Ways HR Can Help Organizations Through Disruptive Growth

People tend to think of disruption as a calamitous, generational event. Ask someone in business for an example, and they might cite how e-commerce has disrupted physical retail stores, or how social media and the internet have disrupted the newspaper business.

- Michael Gretczko And Emily Scott

The truth is, industries, markets, and businesses don’t have to be wrestling with their very existence — or even their accepted way of doing things — to be disrupted. In ways big and small, through new technologies, cultural shifts, geopolitical events, unexpected competition, and many other transformations that only seem to accelerate with time, disruption has become part of business and is changing the way organizations manage the workforce.

As we well know, the only constant is change. Markets are shifting, and organizations have to respond with new services and ways of thinking to be nimbler, and to work more fluidly. We all have to find ways to sense the environment and get new ideas to market faster than ever before.

HR professionals play a critical role in helping their organizations grow by developing a workforce that is capable of delivering against changing corporate goals. Attracting, training, motivating, and retaining talent are all key to organizational success. Organizations will thrive in a disruptive environment only when the right people, with the right skill sets, are equipped to innovate at rapid pace against shifting business challenges.

Building a flexible workforce involves fresh thinking and new strategies. The traditional approach to problem-solving is linear: identify a problem, come up with a solution, execute that solution, and move on to the next problem. When your business is constantly being disrupted, being reactionary only gets you further behind.

Disruption can only be sensed by looking at what’s ahead. Predictive evaluations of trends, customer and worker sentiment are better indicators of future disruption than historical review can ever be.

What does this look like in practice? Here are some insights: