Mercer has won a coveted place on the 2022’s Forbes and Statista list of the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms.1 We ranked well across the board but scored especially strongly in our core capabilities of human resources and coaching, and organization and change management. The rankings are informed by client recommendations. They confirm that Mercer is a trusted advisor and highly valued by our clients.
The new Forbes and Statista listing is a timely reminder that Mercer is well placed to help companies across the world address the core challenges they face today.
As the global pandemic put everyone at risk, the collective focus shifted onto that most valuable of resources — people. Some anticipated people-trends accelerated by five to ten years. The labor shortage is a painful example. It became worse, as people began to question deeply what they expect from work and their workplaces. Driven by need and enabled by technology, the pandemic demonstrated the potential and feasibility of virtual and remote work. Employees are no longer willing to fall back to pre-pandemic (un)flexible working arrangements. Overall, executives now better understand the importance of effective people management to deliver on their strategies and transform their organizations.
Consequently, a major change that companies are facing today is the rise of empathy. Empathy is key to understanding employees’ needs and making the difference in attracting and retaining talent, and is the basis of an inclusive work culture that fully addresses diversity, equity and inclusion concerns. As such it is part of the solution for labor shortage.
All this marks a profound change from the situation prior to the pandemic. Remember, back then, when it was all about digital transformation, and organizations were bringing in one new technology after another? However, even during this period, it was apparent that technology alone was not the answer and that the process of change had to start and end with people’s needs.
The previous credo promised that a chief data officer would get the job done. It soon became evident that digital literacy and digital adaption was everyone’s concern, and that developing this key competency — on both, an individual and organizational level — was the only way to master the necessary digital transformation, and so stay relevant in the longer term.
The successor of the digital transformation is the transformation of work. We now know the full extent to which new technologies can fundamentally change how work is done and what can be achieved. This fundamentally drives the need for a transformation of how we work.
This transformation process starts with identifying the work to be done, subsequently implementing augmentation and automation based on artificial intelligence and robotics. Roles are at the center of change. Companies employ a skill-based approach to build for flexibility, efficiency and be more customer-centric.
The pandemic highlighted the dependence on healthy societies, stable economies, and the environment. It’s the next transformational challenge facing all businesses today that needs everyone’s hands on deck: the transformation toward sustainability. For many companies ESG is already a core priority of their corporate activities. But this transformation is about becoming sustainable at the core of the organization, ingraining sustainability into the DNA. This will only be successful if everyone in the organization is engaged and excited about making their contribution to the necessary change. Again, people are at the center of this transformation - so it is now up to HR to position itself as a driver, especially for the “social” in ESG, addressing social sustainability holistically.
With Mercer, transformation is a journey that creates excitement and engagement for the future. We work with our clients to create human-centered positive change. We build the capabilities of an organization and develop the people that work there. We make this journey a success by following these transformation principles:
Beyond making transformation human-centered and empathetic, we also lead with evidence:
We work to make sure that change is self-sustaining, and leverage people practices amplifying the momentum of change for long-term results. We transfer knowledge and digital assets to enhance in-house capabilities for a successful and sustainable journey that extends far beyond our period of engagement. We believe in building brighter futures together.
The Forbes article on The World’s Best Management Consultants is available here.
1 Forbes and Statista ranking methodology
Statista has established several worldwide top lists in the field of management consultancies, and has conducted such analyses across the U.S., Germany, France, the U.K., Switzerland and Japan. To determine this list, Statista looked at the results of these country-wide top lists and created a top list of the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms. All six top lists are based on a similar methodology and take into account numerous recommendations from consultants and clients of consulting firms. The ranking is divided into 13 sectors — from aerospace and defense to financial institutions — and 14 functional areas — including strategy, sustainability and digital transformation. The 230 firms that received the most recommendations are ranked according to star ratings: five stars for “very frequently recommended,” four stars for “frequently recommended” and three stars for “recommended.”
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