What can we learn from this?

**Professional services organizations need to build an employee-centred culture which transcends billable hours and profitability.**

Building this type of culture will result in high employee engagement and confidence in the organization.

Professional services employees want to improve their skills and advance their careers, so development and compensation planning will be key. Strategic planning for change needs to focus on the right collaboration tools, along with team and skill-building. Knowledge-sharing, teamwork, transparency, and collaboration need to be at the core of a continuous learning culture.

Productive, billable hours can rise while non-productive administrative hours will lessen, which will leave more time for training and personal time off. The top performing PSO organizations mandate more than two weeks of training time per employee per year. Although training days increased by 13% in 2022, it's vital that firms do more to maintain a "warm pool" of candidates ready for hire.

Having the right tools and infrastructure to support remote employees will be more critical than ever

Human Capital Management (HCM) usage will continue to gain in importance as more and more firms realize the benefits of integrating payroll with recruiting and skill-building and allows full visibility of the resource pipeline.

HCM applications are starting to provide powerful learning management platforms, so employees have a single system of record to enhance skills and manage certifications and credentials.
Effective HCM usage requires effective talent management processes, including change management, along with leadership training and development. Unfortunately, the role of Human Resources has not yet become strategic enough for many consultancies.
Several years ago, HCM was used by less than one-third of PSOs – now, it is used by 70.5% of them.