Breaking free of traditional employment distinctions through the workforce ecosystem

Karen Weisz, Managing Director, Technology, Media, Telecommunications HCM at Deloitte talks exclusively to UNLEASH at UNLEASH America 2023 about workforce challenges, new dynamics, and how to achieve your talent goals through experimentation.

+++

The reason we talk about the workforce as an ecosystem is an ecosystem is a structure. I mean, all ecosystems are structures, but they’re not necessarily rigid.

And in this case, it’s really a structure of workers. They could be human, could be machines inside or outside the organization, but all coming together in service of delivering value for the company, the entity, the organization they serve.

And why do they matter? Why they’re important is because frankly, old ways of looking at the workforce as traditional full-time employees who are on a balance sheet and show up for 40 hours a week and work in an office? I think we’d all agree that’s really disintegrated over the recent years.

So, looking at this expansively allows organizations to access skills from all different sectors, new talent pools, optimize costs, and think more creatively about how they get work done.

What do you think the key actions are for organizations to achieve their talent goals?

I think there’s a number of things they can do and probably starts with experimenting.

Rather than seeing organizations try to lift a whole ship at one time; if they can find a part of the organization to experiment and to be able to take the traditional approach to talent acquisition or how they think about the employee life cycle and expand it to say, what could this look like if we accessed contingent workers from outside the organization and brought them in to do gigs to access skills differently? And if they can play with that and experiment before they make big investments, that’s a really good way to get started.

What are the main talent challenges you’ve seen organizations struggling with?

I think there’s a number of challenges, and part of it stems from the really disjointed way that the ecosystem is managed today.

HR tends to have responsibility for full-time employees. Procurement takes responsibility for contingent workers. Finance is looking at the cost of all of it. You often have legal in the mix or supply chain or other entities within the organization. So, one big challenge is getting everybody to play together so that they can get a common view of what the ecosystem looks like.

Another big challenge is technology and platforms that enable you to not just manage workers who are outside the organization, but actually pull them into your talent systems. Be part of a talent marketplace, be part of how you look at skills and development.

And I think for a lot of organizations, the barrier they foresee is old risks around co-employment that are not always as big as they may fear. So, there’s ways to mitigate that and bring more workers in to be part of your culture, part of the success of the organization, feel more included. And those are some of the probably the main challenges out of the gate to tackle.

For Deloitte’s full definitive insight into human capital trends for 2023, read their latest report here.