Dinette Koolhaas is SVP and president at Kelly International.
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In their ongoing efforts to manage global employee and talent shortages, enterprise leaders are realizing the importance of prioritizing workforce agility. But what does this really mean? We define workforce agility as a business strategy that enables companies to scale and align their workforce in response to business changes.
In our 2023 report, The Three Pillars of Workforce Resilience, which includes insights from two new global surveys conducted among senior executives and talent at all levels of organizations, we surfaced some common challenges facing senior leaders across all industries. One is the struggle to scale and retain a workforce: Approximately half of the 1,500 executives we surveyed reported that they struggled to source talent quickly and to build and access a competitive workforce, and over a quarter reported trouble recruiting talent for new business opportunities. These senior leaders also overwhelmingly reported making significant efforts to automate tasks and, in doing so, improve workforce resilience—yet, a third of them have yet to make sufficient strides in automating, even where doing so would benefit their operations and workforce.
Broken down simply, an agile workforce that effectively manages these challenges has three key competencies:
1. Acquisition ability: Leaders are able to seamlessly scale and align the workforce in response to changing business demands, including rapidly recruiting employees with specific skill sets or reassigning employees.
2. Optimization and retention ability: Leaders are able to identify internal potential and offer new opportunities. This may include upskilling or reskilling current employees, or other types of additional training to build skills and improve employee loyalty and engagement.
3. Company readiness: Leaders are able to build efficient HR/talent acquisition processes to allow them to respond to changes quickly. This means when a vacancy arises, talent is already in the pipeline to fill it. This level of readiness also requires technology, data and skills being in place.
To address the significant global challenge of recruiting and retaining correctly-skilled employees, and to effectively leverage the influx of AI and automation, we recommend several industry-agnostic strategies to promote workforce agility:
• Embrace a contingent talent strategy: Over half of the resilience leaders in our study (those successfully wielding agile workforces) reported that focusing on contingent talent to enhance flexibility was key to being more agile. This may involve a mix of full-time and part-time employees, independent contractors, temporary workers and those on short-term assignments.
• Remove barriers to talent mobility: Some 68% of resilience leaders have seen the importance of focusing on skills rather than educational qualifications. Certainly, in some situations, a certain degree or license is mandatory. However, in many cases, it is more beneficial to avoid blocking otherwise ideal candidates who may not have obtained educational qualifications—particularly those who possess in-demand technical capabilities.
• Utilize automation wisely: Sixty-one percent of resilience leaders are improving workforce resilience through automation. Granted, automation is a double-edged sword that may initially require further employee training; however, when possible, repetitive or tedious tasks can and should be automated to allow talented employees to focus on KRAs.
• Leverage business process outsourcing (BPO): Despite a lack of coverage, the BPO industry is thriving, with more and more companies realizing the benefits of leveraging BPO partnerships for high turnover or hard-to-fill roles, as well as to enhance flexibility and service quality.
• Implement accelerated training programs: Resilience leaders are committed to fast-tracking skill development to unlock new talent pools, whether this means creating dedicated training programs to recruit and build correctly skilled employee pools, or upskilling and reskilling existing employees.
• Embrace flexibility: Whether it’s work-from-home, hybrid work situations, flexible hours or some combination of these, resilience leaders understand the importance of giving this control back to their employees in order to promote retention.
• Leverage a diverse workforce: A truly diverse workforce is comprised not just of equal numbers of men and women, or a range of cultural backgrounds, but also employees of different ages, experience levels, and veterans or retirees.
Agility involves more than changing worker numbers or adding skills. It requires analyzing labor allocation, workplace structure and skills deployment. As our resilience leaders have shown, embracing unconventional approaches (such as removing barriers like educational qualifications or recruiting and sustaining a multi-generational workforce) can yield dramatic results, as can leveraging BPO partnerships and automation to improve workplace operations and processes. Ultimately, industry leaders must be relentlessly focused on aligning workforce strategy with business change to stay competitive and improve agility, resilience and service quality.
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