As 2021 winds down, many HR leaders will be thinking about 2022 and beyond. The center of this thinking will be both Transforming Existing Talent and Hiring talent required for the various digital and transformation initiatives.  The pandemic accelerated our Future of work thinking and continues to impact the way we think about talent.  Even the C-suite leaders who felt strongly about resources having to be in the same building for optimal innovation are now rethinking the strategy.  Companies are learning that as long as the teams have the Psychological Safety of raising the issues and solving them, it does not matter whether they are remote or distributed.   This learning is not necessarily new research.  Amy Edmonson- An American Scholar from Harvard Business School, conducted a fascinating study of high-performing medical teams in 2015.  In the research, professor Edmonson pointed out that high-performing teams are not necessarily high skilled but have the comfort level to raise issues and discuss and resolve as a team.  This term was famously coined as Psychological Safety. It means people can speak up, make mistakes, question things, and raise concerns without humiliation or retribution. Psychological Safety creates a learning organization – a place where teams are more than the sum of their parts, and people go beyond their comfort zones to achieve success together.

When Steve Jobs founded Pixar Animation Studio, Jobs had the audacity to staff the company with Artists and Technologists.  This mix, Jobs believed, will bring out the best products in animation.  In some ways, companies have to understand that the best Digital Talent is a mix of technology and other relevant talents across various functions. Overemphasis on one form of talent (specifically programming Talent) may not set up the company for Digital success.   Diversity in talent (all forms of Diversity is crucial).  Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, the author of the book Linguanomics, states that diverse language trajectories shape overall thinking, and individuals who learn a second language also gain better mental skills.  As a result, Diversity is not just an outside experience – it also refers to the self-enriching learning experience that one must adapt towards 2022 and beyond.

Organizations have a tremendous opportunity to build a distributed-diverse- agile workforce aligned to the objectives.  The time has never been better for HR leaders.  It is truly a Pixar moment for HR!.  Why do we believe so?  Several significant trends are necessitating the Reskilling and the Hiring of certain unique skill sets.  The objective of this week’s email is to highlight the same.  Let us look at them one by one.  We believe that if Recruiters and Workforce Planners understand these trends and the skills associated, you can plan and build a successful organization.

By defining a talent strategy using these developing trends, you can develop a winning Workforce Strategy – a strategy that will help in retention and create new opportunities

• Automation is expected to create significant opportunities for Grafting existing talent.  Several jobs around the categories of RPA, Business Process Reengineering, Low Code/No Code are expected to impact existing business analyst type of talent significantly.  Our analysis shows that even though we may optimize several jobs, about 90 million-plus new jobs will be created by various Automation initiatives by 2030.  Bill Carapezzi in Pfizer led the Automation COE and generated around 35 million USD in savings since 2019.  Bill Carapezzi has more than 450 automation in production across Pfizer and saved more than 150,000 FTE hours  (Source:  Analysis and Interviews conducted by Zinnov Digital Transformation Consultants).  One of the success factors quoted by Bill Carapezzi is involving the existing talent in Automation as they have intricate process knowledge.  This attribute is referred to in the Automation world as In-house Process Discovery.  No amount of external vendors can accomplish this for you, and you need to rely on existing talent

Opportunity zone for existing talent.  Targeting employees who have expressed a desire to quit to create new career opportunities in this area.  We need to Graft the existing talent in new teams so that they get integrated with new skills.   Supporting the team members in the new teams is critical and should be part of assuring Psychological safety.  Grafting refers to the process of integration and support.

The internet/web is transitioning from Web1.0 (static web) and Web2.0 (social web) to Web3.0, propelled by blockchain and crypto technologies. The data will be interconnected decentralized and allow users and machines to interact with the data proactively. Technologies and protocols such as Smart Contracts, P2P sharing and access, and Decentralized Finance (Defi) are helping converge the human data interaction and transparency.

Japan, China, the USA, and Switzerland are leading countries utilizing blockchain across industries.

Opportunity zone for early career/New talent.  Targeting students for Internships and Apprenticeships will be a strategy with high ROI

Extremely high computational capabilities of quantum computing leveraging Qubits instead of the traditional binary bits are expected to drive use cases across industries such as drastic high-speed drug discovery & development, allow for faster trading algorithms, provide highly secure cyber security, and provide a medium to run high complexity simulations in domains such as climate change impact; and concurrently reducing computing power usage by 100 to 1,000 times.  Quantum technology is currently spearheaded and primarily controlled by a limited set of companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, D-Wave Systems, IonQ

Opportunity zone for early career/New talent.  Targeting students for Internships and Apprenticeships will be a strategy with high ROI (Especially on the Algorithms Researcher)

The pandemic has forced employers to experiment with remote work, providing substantial infrastructure and operational cost-benefit to employers and work flexibility and relocation flexibility to employees. Over 70 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to continue², and business leaders are re-aligning for hybrid-work for the coming decade.

With remote job postings up over 5X over the pandemic, designing clear strategies will help you win the talent war.

Opportunity zone for existing talent.  Targeting employees who have expressed a desire to quit to create new career opportunities in this area.  Also, having a clear strategy will help organizations tap into Mothers working from home for Contact Center type talent.  Also, several entry-level Cloud Support Engineer roles, Salesforce Admin roles, and other

The gig economy has been rising consistently post the 2008 crisis, and the growth has been propelled exponentially by the pandemic. Job flexibility and work accessibility provided by freelance platforms is the appealing critical factor as millions lost employment during the pandemic, drastically reducing the sense of security employees held working with firms under a full-time contract. Gig economy ecosystem operates primarily in two broad categories – one, in mid-low-income countries with lagging yearly work demand such as the Philippines, Brazil, and Pakistan where blue-collar gig workers and seasonal white-collar workers make up a large share of total employment; and two, in developed economies such as Switzerland and Norway where high-income white-collar tech, management, and business jobs are in demand for higher work-life balance and higher-income prospects.

Opportunity zone for existing talent/New Talent.  Targeting employees who have expressed a desire to quit relevant Gig jobs will be a way to Graft and Grow the talent.  The Gig jobs may be the ideal opportunity for some of your great existing team members to help retain talent.

Of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies, at least one-fifth (21%) now have net-zero commitments, representing nearly $14 trillion annual sales. Net-zero pledges cover over two-thirds (68%) of the global economy, with large scale government initiatives across the globe as the UK became the first G7 economy to legislate for net-zero by 2050 (2019) and China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, committed to carbon neutrality before 2060 (2021). Enterprises are incorporating emission reduction and net-zero targets and developing in-house teams and strategies. Large-scale supply chain optimizations, operations optimizations, and infrastructure development strategies are being reevaluated, incorporating modern technologies to reduce the global carbon footprint across firms.

Opportunity zone for New Talent/existing talent.  Targeting employees who have expressed a desire to quit relevant Gig jobs will be a way to Graft and Grow the talent. Some of your existing team members who resign may be passionate about this area as this may give them a more significant purpose