The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) have just released “Creating People Advantage 2010: How Companies Can Adapt Their HR Practices for Volatile Time.” The report is based on the results of their online survey of 5561 human resources and business unit executives from over 100 countries. Here are the key findings.
“Managing talent — identifying, attracting, and retaining the right people — continues to be perceived as the most important topic for companies’ futures.”
“Improving leadership development has risen in perceived importance over the past two years”
“Strategically planning the workforce has moved higher on the agenda as companies return to growth after the economic crisis and recession.”
“Employee engagement suffered during the past two years, as many companies resorted to layoffs and other cutbacks.”
There’s more in the BCG news release. My own take on what the researchers found is that there’s far too little awareness of what it means to operate in a volatile knowledge economy.
Success in the knowledge economy calls for people who take initiative, solve problems, and innovate. Those people are not easily herded and you can’t manage them as if they are interchangeable parts.
That’s why companies who used layoffs as their primary response to the recession are going to have a harder time coming back. Those employers, perhaps unwittingly, have created the impression that they simply don’t care and people who have other employment options will remember.
There also seems to be a belief that you can plan your human resources the same way you plan for inventory. That may have worked in a slower-moving environment, but not today.
In volatile business environments, planning becomes less important and agility becomes more important. Agility comes from hiring people who can learn and adapt quickly. Managing those people calls for higher trust levels, more autonomy, and more growth, not more planning and control.
