A third of CHROs do not believe their company’s approach to strategy enables them to respond to external market shifts, according to new global research from Workday. The study conducted by Longitude, surveyed almost 1,000 business leaders across Asia, Europe, and North America. In addition, and in keeping with their people-centric mission, CHROs are the most likely of all senior leaders to believe that success in the marketplace is directly related to keeping employees engaged.
They plan in a continuous, real-time manner, which gives them the speed, agility, and dynamism they need to innovate successfully. Leading organizations build fluid organizational structures and processes. Nearly half claim the ability to reallocate people quickly to where their skills are needed. Leaders are much more likely than laggards to have plans to upskill the majority of their workforce and push specific initiatives to increase employee engagement.
Overall, we found that the main obstacles to real-time planning are inflexible legacy technologies and bureaucratic organizational culture .
When it comes to the proportion of C-suite leaders who agree that their organization’s back, middle, and front office processes are “completely integrated,” CHROs have the brightest outlook, with 71% of them saying these processes are completely integrated.Many organizations have discovered that vast proportions of their recent revenue are directly linked to skill areas that didn’t exist even five years ago. Skills are constantly changing, with new ones appearing while others become obsolete.
Data is absolutely key in empowering decision making closer to the customer: Laggards say that out-of-date information and siloed teams are major barriers to the democratization of decision making. Among leaders, 80% say all employees have access to timely and relevant data without gatekeepers blocking access to such information, compared to just 24% of laggards.
CHROs overall align with their peers in the C-suite when it comes to their belief in the effectiveness of current key performance indicators. One area where they are most positive—more positive than the CEO, for once—is the belief that their organization has a culture in which learning from failure is encouraged: 80% of CHROs believe this to be the case, vs. 78% of CEOs.