2018 brought big changes for employers and their teams. Record low unemployment rates, a new influx of Gen Z teammates, a changing tax landscape, and increasingly distributed, remote, and contract teams left many organizations scrambling to find enough people with the right experience to meet the changing demands of their customers. To tackle the challenges 2019, business leaders will need to improve productivity and efficiency in an increasingly competitive market for highly-skilled talent.
Leaders should be looking to their most powerful tool to eliminate barriers to productivity: people data. From skills and experience to utilization and development, critical data about your people is often locked in siloed systems, disparate social platforms, and aging spreadsheets, where few will be able to benefit from its availability.
Over the last year, we’ve worked with thousands of leaders to build stronger teams that produce extraordinary results for customers. We’ve learned that while most organizations believe they have a stronger team than ever, most still struggle to answer questions like “Who can help me close this deal?” or “Who has the best experience to assign to my project team?” We’ve put together top 3 recommendations to consider as you work toward developing your 2019 people strategy.
Surface Untapped Potential
Your most talented employees spend on average 1 day per week looking for right people & information within their own organization. To solve this problem, organizations often try to maintain directories and org charts to house everything from contact information to previous experience to reporting structures, where information is often incomplete, out of date, or missing entirely.
Modern teams are taking a different approach to the internal search dilema. With Structural’s intuitive people search, skills match, and smart filters, more leaders are finding the right people for the right projects and client engagements. Structural clients like IceMiller, IPREX and Clear Night Group have already started to use people data to assign the right teammates to client engagements, and increase referral business.
Align Teams Around Impactful Work
2018 data suggests 65% of executives in highly skilled services organization had to turn down work in the last 12 months, as they lacked the necessary resources and skills. At the same time, most young employees believe they can’t do their best work because leaders do not know what they’re capable of. It should come as no surprise that these organizations are turning to analytics to uncover the full breadth of the experience and availability of within their networks to better align talent with opportunities.
For teams with newly acquired talent, it’s critical to tap into past project history, previous work experience, and areas of competency to match people with work that moves the needle. Not only will employees benefit from opportunities to sharpen their skills, customers will get access to your best team for each engagement.
Create Agility & Connection Across Teams
94% of high performing organizations strategically leverage external talent networks, especially as client requests are less predictable and timelines are urgent. This means contractors, remote teams, and distributed workforces coming together to solve pressing challenges, many times without ever formally meeting one another in person. While this shift creates more room for flexibility and round-the-clock collaboration, it leaves room for communication issues and mismatched expectations.
Structural clients stay connected, especially as teams flex to meet the demands of a changing market. With targeted communications, on-demand personality data, and work style available to every teammate, employees can quickly get to know the strengths and preferences of their teammates, whether they’re working on a one-time project or a years-long contract.
Despite big changes in the way we work in recent years, growing productivity remains challenging for most enterprise organizations. By eliminating barriers to key data, top-performing leaders will increase outputs and efficiency, while removing the frustrating and taxing process of finding and connecting with teammates across an organization. What’s more, unlocking people data will ultimately help your organization empower employees to do better, more fulfilling work.
Interested in exploring Structural’s platform with your team? Get a custom guided evaluation to explore the power of your team’s data.
