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THE CHANGING WORLD OF WORK, WORKERS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Work, workers, and organizations are changing in significant ways, and at an ever increasing rate, and there is every reason to believe that both the degree and the rate of change will continue to increase. Most of these changes have significant and profound implications for how talent should be managed.

Simply stated, many of the old principles and practices concerning what makes for good talent management are obsolete as a result of the changing nature of work, workers, and organizations. What used to be good or best practice—or at least good enough practice—with respect to how people are recruited, selected, trained, developed, rewarded, and evaluated simply does not fit today’s workforce and workplaces. These strategies, practices, and policies have become increasingly obsolete, and virtually every activity that organizations engage in with respect to how human capital is managed needs to be changed to become a best practice in this new world of work. This includes many of today’s best reward, selection, and development practices.

So far the talent management principles and practices of most organizations have not changed significantly in response to this new world of work. They still follow a job-based bureaucratic model, focusing on job descriptions, equating fairness with sameness and seniority, and are managed by human resources (HR) functions that are not changing as fast as the world of work is. This has resulted in numerous books and articles that are critical of HR, some of which suggest “blowing it up.”

Table 1.1 Percentage of current time spent on various HR roles in the United States

Source: Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau, Global Trends in Human Resource
Management: A Twenty-Year Analysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Results from 2016 are new, and were not included in the 2015 book.
Note: 1,2,3,4,5,6.7,8 Significant differences between years (p ≤ .05).

There is considerable evidence that the HR functions in most organizations are not strategy driven and are not changing as fast as they need to. Table 1.1 presents data from my global survey of large corporations. The survey, which is done every three years, measures the views of senior HR executives on talent management and their organizations’ practices. It is the only study that has measured change in HR practices on a global basis. The results show that between 1995 and 2016 there were no significant changes in how HR spent its time. In every country studied HR has spent and continues to spend most of its time on record keeping and providing administrative services.

The good news is that the major changes that have and will occur in the world of work are identifiable and will likely to continue to be. As a result, it is possible to make fairly definitive statements as to what the world of work will be like in the future. This in turn means that it is possible to specify what organizations should do with respect to talent management to be effective moving forward.

Talent management should become increasingly strategy driven, skills based, performance focused, agile, segmented, and evidence based. Before specifying in detail what talent management should look like, it is important to identify recent key changes in the world of work and why they demand new approaches to talent management.