The business case for workforce intelligence

Workforce Intelligence will not only revolutionize how we as people leaders work, it will also enable us to create more equitable and impactful organizations by ensuring no one is hidden. The new world of work will be designed with inclusive, data-driven decision making with every people leader having a Zero Wasted Potential people strategy that they report to shareholders on and bake into their organizational planning.

Siobhan Savage, CEO & Co-Founder at Reejig

It’s time for workforce intelligence and AI to get on the strategic business agenda

There’s no doubt that for many years talent teams have been fighting an uphill battle when it comes to investment in enterprise tech and AI. Despite people (and their potential) being an organization’s most expensive and most important asset, investment in AI and technology that centralizes and highlights an entire workforce — from skills, experience, and learning to career pathways — is dismal when compared with other business units like finance, marketing, and sales.

70% of company executives believe people analytics is a top priority for the future, yet HR only accounts for 17% of AI adoption use cases across all industries.

It's taken the impact of a global pandemic and recurring recessions to thrust the spotlight on this underinvestment and get the attention of executives and boardrooms across all industries. And now what’s needed is crystal clear.

For enterprises to optimize their workforces, they need to invest in technology that will give them real-time visibility over their workforce skills so they can take a skills-based approach to finding, retaining, planning, and reskilling talent. This has always been on the people agenda, but now it’s front and center on the strategic business agenda.

What’s the impact on organizations that are dealing with siloed data and outdated workforce planning models?

1. Companies have no visibility over their workforce skills.

   Typically businesses rely solely on what candidates and employees are willing to tell them via their people profiles. The problem is, on average less than 20% of employees ever fill them out, making it nearly impossible to take a skill-based approach to hiring, retaining, and reskilling talent.

2. Knowledge across talent teams is siloed.

   When talent acquisition and talent management teams aren’t working collectively on the same set of data and KPIs, unnecessary and costly hires are made — often when skills already exist internally. What can these unnecessary hires cost? You can be spending up to $136k USD in redundancy and rehiring costs vs. reskilling for a single skilled worker.
   
   

3. Employees are feeling the impact.

   With disconnection and a lack of visibility comes a lack of knowledge of the career paths available to your people. One-third of employees today lack confidence in their career paths at their current organization, and are considering quitting because of it.

What this means is organizations are ‘flying blind’ with no easy or scalable way to get 100% visibility of their skill, experience, and potential in their workforce, and no easy way to ensure that the talent decisions they are making are fair, equitable and free of bias.

The impact of these challenges is three-fold:

Why organizations needs Workforce Intelligence

As organizations skyrocket towards a new world of work and continue to grapple with the impact of the pandemic and an uncertain economic outlook, workforce optimization has never been more important or strategic – or more challenging.

The emergence of Workforce Intelligence has finally given executive leaders the understanding of where people and their skills are best served within an organization. Such unprecedented visibility solves many of the burning challenges that are holding you back today to create a new world of work where organizations have the data and the resources to optimize their workforces at scale. 

When an organization can map their entire workforce — from people and skills to jobs and pathways — from one central nervous system, they’re be equipped with the knowledge and foresight to:

1. Access your skills inventory & ontology.

   Consolidate all of your talent data into one place and apply AI models to produce a live skills ontology. Understand the interrelationships between the skills your people have, and the skills required to prepare your organization for any scenario.
   
   

2. Action a skill-based strategy.

   Inject a skills-based approach to how you hire, develop, retain and reskill talent based on the needs of your organization today and tomorrow.
   
   

3. Drive workforce optimization.

   Develop and deploy people where they’re needed most. Real-time insights into the DNA of your workforce, from skills and experience to diversity, allows you to supercharge your workforce strategies and ensure you have the right people, with the right skills, at the right time.
   
   

4. Create personalized career pathways.

   Identify skill gaps early and start personalized learning journeys to reskill or upskill talent. You can engage your employees with their own career pathing journeys matched to their skills and potential in real-time; from next move to succession or job adjacencies.
   
   

5. Automate and scale transformation.

   Drive transformation at scale through automated nudges that benefit both the company and the individual. You can communicate widely, or with hyper-targeted messages, in the moments that matter without losing a second of effiency, or an ounce of personalization to cut through the noise and create change.
   
   

What Workforce Intelligence delivers for your teams?

Research shows that your leaders, your talent departments, and your people are in need of data-driven decision making support. The future of these decisions is, of course, intelligence. Technology acceleration will continue for all organizational departments, but giving talent and people departments the ability to build and access Workforce Intelligence has a knock-on effect that will change your organization for the better.

With the ability to make data-driven, skills-based decisions, leaders can strategically plan to scale successfully, diversely, and most importantly, ethically. The central nervous system created by Workforce Intelligence gives a complete, unbiased picture of your workforce, giving teams and organizations the tools to understand and plan for market shifts and move people around based solely on their skills and potential.

When you have the capability to place the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, you can actively plan for a fair, optimized future for your workforce.

With Workforce Intelligence:

• Executives and people leaders can strategically optimize their workforces with the right skills in the right place at the right time.
• Workforce Strategy teams can plan their workforces for today and the future with actionable workforce insights.
• Talent Management teams get the full picture of their organization’s skills and talent, enabling them to build talent management and succession plans at scale and engage people with personalized pathways to advance their careers.
• Learning and Development teams gain visibility into the organization’s skill gaps and build the right learning programs for the business.
• Talent Acquisition teams get 100% visibility across their entire internal and external talent ecosystem, enabling them to build talent shortlists with high-quality, diverse candidates in seconds, not hours. 
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging teams can reduce bias in recruiting in talent management processes, proactively engage talent from under-represented groups and track progress to diversity goals.
  
  

Make workforce optimization a priority 

See what a workforce intelligence solution can do for your organization.