pursuing.
Organizational design
I’m not surprised to see this take the #1 spot here although I am surprised that it didn’t show up previously. I created a framework on the 5 types of organizational design models that I see emerging and I get emails about this topic a few times a week from leaders who want to know what their options are here. It’s clear that the traditional hierarchy just isn’t cutting any more but what are the alternatives? Is holacracy the best option? What about having a totally flat structure? This is definitely an area to pay attention to as I expect to see much more change happen here.
Culture and engagement
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that engagement is dying. I’ll have much more on this in separate articles but I really don’t see engagement as a metric that we need to be hanging our hats on any more. It had it’s time in the sun and I think we are moving on to something else, for me this evolution is all about designing employee experiences, but again, that’s a whole article for another day. In the meantime what I thought was interesting was that in the 2015 report culture and engagement were grouped together but in the 2016 report they were broken apart. You can always bank on seeing culture or engagement make a top 5 list for almost any report by any company.
The employee experience is mentioned, but not enough
I probably have around 150+ in depth one-on-one conversations with business leaders every year. Some of these are publicly recorded as episodes of the future of work podcast that anyone can listen to, and some of them happen offline during private events or functions. Perhaps one of the biggest themes I’m seeing emerging is the design of employee experiences. Not coincidentally, this is also one of the most requested topics I asked to keynote on. I have a lot more work to do in this area but I’ve already created several articles around the employee experience which you can check out here.
What now?
While reports are always great to take a look at and get ideas from, there are many of them from many different companies. Oftentimes they don’t agree with each other and their findings can be down right contradictory. So my advice to organizations is always, “act on what you find by researching your own company but be aware of the findings that research shows about other companies.” In other words, focus on your company first, but just be aware of what other folks out there are doing.
These are my initial reactions from the report which overall I thought did a great job of explaining and breaking down the top 10 trends they identified for 2016. Did you read it? If so, what stood out for you and what did you think about the findings?
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. You can invite Jacob to keynote your next conference, subscribe to his videos on Youtube, check our his podcast, or subscribe to his newsletter!
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