COVID-19 has revealed how quickly everything can change. And while it is by far the most disruptive market event of the last 20 years, it’s safe to say that it doesn’t stand alone. War, social unrest, climate catastrophes, and economic crises occur all over the world, and each event has the capability to throw sound strategies into disarray.
Hiring and expansion strategies are even more at risk today with international markets more accessible than ever. The pandemic has accelerated the work-from-anywhere trend, forcing virtually every business to reconsider how they are organized. Companies who can adapt their approaches and adjust strategy quickly have the best chance to beat out the competition for the best global talent.
We call this Agility, and it’s the third pillar of our Global Fluency framework. Global Fluency guides multinational companies as they look to expand their footprint while hiring and retaining the best talent. Highly fluent organizations are more likely to create a competitive differentiation.
In our recent discussion with HR Leaders, “How to drive business agility and data literacy in HR”, and some of the top minds in HR, we chatted about Agility and some tangible ways practitioners and leaders can use it to deliver real value to their organizations. Check out a few highlights below and watch the full video here.
Frank Sofia, VP of Stategic Workforce Planning and Transformation at SAP
COVID has presented an opportunity for us to rethink our location strategy, etc. We’re starting to think about leadership development and what that looks like. How do we rotate talent differently across the organization, now that geographic barriers aren’t as defined as they once were? We’re thinking about how to recruit talent, where to recruit talent. And we’re rethinking our business processes around that to a completely virtual environment.
Deepak Parija, VP and Chief of HR Global Markets at Wipro
As teams start doing a lot more so-called value-based strategic work [such as] HR processes, talent management, employee experience, leadership development, success and planning, looking at success profiles, turnover rates, payroll management—all of that has insights that one can be able to pick up. That's an absolute source of information to be able to draw analysis out of and change policies and benefits which are going to be tuned across to what's really making sense and fundamentally we put across onto a benefit strategy or a policy framework which may be completely off the rails.
Charu Maini, Chief People Officer at Flutter Entertainment
In terms of how we're getting ahead of the curve is thinking about what's our point of view once things do get back to normal? Do we want employees to come back into the office full time like things were earlier or do we want employees to have 60/40 or 50/50 or whatever that ratio that is? We can see a scenario where once vaccines are available across the world, [and] there is some sort of an end to this, we are developing our point of view in terms of how much do we want to come back into the office and of course there are different dynamics of different parts of the business.
