Whether your company is challenged by digitalization, supply-chain disruptions, inflation, or economic downturn, your organization needs to prepare for future unforeseen events. In this article, we explore three key considerations for organizing your teams to effectively adapt to continuous change and uncertainty.
Increasing need to build an adaptive workforce
As the world transforms rapidly, the labor market and how we decide to build our teams and organizations face continuous challenges. Over the last decades, we have gone from a unified, jointly managed labor market to one that is increasingly fragmented. The traditional long-term employment is, to a greater extent, replaced by temporary employment in a mix of project hires, consultants, and freelancers.
“It’s becoming increasingly important for HR to take a flexible, boundaryless approach.”
According to the 2024 Global Human Capital Trends study from Deloitte, the next step for HR is to become a boundaryless HR, focusing on how "the organization taps into the most skillful people, no matter where they reside, inside or outside the organization, to address people-related challenges and issues."
Consequently, it’s becoming increasingly important for HR to take an adaptive approach to the unique challenges and opportunities businesses are currently facing. HR needs to find ways to enable the organization, team, and employees to flex to new conditions.
Three key considerations when shaping an adaptive team
1. do you have access to the most critical capabilities and skills for the moment?
In a rapidly changing economy, the need for skills can drastically change. Suddenly, new areas and opportunities arise and you need to hire niche expertise fast. To ensure the most critical skills at the right time, many companies rely on consultants. Letting your employees work in parallel with external specialists with different cutting-edge skills is often an effective way of developing employees' competencies in essential areas.
2. what are your future staffing needs?
In many industries, there are apparent seasonal variations throughout the year, week, and day. Mapping them out makes it easier to plan for how to organize your team. To prepare for change and uncertainty, you also need to plan for different future scenarios. This allows you to formulate a strategy for adjusting the size of the group based on unforeseen events, which in turn will future proof your business.
3. do you have the right mix of permanent and temporary staff?
To adapt the organization for unforeseen fluctuations, you need to have the right mix of permanent and temporary staff. When deciding which skills to hire permanently and which to hire temporarily, we recommend to distinguish between three types of skills: business-critical, medium-level, and less-advanced skills.
All three categories of skills can operate within the same team, and one individual can often move from one team to another.
sofie maervoet
vp global concepts staffing
Sofie is one of the staffing leaders in Randstad with a track record in process optimization, training and coaching. She started her career as a staffing consultant in Randstad Belgium in 2002. Later, she joined the team in Randstad Switzerland as concept manager until she joined the global concept development team in 2018.