Hello again!

Before I jump into today’s topic, a quick reminder that there are only two pay cycles left until the EU directive kicks in! If you speak Dutch, we’ll discuss practical steps towards pay transparency during this webinar with Salure on June 25.

If you’re interested in Global Payroll, join me in London on June 27 for Deel‘s event at the Gherkin. Or join this Global Payroll webinar on June 20.

The labor shortage is only beginning

Dutch Rabobank released research with some nice graphs predicting that the labor shortage is here to stay. It’s been the central topic of my keynotes for a few years now. All demographics point in that direction, and there is no quick fix. After all, it takes about 25 years before a baby born today starts working.

Some countries have tried family planning measures. All of them failed. It’s simply not a solution to fix the labor shortage. Bringing in more workers from other countries isn’t an answer either: these people need housing, health care and other services, their kids need school, and so the demand for workers like teachers, doctors, police etc. increases as a result.

Rabobank concludes that new technologies like robots are mostly used in industrial settings, while AI is predominantly used in IT and finance. Yet there is potential for other sectors, like government and education, that we are not exploring. Even though this might alleviate the pressure on workers in these sectors and improve (not eliminate) the labor shortage. AI could support people with cognitive routine tasks, so that people can focus on personal interactions. The problem: these technologies require large investments and not every company can afford that. The flip-side obviously being that if you can’t hire enough people, your organization is also doomed.

When you start to introduce new technologies, (some of) the work that people do today will change: they will do other tasks. The question then becomes: how will we divide the work? What tasks will be done by people and are uniquely human? And what activities will be performed by robots and AI? Have you made that list yet? And do your employees have the ability to adapt to these changes with agility?

What is Workforce Agility?

The topic of workforce agility was the central theme of a recent Cornerstone Connect event I attended in London. They even gave us a “Workforce Agility for dummies” book, which I read during my trip back. It’s a quick read that lays out the concepts in four chapters. You can order your copy here.

The authors define workforce agility as “the ability of a workforce to respond to change properly. An agile workforce is proactive in anticipating and solving change-related problems, is constantly adapting and learning, and is resilient in the face of ever-changing circumstances”. Now reflect a bit on what you just read: does this apply to your employees? Would you say you have an agile workforce? If not, there is work to do!

Workforce agility emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and skills development to meet the demands of a changing job market, overall and for your organization. Some companies have invested in machines, but can’t use them because there are no trained, skilled staff to run them. They haven’t planned well. In contrast, others are reintroducing apprentice programs to teach young people skills that the retiring generation has. Agile companies are creative: they apply tested and new methods to ensure their workforce is ready for the future.

First, you must determine the Workforce Readiness Gap – the gap between the current skill sets of employees and your ability to upskill them to take on new roles, working next to, and with robots and AI. If the gap becomes persistent, it leads to slower innovation and lost productivity and can seriously impact the future of a company. And the workforce readiness gap is not the only thing that makes it necessary to rethink productivity.

More change ahead!

The closing keynote by Lynda Gratton drove the message home that all aspects of the workforce are changing. We will probably live longer, and that means our current three life stages (education, work, retirement) will consequently change. We’ll move in and out of the workforce, go back to educate ourselves, maybe take a sabbatical, and then come back to work. This has huge implications for the way we currently define careers.

And if you have been in the workforce for a longer period, the skills you learned at the beginning will not help you twenty years later. What we learned in school has a shorter shelf life.  And that means we must focus on lifelong reskilling to thrive.

And finally, new technology is reshaping human activities. With the output of some AI-functionality getting close to human performance, or even surpassing it, we must define what we want humans to do, and what we’ll leave to machines – including who’s responsible for what. I’d recommend that besides thinking about the agile workforce, you also think in terms of a ‘blended workforce’ so you include AI, robots and agents in the right way.

Help is on the way

Because this was a vendor conference, Cornerstone obviously showed solutions to the problems outlined above. Some I had seen before, and others, like Immerse, were relatively new. I want to highlight three aspects of what I saw:

1. Unified Solution: The company aims to offer a unified and seamless experience across its solutions through Cornerstone Galaxy. This is designed to bring all aspects of their services (including Skyhive, a recent acquisition for skills) into a cohesive learning ecosystem. It provides a holistic approach to how companies plan for, assess and build skills, ensuring the workforce is prepared for the future.

Cornerstone broke their solution(s) down into four topics:

·        Learn: Learning content, management and experience

·        Elevate: Talent, performance and succession planning

·        Transform: Talent intelligence, skills and services

·        Extend: integration with 3^rd parties

This organized the various programs and solutions, which I thought was very clear.

2. Immersive Learning: Improvements in mobile experiences and the introduction of immersive technologies like XR are changing learning. When we consider the workforce readiness gap and combine that with engagement, we need more than traditional learning can offer. A Microsoft survey showed that 68% of employees don’t have sufficient focus time to do their work, let alone focus on training. That’s where immersive learning comes in as a new modality. With the benefit that people remember what they learned longer, and are more confident in applying it, due to active engagement and proof of skill.

I had the opportunity to try out Immerse (formerly Talespin). They gave me a headset and I had to counsel a difficult employee by choosing suggested responses (it does support speech recognition, but I didn’t try that). A few times I chose a response that I knew would provoke the employee, just to see what would happen. As predicted, that made the employee more upset and belligerent. I will admit that this headset experience enhanced my engagement. I can see how it makes learning more effective because you’re completely focused on the task at hand (no distractions!). And because you can make mistakes and repeat the same situation as many times as you’d like, it helped me try out different approaches, figuring out what worked best. Which is hard to do in a live training environment.

3. AI and Data-Driven Insights: You should not only use AI in your business. Leveraging AI to personalize learning and provide actionable insights through dashboards and intelligence platforms is a key strategy. The integration of AI Companions was brought to life through the product demos. These companions can e.g. suggest follow-up training to employees. They also help learning admins to quickly respond to new business challenges by reorganizing available training and offering them in a new way. And they change how to measure learning outcomes. And to make learning more fun, employees can choose cohorts to join, and they can see how they stack up against peers with points and trophies, in short everything you need to gamify learning (if you’re into that).

How agile is your workforce?

Back to the question I started this newsletter with. One of the reasons why the Workforce Agility focus really resonated with me is because of its link to the labor shortage. And even though we might sometimes look at this as a numbers game, as demographics, it’s also a skills issue. It’s about a workforce readiness gap. And when the two collide, you have the perfect talent storm. It frames the problem that businesses are faced with in the right way, and it underlines why re- and upskilling are such critical elements for companies today.

Let me know what your Workforce Readiness Gap looks like!

Have a great day, Anita

Lightning round:

·        As AI eliminates the ‘awful’ aspects of work and customer experience, we also face an unprecedented rise of mediocrity. How will we cope with that? Download this ebook by Peter Hinssen [Link]

·        Sweden has published their national draft of the EU Pay Transparency Directive with implementation advice. It's 388 pages long... [Link]

·        ADP released their People at Work report: an annual survey of on-the-job experiences for 34,000 workers in 18 countries. [Link]

Full disclosure: I was not paid to write this post, nor did Cornerstone pay for my travel and expenses.

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