Stephen Covey authored the quote: “People are our most valuable asset”, which has since been widely borrowed. However, many organizations are now realizing this is hugely relevant to the current climate where skill shortages are impacting all industry sectors.
As businesses race to ramp up operations and services, resources to do this are now in such high demand that wage inflation is rocketing, and many companies are struggling to attract and retain the talent they need to compete.
In larger organizations, employee churn has always been an issue and HR functions work tirelessly on both retention and recruitment to reduce the impact to business operations. Additionally, Performance Management processes are utilized to measure the contribution of employees and identify those who are the top performers so that these individuals can be rewarded and hopefully retained.
This is a sensible practice, but in reality, is only performed perhaps twice a year. Objectivity can also be questionable when it comes to comparing the contribution being made; how do you measure contribution on projects? Is it just the number of tasks someone completes – or less tangible activities, like knowledge share?
Creating high performing and inclusive teams is not easy, but in competitive markets it is essential that businesses pursue this in order to maximize the value of their most important asset. Having a view of the current and future capabilities required to meet the demands of the market and ensuring that the workforce has these, is essential to remain competitive. By understanding the gaps, organizations can then take action to close these either through recruitment or upskilling the existing workforce through targeted training.
To do this effectively requires a view of workforce capabilities that very few organizations have. Also, the time it takes to establish this view and the frequency with which it changes, means in reality it is rarely performed to any great level of detail.
This is a real shame, as the benefits of being able to so is clear both in terms of business performance but also in creating an environment where individuals are able to be invested in to learn new skills which invariably builds-in retention.
We recognized this and subsequently created OpusView to provide business leaders with an unrivalled insight into the skills, capabilities and experience of their workforce. Visualization and intelligent search not only identifies the desired skills, but also the competency gaps and future skills demand.
Side-by-side comparisons of those with the required and verified competencies makes it easy to surface the talent required for key projects. Not only that, leaders can also set alerts to be notified when currently unavailable resources with the right competencies become available again.
Additionally, we also capture aspirations of the workforce in terms of the skills and experiences they would like to gain. This is so powerful in terms of building retention and yet so difficult to achieve without having the data readily available, as it is within OpusView.
OpusView is a people-centric ecosystem that provides real-time, accurate data of the talent within the organization. With multiple views and touch points, the information provided enables effective decisions to be made effortlessly to ensure the best people are working on the most important projects. Importantly, with the data being constantly updated and readily available, means businesses can respond quickly and adapt accordingly.
This degree of insight makes undertaking Digital Transformation projects so much easier. It provides complete clarity on workforce capabilities and how these need to be enhanced, updated, replaced to match the target operating model seeking to leverage technology.
Organizational flexibility and ability to respond to changing events is so important and will ultimately determine which businesses survive challenging environments like the one we find ourselves in currently.
Martin Shaw, CTO
