Going forward, workforce plans must be dynamic and adjustable based on a continuous monitoring of supply and demand. Such flexibility used to be extremely difficult to accommodate 鈥� back when the top determinants of supply were worker location and role. Location-bound talent meant that when an employee worked in California, your skills were in California. If you needed specialized IT skills in New York, you had to fly your employee across the country and often they also needed a role change.

But as the pandemic shifted working models to work from home or hybrid models, knowledge workers not only became untethered from the office, but part of a free-range workforce that can work anytime and anywhere. They became location unbound 鈥� and prefer it, as evidenced by the large volume of people moving out of the city to the country, to Florida, or even debating a move to the British Isles, anywhere with a good broadband connection.

At the same time, we鈥檙e seeing a new trend: unbound workers who are performing multiple 鈥� and increasingly diverse 鈥� roles as part of their current position. For example, they may work three days a week on one project or in one part of the business, and on the other two days support other initiatives with teams that are across the country or even overseas. These versatile workers are in demand for dynamic teams because their diversity of experience and unique skill sets aren鈥檛 necessarily needed in their full-time role, but they are in high demand across the business on an ad-hoc or project basis. This trend could be beneficial to both the organization and employee, as variety can prevent monotony 鈥� which hurts the employee experience and leads to attrition 鈥� and even increase job satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Mostly this leads to significant increases in productivity and organization agility.

Given these trends, we鈥檙e seeing the future of work as a flexible, global, incredibly agile gig economy that encompasses internal and external workers. This means hiring managers don鈥檛 always need to create a new position and budget for every skill set they need; rather, the business makes it easy for them to meet their 鈥渄emand鈥� by finding, accessing, and onboarding the right people 鈥� wherever they are 鈥� with the right skills to meet their needs. Imagine having a talent management system that can cross-charge the salaries or hourly rates of workers to multiple tasks, departments, and operational units across the globe. People can also sign up for flexible, part-time opportunities, get exposure to new areas of the business, develop new skills, and add value along the way.

There is, of course, a balance to be considered between the permanent and flexible elements of any employee鈥檚 position. Too much flexibility and fluidity could diminish job security and expose employees to the negatives of a potential precarious work environment 鈥� a healthy balance is therefore vital.

Looking ahead, this kind of role and location flexibility will increasingly become necessary to access the skill sets needed to meet business and sustainable economic growth. Many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries have had insufficient for births between 2020 and 2022 to meet the demand for skills in 16- to 20-year-old employees entering the workplace between 2036 and 2040. However, Africa will potentially have enough 20-year-olds to fuel OECD country development and economic growth. Tapping into people with desired skill sets from these areas of the world in an ethical and a sustainable way by not relocating people is the best possible way forward. It preserves and bolsters communities and cultures rather than depriving them of their skill base and human resources.

As discussed in a previous article, flexibility is also important when trying to diversify your workforce by attracting, hiring, and retaining workers of diverse genders, age, and ethnic groups. This is critical today. Surveys conducted during the pandemic, such as the , indicate that Black males, for instance, had a much better employee experience when working remotely because they report experiencing less unconscious bias and a great deal more equality. Forcing these workers to come to an office every day can make them more of a flight risk 鈥� and put your employee engagement and access to their valuable skills at risk.

So how can your HR department support this level of flexibility and optimize workforce planning in such an environment?

Start to think of ways to address skills gaps and empower employees to work how and where they want. Enable employees to work in cross-functional teams based on organizational tasks or projects. They can be across hierarchies or lines of business and help to create an agile working environment while fueling skill development. It鈥檚 also important to take an employee-centric approach to development and growth by providing access to internal opportunities through fellowships, gigs, temporary assignments, mentor programs, and experiential learning. Employees will have the flexibility to create a work experience that is uniquely their own, but it will also create an adaptable workforce that is future ready.

The future of workforce planning is here 鈥� and it鈥檚 full of potential for innovations. To learn more, visit www.sap.com/people-analytics.

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.

And it鈥檚 not just retail and service businesses that are losing employees and the valuable skills those employees bring. Companies across all industries and sizes are struggling to retain and hire knowledgeable workers with the right skill sets to run and grow their organizations. This is a business sustainability issue and blocker to business and digital transformation.

The pressure to retain and hire quality talent with strong digital skills in particular has intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the business digitalization need was accelerated by five to 10 years. Suddenly, harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) and investing in robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning are urgent priorities, not long-range plans. This acceleration has created employee skills gaps where organizations that might have been one or two years behind in digital skills transformation have suddenly found themselves to be a decade or more behind. This puts them at high risk of being unable to tap into the new digital economy, which is an opportunity cost few can afford.

The growing digital skills gap has also highlighted current and projected future inequalities because the gap has widened at different rates in different geographical locations and industry sectors. The looming digital divide is potentially so serious that the World Economic Forum has launched the , mobilizing a global movement, including a large number of 麻豆原创 customers and partners, to prioritize digital inclusion as foundational to the achievement of their sustainable development goals. 麻豆原创 has also prioritized its own digital literacy program.

To remain competitive and sustainable in the digital economy, businesses must have enough people with the right skills at the right time to help them accelerate their digital transformation. Every business and digital transformation is also a people transformation, but the key point is that the people transformation needs to happen first.

Embrace the 鈥淯nbound鈥� Workforce as the New Normal

Today, it seems every employee might be a flight risk, especially those with the skills that are foundational to digital transformation and economic growth. One way to address the immediate skills gap is to stem the flood of people leaving your business for greener pastures 鈥� which, for many, are more flexible and less biased work environments. Retention has always been the best form of recruitment. During the peak of COVID-19, knowledge workers were freed from the office and became, at least in their minds, fluid, liberated, and free-range employees. Many don鈥檛 want to go back to full-time office work 鈥� especially women and people of color. As noted in a previous article, pulse studies have found that women, working parents, and employees of color are the most adamant about continuing to work remotely.

And it’s for good reasons. Most employees 鈥� especially women 鈥� found that they were able to sustain high levels of productivity working remotely while gaining more time for relationships, stress-reducing activities, responsibilities such as caring for children and aging parents, and more. They could work from anywhere, at any time that worked best each day, and do their jobs well. Most employees report that they are aren鈥檛 willing to give this up because an employer says so.

The benefits of working remotely have been even more significant for people of color. For example, Black men reported a massive improvement in their employee experience because, while working remotely, they felt they have not been subject to the same level of unconscious bias. In other words, they feel that they’ve enjoyed more equality working from home 鈥� which is critical to fostering a sense of belonging and increasing the likelihood of their retention.

This is why to and meeting the needs of remote and hybrid workers is massively important from both a sustainability and a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective. It鈥檚 critical to develop flexible work environments that balance company and employee needs and create an employee experience they love. Because the fact is, every flight risk threatens your most valued digital skills, as the people with those skills are most likely to leave.

Empower Employees to Expand Their Capabilities to Advance Individual Growth

Another way to address skills gaps is to empower employees to work in cross-functional teams based on organizational tasks or projects. This notion of coming together with others to get work done and then disbanding when the work is finished is widely referred to as dynamic teams. They can be across hierarchies or lines of business and help to create an agile working environment while fueling skill development. By leveraging internal talent, managers and human resources do not have to create new positions, find budget, recruit, or support a team creation process with other time-consuming tasks. Instead, your business organizations can simply bring together employees to form optimal teams that can focus on short term tasks and priorities.

In addition to forming dynamic teams to bridge skills gaps, organizations can also take an employee-centric approach to development and growth by providing access to internal opportunities through fellowships, gigs, temporary assignments, mentor programs, and experiential learning. This allows an organization to build the skills needed for the future while empowering individuals to create a career completely their own. Connecting employees to meaningful work and new opportunities will drive the adaptability needed for better business outcomes.

Proactively Upskill and Reskill

Finally, invest in learning and development. Why? Because every digital transformation is also a people transformation where employers must upskill and reskill their employees to meet today鈥檚 changed needs and tomorrow鈥檚 capabilities demand. Not only must organizations provide the tools to help their workforce discover learning to upskill and reskill them, but they must create an environment supportive of continuous learning. For example, complementing formal training with informal, collaborative, and engaging communities of practice can offer easy access to experts and knowledge sharing to build up skills quickly. A dynamic environment of learning, feedback, and coaching empowers people to take charge of their development with confidence. Here, learning recommendations turn every employee into a proactive learner by giving guidance and nudging them to take action.

Undeniably, closing the skills gap and striving towards sustainable growth requires organizations to create a create a future-fit, resilient workforce that directly addresses its needs as well as those of each of its employees. This can be truly transformational.

To learn more, visit .

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.

According to a pulse survey conducted by the , 76% of employees want flexibility in where they work and 93% flexibility in when they work. The desire for flexible work is strongest among women, working parents, and employees of color who have shown gains in feelings of belonging working remotely. Specifically, 81% of Black respondents say they want flexibility in where they work, compared to 75% of White respondents.

This data is in direct contrast to what most executives report that they want in post-pandemic workforce policies. Of those currently working fully remotely, nearly half of all executives surveyed (44%) want to work from the office every day, compared to 17% of employees. And 75% of these executives say they want to work from the office three to five days a week versus only 34% of employees.

So, what are companies to do? How can they make informed decisions about what鈥檚 best for leaders, for the business, and for their employees?

Applying a Sustainability Lens to Work Location Decision

One way of looking at the issues of return to office or hybrid work is from a business sustainability perspective. For example, if forcing people back to the office will make critical employees more likely to leave their jobs, you have a real flight risk issue impacting the sustainability of your business. Your business must have enough people with the right skills at the right time to propel it forward.

Another perspective to consider is how today鈥檚 business environment has been transformed by climate change, nature loss, and more. The planet needs change, and people demand change. What if, when making decisions about who comes into the office and when, executives considered the carbon footprint generated by employee travel and commutes, weighed against the energy usage working from home, along with the sustainability causes that their employees support?

This would require implementing next-generation holistic steering and reporting that maps operational and experiential data to show progress on goals such as reducing the carbon footprint of the business. Imagine executives having climate and natural capital accounting at their fingertips, including individual and collective employee carbon footprint tracking.

This is the kind of holistic steering and reporting that groups such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) want companies to integrate into their strategic decision-making. Integrating economic, environmental, and social performance data into decisions 鈥� referred to as Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics 鈥� can help executives serve their own goals, respect their employees鈥� preferences for when and where they work, and contribute to reaching sustainability goals that make the world a cleaner, greener place.

How 麻豆原创 Can Help

In 2020, 麻豆原创 committed to enable companies to report on the WEF鈥檚 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics. As promised, we have delivered to help enable holistic enterprise-wide sustainability performance management. 麻豆原创 also made it easier to become a sustainable business and reduce carbon footprints with , which can enable businesses to move toward lower carbon emissions and more sustainable operations. 麻豆原创鈥檚 data-driven approach lets businesses embed sustainability comprehensively and gain actionable insights across the entire value chain to enable companies to transition to low-carbon business processes.

Faced with an ambitious sustainability agenda and carbon-lowering targets, one 麻豆原创 customer wanted to go further and consider the employee wishes for home/office work, and the carbon emissions generated from their commute to work against the energy efficiency of their home offices. The company had committed to lowering its enterprise carbon emissions and wanted a mechanism to support managers鈥� operational workforce planning processes.

麻豆原创 built a proof of concept (PoC) application in just one day once the employee survey was collected. The PoC decision support application was realized as follows:

Employee address data was acquired from records using the standard delivered API. 麻豆原创 Data Quality Management and microservices for location data were used for both data cleansing 鈥� a big bonus since the customer was able to cleanse inaccurate addresses in 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Employee Central 鈥� and data enrichment to geocode the home and work addresses with the latitude, longitude, and altitude information. The world of geo-location services was opened.

Demographic measures and dimensions were acquired from 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics using the standard 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud connector.

While trying to understand employee sentiment on workplace and flexibility preferences, a survey was created using Employee Experience Management Solutions from 麻豆原创 and Qualtrics. The survey allowed for employees, whose jobs enabled them to work from home, to answer questions relating to their preferences for the number of days a week they wanted to work from home and their commute (means and time of travel). The insights gathered allowed us to understand that the travel time to work 鈥� not distance 鈥� is a major factor in determining retention risk amongst various demographic groups and so the information was valuable input for the flight risk tool they had in 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud enterprise reporting.

was then able to use external Web services and geo-location services to calculate the travel distance and travel time to work by various means of transport. One of the services was then able to determine the carbon emissions for the means of travel that the employee had specified. The commute travel time by job grade is a leading predictor of flight risk and is easily added to the flight risk prediction dataset.

The systems also gathered information of all the corporate and possible work locations. This opened the possibility for work location optimization, but it was not part of the scope of the PoC.

The data was then blended using 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform, specifically 麻豆原创 Data Warehouse Cloud, and anonymization views were defined to protect actual home addresses from being shown. Real-time 麻豆原创 HANA data anonymization allowed the application to use actual addresses to accurately calculate the travel metrics while safely anonymizing sensitive data for dashboard visualization and drill-down.

A dashboard was built and refined to analyze and interrogate the employee commute measures and identify specific employee carbon emissions each working day. Geospatial representation and visualization were built and demonstrated with interactive zoom and data filters. A what-if scenario was demonstrated with graphs and metrics calculated in real time to show the specific carbon emission impact of changing the percentage of time spent working remotely.

As shown in the below process, this PoC was achieved using various 麻豆原创 solutions, including 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform.

In Summary

Executives can make better decisions about the impact of employees going back to the office and how often, considering the social and actual carbon emissions from commutes in their people planning. Using 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions for employee information to geocode the distance of employees from the office and utilizing to layer experience insights to determine preferences, they can analyze carbon emissions for different types of commutes and make data-driven decisions to fuel their sustainability initiatives.

As shown in the below figure, executives can even look at this data by employee gender, race, and age. This helps them better assess, for instance, how many employees have strong preferences and who would become a flight risk should the business choose to mandate regular employee in-office attendance.

Finally, the figure below shows the simple what-if scenario to demonstrate how quickly and effectively analytics interfaces can be built, in this case, incorporating a slider bar and immediate impact of the change for the pre-filtered employees.

This kind of sustainability data and analysis empowers executives to find the 鈥渟weet spot鈥� in decisions that balance their preferences against employee preferences and align them to important goals such as reducing their carbon footprint.

Suddenly, what鈥檚 best for all becomes quite clear.

Learn more at .

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.