The article’s content results from my curiosity and inquiry into the topics of interest to me, and presumably to many others. It is offered to instigate dialogue and invite joint thinking and collaboration. It is not deemed right or “true” — I am sharing my point of view and recommendations on the way forward based on my experience.
It’s about how you can best take advantage of technology and systems-related events, further optimizing your resources. Creating continuous feedback loops of insights and actions — making it all transparent, being humble about failure, and integrating continuous learning from those into your operations — will be key.
How Are We Going to Augment the Workforce?
Marry human labor with digital labor and take advantage of the combination of these two types of work. Most automation happens in manual activities. When automation starts in how you manage and process data, the job doesn’t disappear. It enables you to create greater customer satisfaction and a more efficiently achieved, different contribution from your workforce.
We have to go beyond the first use cases and feed forward-thinking of how to scale it and how to bring new people with the right skills on board. We can start breaking down the barriers by introducing new habits, bringing people from different domains together and making them solve a common problem. They will build appreciation for each other’s roles and that leads to acceleration.
Two key notions will help HR to fulfill the critical role it actually ought to play: 1) think in analogy and 2) lead courageously with powerful questions. None, actually, needs to know all of the answers. The integrator role the People Function should fulfill in helping the different constituents bring it all together — by facilitating strategy development, creating effective performance platforms, inserting feedback loops, challenging inefficiencies and inequalities, and rewarding the right behaviors — are some examples of this.
It’s still about people — process — technology. No need to change the frame of reference; it is a similar “segmentation”, alongside recognizing the ever-changing needs and that different approaches are required.
Empowered Employee
- Re-defined empowerment: access to knowledge and information is turned into an advantage at scale.
- New culture to allow for it: democratization, decentralization and automation shift power around.
- Trained, re-skilled and re-deployed people: the role AR/VR can play in this is powerful — open the minds.
Meaningful Work
- Representation and visualization of how work gets done: the analogy of asset operations and service operations; modelling and continuous improvement of your commercial, finance and people operations.
- Self-efficiency: self-service is a desired choice, with flawless access to data and reinvigorated decision-making.
- Virtual Reality Collaboration and Virtual Employee Experience: focus on relevant outcomes.
- Automation: unleashing talent, helping people thrive and be the best at what makes them unique.
Efficient and Effective Operations
- Widespread process mining, process mapping, analytics, and cloud finance management capabilities.
- Modelling scenarios beyond the domains of finance, supply chain and commercial.
- Customer-focused NPIs and product optimization versus new concept development, in a broad sense.
- Workflows and supply chains will become more connected and optimized; feed digital twins and simulations to anticipate and adjust to potential bottlenecks or changes upstream or downstream of the user.
The same analogy is applicable in the People Function — to become more connected and optimized, feed simulations to anticipate skill and talent, capacity, diversity and leadership gaps, collaboration or learning needs, and alterations to the structure. HR should play hand-in-hand with Finance and IT in identifying and providing tooling to enable the above. Access to data for decision-making means recognizing that speed and quality insights drive informed decisions that lead to more intelligent actions. Foster a culture of UX and DX and a communications environment in which people can navigate effectively, access and obtain the feed of information they need for their work — recognizing the daunting data challenges their stakeholders, employees, external groups and functions face. Essentially, its role is down to fostering a frictionless environment.
