Tech workforce hiring DNA can benefit from recalibrating, especially in the industrial Internet of Things manufacturing ecosystem.
My advice: continuously focus on “What’s Next?” to grow, expand and sustain your own and your clients’ organizations.
Your organization’s first step? Focus on recalibrating the Human Resource function, regardless of whether you in-source or outsource HR.
When HR serves a more holistic function within an integrated, cross-functional human capital strategy, your organization is future focused and always on.
Recalibrating Workforce Hiring DNA requires innovators not more order takers.
Take your organization’s HR pulse. In speaking with leadership across manufacturers and service providers, I still hear too many examples of managers ordering up replacement or additional personnel as though they were at a short-order diner.
That practice fills a tactical need instead of representing the execution of enlightened corporate hiring strategy.
The BNA 2015-2016 Human Resources Benchmark study documents how the majority of HR departments still remain primarily responsible for hiring, onboarding and benefits administration. Very few HR folks sit at the C-Suite strategy table to create and innovate a workforce blueprint fine-tuned to meet the challenges of the industrial Internet of Things.
This tactical HR role results in hiring employees who continue to fulfill skill-specific departmental hiring specifications. Everyone sticks to their own kind and operates within their own department. There is very little recalibration of tech workforce hiring DNA going on in this scenario.
Alternatively, when tech workforce hiring DNA is recalibrated, HR strategy targets developing cross-functional workforce competencies in existing and future hires. Everyone is hired based on their ability to work across former departmental silos. The objective is cross-pollinating skill sets and workforce interoperability.
That scenario is innovative in anyone’s corporate Playbook.
To recalibrate tech workforce hiring DNA, focus on creating engaged teams.
The Deloitte 2016 Global Human Capital Trends study, Different by Design, identified 10 key trends. These trends are particularly relevant as the Internet of Things continues to alter how we work, whom we hire, what and how we manufacture and how, when and why we communicate with each other. Aggregated, they fall into main four buckets.
- Creating a new mission and purpose for HR focused on creating an engaged and purposeful culture.
- Revamping what the new workplace “looks like” incorporating digitally relevant HR tools, design thinking and the possibility of a gig economy component.
- Redefining a new HR function by incorporating Big Data, people analytics and revised HR capabilities and responsibilities.
- Developing new leadership careers and new leadership skills based on a culture fostering leadership development and continuous learning opportunities.
Significantly, the suggested new model for companies focuses on creating networks of teams. Companies hire, build and empower members of the workforce as they are assigned to work on specific business challenges, projects and initiatives. These “networks of teams” are aligned and coordinated, assembled and re-assembled, similar to how military operations and information centers are created and deployed.
In my Playbook, the most significant upside to this strategy is that gradually, as personnel experience participation in a network of teams, they develop hybridized and flexible skill sets. Considering the rate and pace of technical advances in the Internet of Things business ecosystem, the network of teams workforce model cannot happen quickly enough.
However the majority of respondents feel that their organizations were nowhere near this type of cultural hiring nirvana.
Start off by discovering missed opportunities by perpetuating current HR hiring practices.
The key to self-discovery is collaboration. Is it time to realize you have a hiring strategy problem?
Take a good look around your organization. Are you hiring your tech workforce based on collaborative skillsets as well as level of education and experience?
If your organization still focuses on hiring warm technical bodies to fill specific workforce voids, you may get what you pay for (and specify). When individuals are hired, and expected to fit in and run with the pack, they may find themselves as lost as the rest of the pack.
My advice: At the very least, move your organization beyond hiring “anyone” to fill the workforce and skills gap. Instead, consider what your workforce looks like if your hiring strategy focuses on hiring for a network of flexible, collaborative teams.
To recalibrate tech workforce hiring DNA, your corporate culture requires a solid direction, strategy and roadmap, not only for HR but for everyone within your organization. Time to get started? If so, you know where to reach me.
What struggles have you experienced in hiring a tech workforce? What is the average length of tenure for these personnel? Have you focused on creating a network of collaborative teams or is your organization still divided into corporate silos?
Babette Ten Haken is a writes, speaks and coaches about 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.
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