Unleashing the Power of Your Workforce: A Q&A with Deloitte’s Chief Growth Officer and Workforce Transformation Leader

Deloitte and The Executives’ Club of Chicago recently hosted Activating the Internal Talent Marketplace: Unleash the Power of Your Workforce, a virtual event exploring the future of work and how leaders are valuing and investing in their workforce. Our Workforce Transformation leader Robin Jones and I took part in this panel discussion, alongside David Kiron, PhD, editorial director at MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT SMR) and Schneider Electric’s Vice President of Talent Digitization Andrew Saidy. 

Robin and I sat down with Chicago Managing Partner Kathy Scherer to discuss more about this important topic as well as MIT SMR’s and Deloitte’s 2020 research report that focused on the future of workforce. 

Scherer: This research report focuses on the opportunity marketplace. Can you define what this is? 

Stacy Janiak: Opportunity marketplaces are just that – markets – where managers provide opportunities for workers, and workers offer their capabilities. These opportunities can include project experiences, trainings, mentorship, networking, and entirely new jobs. Opportunity marketplaces go beyond serving as a mere “gigs” exchange and instead provide a vast diversity of opportunity for the worker that align organizational and worker interests. 

Scherer: Why did you embark on this research agenda around workforce opportunity? 

Robin Jones: At Deloitte, we have helped many organizations rethink how they value and invest in talent, with the goal of developing more flexible, productive, and empowered workers. We saw an opportunity to build on eight years of research with MIT SMR on digital transformation and delve into a more specific and human area: the workforce. We found that the most effective approaches to unlocking workforce potential have a common core: opportunity.  

Scherer: MIT SMR and Deloitte surveyed nearly 4,000 executives, managers and analysts from global organizations to understand how the relationship between businesses and their workforces are evolving. Can you highlight some of the research’s most interesting findings? 

Jones: The research showed that there’s a large disconnect between organizations and their workforce when it comes to investing in and rewarding skills development.  

For example, 74 percent of respondents believed that developing worker skills and capabilities was important to their organization’s strategy, but only 34 percent were happy with their organization’s investment in them prior to the pandemic which has pushed ahead digital transformation and reskilling needs even more. It’s also interesting that both executives and employees were feeling dissatisfied with the level of investment into their professional development.  

That’s the bad news. The good news is that organizations are starting to recognize this disconnect and re-think their ‘fixed’ models of meeting the needs and wants of the workforce.  

Janiak: This part is key. It’s around workforce transformation where we are working most closely with our clients to seize this opportunity. During this unprecedented and transformative time, there is a real opportunity for leaders to fundamentally recode their organizational DNA to embed new attributes of purpose, potential, and perspective for their employees.  

Scherer: Can you speak a little more to the “opportunity”? 

Jones: Our research shows that organizations need to think beyond upskilling, reskilling and training efforts. More skills and better experiences without more opportunity is insufficient. If workers don’t value the opportunities they’re offered—if those opportunities don’t speak to their passion, potential, and purpose—they can leave or become disengaged. 

While this may not be a top concern for organizations in a steep downturn, it’s still critically important to be thinking about employer brand and retention strategies and how to maintain human capital for the long term. And this is why we think opportunity must be the new organizing principle. It can be a competitive differentiator for organizations that are able to create new opportunities for workers while pointing them in the direction of creating net new value in the organization while at the same time fostering new skills and individual growth. And ultimately this focus and alignment creates more agency for the workforce itself, resulting in significantly improved return on the overall workforce investment.   

Scherer: Can you share some of the different strategies that organizations can use to drive adoption? 

Jones: Deloitte just released a new article a couple of weeks ago on bringing internal talent marketplaces to life, and we found three common strategy models:

1. Talent deployment: Focuses on retention and productivity – this includes activities like matching skills to roles and leveraging internal talent supply to fill roles with the outcome of visibility into talent supply, unlocking capacity, and business agility/resilience.

2. Talent management: Focuses on career mobility – this includes activities like short- and long-term career move strategies, sequence moves to align with business objectives, build a growth mindset/culture, empower employees, create belonging, and develop sustainable talent pools.

3. Future of work: Focuses on skills-based growth – this includes activities like connecting development of skills to projects and creating a talent model based on skill supply/demand to enhance business responsiveness and evolve work design. 

Scherer: How do you think leaders should think about workforce management practices differently? 

Janiak: The future of work has been forever altered by the events of 2020, and it’s critical that leaders rethink their workforce strategy in the next normal. While leaders were quick to pivot to remote work strategies, for example, they now should consider what workforce transformation looks like long-term, as returning to the old ways of doing business simply will not work for the newly enlightened workforce.  

To be most effective, workforce management should go beyond policies and programs and consider how to change manager behaviors. Engaging managers is a key step in this effort—all 13 organizations we spoke to for our Activating the Internal Talent Marketplace research named manager engagement as a top enabler of a successful talent marketplace. This is because the marketplace can’t exist without a robust gig demand (whether full- or part-time), and this is the manager’s prerogative. 

Scherer: What’s next for Deloitte’s collaboration with MIT SMR? 

Jones: We are in a decade-long relationship with MIT SMR, and the next study we are publishing in April 2021 will discuss the future of the workforce. We’re going to look at how the meaning of the workforce is changing, and we’ll be exploring three themes:

1. Strategy: How are changes in business, technology, and workforce strategy related and impacting executive decision making?

2. Organizational culture and identity: The impact of changing strategies and the nature of work on management practices, individuals/teams at work, and diversity/equity/inclusion?

3. Organizational ecosystems: How do workforce strategies impact the organizational ecosystem across internal employees, external gig workers, innovation contributors, etc.? 

Click here to learn more about MIT SMR and Deloitte’s 2020 research report, “Opportunity Marketplaces:

Aligning Workforce Investment and Value Creation in the Enterprise and here for Deloitte’s follow-on research, Activating the Internal Talent Marketplace, and sign up to receive the 2021 report. 

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