Since early 2020, our society has faced the COVID-19 pandemic, digital disruption and wide world economic challenges sequentially. Due to this, many businesses had to adapt and navigate through these conditions in ways to successfully address changing expectations from customers, suppliers, shareholders, and their employees.

Such conditions turn a lot of companies to accomplish new objectives and transformation. In my perspective, the transformation has to be done primarily in three areas. The first is to spend much more focus on growth, as opposed to cost reduction. A lot of new opportunities occur. That’s been even more apparent with companies facing talent shortages, supply chain disruptions, and potential significant inflation in late 2022.

Second, we should not focus only on classic financial levers, but we have to focus on strategic topics like sustainability and digital transformation. This includes capability building to address the culture in the way how work gets done and redefining the purpose of the organization. Lastly, current these circumstances we should even more focus on health. This helps create more meaning around employees to build a safe work environment for everyone to increase employee engagement and retention through perceived organizational support.

Regarding that, HR will be the driving force for many initiatives necessary such as talent mapping, improving the work environment to be more flexible, prioritizing strategic workforce planning to improve HR productivity and simplifying the organization, performance management, upskilling, and reskilling; building an integrated and user-friendly HR platform; and developing an HR tech ecosystem to improve the employee experience through digitalization.

HR has to play a central role in how companies build/increase organizational resilience and drive value during this disruption era. Consequently, HR leaders have to connect talent strategy with business strategy, implementing changes in the three core areas of identity, agility, and scalability.

“HR plays a central role in how companies build organizational resilience and drive value during this disruption era. Consequently, HR leaders connect talent strategy with business strategy, implementing changes to the identity, agility, and scalability”

If I go back to when I started my career 20 years ago, the thinking was that when I facilitated the transformation process during quality management system ISO 9001 implementation efforts, I could only see the impact of those initiatives on the company. Today, I’ve learned a lot from companies that have done a great job of changing their performance and sustaining it, there are often hundreds of initiatives involved in various areas. As an individual can successfully drive only less than one to two initiatives, with the support of my team that will increase to seven to 14 successful initiatives could be done in a year depending on the size. This means you need more people to be involved in the broader transformation effort for the large company or business.

Learn from the expert, the key to successful transformation is having the executor at the right place that will support that scale of change. Lastly, management has to monitor periodically those hundreds of initiatives from an idea to the bottom line. You have to build some tools for tracking initiatives to the bottom line so that there’s no significant leakage. I mean having real visibility on a week-to-week and monthly to monthly basis, of where you are and having a way to highlight areas, where support is needed, is the key to addressing identity, agility, and scalability.

It’s not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage the change!—“Charles Darwin”