Even prior to the pandemic, some firms were already attempting “workforce transformation,” according to research from December 2019 to January 2020 by SilkRoad Technology, an HR software provider, and Workforce, a platform for workforce management. Their survey defined workforce transformation as “creating the ability and agility of an organization to work in fundamentally different ways.”
Of the professionals they surveyed, just 19% said their companies had fully implemented workforce transformation plans to address disruption, though many of these companies were reportedly still in the process of optimizing those plans. A quarter of respondents said their companies had no plans in place to transform their workforce.
Now, several months into the pandemic, even within organizations where executive teams may feel they’ve successfully scaled their remote workforce, many employees feel otherwise. Across various facets of the employee experience, there was more than a 30% gap between how many executives worldwide said they were supporting their employees and how many employees worldwide reported feeling supported by their companies, per IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics research from April to July 2020.