This post, based on the new PwC’s CEO survey, show the importance of CEOs reinventing their workforce to ensure continuous business change, which is necessary for business survival.
In today’s era of rapid digital disruption, climate upheaval, and global volatility, business reinvention isn’t a one-time transformation.
It has become a continuous cycle of adaptation companies must embrace to survive, according to PwC’s latest CEO survey.
As companies reimagine business models nonstop, their workforce must evolve too.
Reinvention demands new skills, roles, and ways of getting work done.
Leaders must completely rethink traditional workforce planning and talent management approaches to thrive through constant upheaval.
Shifting Skills and Capabilities Needed
What capabilities are companies now looking for in their workforce?
The type of expertise in demand is rapidly shifting as emerging technologies, climate change, and other megatrends take hold.
Specialized skills in areas like AI ethics, regenerative energy, and digital privacy are suddenly at a premium.
At the same time, generalized skills to navigate uncertainty are increasingly valuable – adaptability, innovation mindset, collaborative problem-solving.
This presents challenges for companies used to recruiting for conventional roles and skillsets.
In the past, they may have just looked for experts in fields like IT, supply chain logistics, or accounting.
Now the ideal workforce blends:
- Deep domain expertise in new and evolving business priority areas
- Specialists with niche skills to address big strategic shifts
- Generalists able to creatively solve complex, unprecedented problems.
As companies embrace continuous reinvention, workforce planning grows more complex.
But it also becomes a more formidable competitive advantage.
Rethinking Traditional Workforce Planning
How do companies determine workforce needs for perpetually changing business models?
Updating static checklists of required roles and skills is a futile exercise when future functions rapidly become obsolete.
Instead, CEOs must take a forward-looking, agile approach. Start by mapping existing workforce capabilities against the new core competencies anticipated.
(What climate expertise do we need to support our renewable energy pivot? How can we build AI ethics into all our product teams?)
Then identify gaps and determine which roles will be most impacted by reinvention.
Cross-train personnel between complementary functions to deepen employee versatility.
Invest in formal upskilling programs so people gain the new expertise to move with evolving business strategies.
Rather than viewing jobs as static positions, reconfigure them into dynamic bundles of skills.
This makes it easier to reallocate human capital where it’s most valuable as priorities shift.
It also enables internal talent mobility through defined skill pathways, elevating workforce adaptability.
Evolving Hiring Strategies
Even if training current employees, companies likely still need to infuse fresh talent and fundamentally different capabilities into the workforce mix.
Talent acquisition priorities are transforming to support new business models.
Organizations must broaden the profile of hires, looking beyond industry expertise.
They should seek out candidates who demonstrate agility, curiosity, and experience with change management.
Increasing neurodiversity and individuality across teams creates more resilience and sparks more inventive thinking.
To access specialized talent, CTOs and CHROs must collaborate on building robust talent pipelines.
We need to team up with schools and colleges, mentor some interns and apprentices, and look into hiring talent from around the world.
We might also need to juice up our employee referral programs to tap into bigger networks of potential hires.
Attracting diverse top talent requires compelling messaging about a company’s reinvention purpose and exciting future state.
Why would a promising climate scientist want to join your industrial conglomerate?
Spell out the magnitude of positive impact they can have in influencing mission-driven business transformation.
Employee Development Focus
Investing in developing the capabilities of existing employees is also critical. But this must go far beyond the occasional corporate training module.
Building an agile workforce ready for ongoing reinvention demands building a pervasive culture of continuous learning.
Fund individualized learning journeys, not generic programs.
Whether degree completion, bootcamps, self-paced online instruction, or job rotations, empower workers to direct their development paths to align personal growth with company needs.
Encourage employees to diversify their experience portfolios, learning and borrowing capabilities from adjacent disciplines.
Establish first-of-a-kind roles tasking people to blend expertise in unusual ways (like AI + climate resilience).
Review reward metrics to champion curiosity, skill growth and problem-solving over static job execution.
Make learning visible by sharing knowledge widely. Have savvy employees teach interactive “nano-courses” to share their expertise.
Create spaces to collaboratively explore emerging skills critical to business strategy.
If you engage and challenge workers to reinvent themselves, they’ll help reinvent the workforce.
Reimagining Workforce Composition
Current shifts in the nature of work are also prompting companies to reimagine the very composition of their workforces.
The traditional full-time employee model can’t sufficiently flex and scale with constant business transformation.
While core teams remain crucial, companies should creatively leverage freelance gig workers – accessing top talent as needed for defined projects.
Contractors provide specialized capabilities, fresh ideas, and flexible scale. They also reduce long-term liabilities.
Leaders have to get used to partnering with third parties as trusted extensions of their in-house operation.
Strategic partnerships, vendor relationships, and other outsourcing arrangements increase workforce flexibility.
You can bring in strong outside skillsets that you don’t want on your payroll. Replace the need for mass training with strategic sourcing.
Look into the capabilities of every variety of supplier in your businesses and treat them as dynamic employees.
By committing to filling skills gaps quickly, varied team members from other companies also boost talent mobility.
Connecting to networks outside your business allows for better communication across companies and eventually more opportunity.
Agile working turns freelancers, contractors, and temporary workers into a flexible employment model with a team that can change priorities rapidly.
Empowering Employees in Reinvention
Finally, an agile workforce would need the engagement and empowerment that can make them effective.
People want to be a part of the process that shapes a company’s prospect by the way they define their progressing roles within it.
Silos and hierarchies obstruct progress wheels in an era of rapid business changes.
Offer employees platforms to directly ideate innovations across the enterprise through programs like citizen development, crowdsourcing ideas, and open innovation challenges.
Build collaborative mechanisms for people across levels and functions to prototype, test, and improve business processes and offerings.
Consistently seek out the voice-of-the-employee on what’s working or not. Where do reinvention efforts need course correction?
What are the most impactful areas to direct upskilling resources? Looping people into co-creation exercises builds buy-in and motivates them through difficult transitions.
When people feel heard and empowered as active participants in a company’s evolution, they’ll persist through uncertainties.
Recognize, motivate, and reward employees for driving reinvention as creative problem-solvers and outside-the-box thinkers.
High-performing companies inspire ownership.
Conclusion
Having an agile workforce is becoming a real competitive edge as businesses constantly reinvent their models.
Companies embracing this new way of managing talent gain several advantages:
- Access to specialized know-how and diverse perspectives
- Ability to redirect talent to priority projects in real-time
- High engagement and commitment to reinvent right along with the business
So, how will you reimagine your strategies for hiring, developing, composing, and engaging your workforce?
In this nonstop era of change, those embracing a mindset of continuous workforce reinvention will thrive.
