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9 minute read 09 January 2023
Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends
New fundamentals for a boundaryless world
Yves Van Durme
Yves Van Durme is a partner with Deloitte's Belgian consulting practice and the global leader of Deloitte's Strategic Change practice. He specializes in leadership and organizational development, as well as talent and HR strategy, in business transformation contexts. Van Durme has more than 20 years of experience as a consultant, project manager, and program developer on human capital projects for multiple European, Japanese, American, and Belgian multinationals; family businesses; and small and mediumsize enterprises.
yvandurme@deloitte.com
Nic Scoble-Williams
Nic Scoble-Williams, a partner with Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting LLC, is Deloitte's Asia Pacific leader for Future of Work. With more than 20 years' cross-industry experience in information technology services, talent strategy and advisory, and mergers & acquisitions, Scoble-Williams works with businesses and governments to embed future of work vision into enterprise transformation strategies. She is a frequent speaker on work, workforce, and workplace strategies to thrive in today's world of perpetual disruption
nscoble-williams@tohmatsu.co.jp
Kraig Eaton
Principal | Deloitte Consulting LLP
Kraig is a principal in Deloitte Consulting LLP's US Human Capital service area and serves as the co-lead of the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends team. Kraig has more than 28 years of experience working with senior business and HR executives to transform their Human Capital strategies and capabilities to better support the business goals of the organization. Specifically supporting some of the world's leading organizations on efforts spanning the full spectrum of HR and workforce transformations; from upfront strategy development through large-scale operating model, organization, and technology implementations.
keaton@deloitte.com
Lauren Kirby
Manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Lauren Kirby is a manager in Deloitte Consulting LLP's Workforce Transformation practice with specific expertise in employee experience, talent, leadership, and change programs. She focuses on advising organizations as they align business and talent strategy and define the strategic initiatives that make their people a critical enabler of business and market success. In addition to authoring this report, Kirby served as the program manager for the 2023 Global Human Capital Trends team. She has an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business.
lkirby@deloitte.com
Principal, Lead for Workforce Development Practice
Michael is a partner in Deloitte's Workforce Transformation practice; specifically leading Deloitte's Workforce Development market offerings. With a global team, these offerings drive the market in learning transformations, knowledge management, leadership development and assisting clients to become skills- based. He is also the co-lead for Deloitte's Human Capital Trends research and report. Griffiths is well published in the field of learning and talent, and is the leading market voice on becoming a skills-based organization.
mgriffiths@deloitte.com
Shannon Poynton
Shannon Poynton is a manager in Deloitte Consulting LLP's Human Capital practice with nearly 10 years of experience advising global clients on complex organization, workforce, culture, and strategic change solutions. In addition to co-authoring the report, Poynton was Global Human Capital Trends' 2020 program manager and coordinated the design and delivery of this year's survey and report.
shpoynton@deloitte.com
Steve Hatfield
Principal | Global Future of Work Leader
Steve is a principal with Deloitte Consulting and serves as the global leader for Future of Work for the firm. He has more than 20 years of experience advising global organizations on issues of strategy, innovation, organization, people, culture, and change. Hatfield has advised business leaders on a multitude of initiatives including activating strategy, defining a preferred future, addressing workforce trends, implementing agile and resilient operating models, and transforming culture oriented to growth, innovation, and agility. Hatfield has significant experience in bringing to life the ongoing trends impacting the future of work, workforce, and workplace. He is a regular speaker and author on the future of work and is currently on the Deloitte leadership team shaping the research and marketplace dialogue on future workforce and workplace trends and issues. He has a master's in social change and development from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Wharton, and is based in Boston.
sthatfield@deloitte.com
David Mallon
Vice President and Chief Analyst
David, a vice president with Deloitte Consulting LLP, is Chief Analyst and market leader for Deloitte's Insights2Action team. He and the Insights2Action team help clients to sense, analyze, and act—with purpose and precision—at the ever shifting intersection of work, workforce, workplace, and industry. Part of Deloitte since 2013, David is the former Head of Research for Bersin. He brings more than 20 years of experience in human capital and is a sought-after researcher, thought leader, and speaker on organization design, organizational culture, HR, talent, learning, and performance. David is an author of Deloitte's annual Global Human Capital Trends study and a co-host of the Capital H podcast.
dmallon@deloitte.com
John Forsythe
Managing Director | Deloitte Consulting LLP
John is a managing director in the Federal Organizational Transformation service line of Deloitte Consulting LLP. Specializing in helping client leaders affect broad organizational change across boundaries and chains of command, John has more than 25 years of business management experience, including 17 years in Federal Government consulting. During John's career, he has led many consulting assignments, developing expertise in organizational consolidation, culture change, strategic change, organizational assessment, communications, leadership alignment, and executive coaching. He also has extensive experience in training, group facilitation, strategy development, workforce planning, and organizational design and development. John has provided strategic advice and counsel to clients from across the federal sector, with a focus on the defense sector for the past several years. His current clients include USTRANSCOM, Navy, and Wounded Warrior Recovery Care Program.
joforsythe@deloitte.com
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For the past century, we have been governed by a mechanistic view of work. We have assumed that work is fixed and repeatable, readily organized into discrete tasks, and grouped into well-defined jobs. Transformation efforts focused on cost and productivity—how to deliver the same outcomes through faster, more efficient methods. But in recent years, those models have been challenged as organizations and workers grapple with a greater degree of discontinuity and disruption than ever before.
"At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, everybody thought it would be over in six months if we could just hang in there. But what became very true, very quickly, was that this is not a short haul, it's a long haul—and that we were going to have to fundamentally rethink what work means, where work is done and how we lead work in a different environment." — Terry Shaw, President and CEO, AdventHealth
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The boundaries that were once assumed to be the natural order of things—that work can be organized into clearly defined processes; jobs can be categorized and contained wholly within the organization; work occurs within the four walls of the workplace; and organizations can center their decision-making around shareholders and the bottom line—are falling away. The implication for organizations is that they are traversing a new landscape as they lose those traditional boundaries that kept things packaged and orderly, and gain permission to experiment, pilot, and innovate to define new fundamentals. Similarly, for workers, the rules of engagement with organizations are shifting, opening doors for greater and more meaningful collaboration and cocreation with the organization.
"Many of the boundaries that used to provide the structure of work have been dismantled. Now the boundaries that remain are much more focused on human dynamics, and how people interact with and engage with work." — Chris Ernst, CLO, Workday
Human instinct is to feel overwhelmed or hesitant as boundaries fall away; 10,000 respondents in this year's Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey said their greatest barrier to achieving organizational outcomes is being overwhelmed by too many changes at once. However, the dissolution of boundaries creates new opportunities for organizations and workers who are prepared to show up in fundamentally different ways. This means no longer simply reacting to stimulus in the marketplace by deploying new strategies against the categories and boundaries of the past. Instead, organizations and workers should challenge prior assumptions and adopt a new set of fundamentals built for a dynamic, boundaryless world rather than the stable, compartmentalized one we are leaving behind.
These new fundamentals require organizations and workers to frame the challenge differently, thinking like a researcher in how they approach their business and workforce strategies, treating every new roadblock as an exciting experiment from which they can learn, adapt, and improve. They call on organizations and workers to chart a different path, cocreating their relationship in pursuit of new and evolving purpose, innovation, and reimagination. And they require organizations and workers to design for impact, prioritizing human outcomes and approaching strategies from a human lens—for humans and by humans.
Framing the challenge: Think like a researcher
To lead in this boundaryless world, organizations and workers should activate their curiosity, looking at each decision as an experiment that will expedite impact and generate new insights. Differentiation and winning will come not from always believing you must have the right answer at the start, but by being able to challenge orthodoxies, operate with humility and empathy, and learn from new information so you can refine as quickly as possible. Our 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey data shows that 59% of respondents expect to focus on reimagination in the next 2–4 years, which represents a 2x increase from prepandemic levels (as reported in our 2021 report).1
"We gave our teams permission to try new things, fail fast, learn from it, and move on. We have a number of new ventures and strategies as a result." — Olesea Azevedo, Chief People Officer, AdventHealth
Three of the trends in this report exemplify the need for organizations and workers to think like a researcher.
Navigating the end of jobs. The boundaries that delineated job from job, grouping tasks and categorizing workers into narrow roles and responsibilities, are now limiting organizational outcomes such as innovation and agility. Many are experimenting with using skills, not jobs, as the baseline for how workforce decisions are made. When unboxed from jobs, workers have the opportunity to better utilize their capabilities, experiences, and interests in ways that advance organizational and worker outcomes.
Powering human impact with technology. The boundary between humans and technology as separate forces continues to disappear as new technologies are entering the workplace that not only automate and augment the work done by humans, but actually enhance human and team performance. Forward-leaning organizations are exploring how to use technology in ways that encourage humans both to be their best selves and to do better work.
Activating the future of workplace. Digital and virtual technology advances and the emerging role of the metaverse are redefining the concept of the workplace as a physical space. Now, greater interconnectedness and the blurring boundary between home and on-site work give organizations a unique opportunity to experiment with, not "where," but "how" work should be done. Location and modality become secondary to the needs of the work and the workers.
Charting a new path: Cocreate the relationship
To be successful, organizations and workers will need to learn to navigate this new world together, cocreating new rules, new boundaries, and anew relationship. That means ownership models and value must shift. Organizations should abandon former illusions of complete control and recognize the role they play in living, evolving ecosystems, as workers assume greater influence and accountability for organizational and societal outcomes, leading hand in hand with the organization.
"We are shifting our HR function. Now, we're asking ourselves: How do we cocreate? We want to bring users and workers into our decision-making—putting humans at the center of our design." — Global HR leader, financial services organization
In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, organizations with higher worker involvement in designing and implementing organizational change were more likely to experience positive outcomes. Specifically, those that said they cocreate with their workers stated they were 1.8x more likely to have a highly engaged workforce, 2x more likely to be innovative, and 1.6x more likely than their peers to anticipate and respond to change effectively.
Three chapters of this report exemplify where organizations and workers must cocreate their relationship:
Negotiating worker data. The boundary between the organization and the worker's ownership rights—the binary categories of worker-owned data or organization-owned data—is becoming irrelevant. And beyond ownership alone, conversations about what is workforce data, the transparency of that data, and the mutual benefits of data-driven insights are on the rise as data is becoming a new "currency."
Harnessing worker agency. Traditional work, workforce, and workplace models that assume organizations have sole decision-making authority are fading as workers demand more meaningful work, flexible workplace models, and more personalized career paths. Whereas worker agency might have previously been seen as a threat, leading organizations are finding ways to leverage worker motivation and cocreation to drive mutual and elevated benefits.
Unlocking the workforce ecosystem. The value of fostering diverse workforce ecosystems is enormous, but many organizations are still stuck in old patterns of talent access and management because they're not giving workers of all types (gig, freelancers, contractors, employees, etc.) any say in where, how, and for whom they work. Organizations that adapt their strategies and practices to fit the real-world talent pool, which is far more complex and increasingly comprised of nontraditional workers, will gain access to skills and experiences to accelerate growth, innovation, and agility.
These new ownership models require a large shift from how many work today, so it's no surprise that organizations were least ready to address trends that require cocreation with workers. According to our survey, only 19% of organizations said they're very ready for data ownership, 17% for worker agency, and 16% for workforce ecosystems. This readiness gap will be critical to overcome for organizations to capitalize on the innovation and improved individual, business, and societal results these trends could drive.
Designing for impact: Prioritize human outcomes
The final fundamental for a boundaryless world relies on collective aspirations. Organizations should create impact not only to their business, their workers, or their shareholders, but to the broader society as well. Over half of organizations surveyed this year aspire to create greater connections with the society they work in, indicating that the social enterprise, as we defined in the Deloitte 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report, continues to be a pivotal force in the world of work.
It's no longer enough to build discrete programs that will create value around the edges of important topics like climate, equality, or human risk; they are fundamental to an organization's ability to thrive in this new world of work. In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, more than 80% of organizations reported purpose; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); sustainability; and trust as top focus areas.
Three chapters of this report exemplify how organizations and workers are prioritizing human outcomes.
Taking bold action for equitable outcomes. The idea of diversity as a metric is dissolving in place of the notion that organizations need to be looking at DEI as outcomes instead. Those outcomes will focus on equity in how organizations access talent; enable talent through development programs, methods, and tools; and how they advance and promote talent at all levels of the organization. Organizations will be held accountable less for their activities and efforts and more for their ability to achieve equitable outcomes in support of larger societal goals.
Advancing the human element of sustainability. The boundary of the organization as a fully autonomous entity, with interests that can be separated from the interests of society at large, is blurring. As such, organizations are facing mounting pressure to address sustainability issues from governments, global coalitions, their communities, and, not least, their current and future workforce. That workforce is demanding that organizations move past rhetoric about sustainability in favor of delivering observable outcomes. As a result, organizations must focus on the human elements, which have been largely absent in their strategies and actions to date, by "hardwiring" sustainability into the workforce and work itself.
Elevating the focus on human risk. Organizations have traditionally thought of human risks through a narrow lens—the potential risks that workers pose to the business. In the new world, organizations should expand their view of human risk beyond compliance and reporting to consider how a broad set of risks are significantly affecting and are significantly being affected by humans. These risks, which can have a material effect on a company's long-term viability, must be fully understood by all executives, with ultimate accountability sitting with the board.
Leading in a boundaryless world
For those who get it right, the boundaryless world becomes one of infinite possibility instead of chaos and confusion. As old boundaries shift and disappear, organizations and workers can deploy these fundamentals to set new guidelines, create more autonomy, imagine new possibilities, and achieve mutual value for the organization, the workforce, and society. But doing so requires them to employ new mindsets, letting go of the work, workforce, and workplace operating models of the past to embrace a more fluid and more human future, focused on speed, agility, experimentation, and innovation.
"An alternative definition of the word boundary is frontier. A frontier represents the location of the newest, most innovative, most value-creating opportunity in an entity or an organization. The fundamental challenge, and opportunity, is to reframe how we think of boundaries as not just things that create limits or restraints, but as the very source for new value creation, innovation, and creativity." — Chris Ernst, CLO, Workday
New leadership capability is needed at all levels of the organization to mobilize workers and teams for achieving new outcomes. Yet only 23% of organizations in the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey say their leaders have the capabilities to navigate a disrupted world. They point to concerns about leaders' ability to manage the evolving workforce, with less than 15% of organizations saying their leaders are very ready to inclusively lead an expanding workforce or to consider broader societal and environmental risks when making workforce decisions. They also express concerns about the design and execution of work itself: Only 16% say their leaders are very ready to use technology to improve work outcomes and team performance, and only 18% say their leaders are very ready to develop the right workplace model for their organization.
A new brand of leadership will be required—one that focuses on where you show up and how you show up, and the mindset you adopt to drive work forward. More specifically, you will need to:
Use experimentation to inform better solutions, foster learning, and accelerate value.
Cultivate deep and intimate relationships with the workers across your broader ecosystem through cocreation.
Widen the aperture of your decision-making to understand its full impact with the human agenda in mind.
Those who partner with their workforce and experiment with what's possible will be able to create sustainable models of work, making work better for humans and humans better at work.
Deloitte's 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey polled 10,000 business and HR leaders across every industry, with 105 countries participating. The survey data is complemented by interviews with executives from some of today's leading organizations. These insights shaped the trends in this report.
Jeff Schwartz et al., Deloitte 2021 Global Human Capital Trends— Introduction: The social enterprise in a world disrupted, Deloitte Insights, December 9, 2020.
The authors would like to thank Olesea Azevedo and Terry Shaw (AdventHealth) and Chris Ernst (Workday) for their contributions to this chapter.
Cover image by: Eva Vázquez
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