Oracle HCM Cloud

Workplace 2.0:
The Healthy Option

Using the Cloud for Better Recruiting, Retention, and Compliance

I.
Workplace 2.0

We’re all start-ups now. So how do we behave like them?

The buzzwords come thick and fast. Disruption. Agility. Innovation. Millennials. Engagement. Automation. Every organisation is wrestling with the world of VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Start-ups become giants in an incredibly short space of time, innovating in products and services – and starting from scratch with twenty-first-century ideas about technology, management and business models.

And that’s leaving many enterprises flat-footed. Translating these pressures into workplace design is a Herculean task. But it’s essential if organisations are to respond to new rivals and accelerating customer expectations.

Employees, too, have enhanced expectations – not just the digital-first generations entering the workplace, but across the workforce. While the workplace of 25 years ago was all about where people were and how they were controlled, today’s organisations need to figure out ways of helping their talent collaborate when, where and how it most adds value.

25 years ago

Sectioned offices
The nine-to-five
Rigid hierarchy
Work in serial
Lifetime employment, climbing the ladder

Today

Open-plan, mobile
Flexible working
Flat structures
Work in parallel
Strategic career management

Tomorrow

Everywhere
Work when you can add value
Global,
self-organising teams
True collaboration
Project-based gigs for self-development

Give us the tools…

This is both an organisational and technological challenge. But the technology is largely in place. Mobile productivity is a given. Cloud services allow dispersed teams to work from multiple locations, across all the traditional boundaries. Data collection and analysis is almost passive – with the right tools. We can communicate and collaborate in the moment.

This all places the onus on leadership to equip specialist teams such as HR, line managers and employees themselves with the right environment to collaborate, engage and develop. And Oracle’s own research shows that on this score, there is room for improvement.

Engagement unlocks the future.

What we’re seeing is a transfer of power. (As analyst Josh Bersin put it: “The war for talent is over, and the talent won.”¹) It’s moving from rigid, hierarchical structures to ad-hoc teams and individuals.

It’s shifting from “whoever’s available” to “whoever’s best”. Today’s workplace technologies and platforms make it impossible to sustain silos – however much nervous managers and poorly engaged teams want them as a crutch.

If we think of the team as the highest-value unit of production – they are, after all, what “gets things done” – we can identify the characteristics of those who are lost in the past and those fit for the future.

The objective of Workplace 2.0, then, is to find ways to free teams into “the zone of engagement”.

A New Way of Visualising Employee Engagement

The problem?

Far too many organisations and teams end up in the pseudo-engagement quadrant. Without the right tools to analyse employee sentiment and behaviour, it’s all too easy to assume that employees will deliver – when in fact they are playing to an overly rigid rulebook.

1 Bersin by Deloitte, “Human Resources, Learning, and Leadership: Our Ten Predictions for 2014”, December 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/12/19/ten-predictions-for-talent-leadership-and-hr-technology-in-2014/#740c280e49b6.

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