An all-encompassing culture will be the next big play

If we thought that 2017 was the year of change and disruption, 2018 promises to be a year of even more change and disruption.  5 trends seem to emerge that would impact business, and hence, the HR function and professional in 2018.

Digitization, in all its forms. Increasingly, businesses can build competitive advantage by successfully leveraging digital presence. From AI and IoT, e-connecting with consumers to bots-led HR interfaces, face and voice recognition-based performance and employee service options that rival the best that employees can get as consumers, businesses ahead of the curve will create analytics powerhouses that will help companies take better decisions basis the widespread digital footprint that consumers and employees leave across the e-world. Offline will co-exist and will have to thrive with online. But what would be interesting to see will be how HR and leadership would embrace such changes and balance the co-existence of humans and machines, people intimacy and direct connect at the workplace.

Purpose-led organizations. Employee burn out continues to be the big nightmare for businesses and HR leaders, while well-being remains a key agenda for organizations. This is also perhaps a fall out of an increasingly connected and wired world where lines are blurred between professional and personal lives. Integration of the two actually drives the need for organizations where business and personal purpose find synergy and alignment and create an important meeting ground for mental and emotional well-being. The differentiator for organizations in 2018 will lie here. People will seek to work in organizations whose purpose they understand and organizations who let them discover and live their purpose.

Flex workforces. With several generations at the workplace and the surge of startups, the year will also see the rising criticality of flex workforce and organizations leveraging an open talent economy. This means the demise of conventional fixed ‘term’ policies and performance management systems to more frequent and flexible reviews, peer participation and dynamic workforce management. Managing a remote and agile workforce will become a new skill in the leadership dictionary.

Integration of Marketing and Customer Engagement. With reach getting supplemented through ecommerce and data becoming a commodity (and almost free), the signs are there for the rise of ‘massive customization’, which will combine the best of Marketing with Sales. Competitive advantage will come out of last mile engagement and consumer experience, which will gives impetus to ‘front-led’ or ‘upside-down pyramid’ organizational thinking. Market-led companies will leverage insights in consumer behaviour to drive mass scale customization. From 2018 on, building strong and direct consumer relationships will lay the base for competitiveness.

Disaggregation. Wins tomorrow will come from leveraging the benefits of scale and playing the game of disaggregation. In markets, in categories, with individuals — in all cases, the joy will lie in de-averaging and disaggregating rather than building into one mega pan-nation or pan-geography view. For talent, this means the ability to marry the macro with the micro — to understand the national view and (simultaneously) zoom into a local view. 

The year 2018 will be premised on building competitive and institutionalized capabilities that can build the next frontier of sustainable growth. If there is one call out for 2018, it is that ‘culture’ could be the next big play for HR professionals — a culture that facilitates the above would drive competitive and sustainable growth.