“Across the workforce, the heat is on for organizations to unleash employees’ potential for uniquely ‘human’ work, and achieve the agility levels required in today’s fast-paced business world,” writes Caroline Styr, Center for the Future of Work. “Workforce intelligence – fueled by people data – will unlock new levels of human understanding and bring about essential improvements to both employees’ lives and business performance.”

Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work recently published the whitepaper, Talent Intelligence: Unlocking People Data to Redefine How Humans Need to Work. The paper explores how businesses can use workforce intelligence to transform how work gets done and support new models of work.

Since the dawn of work, humans have been doing the work of machines: executing repetitive tasks for allotted amounts of time. But now, actual machines, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), are taking their rightful place as the agents of monotonous work, and for humans there’s new – infinitely more valuable – work on the horizon: human work. The Fourth Industrial Revolution relies on human capability more than ever, including empathy, complex problem-solving, creativity and, of course, innovative thinking.

Because work is changing, the way people work also needs to change. This means investing in a better understanding of employees, and devising new work structures based on this workforce intelligence. While it’s been an under-utilized asset thus far, employee data will be the key to finding and retaining top talent; fostering productivity, performance and well-being; and driving agile, flexible attitudes toward human-to-human and human-to-machine collaboration that unlocks innovation.

This whitepaper explores how businesses can use workforce intelligence to transform how work gets done and support new models of work, particularly in the following ways:

• Embrace fluidity: Skills regeneration is the new norm.
• Uncover “the natural network” and make way for agile collaboration.
• Enable performance, productivity and well-being.
• Personalize the employee experience to attract – and retain – top talent.
• Leverage information about employees, without being creepy.

Of course, with any use of personal data, privacy issues are of the utmost importance, and this is no different with workforce intelligence. A recent study by Insight222 reveals that a staggering 81% of people analytics projects are jeopardized by ethics and privacy concerns. The paper covers the key aspects of ensuring ethical use of workforce intelligence.

Click here to read the full report.