Build the skills-based digital

workplace of the future

Solutions to help bridge the skills gap
Authored by Daniel Chee

As the digital workplace and the technologies that support it

continue to evolve, a skills gap is inevitable. According to the
World Economic Forum, humans working with machine
algorithms will lead to 97 million new roles by 2025, and more
than 50% of the global workforce (1 billion people) will need to
be reskilled by 2030. What’s more? A Deloitte/Fortune survey
found that labor and skill shortages remain among the top
factors that CEOs expect to disrupt and influence their strategy.

The question is not how to avoid the skills gap, but how to
bridge and cross it. As companies work to reconfigure talent
strategies to attract, retain, and cultivate tomorrow’s workforce,
a new operating model has dawned: the skills-based
organization, which prioritizes potential aptitude and drive over
experience or formal education.

Skills-based organizations are prepared to raise the bottom line,

as they are:

 98% likelier to retain high performers

 52% likelier to innovate
 49% likelier to improve processes to maximise efficiency 1

Today, the digital workplace is the natural environment for a

skills-based operating model. Here is how your organization can
begin to rethink hiring, technology, and leadership as you work
to prioritize skills in this evolving space.

Five skills that help workers thrive in today’s digital

workplace

When building a skills-based digital workplace, picking the right

people is essential, and more nuanced than traditional hiring. To
future-proof your business, seek out these five qualities in your
hires:

1. Passion for learning and teachability. Seventy-two

percent of the executives in the 2021 Deloitte Global
Human Capital Trends survey shared that “the ability of
their people to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles” was
either the most important or second most important factor
in their organization’s ability to navigate future disruptions.
This remains pivotal. When making hiring decisions, the
ability to reskill (or build new skillsets to do work that
diverges from their prior experience or field) and upskill (or
improve existing competencies) is more important than
direct experience. Individuals with these aptitudes can help
close skills gap and thus cushion organizations against
labor shortages.
2. Basic tech savvy. Without a foundation of digital literacy,
teams will fall behind. Perhaps surprisingly, for most roles,
a deep technological knowledge is unnecessary—but the
ability to meet a digital literacy threshold, which should be
set according to industry and role, is key.
3. Critical thinking, especially when evaluating data. As
automation handles more repetitive tasks, what we require
of people is less about tasks and more about thought. The
ability to analyze data and extract insight adds value that
can affect—and even define—business outcomes.
4. An ability to contribute to a diverse and
multigenerational workforce. Each generation brings its
own style, values, and technological and skills-based
capabilities to the job. Effective leaders will use
interpersonal skills to bring them together to face the same
goals rather than each other.
5. A nimble approach. In today’s multifaceted workplace,
an individual worker may move to a new project that
requires different applications, skills, or team members
every few weeks. The workers who thrive in the digital
workplace can accept uncertainty and flow with change.

Reconsidering the role of technology

After you have put the right people in the right roles, you must
equip them with the tools to succeed. The digital workplace
should support skills-building and skills-based people decisions.
Ideally, it should ease the complexities of reimagining work.

Having the right technology platforms and tools is fundamental

to unleashing the potential of the digital workforce and work
outcomes in a skills-based model. As employees work to upskill
and reskill, they will benefit from a digital workplace with
technologies and processes that mirror their daily interactions
with technology outside of work (such as the apps they use to
buy groceries or catch a ride). The right tools, seamlessly
integrated throughout the digital workplace, make it easy for
workers to focus on skills—from hiring and onboarding to project
management and career shaping.

For instance, a platform might help a hiring manager create a

skills-based job description, encourage training sessions for a
worker eager to reroute their career, or show a project manager
which skills gaps exist on their assembled team. In other words,
a savvy digital workplace should make skills-building-based
decision-making inevitable. The more streamlined and
integrated the tech stack, the better.

How ServiceNow can help you prioritize skills

To align our training and skills building with the dynamic nature
of our work, we at Deloitte are implementing the latest learning
features of ServiceNow as part of maturing our digital
workplace. The platform allows us to automate and populate
content about available trainings to promote upskilling and
reskilling across the organization. ServiceNow can help your
organization:

1. Track skills and assign tasks accordingly: ServiceNow

incorporates a back-end feature, Advanced Work
Assignment, that records employees’ skills. Then, when a
project comes in, the process of assigning tasks can be
automated based on workers’ availability, capacity, and
skills. Work is matched to the worker.
 2. Empowering growth: Through its acquisition of Hitch,
ServiceNow will enable workers to view upcoming
opportunities and the skills needed for each, compare their
skills to those requirements, and evaluate and complete
learnings to close any gaps.
3. Push learning in the flow of work: ServiceNow has the
capability to push in-moment learning content to workers
to help close skills gap.

Breaking it down: Six steps to success

Before leaping to adopt new tools or systems, leaders must

reconsider how work is currently getting done and where and
how technology can enable and elevate human capabilities.
Prepare for the move to a skills-based digital workplace with
these six steps:

1. Think about what work must be done. Focus on

outcomes or problems to solve. To start, take time to
consider key questions: How can we think about work
differently? What skills are needed to do this work? How
might tech support enable workers to achieve this?
2. Break it down. Identify the tasks and skills required to
deliver each outcome.
3. Reorganize internally. Base structures and organization
charts around skills and outcomes, not hierarchies.
4. Look for learners. Seek skills rather than position titles,
prior experience, or degrees. An obvious application of this
would be changing the hiring mindset, beginning with job
requirements for new hires.
5. Mind the gap. Identify the learning that’s required for
people to reskill and upskill to excel on upcoming projects
and work.
6. Get the right tech (and maintain it). The right tech
acts as a collaborator, not just an instrument. It uses
artificial intelligence and data analytics to deliver
consumer-grade user experiences to workers hungry to
learn, find purpose, and grow your business.

Committing to continuous learning is key

In some ways, leaders and workers are learning new skills side-
by-side. While workers build skills to work on projects, leadership
is building the ability to see and organize work and the
workforce differently. Both must tolerate some level of
ambiguity along the way, and understand that learning and
growing in the digital workplace should be continuous.

As businesses adopt, maintain, and mature skills-based digital

workplaces, another constant will be a people-first mentality.
Nurturing employee talent means:

 Looking for their merits as learners

 Serving them the right tools to build skills on an intuitive
platform
 Matching their career paths with their passions as they
grow

Invest in the digital workplace to build your workforce, build

their skills, and build your business. Learn more about how we
can help you unleash the power of your workplace or contact us
at [email protected] to get started. You are also
invited to join our upcoming exclusive fireside chat: How could a
recession change talent management? on March 7, 2023.

Authors:

 Daniel Chee

References:

 1
Griffiths, Michael, Cantrell, Sue, Jones, Robin, & Hiipakka,
Julie (2022) Skills-based organizations | Deloitte Insights