• Labor Shortage
    公司雇用大量员工,好>坏? 公司招聘人数越多公司发展越快?为什么不会集中团队的公司落后更快?在人工智能时代如何制造高集中团队,提高追求生产力的全球战略位置?这个新战略是什么样的?Josh Bersin提出了五大想法。本周,我们见证了多年来最令人惊叹的商业故事之一。Meta 宣布裁员22%,收入增长25%,净收入为140 亿美元,同比增长203%。这意味着 Meta 是一家价值160+ 亿美元的公司,税后产生35%净利润(高于谷歌、苹果和Microsoft)。 这真是太神奇了。该公司解雇了近四分之一的员工,财务业绩飙升(Meta 的市值周五上涨了17亿美元)。 我们在这里学到了什么? 很简单,公司无须雇用这么多人就可以以惊人的速度增长。 公司为什么过度招聘? 我们退一步想。为什么公司会过度招聘,我们该如何避免?未来几年,随着就业市场变得更加紧张,公司需要在没有员工线性增长的情况下实现增长。 我们正在进入一个“人员过多的公司”将表现不佳的时代,这改变了以往的思维。 顺便说一句,请注意,2024年普华永道CEO调查发现,高管认为他们公司40%的时间浪费在非必要事情上。十大问题中有三个与人力资源有关。同一项调查还显示,三分之二的CEO认为人工智能将把行政效率提高5%或更多,我同意这一点。这就是我在2024年预测报告中谈论“全球追求生产力”的原因。我们正在进入这样一个时代——人均收入较高的小公司将在执行,操纵和发展等方面超越多员工的竞争公司。由于招聘中太多的层次和挑战,那些没有学会如何集中团队(和员工人数)的公司将落后。 这个新战略是什么样的?这里有五大想法。 #1.不要再认为招聘是一种增长战略。 许多领导者仍然认为“雇用更多的人将使公司发展壮大”。换句话说,如果你想“快速做大”(硅谷的口头禅),你就尽可能快地招聘。更多的销售人员将产生更多的收入。更多的工程师将生产出更多的产品。更多的营销人员将产生更多的潜在客户。更多的服务人员将服务更多的客户。 这些都是有缺陷的假设。在每个职能领域,都有高绩效者(超能力工人)和低绩效者。当你匆忙招聘时,你迫使招聘人员大量招聘,而不是专注于适合。其结果就是我所说的“削弱每个员工的生产力”。您每雇用一个额外的人,就会减慢已经到位的其他人的速度。 是的,公司必须替代离职人员并增加员工。但是,当一家公司快速招聘时,入职和新员工的剪切量迫使经理放慢速度,员工放慢速度,许多现有流程也放慢速度。这意味着每增加一个“新员工”都会降低整体生产力。 我们最近采访了领先的电池制造商之一松下。高级人力资源主管发现(通过分析)直线经理过度招聘,他们的产出放缓,而员工预订了更多的加班时间。虽然经理们不同意(见#2),但当她分享数据时,他们突然意识到了问题所在。 数据显示,一旦一条生产线的调度和人员配备超过50人,生产力就会下降。这是由于收益曲线递减,即增加超过最佳点的工人会导致每个工人的产出减少。 这种人员过剩导致了成本的增加,也导致了更高的缺陷率和材料浪费,因为生产线上的人越多并不一定等同于更高的效率或更好的质量。而生产经理们在直接看到数据之前并不相信这一点。 医疗保健提供商是医疗领域最先进的提供商之一。鉴于护士和临床专业人员的巨大短缺(未来三年将有超过200万个工作岗位短缺),这些公司将行政工作自动化,将临床护理分解为亚专业,并培训护士在执照的顶端操作。 例如,普罗维登斯(Providence)和斯坦福医疗保健公司(Stanford Healthcare)精心设计了护理角色(通过减少管理任务和使用人工智能进行调度),以减少每位患者的人员配备,而不会降低患者的治疗效果。你怎么确定自己在这条曲线上的位置? 您可以查看每个员工的收入或产出。当这个指标开始下降时,你就是在曲线的右侧操作。在许多组织中,我们已经走上了下坡路。 我经常比较细分市场中同行公司的每位员工收入,而数字较低的公司几乎总是在其市场中落后。顺便说一句,这就是为什么私募股权公司几乎总是在收购公司后立即放人的原因。 #2.重新定义HR处理员工人数需求的方式。 我们面临的第二个问题是大多数公司的招聘方式。 据我所知,几乎每家公司都有一个年度或季度的员工分配流程。首席财务官知道经理对招聘的需求是无限的,因此根据业务部门的财务状况向业务部门“发布员工人数”。这些申请被分发给经理,人力资源团队开始工作。 然后,HR 像订单接受者一样运作,招聘组织开始处理申请。我们开发招聘信息、寻找候选人、购买广告和雇用招聘人员。我们开始筛选、面试和评估候选人。并且进行了大量的日程安排、讨论候选人和决策工作。 所有这些努力都需要宝贵的时间却不经过深思熟虑,而且被首席执行官评为#3“最官僚”的过程。 这个招聘应该由内部候选人填补吗?这份工作应该是全职的还是兼职的,可以作为共享工作吗?这项工作是否应该外包,因为它没有战略意义?这个团队的流动率高吗,那么我们是否应该讨论为什么这个职位空缺? 这些都是重要的战略对话,除非高级人力资源业务合作伙伴(或人才顾问)参与,否则它们不会真正发生。招聘经理是老板,他们可能不希望人力资源人员问他们关于他们如何管理团队的各种问题。 那么会发生什么呢?人才招聘团队急于填补职位空缺,几乎没有机会讨论内部发展、工作轮换、兼职或任何其他重要选项。没有真正的过程来思考我们如何“设计”这个团队以实现增长,然后团队会招聘更多的人。 正如我们在系统人力资源研究中所讨论的那样,如果我们采用 4R(人才招聘、人才保留、更新技能、重新设计)的招聘方法,这一切都可以避免。这就是为什么越来越多的招聘团队正在与L&D整合,公司正在购买人才市场平台,大多数首席人力资源官都在努力提高内部招聘比例并制定内部职业管理战略。 #3.为内部流动制定战略、文化和工具。 许多年前,我意识到你可以将公司分为两种类型:一种是相信“向上或向外”的工作模式(他们经常使用堆栈排名),另一种是相信“辅导和发展”工作模式。 第一种公司相信“竞争绩效”,总是通过绩效的视角来看待员工。将人员分组到绩效桶中,随着新机会的出现,专注于这些重要角色的“HiPO”。 第二种公司相信“持续学习”和成长心态,他们为每个人提供成长机会、发展任务和指导。从某种意义上说,这些公司只是本着“任何人都可以被培养来做更多事情”的理念运营,他们专注于永无止境的技能发展。 顺便说一句,今天,我们研究的公司中有三分之二以上属于第二类,但大多数公司都像第一类一样“思考和运营”。因此,我们正处于从“要么执行,要么被解雇”模式到“执行,我们将帮助您成长”的模式的全球过渡。 好吧,在劳动力短缺的情况下运营的唯一方法(现在平均需要 45 天才能招聘,某些职位需要 70 天或更长时间)是转向第二种模式。多亏了人工智能工具和人才智能,我们现在可以发现,拥有市场营销数学学位的营销经理可以在相当短的时间内成为一名数据科学家。 当然,不是每个人都想转行,我们大多数人都害怕做一些新的事情。但是,如果你想在不雇用和流失人员的情况下发展你的公司,并且你想将员工从表现不佳的产品领域转移到增长领域,你必须做到这一点。而强大的人才流动性的结果是什么?您不必按周期招聘(和解雇),您可以培养深厚而持久的技能,并且工作满意度和保留率可以飙升。 #4.重新定义管理者的角色。 从广义上讲,有两种管理模式:作为主管运作的管理者,以及作为“在职教练”运作的管理者。虽然这因工作和角色而异,但高效公司很少有领导者既不“指挥”又不“实践”。 正如WL Gore的人力资源主管多年前告诉我的那样(扁平化、高效管理的先驱),“经理管理项目,员工管理自己。换句话说,如果你想避免中层管理人员臃肿的官僚主义,你必须增加控制范围,并将“管理”定义为教练、项目领导、发展和调整。 当你这样做时,人们会站出来,在团队中担任领导职务。从某种意义上说,解放生产力的途径是“少管理,多领导”。 正如我们新的领导力研究发现的那样,伟大的领导者专注于愿景、灵感、专注和变革。这些是特殊人员的角色,他们可以设定方向并帮助其他人弄清楚如何到达那里。他们协调团队,帮助人们避免时间浪费,并明确分配责任。他们拥抱并鼓励变革,他们树立了榜样,永远帮助和指导他人。 虽然这些想法很好理解,但快速招聘往往让这变得不可能。当我在“快速招聘”(而不是“快速增长”)的公司工作时,我发现经理们对人事问题不知所措:入职、培训、辅导和解决问题。当你慢慢成长并保持广泛的控制范围时,你会发现同龄人会挺身而出,为这些任务负责。这有助于公司的发展。 再次回到医疗保健。有几十人向护士主管打报告并不罕见,因为这些员工训练有素,对自己的工作很清楚,而且积极性很高。这是一个高度可扩展的模型示例,我们都必须一直致力于这种转换。 #5.专注于你的核心。 避免“人员膨胀”的最后也是最重要的方法是集中精力。我的经验是,组织(团队或业务部门)一次只能专注于两到三件事。 但专注于什么?大多数大型公司在世界各地拥有数十个项目、数百个产品和业务部门。在我们的人力资源领域,这意味着做我经常称之为“清理厨房抽屉”的事情。今天,使用新的人工智能工具,我们可以将精力集中在少数重要的事情上。 上周,我们会见了几个人力资源领导团队,他们中的许多人有20个或更多的项目。虽然这听起来可能雄心勃勃,但实际上效率低下。你应该作为一个领导团队聚在一起,决定什么是必要的,什么不是。当 Meta 让22%的员工离开时,我猜许多项目都停止了。尽管这可能很痛苦(每个重大举措都有一个赞助商),但它可以促进增长、盈利和创新。 几年前,在 Sybase(最初是一家高性能数据库公司),我们进入了一个不专注的时期。该公司正在开发工具、中间件、行业解决方案和专业服务。高层领导认为,“成为一家更大的公司更好”。但唉,事实并非如此。 由于失去了对核心数据库的关注,Microsoft和Oracle迎头赶上。很快,“箭后面的木头”变得虚弱,我们的销售和营销分心,最终公司被卖掉了。 去年,我们采访了麦当劳的招聘团队,随着年轻人的职业生涯发展,麦当劳不断招聘新员工。通过“简化主义思维”的过程,在 Paradox 的帮助下,他们将商店职位的招聘时间从25天缩短到6天。这减少了75%的工作量。因此,麦当劳的招聘团队可以专注于招聘质量、目标定位、保留和店内职位管理。对于麦当劳来说,这家公司雇佣了一些世界上最难找到的职位,这是一个奇迹。 公司有数百个机会可以关注。与您的团队聚在一起,优先考虑真正重要的事情。当百事可乐询问他们的员工在大流行期间公司“最官僚、最浪费时间的流程”是什么时(使用他们称之为“流程粉碎机”的众包工具),绩效管理被评为最浪费时间的流程。每家公司都有阻碍的事情,今年是指出它们的原因。 最后:进行对话 底线是这样的。没有公司再一开始就确定什么最重要,哪个团队太大了等方面达成一致。但你必须进行对话。 在当今的经济中,招聘比以往任何时候都更难,人手过剩的公司只会表现不佳。请记住,“少即是多”,并帮助您的整个领导团队思考如何提高生产力、简化主义和专注,无论您走到哪里。 Source JOSH BERSIN
    Labor Shortage
    2024年02月04日
  • Labor Shortage
    2024年人力资源预测:全球追求生产力 In this fast-evolving era, all companies and individuals are seeking for change and efficiency. We can see the core of productivity in the new year: AI. Let's have a look at details on the Josh Bersin Predictions for 2024. 在过去的二十年里,我一直在写关于人力资源预测的文章,但今年不同。我看到这一年打破了范式,改变了商业中的每一个角色。不仅人工智能会改变每家公司和每一项工作,而且公司将开始不懈地寻求生产力。 想想我们的过去。2008年金融危机后,世界开始了加速增长的零利率时期。公司增加了收入,雇用了员工,并看着他们的股价上涨。招聘继续以狂热的速度进行,导致2019年底失业率创下3.5%的历史新低。 随之而来的是大流行,在六个月内,一切都停滞不前。2020年4月,失业率飙升至15%,公司将人们送回家,我们重新设计了我们的产品、服务和经济,以应对远程工作、混合工作制和对心理健康的关注。 一旦经济再次启动(由于美国的财政刺激),公司又回到了旧的招聘周期。但随着利率上升和需求不足,我们看到裁员一再发生,在过去的18个月里,我们看到了招聘、裁员,然后再次招聘以复苏经济。 为什么会出现跷跷板效应? 首席执行官和首席财务官正处于我们所说的“工业时代”——招聘以增长经济,然后在事情好转时裁员。 今天,当我们进入2024年时,一切都不同了。我们必须“囤积人才”,投资于生产力,并重新开发和重新部署人员以实现增长。 我们生活在一个失业率为 3.8% 的世界,几乎每个职位都存在劳动力短缺,劳动力权力日益增强,员工需求不断涌现:对加薪、灵活性、自主权和福利的要求。每年有超过20%的美国员工换工作(每月2.3%),其中近一半的变化是进入新行业。 为什么这是“新常态”? 有几个原因。首先,正如我们在全球劳动力情报研究中所讨论的那样,行业是重叠的。每家公司都是数字化公司;每家公司都希望建立经常性收入来源;很快,每家公司都将使用人工智能。过去停留在行业内的职业正在转变为“基于技能的职业”,让人们比以往任何时候都更容易跳槽。 其次,员工(尤其是年轻员工)感到有权按照自己的意愿行事。他们可能会悄悄地辞职,“做兼职”,或者抽出时间转行。他们看到自己的生活很长(人们的寿命比 1970 年代和 1980 年代长得多),所以他们不介意离开你的公司去其他地方。 第三,生育率持续下降,劳动力短缺加剧。日本、中国、德国和英国的劳动力人口都在萎缩。在未来十年左右的时间里,大多数其他发达经济体也将如此。 第四,工会正在崛起。由于华盛顿的新理念,我们看到了谷歌、亚马逊、星巴克、GM、福特、Stellantis、凯撒、迪士尼、Netflix等公司的劳工活动。虽然工会参与率不到美国劳动力的11%,但在欧洲要高得多,而且这一趋势正在上升。 这一切意味着什么? 这有很多影响。 首先,公司将更加专注于建立高保留率的工作模式(有人称之为“劳动力囤积”)。这意味着改善薪酬公平,继续混合工作模式,投资于以人为本的领导力,并为员工提供在公司内部从事新职业的机会。这就是为什么人才市场、基于技能的发展和工作流程中的学习如此重要的原因。 其次,CEO必须了解员工的需求、愿望和要求。正如爱德曼的最新研究表明的那样,职业发展现在位居榜首,同时对授权、影响力和信任的渴望也排在首位。我们称之为“员工激活”的新主题:倾听员工的意见,并将有关他们工作的决定委托给他们的经理、团队和领导者。 第三,传统的“雇佣成长”模式并不总是奏效。在这个后工业时代,我们必须系统地运作,将内部发展、工作再设计、经验和招聘放在一起。这汇集了招聘、奖励和薪酬、学习与发展以及组织设计等独立领域。(阅读我们的系统性人力资源研究了解更多信息。) “业务绩效”的真正含义是什么? 如果你是首席执行官,你希望增长收入、增加市场份额、提高盈利能力和可持续性。如果你不能通过招聘来成长(而员工不断以奇怪的方式“激活”),你还有什么选择?这很简单:您可以自动化生产并专注于生产力。 虽然这张图表令人印象深刻,但它给每个CEO都引出了一个问题:我们在这张图表上的位置是什么?我们的运营速度是否与同行一样快、一样高效? 我认为这导致了一种我称之为“生产力优势”的策略。如果你能帮助你的公司更快地发展(生产力意味着速度,而不仅仅是利润),你就可以比你的竞争对手更快地进行重塑。这才是真正让CEO们夜不能寐的原因。 考虑一下普华永道最新的CEO调查数据。今年,我们必须比以往任何时候都更快地重塑我们的公司。到2024年,45%的CEO(去年为39%)认为他们的业务在十年内将无法生存。 生产力优势 为什么生产力如此重要?有四个原因。 首先,CEO们关心它。 2024 年普华永道 CEO 调查发现,CEO 认为公司 40%的工作浪费了生产力。 尽管这听起来令人震惊,但对我来说却是真实的:太多的电子邮件、太多的会议、混乱的招聘流程、官僚主义的绩效管理等等。(HR 就有其中一些问题。) 其次,AI让人生产力优势成为可能。 人工智能的应用旨在提高白领的生产力。(过去大多数自动化都有助于蓝领或灰领工人。)生成式 AI 让我们能够更快地查找信息,了解趋势和异常值,训练自己和学习,并清理我们随身携带的文档、工作流程、门户以及后台合规和管理混乱的系统。 第三,公司的发展需要AI。 当很难找招聘到人时,你将如何成长?去年,招聘时间增加了近20%,就业市场变得更加艰难。你能在技术技能上与谷歌或OpenAI竞争吗? 内部开发、重组和自动化项目就是答案。有了生成式人工智能,机会无处不在。 第四,生产力推动重塑。 如果你考虑重塑你公司(新产品、利用人工智能、进入新市场等)的需求,最大的障碍是惯性。为什么诺基亚和黑莓的手机业务输给了苹果?因为这些公司“又胖又快乐”。在这个人才和技能短缺的时代,这是灾难的根源。 普华永道(PwC)估计,“效率低下”产生了对GDP10万亿美元的税收,相当于全球GDP的7%。这种税收阻碍了您的公司转型。每当我们简化、减少会议并更好地定义决策权时,我们都会加快并实现变革。 这一切对人力资源意味着什么? 正如我在《人力资源预测》中所描述的那样,我们有很多问题需要解决。 我们必须加快向动态工作和组织结构的转变。我们必须专注于和务实地对待技能。我们必须重新思考“员工体验”,并处理我们所说的“员工激活”。我们将不得不对我们的人力资源技术、招聘和L&D系统进行现代化改造,以利用人工智能并使这些系统更加有用。 我们的人力资源团队也将由人工智能驱动。正如我们的Galileo™客户告诉我们的那样,一个架构良好的“专家助理”可以彻底改变人力资源人员的工作方式。我们可以成为“全栈”人力资源专业人员,在几秒钟而不是几周内找到有关我们团队的数据,几秒钟与一线领导分享人力资源、领导力和管理实践。(Galileo被一些世界上最大的公司用作管理教练。) 还有一些其他变化。随着公司专注于“通过生产力实现增长”,我们必须考虑每周 4 天的工作制,我们如何将混合工作制度化,以及如何以更有效的方式连接和支持远程工作者。我们必须重新关注领导力发展,在一线经理身上花费更多的时间和金钱,并继续投资于文化和包容性。我们必须简化和重新思考绩效管理,我们必须解决令人头疼的薪酬公平问题。 还有更多。 DEI 计划必须嵌入到业务中(人力资源 DEI 警察的时代已经结束)。我们必须清理我们的员工数据,以便我们的人工智能和人才情报系统准确且值得信赖。正如我们的系统性人力资源研究所指出的那样,我们必须将思维从“支持业务”转变为“成为有价值的顾问”,并将我们的人力资源服务产品化。 所有这些都在我们本周发布的40页新报告“2024 年人力资源预测”中进行了详细说明,其中包括一系列行动计划,以帮助您思考所有这些问题。 让我提醒你一个大观念。生产力是人力资源部门存在的原因。 我们所做的一切,从招聘到辅导,从开发到组织设计,只有在帮助公司成长的情况下才能成功。作为人员流动、敬业度、技能和领导力方面的专家,我们人力资源部门每天都在提高员工和组织的生产力。2024年是专注于这一更高使命的一年。 最后一件事:照顾好自己。 该报告有15个详细的预测,每个预测都有一系列需要考虑的行动步骤。最后一个真正适合你:专注于人力资源的技能和领导力。作为流程的管理者,我们必须专注于我们自己的能力。2024年将是成长、学习和团队合作的一年。如果我们处理好这15个问题,我们将帮助我们的公司在未来一年蓬勃发展。 Josh Bersin预测的详细信息 预测研究是我们每年阅读量最大的报告。它包括我们所有研究的详细摘要,并讨论了首席执行官、首席人力资源官和人力资源专业人士的15个基本问题。它将以以下形式提供: 包含详细信息的信息图。(点击这里) Source JOSH BERSIN
    Labor Shortage
    2024年02月01日
  • Labor Shortage
    Josh Bersin:2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever (Podcast) The podcast "2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever" by Josh Bersin explores anticipated transformations in business by 2024. It highlights the impact of AI, labor shortages, and evolving organizational structures. The podcast delves into the 2023 economic performance, changes in employee engagement, and the necessity for businesses to adapt strategically. It emphasizes a shift towards dynamic, flatter organizations and the critical role of systemic HR practices in shaping future business landscapes. Josh Bersin探讨了2024年企业预期的转型。这些转型由AI的应用、劳动力短缺和组织结构的变化驱动。播客讨论了2023年的经济表现、员工参与度的变化以及企业为应对未来挑战所需的适应策略。它强调了向动态、扁平化组织的转变和系统性人力资源实践在塑造未来商业环境中的重要作用。 In this podcast I recap 2023 and discuss the big stories for 2024, and to me this year is a tipping point that changes business forever. Why do I say this? Because we’re entering a world of labor shortages, redesign of our companies, and business transformation driven by AI. We’ll look back on 2024 and realize it was a very pivotal year. (Note: In mid-January we’re going to be publishing our detailed predictions report. This article is an edited transcript of this week’s podcast, so it reads like a conversation.) Podcast Begins: Interestingly, the entire year 2023 people were worried about a recession and it didn’t happen. In fact, economically and financially, we had a very strong year. Inflation in the United States and around the world went down. We did have to suffer rising interest rates, and that was a shock, but it was long overdue. I really think the problem we experienced is we had low interest rates for far too long, encouraging speculative investment. Now that the economy is more rational, consumer demand is high, the business environment is solid, and the stock market is performing well. The Nasdaq is almost at an all time high, the seven super stocks did extremely well: the big tech companies, the big retailers, the oil companies, many of the consumer luxury goods companies did extremely well. And the only companies that didn’t do well were the companies that couldn’t make it through the transformation that’s going on. On the cultural front we had the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action in education, which led to a political backlash on diversity and inclusion. The woke mind virus by Elon Musk and similar discussions further pushed back DEI programs, which has made chief diversity officers life difficult. We’re living through two wars, which have been very significant for many companies. I know a lot of you have closed down operations in Russia, and anybody doing business in Israel is having a tough time. And we’ve had this continuous period where every piece of data about employee engagement shows that employees are burned out, tired, stressed. They feel that they’re overworked. Despite this employee sentiment, wages went up by over 5% and people who changed jobs saw raise wages of 8% or more. The unemployment rate is very low so there are a lot of jobs. You could ask yourself, why are people stressed? I think it’s a continued overhang of the pandemic: the remote work challenges, the complexities and inconsistencies in hybrid work. And something else: the younger part of the workforce, those who are going to be living a lot longer than people who are baby boomers, are basically saying I don’t really want to kill myself just to get ahead. I want to have a life. I want to quietly quit. If my company don’t take care of me, I’m going to work my wage, meaning I’m going to work as hard as I’m paid, no more than that. And that mentality has created an environment for the four-day work week, which I think is coming quicker than you realize. And unions, which are politically in favor, are rising at an all time increase in about 25, 30 years. Inflation and the need to raise wages to attract talent leads to pay equity problems. This domain is more complex than you think. You can read about it in our research and in 2024 it belongs on your list. 2024 will also see enormous demand for career reinvention, career development, growth programs, coaching, mentorship, allyship and support amongst the younger part of the workforce. And that means that if you’re in retail, healthcare, hospitality, or one of the other industries that hires younger people you have to accommodate this tremendous demand for benefits. These are things that became very clear in 2023. But let’s talk about the elephant in the room:  the biggest thing that happened in 2023 was AI. AI has transformed the conversations we have about everything from media to publishing to HR technology to recruiting to employee development to employee experience. As you probably know, I’m very high on AI. I think it’s going to have a huge transformational effect on our companies, our jobs, our careers, and our personal lives. AI will improve our health, our ability to learn, the way we consume news (note that the NYT just sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement). Almost every part of our life will be transformed by AI. I know from our conversations that most of you are trying to understand it and see where it fits. And many of you have been told by your CEO, “we need an AI strategy for the company as well as in HR.” And the AI strategy in HR is one thing, but the bigger topic is the rest of the company. So HR is going to have to be a part of this transformation: the new roles, jobs, rewards, and skills we need. This year I’m very excited that we introduced Galileo™, which about 500 or so of you have been using. We’re going to launch the corporate version for everybody in the corporate membership in February, so corporate members stay tuned (or join). Galileo brings AI to HR in an easy-to-use, safe, and high-value way, so it will help you get your strategy together. It’s basically ready to go. Then later in the year we’ll launch a version to the JBA community and more. AI, despite all the fear-mongering, is already a very positive technology. Where are we going next? Well as the title of this article states, I think this is the year that changes business forever. And I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, I really see a tipping point. Let me give you the story. For about a decade I’ve been writing about the flattening of organizations, breaking down of hierarchies, creating what I used to call the networked organization. And this is now mainstream and we’ve decided to call it the Dynamic Organization. And what we mean by this, as you read about in the Dynamic Organization research or in the Post-Industrial Age study, is that the functional hierarchies of jobs, careers, organizations and companies are being broken down for really good reasons. The reason we have functional hierarchies, job levels and siloed business functions is because they’re patterned after the industrial age when companies made money by selling products and services at scale. The automobile industry, the oil and gas industry, the manufacturing industries, the CPG industries, even the pharmaceutical companies are essentially building things, bringing them to market, launching them, selling them, and distributing them in a linear chain. And that “scalable industrial business model” is how we designed our organizations. So we built large organizations for R&D, large organizations for product management and product design and packaging, large organizations for marketing, large organizations for sales, large organizations for business development and distribution, supply chain, and so on (including Finance and HR). And all these ten or fifteen business functions had their own hierarchies. So you, as an employee, worked your way up those hierarchies. When I graduated from college in 1978 as an engineer, I went into one of those hierarchies. For each employee you were an engineer, a salesperson, a marketing manager, or whatever and you worked your way up the pyramid. And at some point in your career you crossed over and did other things, but that was fairly unusual. That wasn’t really the career path. You worked about 35-40 years in that profession and then you retired. And a lot of companies had another construct: management and labor. Management decided “what to do” and labor “did it.” And all of these designs helped us build most of the HR practices we use today, including hiring, pay, performance management, succession, career management, goal setting, leadership development, and on and on. Today, if you look at how the most valued companies in the world, they don’t operate this way any more. Why? Because it slows them down like molasses. If you have to traverse a functional hierarchy to come up with a new idea it takes months or years to create something new. Today value is created through innovation, time to market, closeness to customers, and unique and high-value offerings. The “hierarchy” wasn’t designed for this at all. Here are a few dogmas to consider. We used to think that all new ideas come out of R&D. That’s crazy. Of course R&D is important, but some of the most innovative companies in the world don’t even have R&D departments, they have product teams. The Research Department at Microsoft didn’t even invent AI, the company had to partner with OpenAI, a company that has less than a thousand employees. Here’s another one to consider. Deloitte consultants used to talk about “innovation at the edge,” otherwise known as “skunk works.” We used to advise clients to “separate the new ideas from the scale business” so they new ideas don’t get crushed or ignored. Well today all the new ideas come from the operating businesses, and we iterate in a real-time way. So there’s another industrial organization structure that just no longer applies. So what we’ve been going through in the dynamic organization, and we’ve studied this in detail, is that we’ve got to design our companies to be flatter. We’ve got to simplify the job titles and descriptions so people can move around. We have to organize people into cross functional teams, we have to motivate and train people to work across the functional  silos. We have to build agile working groups, we have to redo performance management around teams and projects, not around individual goals and cascading goals. We need to build pay equity into the system so you’re paid fairly regardless of where you started. Let’s talk about pay. One of the problems with the hierarchy is you get a raise every year based on your performance appraisal. And after a few years your pay may have been quite a bit different than somebody sitting next to you simply because of your appraisals. But you may not be delivering any more than them. That wasn’t fair. If you came into the company with a background in marketing, you made less money than somebody who came into the company with a background in engineering. But five years later you might be doing the same stuff but making different amounts of money. And then there’s gender bias, age bias, and other non-performance factors. In a “skills meritocracy,” as we call it, pay equity has to get fixed. We’ve got to have developmental careers and talent marketplaces and open job opportunities and mentoring for people. And these people practices are the facilitation of becoming more dynamic. And the problem of not being dynamic is what happened at Salesforce, Meta, and other tech companies last year. Salesforce hired thousands of salespeople during the last upcycle after the pandemic, and then a year later laid most of them off. Meta did the same thing. Google’s probably next. These companies, operating in the industrial mindset, thought that the only way to grow is to hire more salespeople, more engineers, or more marketing folks. But the quantity of people in one of these business functions doesn’t necessarily drive growth and profitability. What matters is how they work together and what they do, not how many of them there are. This old idea that we’re going to grow the company by hiring, hiring, hiring is gone. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s still a part of the growth part of the company, you’re always hiring to replace people, to bring new skills, et cetera, and to bring new perspectives. But in a dynamic organization, a lot of the growth comes from within. People grow too. Even the word growth mindset has become overused. We need to have an organizational growth mindset so that we can grow as an organization. A great example of this is Intel. Intel lost their way in the manufacturing of semiconductors and also in the R&D. Now they’re reinventing themselves internally and their stock is skyrocketing. They didn’t hire some guru to tell them what to do, they know what to do. They just need to get around to doing it. Google has more AI engineers than OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the other little guys put together, but they didn’t execute well. Now they’re executing better. They brought their AI teams together into cross-functional groups and they’re sharing IP from YouTube with other business areas. I bet they stomp many of the others in AI once they get it going. That’s part of being a dynamic organization. You as HR people know better than anybody how dysfunctional it is when there are multiple groups in the company doing competing things and they’re not working together because they don’t know about each other, or they don’t talk to each other. There’s no cross fertilization or they’re protecting their turf. All of these are the things that get in the way of being a dynamic organization. And the reason it’s relevant in the next year is this has taken hold. Things like talent marketplaces and career pathways and skills-based organizations, skills based hiring, skills based pay, skills based careers, skills based development, et cetera…  these are not just HR fads, they’re solutions to this big shift: making companies more dynamic. Despite their value in the past, hierarchical stove-piped companies don’t operate very well anymore. Now this isn’t an A-B switch type of thing. This is an evolution, but it’s taking place very quickly. And the reason we came up with this concept of Systemic HR is we in HR have to do the same thing. The HR function itself operates in silos. We’ve got the recruiting group, the DEI group, the Comp group, the L&D group, the business partners, the group that does compliance, the group that worries about wellbeing. We’ve got somebody over here is doing an EX project, somebody over there is doing a data management project, a people analytics group. Okay. Those are all great functional areas that belong in HR. But if they’re not working together on the problems that the company has, and I mean the big problems, growth, profitability, productivity, M&A, etc., then who cares? Then you’re at level one or level two in systemic HR. We built the Systemic HR initiative around business problems. And that’s how we came up with the new HR operating model (read more details here or view the video overview). I think Systemic HR will be a very big deal for 2024, and there are many reasons. Not only are we living in a labor shortage but there’s another accelerant, and that is AI. For those of you that have used Galileo, and I hope you all get a chance to use it this year, it’s absolutely unbelievable how AI can pull together information, data, text from many sources in the company and make sense of what your company is doing. You know as well as I do, if you’ve worked in sales, if you’ve worked in marketing, if you worked in finance, these are siloed groups. Few companies have a truly integrated data management system for all of their customer data match to their sales, data match to their revenue, data match to their marketing.  Customer data platforms are a idea, but it doesn’t really happen very often, and it takes tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and many, many systems to do that. Well, AI does this almost automatically. So when you pull together a tool like Galileo, and you use our research as part of the corpus, and you add data about employee turnover, for example, in your company, or pay variations, you’ll see the relationship between pay and turnover just by asking a question. You don’t have to go spend months doing an analysis and trying to figure out if the analysis is any good. And that’s happening all over the company in sales and customer service and R&D and marketing – everywhere. So this more integrated, dynamic organization is happening before your eyes. In 2024, this is the context for almost everything we’re going to be working on now. The other context is the labor market, which is going to be very tough. You’ve read about from us and others about how tight the labor market is now. Unemployment in the United States is 3.8%, and it’s not going to get much better. Even if we do have a recession, which is questionable, there aren’t enough people to hire. The fertility rate is low, and even if every company gives employees fertility benefits and they all have babies, it will take twenty years for these people to go to work. So all of the developed countries: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Nordics, China, Russia, the fertility rate has been low for a long time. The World Bank sees working population shrinking within ten years in almost every developed economy. Since hiring is going to get harder and we’ll see fewer and fewer working people, companies have to be much more integrated in hiring. And we all have to look the Four R’s: Recruit, Retain, Reskill, Redesign. This puts HR in the middle of a lot of job redesign, career reinvention, and a serious look at developing skills, not hiring skills, and using the tools we have as hr professionals to help the organization improve productivity without just hiring and hiring and hiring. I measure the success of companies by two things. One is their endurance: how well have they fared over ups and downs? The second is their revenue per employee. Companies with low revenues per employee tend to be poorly managed companies relative to their peers. Of course there’s a lot of industry differences. When we went through our GWI industry work: healthcare, consumer goods, pharma, banking, we could see the high performing companies were very efficient on a headcount basis. And we found out these companies are actually implementing Systemic HR practices. The other driver that we’re living in a service economy. Interestingly enough, in the United States, more than 70% of our GDP is now services. So the people you have, the humans in your company, are the product. And if you’re not getting good output per dollar of revenue per human, you’re not running the company very well. And this leads to many management topics. How are we going to build early and mid-level leaders? How can we rethink what employees really need? The topics of employee engagement and employee experience are really 25 to 30 years old. They need a massive update. How are we going to implement AI in L&D and replace a lot of these old systems that everybody kind of hates, but we’re stuck with? What’s going on with the ERP vendors and what role will they play as we replace our HR tech with AI powered systems? How will we implement scalable talent intelligence? In a world of labor shortages talent intelligence becomes even more important, whether you think of it for sourcing and recruiting or an internal mobility or just a strategic planning initiative. How do we all get comfortable with AI? And then there’s this issue of Systemic HR and developing your team, your function, your operating model to be more adaptive and more dynamic. So I look back on 2023 I feel it was one of the most fascinating and fun and enriching years that I’ve had. I am always amazed and impressed and energized by you, by you guys who were out there on the firing lines, dealing with these complex issues and companies with old technologies and all sorts of changes going on and how you’re adapting. I continue to be more impressed and more excited about the HR profession every year. I think a lot of people who aren’t in HR think we do a lot of compliance and administration stuff and we fire people. That is the tiniest part of what we do. 2024 is going to be an important year. You as an HR professional are going to have to learn a lot of things. You’re going to learn about Systemic HR issues, you’re going to learn about AI, and you’re going to learn to be a consultant. There’s no question in my mind that over the next decade or two dynamic organization management is going to become a bigger and bigger issue – how we manage people and companies. And I don’t mean manage like supervise, I mean develop, move, retain, pay, et cetera, culture, all of those things. I leave 2023 very energized about what’s to come with AI. And if you’re afraid of AI, just take a deep breath and relax. It’s not going to bite you. There’s nothing evil here. It’s a data driven system. If you don’t have your data act together, you’re not going to get a lot of good value out of AI. I talked to Donna Morris at Walmart last week; I talked to Nickle LaMoreaux at IBM; and I talked with the senior HR leaders at Microsoft. They’re all seeing huge returns on investment from the early implementations, and seeing hundreds of use cases. We’re going to have a lot of new tools and lots of vendor shakeout. (Check out what SAP is up to and where Workday is going.) Stay tuned for our big Predictions report coming out in mid January. That report is my chance to give you some deep perspectives on where I think things are going, recap things that have happened over the last couple of years, and give you some perspectives for the year ahead. As always we would be more than happy to walk through these things with your team. I hope you have a really nice holiday season and you take a deep breath. The world is never perfect. It’s never been perfect. It wasn’t perfect in the past. It won’t be perfect in the future. But the environment you live in and the environment that you create can be enriching, enjoyable, productive, and healthy, and fun if you decide. And I think we all have the opportunity to make those decisions. It has been a pleasure and an honor for me to serve and work with you this last year, and I’m really looking forward to an amazing 2024 together. –END OF PODCAST– Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations  
    Labor Shortage
    2023年12月30日