The need to empower our collective talent

By Seb Haire, guest writer at ProFinda.

The world isn’t working as it should and things need to change. We have seen this in the current political environment, with a new establishment taking power and the repelling of conventional wisdom from the educational elite. People want empowerment, control of their lives and destiny and to be listened too.

This is also true in the world of work; it isn’t working as it should and things need to change. We have seen the evidence directly.

One scary stat from last year’s UK Government Autumn Statement said that the UK was falling far behind its other G7 counterparts including the US, France and Germany in terms of GDP output per hour worked. This data married up with the data we, ProFinda, collected and analysed in our 2016 white paper – The Disconnected Organisation where we surveyed almost 4,000 employees and found that the average employee is wasting 20 working days per year looking for the internal skills and resource to support them on projects. 20 days is basically one calendar month wasted looking for help!

In addition, the survey found that, on average, employees spent around two hours looking for help per search, with 27 per cent of employees eventually giving up, leaving projects improperly resourced or incomplete. Of those who continue with their search for assistance, only 40 per cent of respondents found the response adequate to progress the project. This is clear evidence of a broken model.

There is a wealth of untapped potential within our organisations – and we need to make a change to access it. In my last article I spoke about the paradigm of chance in AI and how frameworks can manufacture chance. Well the data shows that the issue of broken frameworks is a significant one. Just like how the breakdown of political frameworks is affecting the world, the breakdown of internal organisational frameworks is causing billions of dollars to be lost in inefficiencies.

Up until now – organisations have looked top down and have implemented talent solutions that focus on management and reporting, rather than the most important asset within an organisation: the people. As a result, business benefits are diluted, organisations are divided by poor infrastructure and lack of cultural alignment and there continues to be a lack of buy-in from the workforce.

The lack of buy in from people is the issue. Just like in the political arena if people are not empowered and part of the journey then they will look for another option. We need to solve this issue.

At ProFinda we are bravely trying to create a framework for organisations, a step in the direction we think will help. We don’t know all the answers, but if you’re interesting in learning more about the results of this research and how we think organisations will start to move the dial on how their manage talent, email enquiries at profinda.com 

About the author

Sebastian Haire is part of ProFinda’s network of thought leaders  — an international technology company that helps organisations understand their people better. — connect with him at seb[at]profinda.com, on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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