Deloitte: In Wake of COVID-19, 61% of Executives Now Focused on Transforming Work, Double Pre-Pandemic Levels

Amid unprecedented workforce disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are enacting radically new ways of working and operating – and the C-suite is taking action to reimagine the future of work with human capital issues at the top of their agenda. Executives are shifting preparedness strategies from planning for the familiar and are instead synchronizing across the C-suite to develop human-centric strategies that allow organizations to better adapt to ongoing disruption.

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Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends report, “The social enterprise in a world disrupted,” examines how organizations and leaders can leverage the lessons of this pandemic to fundamentally reimagine work, shifting from a focus on surviving to the pursuit of thriving.

Completed by more than 3,600 executives in 96 countries, Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report included responses from more than 1,200 C-suite executives and board members, in addition to other management functions. For the first time in the report’s 11-year history, business respondents (56%), including 233 CEOs, outnumbered HR respondents (44%) in the survey – underscoring the growing importance of human capital in organizational decision-making.

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Reimagining preparedness and workforce potential

The report shows that human capital issues are at the center of leaders’ thinking as they shift organizational views on preparedness. In the 2021 report, 17% of executives said that their organizations would focus on planning for unlikely, high-impact events moving forward, as opposed to just 6% before the pandemic. Nearly half (47%) of executives said that their organizations planned to focus on multiple scenarios, notably up from 23% pre-pandemic. To effectively deal with multiple possible futures and unlikely events, the importance of real-time workforce insights and data as they set new directions has become even more critical.

However, the most important factor in making that preparedness shift is unleashing worker potential through a new focus on capabilities. Almost three-quarters (72%) of executives identified “the ability of their people to adapt, reskill and assume new roles” as a priority for navigating future disruptions. However, only 17% of these same executives said that their organization was “very ready” to adapt and reskill workers to assume new roles, pointing to a substantial disconnect between leaders’ priorities and the reality of how their organizations support workforce development.

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