‘Societal change requires a new approach to leadership, and it’s essential we have a vision and communicate the positive impact’

Peo­ple can medi­a­tise issues at a speed and scale unimag­in­able a decade ago, and mobil­i­ty has nev­er been eas­i­er. It’s an excit­ing time, but also a fright­en­ing one for many peo­ple.

This scale of soci­etal change requires a new approach to lead­er­ship and, as we step into the future, it’s essen­tial we have a vision and com­mu­ni­cate the pos­i­tive impact change is going to bring.

First, we must acknowl­edge that most peo­ple find this lev­el of uncer­tain­ty unset­tling, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to their liveli­hood. In the UK, this anx­i­ety is ampli­fied by the ongo­ing mys­ter­ies around the impact of Brex­it.

As econ­o­mist Dr Daniel Thorni­ley notes in an exclu­sive Brex­it report he pre­pared for UNLEASH ear­li­er this month, there is still insuf­fi­cient clar­i­ty on the rules and sta­tus of Euro­pean Union cit­i­zens’ con­tin­ued abil­i­ty to live and work in the UK.

This is a sit­u­a­tion that leaves organ­i­sa­tions adrift with no exist­ing par­a­digm for human resources to utilise. For many UK com­pa­nies, it will mean added dis­rup­tion to tal­ent man­age­ment and tal­ent acqui­si­tion strate­gies.

All this comes at a time when tal­ent­ed and high­ly skilled employ­ees are not just becom­ing hard­er to recruit and retain, but active­ly rethink­ing their desired rela­tion­ships with employ­ers.

As organ­i­sa­tions look to cope with these changes, they would do well to start by mak­ing bet­ter use of the work­force ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties already at their dis­pos­al.

And yet, in a recent joint research report pro­duced by UNLEASH and the IBM Smarter Work­force Insti­tute, we dis­cov­ered that UK and Euro­pean HR prac­ti­tion­ers felt even less pre­pared to har­ness the pow­er of work­force ana­lyt­ics than their coun­ter­parts in the rest of the world.

Some 44 per cent of HR ana­lyt­ics prac­ti­tion­ers in Europe report­ed that their organ­i­sa­tion had an effec­tive work­force ana­lyt­ics leader, com­pared with 49 per cent of prac­ti­tion­ers out­side Europe.

While 27 per cent of Euro­pean HR prac­ti­tion­ers report­ed that their teams had the right mix of skills from HR, psy­chol­o­gy, sta­tis­tics, data sci­ence and con­sult­ing, com­pared with 49 per cent of respon­dents out­side Europe.

And 26 per cent of respon­dents in Europe indi­cat­ed that their com­pa­nies had the right tech­nol­o­gy for their HR ana­lyt­ics projects, com­pared with 42 per cent out­side Europe.

Whether this gap stems from a lack of capa­bil­i­ties or a lack of con­fi­dence, it pos­es a seri­ous prob­lem when it comes to address­ing the very real chal­lenges these organ­i­sa­tions are fac­ing.

Ours is an increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive world, one in which agile play­ers can dis­rupt estab­lished busi­ness mod­els with­in a few weeks of launch­ing a smart­phone appli­ca­tion. Improved work­force pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and per­for­mance, enhanced employ­ee expe­ri­ence and well­be­ing, and bet­ter HR report­ing at a strate­gic lev­el, are essen­tial to the suc­cess of organ­i­sa­tions and their abil­i­ty to sur­vive, now and in the decades to come.

We need a new vision for the future of work.