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
AI
2024年02月01日
AI
HR Predictions for 2024: The Global Search For Productivity2024年的HR预测强调了生产力和AI在商业和雇佣实践中的关键作用。这篇文章讨论了公司在动态的经济条件和不断变化的劳动力市场背景下,如何适应他们的人才管理和招聘策略。强调了员工赋权的增加,劳动力市场的变化,以及技能发展的重要性。文章还探讨了劳动力囤积、混合工作模式和员工激活等关键概念。此外,还涉及领导力挑战、薪酬公平、DEI计划,以及可能的四天工作周。
一起来看Josh Bersin 带来新得见解
For the last two decades I’ve written about HR predictions, but this year is different. I see a year of shattering paradigms, changing every role in business. Not only will AI change every company and every job, but companies will embark on a relentless search for productivity.
Think about where we have been. Following the 2008 financial crisis the world embarked on a zero-interest rate period of accelerating growth. Companies grew revenues, hired people, and watched their stock prices go up. Hiring continued at a fevered pace, leading to a record-breaking low unemployment rate of 3.5% at the end of 2019.
Along came the pandemic, and within six months everything ground to a halt. Unemployment shot up to 15% in April of 2020, companies sent people home, and we re-engineered our products, services, and economy to deal with remote work, hybrid work arrangements, and a focus on mental health.
Once the economy started up again (thanks to fiscal stimulus in the US), companies went back to the old cycle of hiring. But as interest rates rose and demand fell short we saw layoffs repeat, and over the last 18 months we’ve seen hiring, layoffs, and then hiring again to recover.
Why the seesaw effect?
CEOs and CFOs are operating in what we call the “Industrial Age” – hire to grow, then lay people off when things slow down.
Well today, as we enter 2024, all that is different. We have to “hoard our talent,” invest in productivity, and redevelop and redeploy people for growth.
We live in a world of 3.8% unemployment rate, labor shortages in almost every role, an increasingly empowered workforce, and a steady drumbeat of employee demands: demands for pay raises, flexibility, autonomy, and benefits. More than 20% of all US employees change jobs each year (2.3% per month), and almost half these changes are into new industries.
Why is this the “new normal?”
There are several reasons. First, as we discuss in our Global Workforce Intelligence research, industries are overlapping. Every company is a digital company; every company wants to build recurring revenue streams; and soon every company will run on AI. Careers that used to stay within an industry are morphing into “skills-based careers,” enabling people to jump around more easily than ever before.
Second, employees (particularly young ones) feel empowered to act as they wish. They may quietly quit, “work their wage,” or take time out to change careers. They see a long runway in their lives (people live much longer than they did in the 1970s and 1980s) so they don’t mind leaving your company to go elsewhere.
Third, the fertility rate continues to drop and labor shortages will increase. Japan, China, Germany, and the UK all have shrinking workforce populations. And in the next decade or so, most other developed economies will as well.
Fourth, labor unions are on the rise. Thanks to a new philosophy in Washington, we’ve seen labor activity at Google, Amazon, Starbucks, GM, Ford, Stellantis, Kaiser, Disney, Netflix, and others. While union participation is less than 11% of the US workforce, it’s much higher in Europe and this trend is up.
What does all this mean?
There are many implications.
First, companies will be even more focused on building a high-retention model for work (some call it “labor hoarding.”) This means improving pay equity, continuing hybrid work models, investing in human-centered leadership, and giving people opportunities for new careers inside the company. This is why talent marketplaces, skills-based development, and learning in the flow of work are so important.
Second, CEOs have to understand the needs, desires, and demands of workers. As the latest Edelman study shows, career growth now tops the list, along with the desire for empowerment, impact, and trust. A new theme we call “employee activation” is here: listening to the workforce and delegating decisions about their work to their managers, teams, and leaders.
Third, the traditional “hire to grow” model will not always work. In this post-industrial age we have to operate systemically, looking at internal development, job redesign, experience, and hiring together. This brings together the silo’d domains of recruiting, rewards and pay, learning & development, and org design. (Read our Systemic HR research for more.)
What does “business performance” really mean?
If you’re a CEO you want revenue growth, market share, profitability, and sustainability. If you can’t grow by hiring (and employees keep “activating” in odd ways), what choice do you have? It’s pretty simple: you automate and focus on productivity.
Why do I see this as the big topic in 2024? For three big reasons.
First, CEOs care about it.
The 2024 PwC CEO survey found that CEO’s believe 40% of the work in their company is wasted productivity.
As shocking as that sounds, it rings true to me: too many emails, too many meetings, messy hiring process, bureaucratic performance management, and more. (HR owns some of these problems.)
Second, AI enables it.
AI is designed to improve white-collar productivity. (Most automation in the past helped blue or gray collar workers.) Generative AI lets us find information more quickly, understand trends and outliers, train ourselves and learn, and clean up the mess of documents, workflows, portals, and back office compliance and administration systems we carry around like burdens.
Third, we’re going to need it.
How will you grow when it’s so hard to find people? Time to hire went up by almost 20% last year and the job market is getting even tougher. Can you compete with Google or OpenAI for tech skills?
Internal development, retooling, and automation projects are the answer. And with Generative AI, the opportunities are everywhere.
What does all this mean for HR?
Well as I describe in the HR Predictions, we have a lot of issues to address.
We have to accelerate our shift to a dynamic job and organization structure. We have to get focused and pragmatic about skills. We have to rethink “employee experience” and deal with what we call “employee activation.” And we are going to have to modernize our HR Tech, our recruiting, and our L&D systems to leverage AI and make these systems more useful.
Our HR teams will be AI-powered too. As our Galileo™ customers already tell us, a well-architected “expert assistant” can revolutionize how HR people work. We can become “full-stack” HR professionals, find data about our teams in seconds instead of weeks, and share HR, leadership, and management practices with line leaders in seconds. (Galileo is being used as a management coach in some of the world’s largest companies.)
There are some other changes as well. As the company gets focused on “growth through productivity,” we have to think about the 4-day week, how we institutionalize hybrid work, and how we connect and support remote workers in a far more effective way. We have to refocus on leadership development, spend more time and money on first line managers, and continue to invest in culture and inclusion. We have to simplify and rethink performance management, and we have to solve the vexing problem of pay-equity.
And there’s more.
DEI programs have to get embedded in the business (the days of the HR DEI Police are over). We have to clean up our employee data so our AI and talent intelligence systems are accurate and trustworthy. And we have to shift our thinking from “supporting the business” to “being a valued consultant” and productizing our HR offerings, as our Systemic HR research points out.
All this is detailed in our new 40-page report “HR Predictions for 2024,” launching this week, including a series of Action Plans to help you think through all these issues.
And let me remind you of a big idea. Productivity is why HR departments exist.
Everything we do, from hiring to coaching to development to org design, is only successful if it helps the company grow. As experts in turnover, engagement, skills, and leadership, we in HR have make people and the organization productive every day. 2024 is a year to focus on this higher mission.
One final thing: taking care of yourself.
The report has 15 detailed predictions, each with a series of action steps to consider. The last one is really for you: focus on the skills and leadership of HR. We, as stewards of the people-processes, have to focus on our own capabilities. 2024 will be a year to grow, learn, and work as a team. If we deal with these 15 issues well, we’ll help our companies thrive in the year ahead.
Details on the Josh Bersin Predictions
The predictions study is our most widely-read report each year. It includes a detailed summary of all our research and discusses fifteen essential issues for CEOs, CHROs, and HR professionals. It will be available in the following forms:
Webinar and launch on January 24: Register Here (replays will be available)
Infographic with details: Available on January 24.
Microlearning course on Predictions: Available on January 24.
Detailed Report and Action Guide: Available to Corporate Members and Josh Bersin Academy Members (JBA). (Note you can join the JBA for $495 per year and that includes our entire academy of tools, resources, certificate courses, and SuperClasses in HR.)
AI
2024年01月19日
AI
Workday: It’s Time to Close the AI Trust GapWorkday, a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has pressed a global study recently recognizing the importance of addressing the AI trust gap. They believe that trust is a critical factor when it comes to implementing artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially in areas such as workforce management and human resources.
Research results are as follows:
At the leadership level, only 62% welcome AI, and only 62% are confident their organization will ensure AI is implemented in a responsible and trustworthy way. At the employee level, these figures drop even lower to 52% and 55%, respectively.
70% of leaders say AI should be developed in a way that easily allows for human review and intervention. Yet 42% of employees believe their company does not have a clear understanding of which systems should be fully automated and which require human intervention.
1 in 4 employees (23%) are not confident that their organization will put employee interests above its own when implementing AI. (compared to 21% of leaders)
1 in 4 employees (23%) are not confident that their organization will prioritize innovating with care for people over innovating with speed. (compared to 17% of leaders)
1 in 4 employees (23%) are not confident that their organization will ensure AI is implemented in a responsible and trustworthy way. (compared to 17% of leaders)
“We know how these technologies can benefit economic opportunities for people—that’s our business. But people won’t use technologies they don’t trust. Skills are the way forward, and not only skills, but skills backed by a thoughtful, ethical, responsible implementation of AI that has regulatory safeguards that help facilitate trust.” said Chandler C. Morse, VP, Public Policy, Workday.
Workday’s study focuses on various key areas:
Section 1: Perspectives align on AI’s potential and responsible use.
“At the outset of our research, we hypothesized that there would be a general alignment between business leaders and employees regarding their overall enthusiasm for AI. Encouragingly, this has proven true: leaders and employees are aligned in several areas, including AI’s potential for business transformation, as well as efforts to reduce risk and ensure trustworthy AI.”
Both leaders and employees believe in and hope for a transformation scenario* with AI.
Both groups agree AI implementation should prioritize human control.
Both groups cite regulation and frameworks as most important for trustworthy AI.
Section 2: When it comes to the development of AI, the trust gap between leaders and employees diverges even more.
“While most leaders and employees agree on the value of AI and the need for its careful implementation, the existing trust gap becomes even more pronounced when it comes to developing AI in a way that facilitates human review and intervention.”
Employees aren’t confident their company takes a people-first approach.
At all levels, there’s the worry that human welfare isn’t a leadership priority.
Section 3: Data on AI governance and use is not readily visible to employees.
“While employees are calling for regulation and ethical frameworks to ensure that AI is trustworthy, there is a lack of awareness across all levels of the workforce when it comes to collaborating on AI regulation and sharing responsible AI guidelines.”
Closing remarks: How Workday is closing the AI trust gap.
Transparency: Workday can prioritize transparency in their AI systems. Providing clear explanations of how AI algorithms make decisions can help build trust among users. By revealing the factors, data, and processes that contribute to AI-driven outcomes, Workday can ensure transparency in their AI applications.
Explainability: Workday can work towards making their AI systems more explainable. This means enabling users to understand the reasoning behind AI-generated recommendations or decisions. Employing techniques like interpretable machine learning can help users comprehend the logic and factors influencing the AI-driven outcomes.
Ethical considerations: Working on ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI use can play a crucial role in closing the trust gap. Workday can ensure that their AI systems align with ethical principles, such as fairness, accountability, and avoiding bias. This might involve rigorous testing, auditing, and ongoing monitoring of AI models to detect and mitigate any potential biases or unintended consequences.
User feedback and collaboration: Engaging with users and seeking their feedback can be key to building trust. Workday can involve their customers and end-users in the AI development process, gathering insights and acting on user concerns. Collaboration and open communication will help Workday enhance their AI systems based on real-world feedback and user needs.
Data privacy and security: Ensuring robust data privacy and security measures is vital for instilling trust in AI systems. Workday can prioritize data protection and encryption, complying with industry standards and regulations. By demonstrating strong data privacy practices, they can alleviate concerns associated with AI-driven data processing.
SOURCE Workday
AI
2024年01月11日
AI
Ceipal Further Increases Recruiter Productivity With New WhatsApp IntegrationThe integration of WhatsApp into the Ceipal platform is a positive development for recruiter productivity. WhatsApp, a popular messaging application, is widely used by individuals and businesses worldwide. By incorporating this widely-used communication channel into Ceipal, the platform can now offer recruiters a more seamless and efficient way to engage with candidates.
Users Can Strengthen Candidate Relationships, Schedule Interviews, and Auto-Source Candidates Directly From the Ceipal ATS
ROCHESTER, N.Y.,OCT. 11,2023 Ceipal, the industry-leading, AI-powered total talent acquisition and automation platform, is further increasing recruiter productivity through its new integration with WhatsApp—a free, cross-platform messaging service—so they can deepen their engagement with candidates in real-time. Ceipal applicant tracking system (ATS) users can now connect with candidates directly through WhatsApp conversations that strengthen relationships, improve efficiency, and attract talent faster.
Ceipal users can configure WhatsApp to contact candidates and automatically schedule interviews with them directly through the ATS, allowing candidates to accept, reschedule, or reject calendar invites directly from WhatsApp. The integration also enables users to auto-source candidates with Ceipal’s industry-leading artificial intelligence technology, which connects with potential candidates by sharing job information via email and WhatsApp messages to engage top talent from internal databases.
“In order to create remarkable candidate experiences, recruiters and staffing professionals must be able to immediately reach and nurture top talent before the competition,” said Ceipal Founder and CEO Sameer Penakalapati. “By interacting with candidates via instant messaging tools, such as WhatsApp, they can further build out their talent pools and personalize their communication with them. Ceipal’s WhatsApp integration is another solution for recruiters and staffing professionals to streamline their workflows and boost their productivity so they can strengthen their candidate relationships.”
Additionally, recruiters and staffing professionals can use WhatsApp to share GDPR consent requests. Candidates can easily accept or decline requests directly through WhatsApp, providing a more efficient way to handle these responses.
Ceipal’s WhatsApp integration is part of its suite of productivity applications integrations, which enable users to leverage their favorite software more effectively. These integrations help recruiters and staffing professionals save valuable time, automate repetitive processes, and empower them to grow their businesses.
For more information about Ceipal’s WhatsApp integration, which is now available for free, please visit the WhatsApp integration page.
About Ceipal
Ceipal is a scalable, AI-driven, total talent acquisition platform that provides visibility across all channels and sources while organizing your data into a single talent ecosystem. With the power of advanced automation and artificial intelligence, Ceipal’s industry-leading ATS and CRM capabilities empower you to efficiently identify, assess, engage, hire, and onboard the best talent. Ceipal Procurewise, our native and fully integrated VMS platform, provides unmatched capabilities for your HR, corporate procurement teams, and MSPs to source, manage, and engage contingent staffing, direct sourcing, and statement of work vendors and workers. Ceipal enables you to integrate, manage, and improve the entire talent acquisition lifecycle, so you can simplify, scale, and transform any high-growth business into a diverse talent powerhouse. Welcome to the new frontier of talent acquisition.
SOURCE Ceipal
AI
2024年01月08日
AI
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
AI
2023年12月30日
AI
人工智能正在以比我预期更快的速度改变企业学习AI Is Transforming Corporate Learning Even Faster Than I Expected在《AI正在比我预想的更快地改变企业学习AI Is Transforming Corporate Learning Even Faster Than I Expected》这一文中,Josh Bersin强调了AI对企业学习和发展(L&D)领域的革命性影响。L&D市场价值高达3400亿美元,涵盖了从员工入职到操作程序等一系列活动。传统模型正在随着像Galileo™这样的生成性AI技术的发展而演变,这改变了内容的创建、个性化和传递方式。本文探讨了AI在L&D中的主要用例,包括内容生成、个性化学习体验、技能发展,以及用AI驱动的知识工具替代传统培训。举例包括Arist的AI内容创作、Uplimit的个性化AI辅导,以及沃尔玛实施AI进行即时培训。这种转型是深刻的,呈现了一个AI不仅增强而且重新定义L&D策略的未来。
在受人工智能影响的所有领域中,最大的变革也许发生在企业学习中。经过一年的实验,现在很明显人工智能将彻底改变这个领域。
让我们讨论一下 L&D 到底是什么。企业培训无处不在,这就是为什么它是一个价值 3400 亿美元的市场。工作中发生的一切(从入职到填写费用账户再到复杂的操作程序)在某种程度上都需要培训。即使在经济衰退期间,企业在 L&D 上的支出仍稳定在人均 1200-1500 美元。
然而,正如研发专业人士所知,这个问题非常复杂。有数百种培训平台、工具、内容库和方法。我估计 L&D 技术空间的规模超过 140 亿美元,这甚至不包括搜索引擎、知识管理工具以及 Zoom、Teams 和 Webex 等平台等系统。多年来,我们经历了许多演变:电子学习、混合学习、微型学习,以及现在的工作流程中的学习。
生成式人工智能即将永远改变这一切。
考虑一下我们面临的问题。企业培训并不是真正的教学,而是创造一个学习的环境。传统的教学设计以教师为主导,以过程为中心,但在工作中常常表现不佳。人们通过多种方式学习,通常没有老师,他们寻找参考资料,复制别人正在做的事情,并依靠经理、同事和专家的帮助。因此,必须扩展传统的教学设计模型,以帮助人们学习他们需要的东西。
输入生成人工智能,这是一种旨在合成信息的技术。像Galileo™这样的生成式人工智能工具 可以以传统教学设计师无法做到的方式理解、整合、重组和传递来自大型语料库的信息。这种人工智能驱动的学习方法不仅效率更高,而且效果更好,能够在工作流程中进行学习。
早期,在工作流程中学习意味着搜索信息并希望找到相关的东西。这个过程非常耗时,而且常常没有结果。生成式人工智能通过其神经网络的魔力,现在已经准备好解决这些问题,就像 L&D 的瑞士军刀一样。
这是一个简单的例子。我问Galileo™(该公司经过 25 年的研究和案例研究提供支持):“我该如何应对总是迟到的员工?请给我一个叙述来帮助我?” 它没有带我去参加管理课程或给我看一堆视频,而是简单地回答了问题。这种类型的互动是企业学习的大部分内容。
让我总结一下人工智能在学习与发展中的四个主要用例:
生成内容:人工智能可以大大减少内容创建所涉及的时间和复杂性。例如,移动学习工具Arist拥有AI生成功能Sidekick,可以将综合的操作信息转化为一系列的教学活动。这个过程可能需要几周甚至几个月的时间,现在可以在几天甚至几小时内完成。
我们在Josh Bersin 学院使用 Arist ,我们的新移动课程现在几乎每月都会推出。Sana、Docebo Shape和以用户为中心的学习平台 360 Learning 等其他工具也同样令人兴奋。
个性化学习者体验:人工智能可以帮助根据个人需求定制学习路径,改进根据工作角色分配学习路径的传统模型。人工智能可以理解内容的细节,并使用该信息来个性化学习体验。这种方法比杂乱的学习体验平台(LXP)有效得多,因为LXP通常无法真正理解内容的细节。
Uplimit是一家致力于构建人工智能平台来帮助教授人工智能的初创公司,它正在使用其Cobot和其他工具为学习人工智能的技术专业人员提供个性化的指导和技巧。Cornerstone 的新 AI 结构按技能推荐课程,Sana 平台将 Galileo 等工具与学习连接起来,SuccessFactors 中的新 AI 功能还为用户提供了基于角色和活动的精选学习视图。
识别和发展技能:人工智能可以帮助识别内容中的技能并推断个人的技能。这有助于提供正确的培训并确定其有效性。虽然许多公司正在研究高级技能分类策略,但真正的价值在于可以通过人工智能识别和开发的细粒度、特定领域的技能。
人才情报领域的先驱者Eightfold、Gloat和SeekOut可以推断员工技能并立即推荐学习解决方案。实际上,我们正在使用这项技术来推出我们的人力资源职业导航器,该导航器将于明年初推出。
用知识工具取代培训:人工智能在学习与发展中最具颠覆性的用例也许是完全取代某些类型培训的潜力。人工智能可以创建提供信息和解决问题的智能代理或聊天机器人,从而可能消除对某些类型培训的需求。这种方法不仅效率更高,而且效果更好,因为它可以在个人需要时为他们提供所需的信息。
沃尔玛今天正在实施这一举措,我们的新平台 Galileo 正在帮助万事达卡和劳斯莱斯等公司在无需培训的情况下按需查找人力资源信息和政策信息。LinkedIn Learning 正在向 Gen AI 搜索开放其软技能内容,很快 Microsoft Copilot 将通过 Viva Learning 找到培训。
这里潜力巨大
在我作为分析师的这些年里,我从未见过一种技术具有如此大的潜力。人工智能将彻底改变 L&D 格局,重塑我们的工作方式,以便 L&D 专业人员可以花时间为企业提供咨询。
L&D 专业人员应该做什么?花一些时间来了解这项技术,或者参加Josh Bersin 学院的一些新的人工智能课程以了解更多信息。
随着我们继续推出像伽利略这样的工具,我知道你们每个人都会对未来的机会感到惊讶。L&D 的未来已经到来,而这一切都由人工智能驱动。