READ the full interview in the December 2021 issue of our magazine: Work in 2022: What's Next?

Toby Switzer has been with Agility since the beginning of 1999, and currently serves as the Chief Human Capital Officer of the Agility Group, overseeing the people management aspect of a 16,000+ strong global workforce in a major supply chain services provider. Before taking on the CHRO role, he was Agility's Chief Executive Officer and President International of Agility’s Defense & Government Services, overseeing more than 11,000 employees and $2.5 billion in annual revenue globally. In an exclusive interaction with People Matters, he spoke about the importance, in today's landscape, of prioritising your existing workforce instead of taking them for granted.

Here are some excerpts of the interview.

How has the year 2020 and 2021 been for supply chain services companies? What has changed?

The pandemic period has been one of the most tumultuous, unsettling and disruptive periods in recent history. The global supply and value chain that began to take shape in the 1980s and 1990s came under incredible strain right from the start in early 2020 and remains under strain today. There are huge bottlenecks and imbalances at every node in the global trading system. Shortages of shipping containers, as well as ocean, air and road capacity. A dearth of critical manufacturing inputs such as semiconductors, rare earth metals, pharmaceutical ingredients. A lack of short-term storage space and conventional warehousing. Inventory outages, ships idling for days on the water unable to unload, and record-high rates for container shipping, air freight, and trucking.

There are imbalances and shortages on the people side of this equation, too. In some cases, it’s a matter of not enough people to do certain jobs – heavy-haul truckers, for instance. But in other cases, it’s clear that businesses haven’t devoted enough attention to finding, recruiting and developing the talent they need to make their supply chains work better and stand up to the stress.

I saw an interesting statistic the other day: Bank of America says there has been a 412% increase in mentions of “supply chain” in third-quarter earnings calls by Fortune 500 companies. That’s 412% over Q3 2020 – when supply chain was already a very hot topic – and 123% over Q2 of 2021. Supply chain issues – and I include the people piece of the supply chain – are the most complex, difficult issues that businesses face today. That is unlikely to change anytime before 2023, if then.

The future of work has been accelerated by the pandemic. What are some of the most critical questions that leaders should ask as they prepare for 2022?

We have to have the right formula for hiring in a market that is only getting tougher. We need to be able to find and grow the right talent. And above all, we need to retain our best people, in the face of what some people are now calling “the Great Resignation.”

So my three priority areas of focus are: 

How can you grow managers into leaders who know how to take care of and motivate their teams? After all, people don’t generally leave because of pay; they leave because of bad or ineffective managers. And it takes a lot of skill and development to be a good leader.

How can you use the digital acceleration happening across industries to drive a more efficient and data-driven HR function? McKinsey says most companies in the world advanced their digital agenda by 3-4 years because of the pandemic. HR must inevitably be part of that agenda.

How do you act as a strategic partner to the business? Our industry, and our company, is changing fast. It’s important to show how HR can create value for the business by being involved strategically, as a partner, not just as an administrative function. It is important for HR to participate at all levels of strategic and tactical decision making of the company and to be proactive in how we can make our “human capital” empowered to bring their dynamism to growing the business and working in the community.

How are you leveraging next-gen technologies to manage people and in turn help business achieve its goal? Where are you on your tech journey?

Although Agility has long been a digital leader in our industry, we have yet to fully leverage technology on the HR side. In the past, it has been largely reserved for automating our internal processes. We are now changing that.

We built an effective human capital management database. It gives us greater visibility on far-flung workforce, including the local, operational workforce in emerging markets countries where it used to be hard to get data and visibility.

One area where this visibility is already paying off is in gender and diversity. We now have a gender dashboard that provides an accurate breakdown of our workforce and tells us where we’re meeting or falling short of our goals. We have a new learning management system that will help us manage the development and competency requirements we have for manages and other team members. We have new business intelligence capabilities and tools that will allow us to create better analytics for decision-making. We will also implement a new, smarter talent acquisition platform to replace our older one.

By doing this, we hope to make better decisions to find and hire the best people that will fit into Agility…not only because they have the skills we need, but also because they have the curiosity and potential to drive our culture.

We want people who can identify the new opportunities and changes that we need to continually grow our business.

The pandemic made the workforce rethink their career and deeply question the role of work in their lives. As a result, we're seeing the 'Great Resignation'. How do you think this trend will pan out in 2022?

People want to be part of something, and know that what they are doing is contributing. That means not just doing a function, but recognising how their part leads to the overall success of the company. They want to know why we are doing something or why our strategy has us focused on certain things and not on others. We’re trying to get everyone to understand why we are doing something, and to understand their role in the big picture. 

I think we’ve been fairly successful at that at Agility. The Great Resignation has not hit us as badly as it seems to have hit many other companies. Retention has always been good because people do feel they are contributing at Agility. You can’t take that for granted. Our values have been important, as has our culture. We’re entrepreneurial and less hierarchical than most companies our size. That helps. 

How do you see the larger HR landscape evolving in 2022? How should talent leaders reimagine their roles and prepare for the future?

As much as we need to think about bringing in new talent to our organisations, we also need to make our current workforce our priority. We can’t take our people for granted. 

The job market is in flux as never before and the market is flooded with new opportunities. People are rethinking options and trying to figure out what they want in life and from their work. We have to make sure we have that in mind all the time. We need to listen and focus on what people want and need, not just in terms of compensation. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are even more important in today’s world and for young talent. Fortunately, it is something our leadership has focused on – not just paid lip service to - and embraced as part of our everyday culture.

What’s your vision of the future of work 2 years down the line?

Work is changing fast. It’s a highly dynamic space, and that’s part of what’s challenging and exciting about being a business and HR leader during these times. I would imagine that we are going to see more flexibility becoming a standard part of how companies work, with some level of hybrid work becoming permanent. (I think people are finding they miss the office more than they realised!). Less travel and more virtual meetings are probably a permanent change, as is more technology-abled work across every function in every business in every industry. Jobs that existed even five years ago will be replaced with new ones. 

The overriding theme here is that we don’t always know what’s coming, but we know that the pace of change is accelerating. And the most important thing we can do as a business is to prepare our people to be adaptable to inevitable change, and to have the skills that allow them as individuals, and us as a company, to be resilient.