Deep Dive:Unlocking Human PotentialThe Future of Work

Conversations on the Future of Business

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Unlocking Human PotentialChallenges

Conversations on the Future of Business

40% of employees believe social tools foster better collaboration in the workplace. Source: Microsoft

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Conversations on the Future of Business

This network-embracing mindset extends from our personal to our professional lives. The organization that hopes to remain relevant as an employer and foster a productive workforce needs to reflect the same values.

At the same time, the talent pool is changing. Millennials are flooding into the workforce. They’re the first digital natives, the first generation that has never known a world that doesn’t run on information technology.

The new world of work presents vexing new challenges. Changing demographics. A demand for more mobility and collaboration. Global competition for talent. And greater employee expectations.

Demographics

Millennials—those born in the 20 years before 2000—will soon outstrip boomers. In 2014 they’ll account for 36 percent of the U.S. workforce. By 2025, 75 percent.

Millennials want to feel empowered. Three-quarters say they won’t compromise personal values for their job. Nearly 70 percent believe regular days at the of-fice are unnecessary. They’re selective about where they work, and they know what they want from their employer.

Millennials and boomers have different values, different expectations for their careers, and they approach situations from conflicting perspectives. Yet you need to leverage both for your organization to be successful.

Mobility

With 1.5 billion smartphones and 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, most corporate employees are equipped for mobility. They expect to bring their own devices to work, without restrictions because of security or support concerns. What’s more, they expect you to equip them for mobility. That means mobility-enabled workplace learning, software tools, business processes, and more. And the ability to stay connected—without being chained to a desk.

We are perpetually networked. We eat, sleep, and breathe our mobile devices. Constant connectivity is now the norm, not the exception.

Your Workforce Is Changing. Are You Keeping Up?

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Conversations on the Future of Business

Collaboration

Greater mobility and a flattening of hierarchies mean employees demand the free flow of information. They expect to work across both corporate and geographic boundaries. They look to access the tools and the teams they need, when and where they need them. And they won’t tolerate policies that keep resources locked up in centralized locations.

A Global Market

Just as talent becomes more demanding, so does the talent market. By 2018, there will be 1.2 million openings for STEM jobs—those in science, technol-ogy, engineering, and math—in the United States alone. Yet there won’t be nearly that many gradu-ates with STEM degrees. And some of tomorrow’s most in-demand jobs didn’t even exist three years ago. The yawning skills gap will drive fierce global competition for the best talent.

“It’s time that more managers tap into our basic needs as human beings and leverage them to motivate employees. We all want to do work that matters and is meaningful. Managers must ... find ways to adjust the work to line up with each person’s strengths.” Shawn Murphy, CoFounder, SwitchandShift.com, and Author, Creating Joy at Work

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Conversations on the Future of Business

OpportunitiesUnlocking Human Potential

2025

Source: Business and Professional Women’s Foundation

By 2025, 75% of the workforce will be millenials.

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Conversations on the Future of Business

New currents are roiling the workplace—and it will be the ways organizations identify, attract, develop, and retain the talent that will carry them forward. Yet the blade cuts both ways.

The most challenging disruptors are simultaneously the forces that can drive positive revolution. For the forward-leaning organizations that embrace the new paradigm, there are new opportunities for fielding the best talent, empowering the workforce, and winning in the marketplace.

Demographics

The new generation flooding the talent pool brings with it fresh ideas and new ways of working that can alter organizations to their advantage.

Millennials won’t be happy to wait before they begin to make a contribution. They won’t accept the same old ways of doing things, especially when they can

Embracing the Insurgency

identify more effective approaches. They won’t sit by as the marketplace changes while the company they work for remains inert. They won’t wait for investments of time and resources to pay off at some indeterminate point in the future.

What new opportunities can your organization uncover as you begin to view worn-out tactics and tired strategies in the new light of a generation with higher expectations?

CBSi Interview with Mike Perlis, President & CEO, Forbes Media

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Conversations on the Future of Business

Mobility

Welcome to the age of SoMoClo—the social, mo-bile, and cloud computing era. Social networks give organizations new ways of connecting employees, partners, and customers. Mobile technology can empower your workers to get the job done wherever and whenever they need to do it. Cloud computing delivers the tools and the training that will equip and develop your employees to win in the global, 21st-century marketplace.

Organizations that leverage these always-on-the-go technologies, strategies, and values can field the best talent, gain agility against competitors, and bet-ter sense and respond to customers and the market.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the new black. New tools and technologies allow you to use collaboration to build internal communities and integrate external resources. These communities enable instant interactions, real-time feedback, and continuous creation—of new processes, products, and even markets.

Multiplying Brainpower: Kaggle and YourEncoreOrganizations increasingly recognize the value of collaboration to drive innovation. And extending that collaboration beyond the four walls of the enterprise can multi-ply the brainpower.

That’s the advantage of crowdsourcing. But sometimes you need a crowd with decidedly scientific acumen.

Enter Kaggle and YourEncore. Kaggle is an online platform for hosting competitions on predictive modeling and analytics. Organizations post their data, and data miners around the world compete to produce the best analytical models.

Some 10,000 scientists and 200 universities in 100 countries around the world are using the platform. Organizations as varied as NASA, General Electric, Facebook, and MasterCard have tapped the resource for solutions.

YourEncore brings together a virtual team of highly experienced—and recently re-tired—professionals to apply their exper-tise to address challenges in life sciences and consumer health. Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, General Mills, and others have lev-eraged the company’s 8,000 specialists.

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Conversations on the Future of Business

“For the first time, people [are] starting to leverage their data to build fundamental insights to rebuild their organizations.” Dan Wagner, Founder and CEO, Civis Analytics

Collaborative tools, processes, and learning open the flow of information and unleash the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Platforms such as Chatter, Jive, SAP Jam social platform, and SocialCast allow even technology novices to benefit from mobile and cloud capabilities and drive interactive teamwork across functional and geographic boundaries.

A Global Market

The marketplace is global. Even companies with only local or regional operations now go head-to-head with international competitors, as mobile technology reaches customers wherever they happen to be.

Talent is equally trans-border. Organizations that source their talent globally can find new competitive advantage. And the same technologies that enable mobility and collaboration are giving enterprises new tools to recruit and retain the top talent. Not only that, but they also allow companies to connect with external resources on a global basis to access the knowledge, skills, and innovation they need to succeed.

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Conversations on the Future of Business

42% of employees feel that usingmobile devices for work wouldincrease their productivity.

ImperativesUnlocking Human Potential

Source: Cisco

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Conversations on the Future of Business

“Potential gets coaches fired,” legendary NFL coach Dick Vermeil once quipped. Every organization’s greatest promise lies in the energy and creativity of its people. Yet today’s potential unrealized is tomorrow’s opportunity missed, customer lost, market share ceded.

The need to unlock human potential is absolute. Achieving that objective involves several imperatives. Understanding the aspirations of your employees. Forging a mobile workforce. Tapping the global talent pool. And connecting and engaging all your people.

Understand Aspirations

Organizations connect with customers today by recognizing what customers want to accomplish or who they want to become. You need to do the same with employees. That will only become more neces-sary as the trickle of millennials into your workforce quickly becomes a deluge.

Unleashing Your Potential Energy

Understand employee values, motivations, and expectations for both their careers and the company they work for. Leverage mobile, social, and cloud technologies to make workplace learning more relevant and worker activities more effective and fulfilling. That will position you to align employee expectations and energies with your organization’s culture, customers, and future success.

Forge a Mobile Workforce

Embrace SoMoClo. Take advantage of social plat-forms to foster collaboration and connect internal and external networks. The result will be better knowledge sharing, continuous creativity, and the ability to leverage new capabilities both inside and outside your enterprise.

Empower employees with mobile technologies to revolutionize workplace learning, core operations, and the way workers interact and do their jobs. Mobility can equip employees to access tools and knowledge whenever they need them. Find resourc-es and processes wherever they happen to be. And connect with customers in the most engaging and effective ways.

Reach into the cloud for new tools, technologies, and training. From content to capabilities, the cloud offers the flexibility and scale to empower your increasingly mobile workforce.

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Conversations on the Future of Business

In targeting millennial customers, Coca-Cola Company has embraced an approach it calls TOAS: transparent, authentic, organic, and sustainable. It’s now applying the same strategy to attracting and retaining young talent.

“As members of the Coke family, we choose to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference in every interaction we have with our consumers, customers, and fellow associates every day,” writes Karla Marin, global programs manager for talent acquisition at Coke, in a recent blog post. “And it is this dedication to our mission that drives our attractiveness as an employer.”

How attractive? Coke has earned the No. 10 spot on LinkedIn’s Most InDemand Employers. The list ranks the world’s “most sought-after” employers based on interactions from LinkedIn’s 175 million members.

An example of TOAS in action is a new Out of Office feature on Coke’s Unbottled blog. The series describes what Coke employees do on their own time to achieve work-life balance—a key factor millennials consider when evaluating employers.

A Coke and a TOAS

Tap the Global Talent Pool

The same technologies that empower your employ-ees can give you access to the best and brightest talent around the world.

Social media and collaborative platforms let you source the skills you need, when you need them—whether as permanent additions to core teams as project-based adjuncts to meet a specific need. At the same time, mobile technology is helping work-ers find the best employers. “The number of can-didates using mobile devices to search and apply for new job opportunities is growing exponentially,” reports Brandon Hall Group, “especially in interna-tional markets, where a mobile device is often the only access people have to the Internet.”

Mike Ditka (Former Chicago Bears Head Coach), on Unlocking Human Potential

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Conversations on the Future of Business

Connect and Engage

Connecting employees through social, mobile, and cloud innovations equips them to collaborate on solving business problems and delivering a better customer experience. But technology is never enough. You also need to invest in the structures, processes, and incentives that motivate employees to work together toward a common goal.

To that end, you need to engage employees to embrace your values and magnify your brand. Understand the unique perspectives of all employee populations and ensure that their contributions are both personally and professional fulfilling. Take advantage of new approaches to workplace learning that enable workers to acquire the skills they need when and where they need them. Make sure your organization remains relevant to employees, and your employees remain relevant to the marketplace—so you can remain front-of-mind to your customers.

Workplace Learning in the 21st CenturyFor most of the last century, workplace learning had a familiar look and feel. Learners sat in rows and took notes while an expert at the front of the room dispensed information. Too often, technology-based learning was just a slightly upgraded version of the traditional model. So Jenny Dearborn, chief learning officer for SuccessFactors, an SAP company, writes in a recent blog post.

Today, that’s changing rapidly. Advances in mobile devices and cloud technology, a deeper understanding of how humans learn, and the emergence of millennials are driving more innovative approaches.

Workplace learning will be about social collaboration, team-based activities, and decentralized peer-to-peer learning. It will

be mobile, and access will be continuous and instantaneous. Workers will attend fewer scheduled classes and online training sessions. Instead, short videos, game-like simulations, and peer commu-nities that offer networking, information sharing, and informal coaching will enable anyplace, anytime learning.

Corporate-sponsored training will become less important. Instead, workplace learning will be experiential and relationship-based, and knowledge will come from everywhere. Companies won’t care how employees acquired knowledge, only that they can prove their expertise.

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Conversations on the Future of Business

Unlock Potential

The workforce is changing, and the workplace is changing along with it. Yet employees remain an organization’s most valuable asset. And an engaged, connected, and empowered workforce is crucial to your future success.

In fact, “engaged employees are the ones who are the most likely to drive the innovation, growth, and revenue that their companies desperately need,” according to Gallup Inc.’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report. It’s the engaged workers who build most of the new products and services, come up with most of the innovative ideas, create almost all of their company’s new customers, “and ultimately help spur the economy to create more good jobs.”

That calls for effective management. Only good management can lead to a direct increase in the number of employees who are engaged at work. Gallup found that managers who focus on their em-ployees’ strengths can practically eliminate active disengagement in their organizations and double the number of workers who are engaged.

Forward-leaning organizations around the world are already making the necessary investments, adapting to changing demographics, technologies, and expectations. Where is your organization on the journey to unlocking human potential?

“Opening up that conversation with millennials is very important.... Looking at what some of the technologies are and possibly deploying them, experimenting with flexible work environments, changing the way employees are on-boarded, and just looking at different ways social and collaborative tools can impact the organization.” Jacob Morgan, Principal, Chess Media Group, Author, The Collaborative Organization

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Conversations on the Future of Business

It’s a safe bet that managers and project leaders everywhere keep lists of people they want to have on their teams–lists they can turn to whether they need someone for a temporary project or for a permanent slot. At the very least, they have their social media connections. But companies that want the best employees must develop a talent ecosystem that extends beyond corporate boundaries. When a company’s workforce needs to shift rapidly, business leaders shouldn’t leave it to individual managers to identify the individuals they should try to hire. HR needs to step up by doing the following:

Embrace the Talent Ecosystem

• Keep in touch with alumni. Good employees often leave companies for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance: They find better opportunities or get laid off when business needs shift. After the exit interview, any relationship they have with their former employer usually depends on the personal connections they maintain. Companies that want to lure the best workers back need to make them always feel welcome. For example, Jeanne Meister, a former Accenture vice president, notes that Accenture maintains a robust alumni network, providing former employees with networking opportunities and information about the company, including current jobs and short-term contract openings. “If a bigger percentage of your workforce is going to be contingent workers you should consider forming an alumni network for them,” she suggests.

• Dive into social media. Job seekers now target companies where they want to work by following them and their employees on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They’re building relationships with people that they want to work with, until they know them well enough to send them a résumé. HR managers can use social media the way some big recruiters do: by analyzing publicly available social data to identify people whose activity suggests they might be interested in a new job.

•Establishrelationshipswithtalentplacementfirms.They’re not just for filling temporary vacancies. While some companies may have internal pools of software developers who move from project to project, for example, a lot of that flexible work will likely be provided by contingent workers in the future. Companies can tap talent placement agencies to manage the assignment and reassignment of those workers and even assist with training them.

• Be a great place to work. At a recent meeting of technology executives, a CTO was asked how he was coping with the perceived shortage of IT talent. The CTO responded that he had no trouble finding workers, because the company has a reputation as a top employer. Research from Gallup shows that workers are most engaged when they believe in the purpose of their work. They’re also more loyal when employers help them develop their skills and mentor them along a career path. According to Meister, who is also the cofounder of Future Workplace, it’s up to HR to cultivate and promote the company’s employer brand. That includes the company’s values, purpose, and opportunities for career growth.

Excerpt from A New Vision for HR Management: The Workforce Ecosystem by Karie Willyerd, VP of learning and social adoption at SuccessFactors, an SAP company. Read the full paper here.

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Learn More • Conversations on the Future of Business • Conversations on Unlocking Human Potential• SAP Center for Business Insight • SAP Business Innovation Blog: Unlocking Human Potential

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Conversations on the Future of Business