Finding, keeping, nurturing and engaging talent has emerged as a primary issue that organisations must master to succeed in the decade ahead. Over the past 10 years, talent management has made a critical shift from an art to a science. It is no longer something that some organisations are good at and some not, but a quantifiable discipline that affects the bottom line.
There is a catch, however. To succeed in making talent focus a discipline, leaders must have access to meaningful analytics, reliable technology and forward-looking processes. Our research shows how organisations can use technology to enhance their approach to talent, and the technologies it will take to get there.
Towers Watson recently collaborated with Oxford Economics to study the approaches that 350 HR leaders are taking to master talent issues. The majority of respondents were undertaking transformative initiatives to rethink their global talent strategies, business models and organisational approaches in response to rapid shifts in the marketplace.
The conclusion is that as organisations grapple with the transformation of their businesses and the re-skilling of workforces, they must prepare for long-term, permanent structural shifts in demand for labour.
To prepare for the future, HR must be equipped with the right analytics and information so it can play an important role for the organisation: forecasting and preparing for the talent needs of the next decade and beyond.
By making the most of HR technology and workforce data, leaders will better understand where their talent will come from, critical skills it will need to have and how best deploy to it.
As the technology evolves and improves, Towers Watson is seeing a dramatic shift in the ways that organisations use it within their HR function. Particularly productive are self-service applications that allow everyone in the organisation to benefit from the new HR technology innovations. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud technologies, mobile applications and people communications portals will continue to help complete both simple and complex transactions. More than 75% of respondents to our survey claimed they were planning to either maintain or increase their existing technology spend.
The rise of the chief talent officer (CTO) role will play an increasingly important leadership position in helping organisations understand and prepare for this new world of work. But why now, and how will the CTO prepare the workforce for this shift in required skills?
Structural changes in the marketplace, shifting global demographics and the changing needs of businesses are all reshaping both the supply and demand for talent. Employers need new skills from the workforce, but can find it challenging to find the right people with the proper skills.
Towers Watson and Oxford Economics identified the need for a thorough re-skilling of the workforce to meet the demands of a digitised, interconnected world and the CTO will need to lead that charge.
To compete most effectively in this new world of business, HR professionals face a daunting task in not only rethinking how they manage talent, but also in ensuring that this work is aligned with the strategic goals of the business.
This results in a growing shift, away from the IT department and into the CTO’s responsibility, of the selection for the midand long-term deployment of supporting technology. The CTO will need to understand how to select integrated technology, providing his or her business leaders with the access to the right realtime and meaningful talent information.
That’s not an easy task in the expanding landscape of talent technology providers.
