Surviving The ’21 Halfway Mark, With Hope Of Thriving Towards The End

Having passed this year’s halfway mark, it is a good time to assess what progress has been in made in terms of the transition from surviving to thriving as foretold by the annual Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report.  When last delving into its contents, it was highlighted that the latest version thereof is based on some of the trends that were halted by the global situation that emerged during 2020.  It was said that the biggest call out was the need for humanity to be harnessed to ensure a sustainable forward journey.   The report highlights that those who were more prepared in relation to investment, technology and rapid decision-making capabilities would also be three times more ready for future disruptions. 

While it is a good time to review the above, it is also a difficult time in some instances, especially where tighter lockdown restrictions returned due another wave of the pandemic with the devasting new variant.  Because of this, it seems partially futile to consider the ability of some to thrive, and therefore we should realistically presume that the readiness for thriving appears more to a specific community of organisations rather than to a general one.  Having sad that, it also seems that now more than ever, humanity continues to be relied on to help smaller organisations return to the motive of survival.  Supporting your local providers would be one demonstration of such humanity and there has been multiple calls to action for us all to actively support wherever we can. Every contribution counts in this regard!

As for those organisations that are closer to thriving, the report identifies the unofficial criteria to help establish the progress to date in attempts to develop the green shoots from the survival phase. Hopefully many are far enough along the line to have hope and optimism for further blossoming in the last part of another tough year that for many seems like an extension of the previous one, as if 2020 has not reached its sell by date yet.  These criteria are those 5 trends which also happens to extend from last year and below are a few of the key call outs.

Trend #1 – Designing work for wellbeing

The first of the five trends refer to a concept that may sound illogical: “The end of work/life balance”.  Not too long ago, this was something to strive for in life and now we’re talking about the end of it. Deloitte instead refers to work life integration as the new ideal.  In the survival phase, having balance was good enough to ensure we made it through a tough time however to thrive more than that is needed.  Work and life should not be seen as one thing interrupting each other but in a perfect world it is a situation where the school run is a completely normal unpressured part of your day, to name a simple example.  In fact, it is arguable that the school run was already a part of everyone’s world, and we should now be asking whether the school’s sport afternoon is part of a normal workday as a better example.  The concept of a third office burst onto the scene some time ago.  Office number one is our company HQ, office two is at home, and office three is any place where you can connect to the cloud.  How many of the three are seen as normal for your organisation, or your line manager? It is noteworthy that for some remote work does not yet mean flexible work. The feedback in the report identifies that work should be designed in a way that ensures integration of all aspects of life to ensure an achievable route to worker and human wellbeing.

Trend #2 Beyond reskilling: Unleashing worker potential

During the survival phase, organisations were still learning the bare minimum about adapting to a massively disrupted world.  It was much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for organisational life.  The focus was on “physiological” aspects such as compliance and identifying who can do what in terms of managing the new world of work.  How do we manage employees advising of symptoms? Who could do temperature screening? Who can answer calls from customers that would normally walk in?  Leadership needed to quickly determine how they could reskill the workforce and how they could allocate human resources to changing demands.  To thrive, the focus needs to shift from human resources to humans with resources and this can best be done through increasing autonomy that workers have about what they do.  The input that employees have about what work they do and how they do it, directly affects engagement and the days of to do lists arriving in inboxes from top management are long gone.  In fact, this was among the key factors that contributed to the retention of millennials when that was a hot topic.  Worker autonomy was critical to their retention, and it is evident that this applies to all workers.  For millennials in particular, the oldest ones have entered middle age and some of the work done in accommodating that generation remains unresolved for 20 years.  That should be a signal to us to adapt faster considering the current climate.  If management is still deciding on what their staff are doing and when and how they do it, then thriving organisations are still some distance away.

Trend #3 – Super teams: Where work happens

“The rise of teams” was the phrase that came to life in Deloitte’s 2016 trends report.  Five years on in a pandemic-stricken world, the concept of super teams has been identified as a factor that can help organisations to thrive.  In the survival process, organisations had to find a way for teams and technology to combine in a way that would ensure the show could just about go on and the motive behind the use of technology was to make teams efficient.  The idea of integration returns here to nudge us towards a world where teams and technology are integrated in a way that enhances the human qualities that individuals have.  Once more that common thread of humanity is central to the idea of thriving.  Respondents said that implementing new technologies are one of the top three factors that contributes to transforming work and that organisational culture and workforce capability was the top two of those three.  Technology and artificial intelligence is not destined to replace human contributions, but instead to enhance it.  Two great examples of this can be drawn from how Ford created special teams to set up their production lines to build thousands of ventilators instead of car batteries and Distell used their liquor producing facilities to make sanitiser.   That is an incredible lesson in avoiding the temptation to figure out how to do things better and instead to create completely new work.  It is great that technology helps us do our existing work, but to reach a thriving state, we should think about its transformative potential to envision work that was unimaginable pre-pandemic.

Trend #4 – Governing workforce strategies: Setting new directions for work and the workforce

If you had to choose something that has evolved the most over the last decade or two, then it is the need for and the use of data. This trend assesses how relevant it is now and it looks at exactly what data and consequential information should be most tabled in our current world.  Before, it was ok to look at a standard set of figures, spreadsheets, and scorecards about how well we have performed and from a survival point of view that was important to determine the health in an organisation.  Going forward however the need is significantly different in that organisations need to be able to identify realities about their work in real time to provide insight which will directly affect its future.  Interestingly, the 2020 trends report shows that 97% of respondents said that they needed additional information on their workforce and that is the most meaningful area of required insight.  For thriving organisations, this is among the focus areas and the report summarises the sub-areas that need attention. These are:

1. Capitalising on worker potential

2. Tapping into the entire talent ecosystem

3. Translating values into action 

These 3 items may sound familiar, and they have all been part of previous publications of various sources however the latest report provides some good questions to consider (pages 31 to 34) regarding these as follows: 

• How ready is our workforce to perform the work of the future?
• What new challenges, trends and scenarios are leaders being prepared for?
• How healthy is our talent pool/market?
• How much capability can we access in our broader ecosystem?
• Which of our workers are likely to leave or be retained?
• How does our organisation treat its employees, suppliers and contractors?
• Is diversity in the organisation meaningful enough to ensure influence from different sources?
• What is our organisational culture and how is it being portrayed internally and externally?

The above questions are not exhaustive.  One that came to mind during the accumulation of this piece was:  What do we know now that we should have known two to five years ago?  And as a follow up, what should we know in two to five years from now that we might not be considering right now? The realisation from the latest report is that respondents have indicated they will focus more on planning for unlikely, high impact events.  To thrive it may need organisations to plan for things that will never happen but that would at least mean that survival has been acquired, which must be seen as a positive in today’s climate.

Trend #5 A Memo to HR – accelerating the shift to re-architecting work

If there ever was a chance for HR to stand up and deliver, then it was during the pandemic.  Truth be told, HR is always at the centre of such discussions and under scrutiny from various sources, be it internally or externally, so just imagine the increase to that with COVID19 gnashing its teeth.  The community rose to the challenge (at some cost) and the conversation has evolved from “having a seat at the table” and other clichés.  Due to their incredible response, executives expressed greater confidence in HR’s ability to adapt to future changes.  The trends report suggests that HR now needs to capitalise on this stronger platform.  The findings are that the human capital space needs to transition from being process based to impact based, from worker based to human based and to shift focus from managing workers to rearchitecting work.  This can be done by venturing to areas that are broader than its traditionally perceived remit. One of the results of the trends survey was that HR’s biggest impact came from areas that are traditionally viewed as “HR’s job”.  These areas were in the health and safety space, along with communication to employees and promoting worker wellbeing.  This certainly is not a problem because as is often the case, basic housekeeping issues tend to require perfecting first before organisations can move onto bigger goals.  HR have now demonstrated these housekeeping matters well under the hardest circumstances and now is as good a time as any to help organisations move to thriving by exploring broader areas of impact.  The top broadened areas that are highlighted will strengthen many a business and thus HR must accelerate its plans to understand what leadership is needed for the future of work and establish a process of preparing next generation leaders for that.  Furthermore, they need to partner with workers by treating them as a creative force to result in a more symphonic approach to innovation and progress.  As the tide continues to turn, HR should take advantage of the opportunity to walk through the doors that have been opened and it is great to see that some organisations are already doing that well! Long may it continue and improve.

Congratulations to those who has made it to thriving and to everyone fighting survival, keep going!

A Peek Into Human Capital’s Favourite Report

More than 50 pages of trendy human capital goodness! That is what we get every year from Deloitte in one of the most anticipated publications in the HR world. For this year’s version, there’s been more business executive responses than HR executive responses for the first time since the inception of the survey 11 years ago. This piece and subsequent ones intend to share a personally interpreted summary for anyone who can’t get to all the content however for those who can, the full report is available here if you have not read it yet. Please allow me to add that the expressed personal views are my own and by no means a reflection of any other party.

To begin with, the opening of the report refers to today’s world of continuous disruption. We’ve lived in a disrupted state for as long as can be recalled. Change has always been the only constant and we have always been at a stage where its rate has been faster than at any other time before it (Ironically, that is one fact that will not change). If we needed a symbol for it then 2020 and the global pandemic that came with it was exactly that if not more. The passage goes onto highlight that organisations need to proceed from a survive to a thrive mindset by becoming and remaining more human to make the shift. The 2021 issue of the report promises to be another fascinating one considering the context and climate.

It highlights that to survive is not enough because it is limited to making it through one crisis at a time. A thrive mindset on the other hand recognizes that a crisis can come at any time, things change from moment to moment, and within this, there are opportunities to reimagine things. A new canvas can be established, to create new realities. It’s about aiming for domination rather than settling for just making it. Only human teams with human qualities led through a human approach can achieve this. A predictable world can be led by equations and algorithms, our world cannot. We are encouraged to approach everything from a human angle first which is pretty much what the best leaders have been saying (and the greatest ones have been doing) for years. This style needs to become mainstream. The report says that to thrive the following principles are needed: 

–         Purpose and meaning

–         Ethics and fairness

–         Growth and passion

–         Collaboration and relationships

–         Transparency and openness

When there is continuous disruption there must be continuous reinvention. The above human qualities allow for that.

The purpose of the report centers on how organisations can achieve the above. How can they position themselves to thrive WHILE there are threats to survival? The increase in survey respondents is among the demonstrations of the ongoing relevance of human capital matters and the rest of the report will most likely deepen that realization. 

Your thoughts and experiences on this are welcome in the comments or directly, especially if you have perused the contents of the report more extensively. I’ll be doing that over the short to medium term having passed the midpoint of quarter one of our hopeful year and I’ll share my opinions here as that process unfolds. In the meantime, all the best to everyone in executing the call out for more humanity! One important reminder – to be human, also means to not be perfect, least of all in the climate that we are currently navigating.

South Africa Locked Down: Temporary Employer Relief Scheme Claims

Many small and medium businesses and their employees have struggled to cope with the restrictions in place.  These has been extended and essentially, we are now at the halfway mark of this 5 week lockdown.  That is not the best news for many who are really struggling with these circumstances. 

Not that it will solve every problem out there, but it is important that everyone knows what has been put in place to help soften the blow a little bit. Government has made some provisions and I would encourage everyone that is eligible to make use of this. 

I have tried to share my own understanding of what has been put in place.  If it makes sense and is clear enough, please share it with your family members or anyone you know that may need it. 

The official document can be found on the website of the department of employment and labor. My own summary is below, with the hope that it’s a bit easier than the original guide.  If there is an even easier out there, then by all means share that one. 

COVID 19 EASY AID GUIDE SUMMARY

Because of the state of DISASTER that was declared in SA, the minister of employment and labor can change current procedures and policies to help manage the situation for employers and employees, and this is what has been done.

The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) and the relevant people there (Unemployment Insurance Commissioner and Unemployment Insurance Executive) has In addition to normal UIF benefits developed a Corona Virus Disease Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (COVID-19 TERS) to contribute to dealing with COVID-19 and its impact. 

An action required: Employers that require financial assistance from UIF needs to appoint someone to start the process by sending an email to a dedicated mailbox at this address: covid19ters@labour.gov.za  

The mailbox will reply with an auto-response that explains the procedure and all requirements of the application.  The person from the company that sent the email and reads the response will then need to submit everything that is needed as explained in the automatic response.    

The guideline from the department of labour goes further and says how clients can access Unemployment Insurance Funding related to COVID-19 and the steps and documents needed are:

1. A letter of authority that gives permission to someone to lodge a claim on behalf of the company.  The letter must be on an official company letterhead
2. A spreadsheet that the employer needs to complete with critical information
3. Payroll evidence of last three months of salaries paid to employees
4. Confirmation of bank account details via submitting a certified latest bank statement
5. An MOA (I did not know what this stood for and looked it up – the short storied discovery is that it is basically a more formal version of a gentleman’s agreement between relevant people that outlines the rights and responsibilities of everyone involved in the company) It stands for: A Memorandum of Association or Memorandum of Agreement

HOW TO SUBMIT THE INFORMATION:

Use the dedicated mailbox that has been created (Note that this is a different email address from the above one): covid19UIFclaims@labour.gov.za

If the spreadsheet submitted is complete and accurate, it will be used to calculate which amount is due to the company or bargaining council.

Payment will be made after the memorandum of agreement is signed off between employer, bargaining council and Unemployment Insurance Fund.

The website also gives a call center number for the department of labor that can be used which employees can also use.  I would encourage everyone to make use of the facility.

Lastly, I again need to add that the aim here is to help even just one more person understand the process better, and that as a result more people will benefit from the R 4 Billion that the President has set aside for employers and employees that are out of work because of the lock down.   Ideally by now many employers would have explored this avenue already however I have reason to believe there are some that is unaware of it who has more questions than answers.

All the best to everyone facing different challenges during this time whether it be financial or otherwise. Look after yourself! Stay home and safe! And THANKS to all the amazing essential workers out there.  You really are heroes!