From Mission Outcomes To Human Outcomes

One of my favorite go-to sources for updating my knowledge about organization and people management is Deloitte. Based on extensive surveys, Deloitte publishes annual evidence-based reports that illuminate human capital trends across different sectors and on a global scale.

For MSCI members, I wanted to highlight a few trends revealed by Deloitte in its 2024 Global Human Capital Trends and a companion report, 2024 Public Sector Human Capital Trends. These thought-provoking discoveries should inspire your business and human resources (HR) leaders to critically evaluate your company’s existing strategic priorities, business operations, and people management practices. Doing so will enable you to gain more clarity about what your company truly needs to do to achieve your desired outcomes.

2024 Human Capital Trends

Deloitte defines human performance as “a mutually reinforcing cycle with compounding shared value for workers, the organization, and society.” In addition to improving mission outcomes, human performance also allows the organization to “address new concerns from the workforce, increasing well-being, remain competitive in the war for talent, and shift workforce responsibilities to focus on uniquely human work.”

Below are the key trends discussed in Deloitte’s reports.

• Human Sustainability. This trend stresses the importance of building human connections with multiple stakeholders both inside and outside of the organization. By creating value for all people, organizations will stand a better chance of achieving sustainability.
• Beyond Productivity. This trend questions the adequacy of traditional productivity metrics for measuring human performance in the artificial intelligence empowered workplace. A big challenge facing organizational leaders today is to figure out how to create shared, mutually reinforcing sustainability outcomes for both the organization and its members.
• Transparency Paradox. This trend brings attention to the double-edged effect of the fast development of technology on organizations. On one hand, technology enables greater communication and transparency, leading to more trust. On the other hand, with greater transparency comes a bigger possibility of invasion of privacy, consequently hindering trust building. Leaders must consider this paradoxical impact of technology in order to create a balance between transparency and trust.
• Imagination Deficit. The new technology-empowered workplace requires workers to have more imagination about new or different ways of working. This calls for the development of human capabilities for innovation, adaptation, curiosity, and empathy.
• Digital Playground. With technology continuously sparking change in the workplace, people need, more than ever, a safe space to explore and experiment with new solutions. Accomplishing this can positively drive human performance.
• Workplace Microcultures. Culture is complex with multiple layers. Instead of focusing on creating one shared culture, organizations need to allow for the co-existence of multiple subcultures. Doing so helps promote autonomy which will boost productivity.
• Boundaryless HR. The future of work requires HR to evolve from being a siloed function to becoming a boundaryless discipline integrating the people, organization, and other stakeholders it serves. Boundaryless HR helps develop human expertise across the organization, among many others.

One More Key Takeaway

What I take away from Deloitte’s 2024 human capital trends analyses is the need to shift from mission outcomes to human outcomes.

For organizational leaders, this means broadening their primary focus on the mission-driven mode of work to embrace a more human-centric management approach. As these trends reveal, regardless of the business sectors and contextual differences, a common factor that impacts an organization’s survival and sustainability is people. In today’s workplace where many work processes are being automated by technological tools and employees feel increasingly insecure about their jobs due to the fear of being replaced by machines, making more investments in people both financially and emotionally, is key to sustainable business.

Keep in mind: when people are taken care of by their employers, they will take good care of the company in return. This reciprocal relationship cannot be established if the leaders continue to focus exclusively or primarily on the mission outcomes (for example, profit gains and operation efficiency) as they have done in the past.

The most critical mission for business and HR leaders is to find ways to boost human performance, for example, by providing adequate job aids, addressing their individual needs, supporting their career aspirations, creating developmental/growth opportunities, and protecting their overall well-being. In so doing, companies will ultimately reap the benefits produced by a happier, healthier, and more engaged workforce.

Let me conclude with a call to action in Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report:

“It’s time to trade in the rules, operating constructs, and proxies of the past. Prioritizing human performance can help organizations make the leap into a boundaryless future.”

Jia Wang is a professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on international and national human resource development, organization crisis management, and learning within organizations.