A Field Guide for Human Capital Decision Intelligence

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand on this field guide:

Deloitte, March 22, 2022

By Dan Roddy, David Mallon, and Marc Solow

Organizations everywhere are standing on the threshold of a new era in decision-making. A global mining company uses data captured from the work itself to sense changes in worker skills needed over time, inform workforce development investments, and guide individual employee career choices. A logistics company anticipates truck repair needs, ensuring people and parts are at the ready. A consumer products company uses real-time visualizations of their distribution channels to identify the root causes of customer service issues within minutes and assign resources to solve them. A high tech company tracks the markers of company culture across a virtual workforce, ensuring their “secret sauce” isn’t diluted by distance.

So here companies stand, with a newfound capability for making better work, workplace, and workforce decisions within their reach and yet, just beyond their grasp. In Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends survey, conducted a few months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a mere 3% of nearly 9,000 respondents—only 3 in 100 globally—told us they had all the information needed to make people decisions.

The situation hasn’t improved in the COVID-19 context. If anything, people issues are murkier—and the ability to respond to them more urgent—today than before the pandemic struck. Witness the many business headlines featuring managerial missteps, even among the world’s most sophisticated companies. For most, the decision intelligence necessary to align and optimize work, workplace, and workforce in pursuit of mission and strategy remains at best an unfulfilled promise.

The technological enablers needed to consistently deliver actionable insights to leaders at all levels of the organization are at hand. They promise to support a new decision intelligence—to help leaders make sound and timely decisions—from the strategic-level choices made in the C-suite to the myriad tactical choices made by supervisors and teams every day.

The disconnect between the means of decision intelligence, such as data and sophisticated analytics, and the motivation and ability to wield them in a coherent, consistent manner across an organization is a serious challenge. In a world moving ever faster, employee and corporate performance are at stake, and financial results along with them. The success—and sometimes, the survival—of many companies hinges on their ability to navigate in what John Seely Brown, former cochair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, calls a “whitewater world.” To do this, leaders must be able to continuously and quickly identify and respond to internal and external challenges and opportunities arising at the intersection of the workforce, the workplace and work itself. 

What, then, is holding companies back? Read the rest or download free here.