Businesses today are experiencing a paradigm shift in terms of how they operate and create value. We are well into an era where the largest taxi provider doesn’t own a car or the largest accomodation provider owns no real estate. Be it a neighbourhood startup or a historical Fortune 500 stronghold, digital is fundamentally disrupting the way organizations work. One of the largest consumer goods companies today drives more than 50 percent of its product initiatives through collaboration with outside innovators. According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2016 survey, 82 percent of executives feel industry boundaries are indeed being erased and organizations and their workforces can be seen migrating from product economies to digital network ecosystems.
The emergence of digital ecosystems have brought us to the brink of a revolution that will radically alter every aspect of work today – how it is organized, learnt, performed, owned and even supervised.
Redesigning how work is organized – Digital is forcing us to relook how we organize the value generation process. Organizations are going asset light and relying more than ever on real-time collaboration and network models to organize their value generation process. Businesses are going beyond rigid operating models to organize work as a dynamic aggregation of collaborations and partnerships.
Revolutionize how work is performed and enabled – Digital advancements in the form of analytics, wearables and collaboration software are altering work practices like never before. Today’s millennial workforce expects real time collaboration and empowerment to make localized decisions. An evolved form of scientific management using digital to slice and measure work – ‘Digital Taylorism’ – is becoming a popular measure for improving employee efficiency today.
Re-invention of learning – Evolving digital ecosystems are demanding rapid turnaround times for new and niche skills. Organizations are challenged to constantly upgrade skills of their workforce to keep them motivated to deliver. Learning content delivery also needs to be differentiated to cater to a multitude of learning styles and adapted to the accessibility of an employee.
Rise of the ‘extended workforce’ – The definition of an employee itself is being enlarged to encompass the digitally enabled fluid talent pools. As organizations begin to employ “Talent in the cloud” services provided by companies like Elance and TopCoder, it becomes critical that they simultaneously adapt their engagement practices to effectively integrate these employees into the organization.
Redefinition of organizational leadership – Leadership practices themselves need to evolve to match the need for agility in today’s network based economy. Today’s networked ecosystems are forcing leaders to make decisions quickly and sometimes even without formal authority.
This evolution, in both work and the workforce, begs the question, “How can organizations continue to drive shareholder value?” While talent management is one of the key levers to achieve this goal, we focus on employee engagement and how it can be managed to deliver sustained value in this era of digital ecosystems.
To address the needs of today’s digitally powered network economy, organizations would need to fundamentally alter their approach to employee engagement –
1. ‘Internet of talent’ – The new rules of engagement – Organizations should rethink engagement as a means for sustainable value creation across the ecosystem and not just a measure to drive employee happiness and satisfaction. In the taxi aggregator’s parlance, in an era where the employer is an app which can be easily changed by a simple login/logout, engagement means the challenge to prevent this switch and maintain drivers’ engagement. Organizations need to define their unique ‘digital culture’ around a shared purpose that permeates across the entire ecosystem and prevents any disruption to the value creation process.
2. Rise of new customers and competitors – Unexpected skill alliances and talent wars – Network based partnerships between parallel industries will require organizations to map, foresee and preempt engagement scenarios that bring in talent competitors from unimaginable places. A taxi aggregator and a local hospital are competing for common talent today – nurses that help deliver vaccinations for health initiatives. HR needs to recognize its newest breed of customers with fluid roles across this extended workforce and upgrade their engagement platforms to serve their needs.
The aforementioned approach would need to be well supported by modern-day enablers for engagement –
a. Matching the digital pace with predictive agility and productivity enhancement – Organizations today need to move away from a periodic and reactive form of engagement and become proactive, analytics-driven, engagement powerhouses capitalizing on the wealth of live data being churned out every day. Real-time data analysis can drive engagement through dynamic role mapping, active feedback, geo-located safety alerts and communication of customer recognition. In addition, engagement will have to evolve to motivate employees by complementing their abilities with “digital co-workers” in the form of bots, drones and avatars or with analytics powered wearables that work as peers and provide live information, suggest corrective actions and even share work.
b. Learning continuously – It is about time organizations embrace continuous learning as a core competency and respond with agility to stay ahead of competition. Leveraging digitally augmented learning, crowdsourcing and innovation platforms to evolve their engagement practices is essential for organizations to keep their talent and themselves relevant in the ecosystem.
c. Leading horizontally – Leaders need to look for ways to influence without authority (horizontal leadership) by proactively tapping into live conversations and responding with agility to the demands of their networked workforce. Technology is already improving communications by allowing the leaders to engage with their teams, or the broader organization, easily and quickly. Leaders can ensure sustainable value creation through innovative approaches like decentralization of authority and creation of self-interest digital talent pools that drive engagement autonomously.
As organizations rapidly adopt “outcome” driven engagement methods across the network, it is important to be cognizant of the need for adequate risk management coupled with effective communication while rolling out any enterprise-wise engagement initiative. Widely publicized implications of ‘Digital Taylorism’ and rising privacy concerns serve to remind us that we need to digitalize not dehumanize the workforce.
About Authors: Jayesh Pandey is Managing Director – Accenture Strategy, Talent and Organization, India and
Shounak Gadre is Principal – Accenture Strategy, Talent and Organization, India
