Organisations will thrive if they allow employees to choose, says report

The best way to unleash employee potential is to empower them with agency and choice over what they do, according to the 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital trends report.

“We’ve lived in a world where we assumed organizations knew best what skills workers needed to bring to the table,” said the report in a section titled ‘Beyond Reskilling: Unleashing Workforce Potential”. “But the pandemic taught us that potential comes to fuller fruition when workers are allowed to take more initiative. Workforce potential is not about what workers were recruited to do, or what they are certified to do, or even what organizations or leaders want them to do next. It’s about giving workers more freedom to choose how they can best help tackle critical business problems as organizations and ecosystems evolve.”

One way to do this is through opportunity marketplaces, the report said.

It laid out the advantages of opportunity marketplaces for organisations and employees alike:

1. Opportunity marketplaces unearth information about workers’ passions, skills and strengths that organisations may have not known about earlier. This knowledge helps organisations to better match workers with different projects, which goes a long way in improving the organisation’s performance.
2. Workers stay motivated and engaged because they are able to do what matters to them and use the strengths and skills they are most interested in utilising.

The report also urged organisations to move beyond traditional workforce planning models. “Historically, workforce planning has relied on competency frameworks, static job descriptions, and linear career paths to define and organize work and the workforce,” it said. “Top-down approaches based on identifying business needs and then finding or developing the skills to put against them will always be slower than approaches that allow workers to self-select based on their interests and abilities.”

About the report

The 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report surveyed 6,000 professionals in 99 countries across every industry, sector, and region of the globe.

The report’s authors said that they had set out to understand what organisations must do to go from “survive” to “thrive” during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Read the complete report here.

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