Future of Work
by Etienne Pretorius
Davos WEF 2022 in terms of Jobs and Skills, Davos WEF 2022 focus on Future of Work / Hybrid Work and Malcolm Gladwell’s rant on “Diary of a CEO” regarding working from home led us to develop a consulting pillar for PBC Group in terms of the Future of Work. We did this because people in our network were talking about it from one of two sides. They were favouring either “back to office” or “work from home”. We didn’t hear any compromise where a hybrid plan was being considered.
We will write and publish a number of articles over the next season in which we were influenced with material published by Lynda Gratton (2022) Redesigning Work and by Bernard Marr (2022) There will probably be contributions from work and research I did for my MBA dissertation in which I focused on learning organizations.
We are all iterating a learning in terms of the new plans for office and work and we are not advocating for one or the other model. We know that open-plan offices were never places of collaboration and we found them to be distracting and noisy. Conversely, technology trending towards virtual reality is also NOT offering an absolute answer. Creativity needs to include aspects of collaborating but also deep thinking and focus, requiring the work environment and management style to become more empathetic, but with sufficient direction and control. We believe, therefore, that office layouts and location need re-planning, employee demographic needs careful analysis, and line managers need retraining. The trend of having even more meetings in the work from home scenario is an issue for debate and is a trend that developed since people began working from home through the pandemic. We need to strategize and consider the technology we used to meet remotely will need consideration, offering a potential competitive advantage for the business. Projects, which require focused collaboration and brainstorming sessions, could facilitate critical thinking and still provide a landscape where hybrid meeting / location is possible. However, there we still see a need for the mindset change when redesigning physical spaces and leadership support when changing management styles and team structure.
Even the trends in educating and upskilling have changed to conform to trends post pandemic. Accreditations and online learning challenge the primacy of formal education, where badges are now often sought after rather than degrees. Formal education has not become redundant, however, seems to synergize with accreditations because recruitment and employers have looked at skill sets rather than pure education and academia. In Tunisia, online education has even become an export via MOOCs, certification or accreditation as they invest in education for lifelong learning and move into high value-added sectors to promote growth and not leave anyone behind. We need to use designs that are simple and easily implementable. This development of hard skills needs to be supplemented with soft skill development as young people enter the global market because they just haven’t had the experience to develop the soft skills required to survive and succeed in a role.
So the future of work, where employers are insisting or encouraging return to office, needs a dramatic and urgent rethink. If the employer genuinely wants to maintain good retention rates, they might want to consider re-evaluating the locational and structural aspects of the business. We need to acknowledge that managers have become even more important. We saw how well teams performed when managers acted in one-to-one meetings with their teams during the pandemic. Even Four Day Work Week plans are up for discussion and for experimentation as it relates to the future of work. The world has never faced this many changes all at once.
We feel that there are some subjects that need consideration:
- Diversity and inclusion in terms of remote work
- Maintaining company culture with intentionality in the hybrid world
- Reskilling, upskilling, cross skilling and life long learning investments
- Labour market evolutions post pandemic and the employment contract
- Trust and safe conversations when attempting to manage the employee relationship
- Segmentation and demographic of the population of the world citizen in terms of need
- Company culture to allow discussions about soft skills, ESG and its integration
- Potential redundancy of strategies, structures, mindsets versus those aspects which will remain durable
- Taxonomy of education
- Employment scarring, the great resignation, the global skills shortage and the global skills framework
Many years from now, perhaps one of my great grandchildren will read this article and vaguely remember me mention the pandemic, or the dramatic change we had to negotiate in the current era. They might know that these changes came with significant challenge, however, they will also know that we succeeded. Humans are an amazing creation, able to dynamically adapt, with an ability to decide to support each other and leave no one behind. That is the vision we have at PBC Group. We want to help our client leave no one behind, and discover that “human capital” is something really valuable.