Current Situation
Market uncertainty presents the modern organization with a high risk of unforeseeable change. Rigid organizations built on divisional autonomy are limited in how they can move resources and people to adapt to external business factors or business process changes. Rigid structures have high degrees of siloed, nontransferable talent specialization, budget and talent proprietorship, covetous resource allocation, and approval-based cross-functional team assembly and alignment. Established rigidity slows down adaptation, limiting competitiveness and disconnecting employers from the workforce as slow responses lead to big change managed by directive.
Goals and Objectives
Rethinking organizational structure to include two-way communications channels, feedback, and sentiment understanding helps business leaders surface business risks and understand and forecast change impact on the workforce. Aligning the mechanics of change with the organizational skills taxonomy while making that taxonomy dynamically reflective of the workforce in real time further enables business leaders to model possible change and plan adaptively to take smarter risks and capitalize on change via smarter, proactive, and adaptive organizational optimization efforts.
Technology Deployed
Intelligent workforce management relies on feedback loops, pulse surveys, communications tools, analytics, workforce planning, skills taxonomies, and workforce analytics. Modeling the ideal workforce begins with understanding the risks felt by the workforce and mapping them to what business leaders see as the biggest risks to the overall enterprise. As business leaders then move to implement operational adjustments, they can model them against workforce impact as a business measure.
Use Case Summary
Moving to an adaptable workforce model requires abandoning historically centralized business rigidity. Optimizing the aggregated individual work state for employees against the conditions for organization change in proactive or reactive settings keeps decision makers smart about how best to keep the enterprise connected and engaged through change. Incorporating skills into the assessment also minimizes the degree of work polarization caused by organizational change by aligning highly adjacent roles to those that will emerge after the transition, making change less noticeable to work types and workloads.