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Desempeño de personas y organizaciones

Lo nuevo posible: Cómo RRHH puede ayudar

a construir la organización del futuro

12 de marzo de 2021| Artículo

Por Asmus Komm , Florián Pollner , Bill Schaninger y Surbhi Sikka

La pandemia subraya la urgencia de un modelo de talento y

trabajo más dinámico. Los líderes de recursos humanos
pueden ayudar centrándose en la identidad, la agilidad y la
escalabilidad.

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 Artículo (8 páginas)

Los líderes empresariales que observan que sus organizaciones

experimentan una profunda agitación debido a la crisis de COVID-19 pueden
tener dificultades para comprender lo que significa todo esto hasta que se
asiente el polvo.

But the pandemic hasn’t afforded them, or any of us, that luxury. It has
created profound and immediate changes to how societies operate and how
individuals interact and work. We have all witnessed an at-scale shift to
remote work, the dynamic reallocation of resources, and the acceleration of
digitization and automation to meet changing individual and organizational
needs.

Organizations have by and large met the challenges of this crisis moment. But
as we move toward imagining a postpandemic era , a management system
based on old rules—a hierarchy that solves for uniformity, bureaucracy, and
control—will no longer be effective. Taking its place should be a model that is
more flexible and responsive, built around four interrelated trends: more
connection, unprecedented automation, lower transaction costs, and
demographic shifts.

To usher in the organization of the future, chief human-resources officers

(CHROs) and other leaders should do nothing less than reimagine the basic
tenets of organization. Emerging models are creative, adaptable, and
antifragile .[ 1 ] Corporate purpose fuels bold business moves. “Labor”
becomes “talent.” Hierarchies become networks of teams . Competitors
become ecosystem collaborators. And companies become more human:
inspiring, collaborative, and bent on creating an employee experience that is
meaningful and enjoyable.

After the pandemic erupted last year, we spoke with 350 HR leaders about
the role of uncertainty in their function. They told us that over the next two
years they wanted to prioritize initiatives that strengthen their organization’s
ability to drive change in leadership, culture, and employee experience.

How are they doing? In this article, we discuss ways that CHROs can
continue to meet the moment by rethinking processes in three fundamental
areas: identity, agility, and scalability.

How HR fits in the big picture

McKinsey has recently conducted research on how businesses can best

organize for the future . The experimentation underway suggests that future-
ready companies share three characteristics: they know what they are and
what they stand for; they operate with a fixation on speed and simplicity; and
they grow by scaling up their ability to learn and innovate.

HR can help propel this transformation by facilitating positive change in

these three key areas, as well as with nine imperatives that radiate out from
them (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1
Identity: HR can clarify the meaning of

purpose, value, and culture

Companies that execute with purpose have greater odds of creating

significant long-term value generation , which can lead to stronger financial
performance, increased employee engagement, and higher customer trust.

Home in on the organization’s purpose

What is your company’s core reason for being, and where can you have a
unique, positive impact on society? Now more than ever, you need good
answers to those questions—purpose is not a choice but a necessity.

CHROs play a vital role in making sure the organization is living its purpose
and values . HR can articulate and role-model desired individual mindsets and
behaviors linked to purpose by identifying “moments that matter” in the
company’s culture and translating purpose into a set of leadership and
employee norms and behaviors.

For instance, commercial-vehicle manufacturer Scania holds an annual

“Climate Day,” during which the company stops operations for one hour to
hold sustainability training, in line with its purpose to “drive the shift toward a
sustainable transport system.”[ 2 ]

HR can also ensure that clear changes are made to recruitment and
capability-building processes by determining the characteristics of a
“purpose driven” employee and embedding these attributes within
recruitment, development, and succession planning.

HR can also incorporate purpose-driven metrics into compensation and

performance decisions. Companies across industries have embarked on
these metrics lately. For example, Seventh Generation, a maker of cleaning
and personal-care products, recently built into its incentive system
sustainability targets for the company’s entire workforce, in service of its goal
of being a zero-waste company by 2025. Shell has plans to set short-term
carbon-emissions targets and link executive compensation to performance
against them.

Think deeply about talent

Organizations that can reallocate talent in step with their strategic plans are
more than twice as likely to outperform  their peers. To link talent to value, the
best talent should be shifted into critical value-driving roles. That means
moving away from a traditional approach, in which critical roles and talent are
interchangeable and based on hierarchy.
Getting the best people into the most important roles requires a disciplined
look at where the organization really creates value and how top talent
contributes . Consider Tesla’s effort to create a culture of fast-moving
innovation, or Apple’s obsessive focus on user experience. These cultural
priorities are at the core of these companies’ value agendas. The roles
needed to turn such priorities into value are often related to R&D and filled
with talented, creative people.

To enable this shift, HR should manage talent rigorously by building an

analytics capability to mine data to hire, develop, and retain the best
employees. HR business partners, who articulate these staffing needs to the
executive management team, should consider themselves internal service
providers that ensure high returns on human-capital investments. For
example, to engage business leaders in a regular review of talent, they can
develop semiautomated data dashboards that track the most important
metrics for critical roles.

Create the best employee experience

possible

Companies know that a better employee experience means a better bottom

line. Successful organizations work together with their people to create
personalized, authentic, and motivating experiences that tap into purpose to
strengthen individual, team, and company performance.

The HR team plays a crucial role in forming employee experience.

Organizations in which HR facilitates a positive employee experience are 1.3
times more likely to report organizational outperformance, McKinsey
research has shown . This has become even more important throughout the
pandemic, as organizations work to build team morale and positive mindsets .

HR should facilitate and coordinate employee experience. Organizations can

support this by helping HR evolve, strengthening the function’s capability so
that it becomes the architect of the employee experience. Airbnb, for
instance, rebranded the CHRO role as global head of employee experience.
PayPal focused on HR’s capability and processes to create a better
experience for employees, including coaching HR professionals on
measuring and understanding that experience, and using technology more
effectively.

Strengthen leadership and build

capacity for change

Culture is the foundation on which exceptional financial performance is built.

Companies with top-quartile cultures (as measured by McKinsey’s
Organizational Health Index ) post a return to shareholders 60 percent
higher  than median companies and 200 percent higher than those in the
bottom quartile.

Culture change should be business-led, with clear and highly visible

leadership from the top, and execution should be rigorous and consistent.
Companies are more than five times more likely to have a successful
transformation  when leaders have role-modeled the behavior changes they
were asking their employees to make.

To strengthen an organization’s identity, HR should ask the following

questions:

How can we develop an energizing sense of purpose that has a tangible

impact on our strategic choices and ways of working?

How can we identify key talent roles and focus them on creating value?

How can we build a data-driven, systemic understanding of our

organizational health?

Agility: HR’s role in flattening the

organization

Organizational agility improves both company performance and employee

satisfaction . HR can be instrumental in shifting an organization from a
traditional hierarchy to a marketplace that provides talent and resources to a
collection of empowered small teams, helping them to achieve their missions
and acting as a common guiding star.

Adopt new organizational models

For instance, as a part of a multiyear agile transformation, a large European

bank worked to establish an in-house agile academy led jointly by coaches
and the HR function to drive capability building for the transformation.

To be successful, a transformation should touch every facet of an

organization—people, process, strategy, structure, and technology. HR can
help create an iterative approach by developing core elements of the people-
management process, including new career paths for agile teams, revamped
performance management, and capability building. It should lead by example
as well, by shifting to agile “flow to work” pools  in which individuals are
staffed to prioritized tasks.

Create a flexible—and magnetic—

workforce

Because many roles are becoming disaggregated and fluid, work will
increasingly be defined in terms of skills . The accelerating pace of
technological change is widening skill gaps, making them more common and
more quick to develop. To survive and deliver on their strategic objectives, all
organizations will need to reskill and upskill significant portions of their
workforce over the next ten years.

According to a 2018 McKinsey survey , 66 percent of executives said that

“addressing potential skills gaps related to automation/digitization” within
their workforces was at least a “top ten priority.” HR should help prioritize
these talent shifts.

In a more recent survey McKinsey conducted with global executives  about

the postpandemic workforce, more than a third of respondents said that their
organizations were unprepared to address the skill gaps exacerbated by
automation and digitization. The shift to digitization has accelerated during
the pandemic: 85 percent of companies have picked up the pace of their
digitization (including a 48 percent rise in the digitization of customer
channels). In light of these trends and the need to shift skills, there is a clear
business rationale behind workforce strategy and planning.

HR should be a strategic partner for the business in this regard, by ensuring

that the right talent is in place to deliver on core company objectives. HR can
also drive workforce planning by reviewing how disruptive trends affect
employees, identifying future core capabilities, and assessing how supply and
demand apply to future skills gaps.

Moving to a skills focus also requires innovative sourcing to meet specific

work-activity needs (for example, the gig economy and automation), and
changing which roles companies need to source with traditional full-time-
equivalent positions and which can be done by temporary workers or
contractors. In the survey with global executives, about 70 percent said that
two years from now they expect to use more temporary workers and
contractors than they did before the COVID-19 crisis.

During the pandemic, we’ve seen how organizations have come together to
utilize talent with transferable skills. For instance, McKinsey has supported
Talent Exchange , a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help workers
displaced by the crisis.

Make better decisions—faster

Companies that make decisions at the right organizational level  and that
have fewer reporting layers are more likely to deliver consistently on quality,
velocity, and performance outcomes and thus outperform their industry
peers. The pandemic has trained the spotlight on the power of fast decision
making, as many organizations have had to move dramatically more quickly
than they had originally envisioned. For example, one retailer had a plan for
curbside delivery that would take 18 months to roll out; once the COVID-19
crisis hit, the plan went operational in just two days.
HR can help with strong decision making by empowering employees  to take
risks in a culture that rewards them for doing so. McKinsey research revealed
that employees who are empowered to make decisions and who receive
sufficient coaching from leaders were three times more likely to say that their
companies’ delegated decisions were both high quality and speedy .

Introduce next-generation performance

management

Companies are experimenting with a wide variety of approaches to improve

how they manage performance. According to a McKinsey Global Survey , half
of respondents said that performance management had not had a positive
effect on employee or organizational performance. Two-thirds reported the
implementation of at least one meaningful modification to their performance-
management systems.

We identified three practices—managers’ coaching, linking employee goals

to business priorities, and differentiated compensation—that increase the
chances that a performance-management system will positively affect
employee performance. HR plays an important role in embedding these
practices in performance management by supporting the goal-setting
process, decoupling the compensation and development discussion,
investing in manager’s capability building, and embedding technology and
analytics to simplify the performance-management process.

To strengthen an organization’s agility, HR should ask the following

questions:

Can we enable more effective decision making by pushing decisions to the

edges of the organization, creating psychological safety  that empowers
people, and building capabilities?

How do we accelerate the shift to a more diverse and deeply motivated

talent base, one that is supported through a human-centric culture that
enables outperformance and superior experience?
 Which organizational areas or end-to-end value-creation streams would
most benefit from a shift to new ways of working and organizing?

Scalability: How HR can drive value

creation

The new normal of large, rapidly recurring skills gaps means that reskilling
efforts must be transformational, not business as usual or piecemeal.

Lean into a learning culture by

reskilling and upskilling

Effective reskilling and upskilling will require employees to embark on a

blended-learning journey that includes traditional learning (training, digital
courses, job aids) with nontraditional methods (enhanced peer coaching,
learning networks, the mass personalization of change , “nudging”
techniques).

For instance, Microsoft shifted from a “know it all” to a “learn it all” ethos,
incorporating open learning days, informal social learning opportunities,
learning data for internal career paths, and new platforms and products for its
partner network.

Memo to HR: Look in the mirror

To drive and facilitate these workforce initiatives, HR must transform itself

first. Talent is consistently ranked as a top three priority for CEOs, yet many
lack confidence in HR’s ability to deliver.[ 3 ] The HR function is often
overburdened with transactional work and not well equipped to create value
for the enterprise.

Yet people-first organizations look at business problems from the perspective

of how talent creates value, and HR is well positioned to bring data-driven
insights to talent decisions. HR can arm itself with data-driven insights and
people analytics to support talent-driven transformation, and HR business
partners can then consistently make talent decisions based on data.

Create a value-enhancing HR ecosystem

McKinsey analysis has shown that a preponderance of executives recognize

how much external partnerships help companies differentiate themselves.
Increased value can be created through ecosystems where partners share
data, code, and skills. Success now requires “blurry boundaries” and mutually
dependent relationships to share value. The need of the hour is for HR to
collaborate on and leverage the landscape of HR tech solutions across the
employee life cycle—from learning, talent acquisition, and performance
management to workforce productivity—to build an effective HR ecosystem.

To strengthen an organization’s scalability, HR should ask the following

questions:

How can we set up platforms spanning multiple players in the ecosystem

and enable new sources of value and employee experience through them?

How can we become the best company to partner with in the ecosystem?
How can we set ourselves up for fast partnering and make the ecosystem
accessible?

What are the critical skills that drive future value creation and how can we
upskill our talent base accordingly?

Looking ahead: How transformation

happens

As the organization of the future takes shape, HR will be the driving force for
many initiatives: mapping talent to value; making the workforce more flexible;
prioritizing strategic workforce planning, performance management, and
reskilling; building an HR platform; and developing an HR tech ecosystem.
For other initiatives, HR can help C-suite leaders push forward on
establishing and radiating purpose, improving employee experience, driving
leadership and culture, and simplifying the organization.

Given the magnitude of the task and the broad portfolio of value-creating HR
initiatives, prioritization is critical.

In May of 2020, HR leaders attending a McKinsey virtual conference

indicated that over the next two years, they wanted to prioritize initiatives that
strengthen agility and identity. That included 27 percent who said that they
would focus on responding with agility and 25 percent who prioritized driving
leadership, culture, and employee experience. Next came mapping talent to
value and establishing and radiating purpose, each at 13 percent (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2

At a second conference for HR leaders,[ 4 ] about half of the assembled

CHROs said that they were focusing on reimagining the fundamentals of the
organization and rethinking the operating model and ways of working in the
next normal.

We see organizations making this shift. Throughout the pandemic, HR has

played a central role in how companies build organizational resilience and
drive value . CHROs and their teams can continue on this path by connecting
talent to business strategy and by implementing changes in the three core
areas of identity, agility, and scalability, as well as the nine imperatives that
flow from them.

A more flexible and responsive model will also help organizations meet
coming demographic shifts and other workforce changes. Millennials are
becoming the dominant group in the workforce (with Gen Z close behind),
creating novel challenges for organizations to meet their needs. The
prominence of the gig economy and alternate models of working will only
grow, with 162 million workers in the European Union and the United States
working independently— 70 percent of them by choice . And the rapid spread
of digital technology and automation is dramatically reshaping the global
economy, with half the tasks people perform already automatable today.

These trends are not new, but they are approaching tipping points, placing
organization at the top of the CEO agenda. CHROs can help leadership by
transforming their own HR organizations: developing and reinforcing clear
priorities; embracing new ways of working, including rapid iteration and
testing with the business and seeking explicit feedback; and revamping the
HR skill set by embracing agility and digital capabilities.

While clearly a trial by fire, the pandemic also provides an opportunity for HR
to accelerate its shift from a service to a strategic function, helping to shape
a more dynamic organization that is ready to meet the postcrisis future.

1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, New York, NY: Random House
Trade Paperbacks, 2012.
2. Scania Annual and Sustainability Report 2019, Scania, scania.com.
3. Dominic Barton, Dennis Carey, and Ram Charan, “People before strategy: A new role for the
CHRO,” Harvard Business Review, July– August 2015, Volume 93, Number 7–8, pp. 62–71,
hbr.org.
4. Survey of human-resources leaders at “Reimagine: Organizing for the future,” a McKinsey virtual
conference held in June 2020.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Asmus Komm es socio de la oficina de Hamburgo de McKinsey, Florian

Pollner es socio de la oficina de Zúrich, Bill Schaninger es socio principal de
la oficina de Filadelfia y Surbhi Sikka es consultor de la oficina de Gurugram.

Los autores desean agradecer a Talha Khan por sus contribuciones a este
artículo.

Este artículo fue editado por Barbara Tierney, editora sénior de la oficina de
Nueva York.

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