I was struck by research from Korn Ferry published a few weeks ago. The top issues facing HRDs and CHROs? Employee engagement and retention, and aligning business and talent strategies. I’m sure you’ll feel a sense of déjà vu reading the figures. Article by Ab Banerjee CEO – ViewsHub.

Thirty-four per cent of CHROs say aligning talent strategy and business strategy gives them sleepless nights; 24 per cent cite employee engagement and churn as a key factor in their insomnia. But as the pace of business change accelerates, technology advances faster, and new powerful economies like China and India take hold globally, I believe these problems will only grow in importance. And they will demand that the HR sector takes a fresh perspective on how we tackle these particular challenges.

Our businesses as ocean-going ships
Retention and talent strategies are not new problems, but these figures reminded me of something else I’d read a few months ago: company lifecycles are imploding. They’re undergoing a crunch, even amongst the largest corporates.

In the past it seemed like the giants of business were here to stay forever. J.P Morgan. DuPont. Colgate-Palmolive. Those three have all been on the NYSE for more than 150 years. But this is changing too. The average lifespan for an S&P 500 company today is just 15 years, down from 30 a few years ago.

The world’s largest companies are being buffeted around and blown violently off course by new, emerging forces. Technology is the key force; but there are others too, including increasing competition, globalisation and changing consumer tastes. As the large, fast-growing developing nations become true global competitors, company lifespans are likely to condense even more.

This puts a thick highlighter mark through the Korn Ferry results – and in many ways explains the urgent need for effective HR solutions. Business is faster, more dynamic and more fluid than ever before. Clearly, in that context, retention and talent strategies will continue to be top of mind for HRDs.

HRDs are responsible for hiring the sailors that man our business ships. In the past, when our ships were all steering solidly and patiently in one direction on calm waters, it was fairly easy to know who you had to recruit and to keep everyone happy.

But now our ships are not only sailing through much choppier waters but having to tack continuously; shifting orientation on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. This makes it more difficult than ever to know which sailors to recruit – and to stop them for mutineering once on board.

Focusing on a spot too close to the ship
This analogy also helps to illuminate some of the ways in which we should adapt as an industry to keep pace with the scale and depth of change. One of the lens though which we have directed HR strategy over the last decade is the collection of real-time feedback, sentiment and well-being data about employees in real-time.

This trend has certainly helped us improve the performance of individuals within our organisations – as well as the output of our businesses themselves. But there’s a downside too – one which it’s time we started to talk about. An unconditional focus on individuals and their metrics can end up putting the blinkers on us. It can force us to fixate on individual employees, and their individual outcomes. Is Mark happy? Is Joanne performing well? Has Kate received positive feedback?

But what we need right now is not to focus microscopically on a spot in the sea right next to the bow, but to lift our vision and take in a broad, deep and wide view of the whole ocean. We need to look out at the horizon; spot the challenges; and adapt, react and change accordingly, as we see them approach. When we were traveling across calm water and we weren’t shifting direction constantly that field of vision wasn’t necessary. It is now. So, what is it that should supplement our focus on individuals?

Teams as a base unit of organisations
It is my view that over the coming years, teams will emerge as the base unit of company productivity and innovation. We will start to devise strategies to improve the effectiveness of teams in real-time, on the fly, for every project team and every department, and not just individuals.

The team is critical because while it is individuals that undertake actions in companies, it is teams that enact strategies. A marketing strategy is written, performed and executed by the marketing team – and not by an individual within the marketing division.

This new focus gives us a powerful and rich additional concept to recast and better understand our companies. Firstly, we must stop standing on the deck, monitoring the work of individual crew members; instead, we have to move back to the hull, take a step above the action, and start to watch how people are working together; the interplay between individuals.

That will give us renewed perspective to spot interpersonal and inter-team friction, which may have been working against our overall objectives all the time. It will also give us a wider field of vision to spot where different groups have either been repeating the same tasks or even working against each other.

Secondly, it helps us understand why we have been getting things wrong in the first place. Our ships have been forced to change direction because we’re constantly having to adjust, readjust, and readjust our strategy again, under the instruction of our CEO. Business is moving quicker, we can’t change that, so we need to anticipate and be more nimble with our strategies.

But, as we know, the base unit for delivering on strategies is the team. Shifting the direction of the ship isn’t done by one crewmember alone; all the different team members must pull together to achieve that objective.

Much in the same way, shifting the direction of the company must be done from the perspective of the team, its composition, its collective skills, its goals and its overall effectiveness. It cannot be done by one person. So in periods of business history when pivoting is more important, like now, teams will be the natural unit of focus and management.

Finding a new measuring instrument
But, if this is the case, what should we be measuring to assess whether we are doing a good job? The answer I believe is team effectiveness; we should find metrics and proxies to measure how well and effectively our teams work – and how well they work together.

This is data that many companies today do not collect; they have rich detail on how the individuals in their firm perform – and more likely than not how happy they are. But they do not have that same detail on how their teams are performing. This needs to change, and it needs to do so urgently. We should work together as an industry to find these metrics, and implement technical solutions to measure them, preferably in real-time.

But as well as starting to collect and monitor this data to get a team-based picture of our organisation, it’s just as important to make sure that this data is pushed to the people who need it most – those on the frontlines of our businesses, outside of the traditional management structures.

This is especially true given the global nature of our companies and the fact that so many employees work remotely, including freelancers. Team effectiveness data will only be worth collecting if it’s put into the hands of the team members, who can then take action themselves to improve performance.

We are now living through an historic period of business and economic upheaval.  Strategies have never had to shift and adapt so quickly. Teams are the base unit for implementing and executing strategies, so it is there we must focus.
We have spent the last decade focused only on individuals – that should and will have to change.
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