Hiring holism, or hiring strategy in general, probably is the last thing on your mind as a business leader of worth.
However, when leadership makes hiring holism a priority, engaged and collaborative employees gain a sense of purpose and commitment to their organization. That translates into value creation.
Gallup® categorizes workers as “engaged” based on their ratings of key workplace elements that predict important organizational performance outcomes, such as having an opportunity to do what they do best each day, having someone at work who encourages their development and believing their opinions count at work.
According to Gallup, on monthly average, 32.5% of US workers are not engaged in the workplace.
However, your organization is not defined by statistics, is it? Decide to do something fresh.
Recalibrate how you hire. Think hiring holism. Measure the results in overall productivity and profitability.
Hiring holism is based on business holism, tailor-made for the uber-connected industrial Internet of Things manufacturing ecosystem.
Hiring holism as a workforce hiring strategy is systems thinking. The online Business Dictionary defines business holism as a:
Systems worldview or methodology based on the observation that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, displays properties (called ‘emergent’) neither possessed by its components nor anticipated from their analysis, and that the nature of a thing or complex system cannot be understood by breaking it apart but only by looking at in its totality. Opposite of reductionism.
In an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) manufacturing ecosystem, decisions become more collaborative and data-driven. Synergy is achieved by continuous interactive input-throughput-output involving people, software, sensors and machines.
The business value your organization creates for clients becomes more unified. You can continue to measure the performance of individual contributions made by people, software, analytics and equipment. However, the only Whole your clients care about is based on the business value of your offering and its relevance to their growth strategy.
Your business Whole does indeed become greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Instead of chasing individual or departmental KPIs, the workforce functions as an entire unit focused on enhancing the business value of your offering.
A Big Idea with tremendous upside potential. Scary, huh?
To achieve a greater degree of hiring holism, revisit your human capital strategy.
Perhaps the biggest root cause in execution of an organization’s growth strategy is the C-Suite’s attitude towards hiring.
The 2013 Next Generation Manufacturing Study found that:
“Manufacturing executives frequently lament a talent shortage. But NGM data indicate that few are taking the initiative to actually address talent gaps… 56% of manufacturers have the leadership and talent to drive world-class supply-chain management and collaboration, but only 28% have the talent-development programs to support world class supply-chain management. Only 26% have both talent and programs in place – and 42% have neither talent or [sic] development programs in place.”
The situation has not improved that much. The BNA 2015-2016 Human Resources Benchmark Study determined that the C-Suite still tends to relegate human capital professionals to hiring, retention and benefits. The HR (Human Resources) function, whether in-house or outsourced, serves as managers and administrators rather than strategists with invited seats at the big boys’ and girls’ C-Suite table.
That scenario does not describe holistic hiring strategy, does it?
When leadership continues to ask HR to dial up another engineer, office manager, accountant like a waiter or waitress at a short-order diner, the gap between workforce talent management and development and employee engagement continues to widen.
Still hiring warm bodies or creating a strategic trajectory of Hiring Holism?
Today’s smart factory requires individuals who can think, act, decide and collaborate outside the lines of a job description. When employees are capable of coloring beyond the lines of their job descriptions, your organization is on the road towards hiring holism.
Ask yourself: How capable and collaborative are your business people when working on the “other” side of the enterprise, with operations, logistics, IT, DevOps? Depending on the size of your organization, you may be talking about the same people serving multiple functions throughout the day.
Holistic hiring calls for recalibrating your workforce hiring strategy, with particular emphasis on the tech workforce for starters. They are the folks who naturally are comfortable and conversant with data, numbers, operations and logistics, aren’t they? Now develop them to collaborate with the business side of the equation.
Where does your organization fall in this workforce hiring holism continuum?
A recent IndustryWeek webinar described the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem as complexity on steroids. Your hiring strategy is becoming increasingly complex as well.
Continuing to hire the same way you did as recently as 5 years ago, may compromise your organization’s growth, expansion and sustainability. Hiring holism calls for hiring to be recognized as a strategic imperative.
One of the most comprehensive blueprints for tomorrow’s workforce can be found in Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 study. Clearly, whom you hire must be accompanied by a solid strategy for continuous development and training which targets employee engagement.
Hiring holism strategy requires a company’s workforce to keep up with, if not be ahead of, the relentless pace of the industrial Internet of Things. Are you planning and developing a workforce always positioned for “What’s Next?”
What is your organization’s current hiring strategy? Is it industrial Internet of Things ready? Are you planning on addressing how you hire and whom you hire? What creates your sense of urgency?
Babette Ten Haken is a management consultant, strategist, speaker and coach focused on customer success for customer retention. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring and developing collaborative technical and non-technical teams. She serves manufacturing, IT and engineering intensive companies. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Image author: tai111 Image source: Fotolia
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