An insightful report from the Deloitte Human Capital services entitled ‘Rethinking Talent Management’ (December 2014), reminds us that ‘workforces’ are progressively composed by a percentage of people outside the payroll, in many managerial or staff positions. As much as 20% according to the authors of the report.
The key insight here is that, whilst not many years ago one would have thought of this part of the workforce as the low skilled, sub-contracted, outsourced ‘human resources’, a trend, strategy and implementation mainly driven by cost control, today, this is shifting to the higher end intellectual capital. Less of a pair of hands and more of a brain (and hands)
I think this is un unsettling model for the traditional Human Resources (HR) approach, a function that is still struggling to catch up with the volatile and challenging environment, for which conventional HR policies don’t work anymore. The traditional approach has a limited understanding of this ‘high end’ resources. They all fall into the category of advisors, consultants, none executive directors or similar. Most of these models are old and static and presume a particular transactional model, a vendor-purchasing relationship, completely contaminated by cost/money and ‘selling your time’.
These models are becoming obsolete very quickly. We need to find progressive and creative forms of partnership that allow companies to have at least 25 % of the Human Capital Resources outside the fixed payroll. Yes, there will be a contractual agreement, of course, but not the typical consulting one of ‘days/daily/rates/bodies and selling time’ as promoted by the Big Consulting groups.
There may be more than one alternative models. The point is to open your mind and imagination to them. The ‘Contingent workers/non employee/high end of human capital’ model as described by the Deloitte report is a very good start to imagine a new Human Resources for the 21st Century
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