The digital twin workforce is changing the face of human capital management in all organizations, regardless of their size. Digital twin workforce refers to a digital representation of people at work, teams, and workforce processes. It will enable HR to digitally model real-world workplace behavior in a virtual context.
The pace of change in technology and business means that HR is often only reacting to change, and often from a limited perspective.
The digital twin workforce can deliver predictive insights to anticipate where to direct interventions, to mitigate challenges, recognize future skill gaps, or plan staffing levels. It also allows HR to manage employee experience, support diversity and inclusion, and plan for workforce interventions strategically.
Organizations that implement a digital twin with workforce modeling will benefit from an immediate competitive advantage as they gain alignment in their human capital strategies with their business strategies.
A Digital Twin Workforce is a digital representation of the organization's employees, teams, and workforce processes. The Digital Twin Workforce emulates real organizational behaviors, the real performance metrics, and the real workflows in a virtual world.
This is originally a manufacturing concept. It means it provides duplicate models of machines, production lines, and specific job functions.
From an HR point of view, a digital twin workforce is used to model human capital. It helps understand organizational dynamics, which helps leaders make data-informed, strategic decisions.
Employee Model: Represents individual skills/roles/performance measures.
Team and Organizational Map: Visualizes team structure, reporting relationships, and collaboration.
Predictive Analytics: AI and machine learning to predict turnover, skill gaps, and performance risk.
Simulate Different Scenarios: Simulate to test HR interventions like training programs, policies, team reorganizations, etc.
A digital twin assembles and connects multiple streams of data from the following sources:
Employee records for the business and HR systems.
Performance, engagement, and workflow metrics.
Maximizing human capital informally and formally through integrated learning.
Collaboration and workflow data.
Training and career development information and records.
To simulate the behavior of the workforce, identify risks, and inform decision-making, digital twins analyze all this data to forecast strategies, interpret behaviors, etc.
HR teams can run "what if" scenarios, such as:
Picturing the effect of a different leadership structure.
Understanding the effect of remote work policies on productivity.
Visualizing the impact and outcomes of skilling up on organizational labour capabilities.
Implementing a Digital Twin Workforce enables organizations to gain insights. The traditional HR mechanisms that would otherwise be unattainable trace or track it.
It enables leaders to understand their workforce in new ways and take informed, strategic actions.
The benefits can be categorized into four buckets:
Digital Twin provides HR with the ability to foresee changes in the workforce before changes happen.
Key capabilities include the following:
Predicting attrition, retirements, and staffing requirements. It also allows for to prevention of turnover from taking place, and plan proactively for recruitment and succession.
Identifying skills gaps while hiring. HR can find and address skills gaps in key positions before they begin to impact company performance.
By predicting trends, organizations can have assurance that their workplace continuity will be kept in check and have the talent they need, when they need it.
Digital twins allow organizations to gain insights that can support guided and personalized growth and retention strategies:
Individualize Career Development Plans: As an example, provide personalized learning and growth opportunities based on an individual's strengths and performance tendencies.
Identify high-potential employees and potential turnover: recognize top performers and take actions to manage retention.
This level of targeted talent management provides high-quality opportunities for meaningful engagement and investment from career path employees, with companies increasing productivity and loyalty.
Digital twins can have a significant impact on neighborhoods, too, when it comes to DEIB, i.e., diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging:
Monitoring onboarding, promotion, pay equity, and team make-up: Level set the fair and equitable opportunity for all of your employee populations.
Testing policies enacted for inclusive and equitable outcomes: Test the implications of human resources initiatives before rolling them out into the real workforce.
In supporting DEIB, organizations can create inclusivity in the overall culture and to positively affect employee satisfaction and engagement.
According to Devele.ai revealed that 70% of HR leaders plan to invest in digital employee twin technology in the next two years, which shows acceptance of data-driven workforce management.
Beamery stated that generative AI-enabled behavioral digital twins demonstrated an 85% accuracy rate at predicting actions individuals would take after a 2-hour interview in an attitudinal survey.
Digital twins provide predictive insights about an individual's likely responses to attitudinal outcomes, based on predictive analysis of the interview data.
Josh Bersin, a leading analyst in HR tech, points out the extraordinary potential of digital twins at work:
"We are about to witness an explosion of 'digital employees' in our companies, and these may be the 'robots' we've heard about for years."
This vantage point highlights the accelerated adoption of AI-enabled digital twins into HR functions from talent acquisition to performance management.
Digital Twin Workforces signal a major transition in human capital management.
It provides HR leaders with the ability to create virtual versions of workers, systems, teams, or tasks, allowing your organization to have an adaptive method of anticipating trends.
It helps in optimizing talent and creating access and equity.
This is a significant technological advance for HR leaders who are looking for predictive insights, testing options, and individualized approaches to managing talent.
Digital twins can help to align business strategy and workforce execution. Organizations that start leveraging early digital twin technology will likely place themselves in a competitive advantage in their approach to workforce strategy and have increased accuracy in workforce planning and improved proactive workforce responses that are aligned to the company's longer-term goals.
As AI and analytics develop, organizations with Digital Twin Workforces will likely represent the future of strategic HR leadership.
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