The Biz Blog

UAE Trends Breakfast 2020 Highlights

Written by Thomas Smith | Sep 29, 2020 9:09:25 AM

It's been a week since we hosted our first ever Virtual Trends Breakfast for our learning community in the UAE. The event was a huge success and combined a morning of networking, with interactive breakout rooms and insights from our CEO Hazel Jackson around Deloitte's Human Capital Trends report and from her CEO network.

We are so pleased with all of the positive feedback we received. Andrew Wolhuter, said:

"It’s my 3rd Trends breakfast with the fantastic team at Biz Group - UAE. This is by far one of the most incredibly well organised online events I have attended. A huge congratulations to Hazel Jackson and her team of ‘Bizzers’ for the incredible break down of the Human Capital report from Deloitte."

It's been a decade of Human Capital Trends

We can hardly believe that it's the tenth year that our friends at Deloitte have released their human capital trends report. To give you some insight behind the report and why it's so important, Deloitte's Human Capital professionals leverage research, analytics and industry insights to help design and execute the HR, talent, leadership, organisation and change programs that enable business performance through people performance. 

The main theme from the report for 2020 was 'The social enterprise at work: Paradox as a path forward', and included 3 bold shifts:

  • Fostering belonging amid a desire for individuality
  • Creating security in a world of reinvention
  • Taking bold action in an age of uncertainty

The top ten trends for the Middle East were:

  1. BELONGING
  2. WELL-BEING
  3. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
  4. BEYOND RESKILLING
  5. EVOLVING HR
  6. POST GENERATIONAL WORKFORCE
  7. ETHICS AND FUTURE OF WORK  &&  7. COMPENSATION CONDUNDRUM
  8. MEASURING WORKFORCE STRATEGIES
  9. SUPERTEAMS

You can download and view the full report here. 

How did the Top 4 Trends resonate with our participants and their organisations?

As part of the event, we called upon our participants (who were made up of mostly L&D and HR professionals in the Middle East) to share their insights and how important they felt the trends were to their individual organisations. Interestingly, the results were slightly different to what was projected in the report.

According to our participants, well-being was the most important trend to their organisation at present, which is also a testament to the challenges of COVID-19 and the impact it's had on employees around the region. Belonging came in close second, with beyond reskilling at 3rd and knowledge management at 4th. See the full poll below:

How are our participants performing in the three areas of belonging?

We also wanted to find out a bit more about Deloitte's top trend for the Middle EastBELONGINGand how our community was performing in the three key areas: Comfort, Connection and Contribution. To our surprise, it was fairly equal with the majority of people scoring around the 6.7 mark for each area. This shows that there definitely is more work to be done for BELONGING, but we are definitely making a great start as a whole.

From the report, those in the Middle East felt strongly about BELONGING, so much so that:

  • 79% think it's important / very important, and of those, 13% felt ready
  • 93% agreed that a sense of belonging drives organisational performance
  • Single incidence of “micro-exclusion” can lead to an immediate 25% decline in an individual performance on a team project

 

How are our participants impacted by knowledge management?

The third biggest Trend (in the Middle East and Globally) is KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, so we asked participants which of the following challenges impacted them the most. 33% said that there is currently too much data, but feel like it's underutilised, and 23% have challenges accessing the data they need and when they need it. See the full poll below:

Some other interesting facts from the report were: 

  • 75% think it's important / very important but only 9% felt they were ready
  • In 2019, there were a total of 293 billion emails sent and received each day
  • A staggering 55% of enterprise data is unused
  • Microsoft Teams have around 13 million daily active users

We would like to extend a huge thank you to the Biz Group team for working hard to make the event possible, and to our fantastic guests for their valuable contributions and sharing their personal insights with each other on the day. 

It's amazing to see how our learning community is impacted by these trends, and we are so curious to see what will happen in 2021 and beyond. If you'd like to find out more about these trends and how they can be mapped to different learning solutions that we offer (such as VR training / emotional resilience) etc, please get in touch with us on VILT@bizgroup.ae 

Click here to download the 2020 Trends Mapped to Learning Solutions flipping book.

Keep learning,

Biz Group