PART 2

#10 Productivity will become an essential measure of employee success At this point in the economic cycle, we must work to prevent any over hiring that may result in reduced productivity, the report notes. This brings forth the issue of design: job design, team design, and skills design. If you hire someone with complementary skills to the team, will they be shared? Will the hire effectively make the whole team better? Or will they get in the way? HR professionals must watch for this. "Dont just 'fill the slots' created by hiring managers: look at the organisation and make sure youre redesigning jobs to make work easier. "Also, think about the entire employee experience at work: every new product, process, or policy you create should improve productivity, not reduce it. Another critical point the report highlights is: productivity creates employee engagement! When people feel productive, they love their jobs. When they feel they are wasting their time, they check out, quietly quit, or depart. Every HR organisation should thus create an organisation design center of excellence and let this team go out and implement projects around productivity.

#11 Growth in the flow of work will become a new focus for corporate learning When companies go beyond development and facilitate growth in the flow of work, they are much more likely to build skills for the future. A study by The Josh Bersin company once found that companies that focus on growth are 29 times more likely to let employees "unleash their potential", four times more likely to be innovation leaders, and 7.2 times more likely to be best places to work. Growth-oriented L&D teams take on several new innovations: Talent marketplaces where people can build skills through projects, gigs, mentoring, relationship-building, networking, community events, and more. Capability academies to focus on comprehensive strategic business capabilities. Career pathways with tuition-free education to build capacity in particularly constrained roles. "These novel solutions are no longer point solutions to address a specific knowledge or skills gap, they are strategically embedded in the broader business and talent strategy of the organisation and become part of the systemic HR operating model," it was pointed out.

#12 The role of the recruiter will become increasingly important In this trend, Bersin highlights one important point for leaders to realise: "Your recruiters are more important than you think. They are not salespeople looking for candidates. Instead, they must consult with hiring managers, help decide if a candidate fits the culture, and be armed with powerful tools for sourcing, assessment, and selling 'the deal'. "Additionally, we suggest recruiters take on other roles to really see how their job fits into other areas of the business. Some of the most passionate and highly-skilled HR professionals work as recruiters; make sure youre using them effectively."

#13 People analytics will evolve into talent intelligence The agenda for people analytics teams keeps growing. This is a good thing, but we must focus on a new problem. "Now that the economy is slowing, how can we use data to better help the company grow?" "Can you predict how many people you can hire, reskill, grow through retention, and enhance through redesign?" In 2023, the people analytics teams should work with the sourcing intelligence and workforce planning teams to be even more relevant than ever. Doing an analysis of burnout and turnover will continue, but the big ROI will come from a strong look at strategic skills gaps, sourcing strategies, strategic retention, reskilling, redeployment of people, and how leaders address job redesign. In other words, forward-thinking companies will expand their people analytics teams and add labour economics, workforce planning, sourcing intelligence, and skills intelligence.

#14 A new HR tech landscape will arrive 2023 will see the emergence of a new integrated 'skills-powered talent platform'. Companies will have multiple intelligence systems that create, infer, or store skills, and would want this to come together into an integrated place. There will also be higher availability of employee experience tools, with the continued expansion of learning systems, recruiting, offerings in pay equity, wellbeing, DEI, and more.

#15 HR organisations will move to a new operating model: systemic HR The final, and probably most interesting, trend is what Bersin calls the new operating system for HR. Most companies call this the "operating model," but the substantial change is not simply better service delivery, improved access to data, and more HR business partner skills. Its also a new framework for integrating HR into a total operating system, so information and insights captured in one part of the company can be leveraged and addressed elsewhere.

A few fundamental principles highlighted are: Every HR team should understand what other teams are doing. The overall top priority talent strategies should be shared and agreed on by everyone. Every HR professional should strive to have "full stack" skills. HR teams should share their roadmaps with each other regularly. HR professionals should rotate around HR and into and out of the business. HR technology roadmaps should match the HR talent strategies and be shared regularly. Local or embedded HR teams should have a voice in all strategic programmes. An integrated analytics and talent intelligence function should inform all major decisions.

(Source: https://www.humanresourcesonline.net/the-workplace-in-2023-15-trends-redefining-work-theworkforce-and-hr)

QUESTION ONE [50]

1.1. Consider #1, #2, #13, #14 and #15. Critically discuss the implications of these trends on the function of human capital. (30)

1.2. In 2023, we will need to learn to balance the new world of empathetic, flexible leadership with the need for ever-increasing levels of productivity. Recommend strategies leaders may utilise in order to create this balance. (20)