HR and business must be aligned to support resilience
Wholesale transformations in products and services are unrelenting in an effort to match digital and technology advances, as well as react to pressure from investors, governments, customers and employees to meet environmental and climate goals.
Alongside this, changing ways of working and skills shortages mean that what employees expect from current (or future) employers is in constant flux too, resulting in an ever-evolving employee value proposition (EVP).
REBA’s sixth report in the Transforming Engagement Series, Evolving EVP: meeting business and workforce change, in partnership with Mercer Marsh Benefits, endeavours to deliver the data chief people officers (CPOs) need to identify business transformational shifts. It also looks at how to attract and retain the transformative skills organisations need today.
It was noteworthy that this research indicated relatively few organisations expect to see a change in the pace of crises, inflation rises, business closures or employee redundancies. Which means we need to learn to live with constant change.
This may be why the push to for business resilience stands out in this research. Nearly two-thirds of respondents expect to push even faster towards making their businesses resilient. A vital step towards this objective is creating a resilient workforce – one with no employee burnout, low staff turnover and absenteeism rates, that has good ongoing skills development and high productivity levels with an engaged workforce.
However, the research found that there was a lag between the three-quarters (73%) seeing resilience as a business challenge and the six in 10 (60%) who said building resilience is going to be a key HR challenge over the next two years. This is a gap that CPOs must surely focus on closing to achieve full resilience across the workforce to drive business resilience.
HR needs to focus on its own resilience and business transformation
As predicted previously in this series, HR teams need to transform their practices to be fit for today’s (and tomorrow’s) workforces. They need to focus on their own resilience building and skills development to avoid becoming unsustainable in an era of rapid change.
CPOs should recognise fatigue within their teams after three years in crisis mode and adopt resilience practices that will develop them into HR teams that are future fit. Two big areas where HR is lagging behind business transformation is digital technology change and changes to meet climate goals.
Nine-in-10 (91%) said the use of digital technology would increase within their business in the next two years, while two-thirds (62%) said that using digital platforms more effectively is a key HR challenge. More than eight-in-10 (82%) say the pace of transformation to meet environmental and climate targets will increase in the next two years.
Watch these areas as pressure grows to bring HR in line with wider business transformation.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Mercer
At Mercer, we believe in building brighter futures.
