This article is authored by Setu Shah and was published in Human Resources Association of India Magazine - Issue 8 in Feb'24. 

As we look around in today's fast-paced corporate arena, one thing is crystal clear – the world of work as we know it, is morphing at an unprecedented rate. A close inspection into 'the Changing Work Landscape' reveals a trend that's been gradually gaining momentum. Businesses are not merely on the hunt for talent anymore; they're now on a quest for cultivating and enriching a 'Talent Tapestry.' An elegant mosaic of skills, knowledge, and potential, all interwoven into one cohesive entity ready to take the business world by storm. In the intricate fabric of modern workplaces, each thread represents a unique contribution, vibrant ensemble of colors represents skill, experience, and roles people perform, weaving together to create a thriving organization. This article explores a strategic approach to talent development and workforce management, tailored for the dynamic work environment.

"In the mosaic of the workplace, every thread is a story waiting to be told."

Threads of Talent Development

Recognizing the importance of diverse skills and experiences, human resources professionals, CxOs, and organizational leaders/managers play a pivotal role in shaping a successful and vibrant workplace. Traditional structure and nature of job roles are changing, work hierarchies are dynamic owing to a similar nature of initiatives, programs and projects any organization ventures. Considering the dynamic nature of businesses today, using lightweight “skills” as a common currency to assess the wealth of talent an organization embodies is an agile approach. In the realm of talent management, it's essential to identify and nurture skills. Consider skills like a palette of colors with 4 categories –

• Essentials – which are like core skills that an organization needs.

• Unique colors – which an individual possesses that an organization may or may not have tapped into or may not be currently required as part of individual’s current job profile.

• Complementary colors – are skills that bring higher degree of associativity, productivity, and synergy. 

• Supplementary colors – are skills which work well with other skills (directly/indirectly) to bring comprehensiveness. 

Traditionally most organizations “made it work” by acquiring, nurturing, and developing essentials/core skills. Over a period of different workplace revolutions, the canvas has grown bigger (globalization), consumer demand/appreciation of unique artistry/solutions has increased and so has increased the need of identifying these other categories of skills. Problem solving and innovation - the cornerstone of thriving organizations has made multitude and multi-disciplinary skills inclusion imperative. Lightweight skills are easy to understand, provides near accurate self-assessment through elementary questionnaire thereby allowing democratization of its identification and development. Most importantly, with technology intervention, a tree or a neural network of skills can help identify complementary and supplementary skills allowing people to navigate and uncover the skills earlier unknown to them. A strategic approach involves personalized training programs, experiential learning opportunities (gigs/projects/etc.), mentorship initiatives, coaching exercises, and continuous learning opportunities.

The Tapestry of Workforce Management

"The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team."

— Phil Jackson

Workforce management (in this context) involves cultivating a thriving ecosystem through:

1. Organization structure: Allowing flexibility for people to operate within/across lines of hierarchy.

2. Processes encouraging positive evolution: Processes provide predictability in operations. Talent management strategies and processes ensure that the right talents are in the right roles at the right time providing regular feedback and support employee growth and development. These systems encourage continuous learning, make room for career progression, and create opportunities for employees to reach and grow their potential.

3. Policies to empower workforce: Allowing and encouraging diversity and inclusion of skills, experiences and perspectives through strategic hiring, engaging employees towards work and work environment and promoting lateral moves to enhance career lattice are some pivotal initiatives.

This article is authored by Setu Shah and was published in Human Resources Association of India Magazine - Issue 4 in Sep'23.

Organization’s pursuit to sustaining and thriving is determined by how well it can adapt to changing dynamics in the competitive market, legislation, shifting consumer behavior and industry advancements. People are the only assets who can influence changes to navigate their organization through it and hence an organizational culture should revolve around its people. While organizations globally, of all sizes and across all maturity curve have started to comprehend the importance of a healthy people-centric culture, its implementation is experimental, fragmented and subjective to say the least.

Organizations must believe in - “People are good and they want to do good work” is contingent on its understanding of every individual. Every individual in an organization has their own distinct journey, beliefs, aspirations, communication styles, backgrounds, success metrics, etc. which are shaped by their unique experiences. They read, interpret, comprehend, and respond to situations differently and hence must be treated differently. This individualized approach helps synergize a collective effort which aggregates to generate more value. Organizations are virtual entities conceptualized by people to serve a purpose compelling an all-inclusive culture to accommodate and thrive diversity.

Culture is a psychological safety net that an organization provides to its employees to operate effectively. It is determined by what an employee does when he/she is asked to do something and when he/she is not asked to do anything. Culture is inspired from the top management, institutionalized by middle managers, and celebrated by everyone. Top management defines the flexibility/tolerance around work, authority, empathy, people growth and rewards while the cultural montage is assembled democratically.

1)        Work: What are you responsible for?

It is amusing how above simple question garners a confrontational tone and defensive responses at all levels of people hierarchy. Accountability of work instills respect for one’s role and motivation to succeed towards achieving their purpose. Well defined work structures and flexibility to operate are quintessential to breed accountability and foster collaboration. How much room for experimentation exists for an employee’s areas of responsibility correlates to the psychological safety in the organization.

As Jim Collins alludes in his renowned book “Good to Great”, “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then they'll figure out how to take it someplace great”. 

2)        Power: What authority do you have to fulfil your responsibilities?

Like the adage popularized by Spiderman Marvel movies “With great power comes great responsibility” … at workplaces – “With great responsibility should come great power”.

Organizations need to test and have the apt power dynamics, team structure and hierarchies. This guides whether the information can flow through least number of hops or if it needs to navigate the right channels and managers before it reaches the desired destination. Are employees empowered to disagree productively or do they need to discuss with their managers 1-on-1 beforehand? Innovation is a result of experimentation, creative differences, navigating conflicts, radical candor, and freedom to make mistakes. Democratic vs hierarchical decision making and resistance to pivot/change a decision needs to be well communicated.

3)        Empathy: Do we trust the heart or head?

People Managers are the brand ambassadors of percolating and institutionalizing culture. Investing in coaching them on cultural sensitivities, psychological safety and organizational people centricity is paramount. Increased awareness of people managers and team members about difference in cultures, exchanging feedback and the way-people-operate can be achieved through tailored technology interventions. Enabling this flow allows people to get into their groove and organizations to gain momentum.

“Psychological safety describes a belief that neither the formal or informal consequences of interpersonal risk like asking for help or failure to deliver will be punitive. Candor is appreciated and expected.” – by Amy C. Edmondson in her book “the fearless organization”

4)        People Growth: What are our seeds of growth?

“You can’t expect new results by doing the same thing” – To create new frontiers or perform the same tasks in more efficiently; people need to adopt the mindset of continuous learning and development. This fosters a sense of professional and personal growth compounding to exponential organizational growth. Learning through newer opportunities, mentoring/reverse-mentoring, coaching, gigs, and structured courses elevates skill quotient, builds succession plans, creates opportunity for career advancement and acts as a strong positive motivator for the workforce. By connecting personal goals to professional goals, people managers must be invested in their team’s unique growth plans.

5)        Rewards & Benefits: How much do we focus on going far vs fast?

Organizations must tweak their focus on long-term vs immediate rewards based on the behaviors that they want to inspire. Long term benefits/rewards like length of service awards, promotions post a specific tenure, health insurance for extended family members, financial support to family members in case of employee death, subsidized home loan rates, etc. cultivates a feeling of belongingness and longevity. Unique benefits like pet adoption leave, laundry services, outpatient medical and wellness coverage, etc. and spot rewards like employee of the month/quarter, etc. provide instant gratification and recognition appealing to intrinsic cultural fundamentals. Disproportionate concentration across these two types (physiological safety and positive motivators) based on the behavioral demands of the business and employee demographics will help organizations strike the right balance.

This article is authored by Setu Shah and was published in Human Resources Association of India Magazine - Issue 2 in Aug'23. 

21st century marks an unprecedented pace, volume, and magnitude of changes in business, technology, and society. Cross-discipline impact of advancements across these 3 segments have exponentially generated value to move further on evolutionary scale. Innovation engine continues to run overtime in today's hyperconnected world. Rampant speed of innovation has a similar (or generally) higher acceleration than the capacity of human beings to adapt/adopt. As per a research, global spend in digital transformation is projected to be (more than) double in the next few years from 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022 to 3.4 trillion U.S. dollars by 2026.

3 broad categories of technologies with astounding impact and potential for more are:

1.        Virtual Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Digital Payments

a.        ChatGPT - a GenAI chatbot took the world by storm since its public launch in late 2022. Such Artificial Intelligence is capable of self-learning and generating text, images, and other content from simple language prompts. Large language models (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) aided prescriptive guidance continues to find dozens of new applications every day in all known industries. Open architecture of technology has democratized its design, diversified its development, and increased its impact innumerously. We are still in the inception phase of AI where machines are performing dedicated tasks almost similar to humans like predicting revenue/sales, supply chain, employee attrition, heartbeat irregularities, etc. Once AI continues to learn, grow, and evolve beyond human intelligence, the Super AI is predicted to perform tasks better than humans with cognitive conscience.

b.        Decentralized trust management (control and decision making) through Blockchain has found various applications in cryptocurrency, talent profile/credentials validation, smart contracts, asset administration, protection of copyrights, healthcare records and many more.

c.        Digital Payments story went into hyperdrive with India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI) launched in 2016 clocking 9.4bn transactions valuing 14.89 lakh crore in May’23. QR code enabled UPI payment channel has unified diverse income group, industries and business classes transforming consumer experience and ease-of-doing-business in India. Mobile payments, contactless payments, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, smart speaker payments, and digital wallets are gaining popularity.

2.        Physical Technology: 3D printing, IoT and Drone Technology

a.        After successful experimentation of creating construction material supporting green building practices and sustainable architecture, 3D printing continues its inspirational journey towards fabricating customized medical implants and on-demand industrial spare parts.

b.        Smart - offices, homes, cities, healthcare, and agriculture are making giant strides with Internet-of-Things (IoT) fueled by fat pipes (5G). By capturing information like temperature, moisture, speed, weight, air quality, heart rate, etc. per micro-second, these smart sensors are clocking gigabytes of data in industries, cities and healthcare establishments to detect, correct and predict anomalies further training AI and machine learning models.

c.        Robotics and drone tech have enormous prospect to revolutionize today's booming e-commerce retail product delivery ecosystem, disaster response and relief in disaster prone areas (hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc.), efficient delivery of time-sensitive medicines and precision agriculture (with its multispectral cameras).

3.        Hybrid and Pervasive Technology: AR, VR and Metaverse

a.        Augmented Reality has been in wide distribution since sometime now with interactive educational experiences, AR-assisted remote technical support and consumer retail clothing try-ons. Augmented health & safety trainings in industrial and manufacturing setups is a fun learning experience of dealing with hazardous situations without risks. 

b.        From earliest version of VR - Sensorama in 1960's to Apple's latest launch of Vision Pro (AR+VR) in 2023 - Virtual Reality is offering a simulated experience making our real world more informative, immersive, and interactive in the flow of work and life. Its applications range from urban planning to factory designs and virtual tourism to mental health therapy.

c.        People are already socializing, working, and gaming in Metaverse (or some form of it). Virtual tourism, stand-up comedy events, music concerts, real estate development and art galleries are a few other near-future use cases.

In future, influence of these technologies independently will be enormous. Cross pillar applications of these individual monoliths will be monumental transformation in the way we think, work, and live today.

A progressive mindset to view these advancements as tools to augment our existing skills (or to develop new ones) will empower us to realize its boundless possibilities. Newer business models, newer job roles and subsequently newer skills emerge with this confluence.

As per World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, net effective of job displacement will be 2% between 2023-2027 and Global Skill Taxonomy changes are led by cognitive skills, technology skills and leadership (working with others) skills.

Skill is the new currency and learning is decentralized. Businesses are hiring and developing cross discipline skills like behavioral science practitioners, conversational designers, AI prompt engineers, story tellers, data scientists, etc.