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Three trends are colliding to redefine the way enterprises engage, optimize, and transform their workforce.
- Insights driven enterprise
- The transformation of AI
- Significant changes in “workforce demographics”
Each trend creates a data blind spot for organizations, causing short-term and long-term consequences for companies. The good news is that enterprises have the data to illuminate blind spots at their fingertips. Leveraging this data will create a marked business advantage now, and in the future for the insights driven enterprise.
Sapience CEO Brad Killinger joined Sapience CRO Matthew Smith to discuss these converging workplace trends at a recent Sapience webinar. Below is a brief overview of the trends they discussed, and the strategies future-focused companies are deploying to collect, analyze and execute based on workplace data and insights to increase visibility, improve decision-making, and build teams.
The rise of the insights-driven organization and the CDAO
“Companies are no longer running on gut feel. They are driven by analytics. They’re driven by data,” Smith explained.
Those enterprises that have not yet embraced data-driven decision-making will fall behind their competitors. Gartner predicts that by 2026, data and analytics strategies led by chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) will prove strategic growth drivers for organizations, further separating data-focused companies from the pack. As such, companies are racing to hire talent to oversee data-led digital transformations and effectively collect and analyze data and insights.
Sapience has been a leader in this transformation as enterprises across verticals pivot to become true data-driven organizations. These data and analytics leaders are using a workforce analytics platform like Sapience to understand what is happening across their entire enterprise.
Forget Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) – this is Bring Your Own AI
Knowledge workers’ AI use doubled in less than six months, with three-quarters reporting they use AI to save time, focus on their most important tasks, and increase productivity, according to May 2024 research from Microsoft. If companies aren’t providing these tools, workers are turning to other options, such as ChatGPT. The full impact of these tools is not easily understood, unless organizations have access to work data.
“AI is transforming jobs in front of our eyes. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes,” Killinger noted. “The data around those interactions is going to become more and more critical to a company to understanding the impact of AI on an organization’s capacity, the skill sets required to keep moving the business forward, the training opportunities, etc.”
Companies use a workforce analytics solution such as Sapience VUE® to understand how teams are using AI, measure AI’s impact on productivity, and identify areas ripe for automation. Such innovation allows them to move faster and more targeted while creating a stronger ROI from their AI investments.
Unprecedented labor market dynamics create a perfect storm
A significant number of baby boomers will retire over the next five to 10 years, some of whom hold top leadership roles at their organizations. The loss of this expertise will be consequential for companies. Meanwhile, a new generation is entering the labor work – one that defines the value of work and the workplace quite differently than prior generations. The combination has some experts declaring 2024 the toughest labor market company leaders have experienced.
Killinger noted how the nationwide return-to-office argument encapsulates generational divides, and how accurate data about workforce productivity can serve as a source of truth, guiding companies’ decisions about remote work policies and strengthening their communication strategies.
“I have daughters in the workforce now who have had a completely different experience of what work looks like [than I have]. They joined their companies during pandemic time,” he explained. “I can tell you, as a CEO, if you say, ‘Everybody back to the office five days a week and we will call it collaboration,’ all the younger generation hears is, ‘you don’t trust me.’”
Enterprises can use a workforce analytics solution, such as Sapience Whereabouts Work™, to validate compliance of its return-to-office policies, which enables leadership to make decisions based on fact as opposed to gut feeling or personal work preferences.
Killinger believes companies that use data to inform remote work decisions will be better positioned than those that attempt to impose their will on employees. Leaders that double-down on office mandates will likely find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent.
Start with a platform like Sapience, which integrates with existing systems to automatically ingest and analyze data, highlighting insights and action points that can make an immediate impact on your business.
For more about how enterprise companies are using workforce data to navigate emerging trends, check out a recording of the Sapience webinar, “A Workforce Storm is Building – Are You Prepared or Exposed?” Click here to watch.
Interested in talking with us about how workforce analytics solutions from Sapience will help your organization, please contact us to schedule a discussion or a no-obligation demonstration of our platform.
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