How Can You Prepare Yourself for A Changing Workplace Discussion Paper

Today, disruption and change are constants.

Whether it’s a shift in organisational structure, the creation and adoption of new technology, an increased pace of work or developing new strategy after a project set-back, change in the workplace takes on many forms.

As noted by Kerryn Fewster, the founder and director of Change2020 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., a collective of change consultants who help organisations develop sustainable strategy and clarity of vision in times of change, resilience is critical for today’s leaders who play a vital role in building and fostering resilience in their teams; “Leaders today must not only build new and different capabilities, but actively manage their capacity for exercising leadership. Developing resilience to handle complexity is not a luxury, but a strategic advantage for both individuals and organisations.”

Managing employees through a period of change takes art, intuition, skill, strong listening, and effective communication. When done correctly, change management can help a leader gain respect and loyalty. Done poorly, it can have adverse effects on the organization and its people.

For this week’s memo, please research and discuss how the workplace is changing and what you can do to better prepare yourself for it…both as a manager and employee/individual.

As a primer please read the following. You may also you additional sources for your memo.

https://www.ajoconnor.com/sites/default/files/images/WorkplaceoftheFuture-10ForcesShaping.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Our nation’s workforce continues to evolve in a workplace transformed by new ideas, products, processes and services—the offspring of our highly productive innovation ecosystem. At the same time, the workforce is affected by increasing globalization and major demographic shifts—including an aging Baby Boomer generation and growing minority and immigrant populations. These changes have created a more competitive economy that affects the substance and conditions of the work we will do across occupations, the participation of underserved groups in the economy, and the ways people prepare for careers.

By 2020, Generation Y or ‘Millennials’ (those born in the 1980s until mid-1990s) and Generation Z (those born from 1995 onwards) will comprise more than half of the workforce. They are digital natives, collaborative, adept at multitasking and their attitudes and expectations will have a major impact on the work environment as they are striving for greater autonomy and flexibility. They expect a genuinely agile work ecosystem, with good internet access, where they can work from basically anywhere – home, client’s office, co-working space, even from a holiday resort. This drive for flexibility will contribute to shifting the status of employees into more and more freelancing and it is expected that 40% of workers in the US will be freelancers by 2020. The movement towards freelancing is also linked with a strong desire to be able to balance professional and private lives (95% of Millennials according to a PwC survey).

The aspiration for personal development is a strong movement within these new generations. Surveys show that a lot of young employees today are motivated to leave their companies, because they feel they do not have enough opportunities to develop their expertise and soft skills within their companies. But it is not only about training. Millennials expect exciting personalized career plans with new fields to explore on a regular basis – much more often than the previous generations. Interestingly, 60% of Millennials surveyed by Deloitte think that 7 months of work means they are ‘loyal’.

In addition to annual progression, Millennials and Generation Z expect regular feedback, even on weekly basis. In order to make this possible, companies have to revise their annual appraisal interview frequency, with it now taking place every quarter or as an ongoing process. Not only do they want regular feedback, but 80% of those surveyed said they want to give performance appraisals to their manager. Also, as digital natives and being social media savvy, they strive for greater collaboration. The same study found that 80% of them said that their ‘team mates’ are the most important people at work. This will have a direct impact on hierarchy. Young, dynamic and agile start-up companies already have horizontal structures in place today and this is likely to be emphasized in future.

With the leaning towards flatter organizations, flexibility and autonomy, entrepreneurship has emerged as a desired career path for Millennials and those of the Generation Z. This is a huge trend not only in the developed but also in the developing world. In a Universum survey of 16,000 Millennials from 42 countries, 70% of respondents viewed themselves as entrepreneurs. In France, a study conducted by OpinionWay and published in February 2017 states that 60% of 18-29 years olds are ready to create their own company. As a result, training, mentorship, coaching and other ‘safety nets’ will be important to give them the tools for success.

There is also a clear shift towards meaningful work. Employees want to feel that they are doing something useful, that their work serves a clear purpose and that what they do produces visible results. For employee satisfaction, companies will have to link this with greater transparency, increased communication and sharing a clear vision – demanding increased leadership skills.

Finally, a strong employer brand is becoming more and more important. Social media already plays an important part in deciding whether to apply for a job or not. The Best Places to Work rankings are likely to increase in importance and workplace reviews will flourish. Glassdoor is a great example of the power shift that is slowly taking place in the digital landscape. This database of anonymously posted information reveals employer ratings, management practices, salaries and job interviews. Highly rated companies offer a great salary, benefits, mentorship, career advancement opportunities, good work-life balance and a culture that promotes employee engagement. LinkedIn has also launched a feature tackling salary transparency by showing how salaries for a given role vary by company, education level and geographical location.

Global comparisons will naturally lead to global talent pools. Talented people will become ‘global nomads’; they are likely to change country, continent and culture with remarkable ease. This will also be expected; 71% of the millennial generation says that they expect an overseas assignment during their career. From the employer perspective, fiercer global competition puts pressure on companies to find the right talent, wherever he/she may be located and companies will turn the world upside down for the right talent. That is, if they still decide to hire. Companies will increasingly connect to skills and resources on demand rather than owning them as a key part of their talent strategy. They will reach and use talent through online crowd sourcing and freelance platforms. This ‘just-in-time labor’ will help them remain competitive.

This will contribute to a more volatile and demanding workforce, with which future managers and executives will have to juggle. Because of the pressure from younger generations, companies will be forced to adapt. They will have no choice; otherwise they will lack the talent they need to win the battle for survival. As the degree of digitalization increases, the workplace will become even more agile. It will be common to manage virtual teams, connecting to work anytime, from anywhere and on any device. This will create new challenges for managers who will have to manage and keep a widely distributed workforce motivated, productive and satisfied. Organizational cultures will be harder to maintain. HR processes, compensation and training models will need revamping.

Different theories exist in terms of which trends will prevail in future, but I believe the world will be divided in two: fragmented and branded. Half of the global companies will be small, agile, relying heavily on suppliers and a contingent global workforce (the ‘New Economy’) working in a spirit of collaboration. The other half will be the Corporate world, where big companies with strong brands invest heavily on talent management, training and employee satisfaction to counterbalance the pressure and the hectic pace of work. In both cases, global leaders will need to be able to operate in a world with multiple stakeholders, different values and diverse attitudes, all in an increasingly volatile economic context. In addition, they will have to be comfortable with data and analytics, harness new technologies and drive innovation and change management. This type of leader will also need to be able to develop and nurture high potentials and future leaders with the right skills and adaptability to match the organizational needs in the ever-changing work environment. Clearly, the global managers of tomorrow will need to review and reinforce their skill set!

According to annual Global CEO Survey from PwC, the following skills are needed for tomorrow’s leaders to succeed:

An ability to see around corners– Identify trends early and stay ahead of the fast-moving competitive landscape.
Tolerance for ambiguity– Tomorrow’s leaders need a constant readiness for changing business dynamics and an ability to work towards unclear goals and outcomes.
Agility in decision-making– Be flexible-minded and a curious life-long learner who is open to testing and measuring new ways of doing things.
Adaptability in execution– Drive nearly constant renewal inside their organization.
At ease with technology– Embrace technology both as an accelerator of change, and as the key tool to remain agile, to adapt to changing circumstances, and to stay close to consumers and influencers.
Surrounded by a great team– Attract great people and cultivate a positive culture with a happy workforce, centered around trust with staff, to compete in the marketplace.
Humility–Maintain a modest opinion of your own importance and be open to listening and learning from all that’s happening in the global environment.

There are a great number of other hard and soft skills required from a global leader, such as financial analysis and budgeting, data and analytics, risk management and control, contract negotiation, customer service metrics and new business development. Further on the softer side we can add handling diversity, conflict management, ability to solve problems, team spirit building, communication, persuasion and delegation skills, diplomacy, leading by example, bird’s eye view, change management, public speaking…

How can the manager of tomorrow learn all these skills?

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As the work landscape continues to evolve, one thought stands out for me as I think about the year ahead: In the workplace, the voice of the individual continues to gain strength—perhaps because of our increasingly intertwined work and personal lives, and the climate we operate in today.

People are a company’s most valuable resource, and in this tight talent market, there is even more responsibility on organizations to create a culture where workers can have meaningful experiences and bring their best selves to work. Business leaders everywhere, particularly CHROs, are recognizing why this is so important: it’s better for all employees and it’s better for business.

A positive employee experience can impact the level of trust workers have and, ultimately, improve performance and retention. This, in turn, impacts the customer experience and helps increase a company’s bottom line. Focusing on a few areas in particular, including diversity, digitalization, and an employee-first culture, can help meet workers where they are as their needs continue to shift.

Diversity Means Difference

We’ve been focused on diversity since our inception at Workday, but as social issues continue to take center stage in the world, we’ve been reexamining and broadening what the term means to us. Diversity, in our view, really means difference.

Our chief diversity officer, Carin Taylor (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., explains that diversity is a blend of unique attributes in each of us, including our differences in background, perspective, race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, nationality, location, function, and more. We strive to look at diversity with a wider lens, and to understand that the diversity issues that we grapple with in the San Francisco Bay Area might not be the same as the issues in other parts of the globe.

To support our goals with action, we took our Belonging and Diversity program to the next level with VIBE, an acronym for valuing inclusion, belonging, and equity for all. This year, we’re dedicating a week in June to VIBE—five days of global awareness across the company to continue our journey of creating a culture of belonging and inclusion.

We’re continuing to leverage data from our weekly global employee surveys to understand employee sentiment, and this year we’re placing an increased focus on examining diversity trends. We are analyzing the data to find out if our employees are having a similar experience at our company across gender, race, age, geography, years at Workday, and so on. This enables us to think about diversity in new ways, and we’ll discover where we’re living up to our expectations and where we can improve.

The Digitalization Imperative

Shifts in the nature of work, new technologies, and the needs of new generations are driving the digitalization of HR, which organizations must embrace to create modern people practices. These shifts often bring uncertainty, but this is an incredibly exciting time to be in HR. We can help guide companies as they navigate these changes, helping them determine what to automate so that they can elevate the many tasks that are uniquely human, and free up time for teams to tackle this higher-order work, such as figuring out the right approach to a particular strategy.

Bringing a consumer-like experience to enterprise software is another aspect of digitalization that is at the heart of our DNA at Workday. In our personal lives, many of us use Alexa, Google, and Siri—technologies that are fun, innovative, and easy. I expect digital tools in my work life to have the same attributes, and I know workers feel the same way. We focus on being mobile first, and we want employees’ digital experiences to echo their consumer experiences.

We are analyzing the data to find out if our employees are having a similar experience at our company across gender, race, age, geography, years at Workday, and so on.

This year we offered open enrollment for Workday benefits on mobile phones. If a team member didn’t complete the process on one device, they could finish up on another. We also bring a consumer-like approach to learning (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., with interactive media and peer-generated content that is available on-demand and all in one place, with features similar to those we see in our consumer lives, including the ability to recommend videos, create a playlist, and bookmark links.

People Come First

According to a study (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. from Accenture, “The parallels between a superior customer experience and employee experience are striking. An optimized customer experience generates loyalty and additional sales. A stellar employee experience attracts talent and boosts workforce engagement, productivity, and retention. This, in turn, directly improves a business’ financial performance.” More simply, happy employees lead to happy customers, so at Workday, employees must come first.

In a blog post last fall, I highlighted (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. a number of programs and activities that help us create meaningful employee experiences, from encouraging an agile career to supporting wellbeing. Employees and individual contributors are the ones on the frontlines doing the work, so they deserve to have great leaders; we invest in our people leaders with a variety of training sessions throughout the year. I particularly enjoy our two-day People Leadership Summit. We fly our new managers from around the world to San Francisco, California, where our senior leadership team talks about culture and what it means to be a people leader at Workday. We wouldn’t expect our customer service team to know how to handle customer challenges without training; so similarly, annual training opportunities are investments in our people, who deserve to have a strong, steady hand supporting them and helping them develop their skills.

The Happiness Quotient

There’s another benefit to happy employees: Happiness is important for productivity. For years research has told us (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. that when our teams are happier and more fulfilled, they are more productive. And just as customer feedback helps us inform our focus for new product features and improvements, our employee feedback helps us think about how we structure people programs and experiences that will contribute to positive employee sentiment.

Employees and customer service are two of our core values (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. at Workday, and I’m humbled that Fortune recently ranked us #4 on its 100 Best Companies to Work For list (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., #2 on its 2019 50 Best Workplaces in Technology list (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., and that we currently have a customer satisfaction rating of 98 percent (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. There is a strong connection between these two areas, and when we apply the same principles to both experiences, we see positive outcomes.

But most importantly, like much of what we do here at Workday, creating meaningful employee experiences isn’t just the right thing to do because of business value; it’s the right thing to do because, well, it’s simply the right thing to do. As we continue to innovate ethically, make people’s working lives easier and more productive, and put employees first, I look forward to sharing more about our journey.

Types Of Changes

I want to start by defining exactly what “changes” I’m referring to. There are dozens of possible changes to cover here, but they tend to fall into one of three main categories:

Job types and responsibilities. Multiple industries are shifting to more managerial and strategic roles thanks to the onset of automation; for example, it’s estimated that 88% of job loss in manufacturing (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. is due to automation.
Working conditions and requirements. We’re also seeing changing in expectations of workers, and working conditions in general; for example, 43% of employed Americans (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. now spend at least part of their time working from home, and flexible schedules are becoming more common as well.
Cultural changes. Finally, we’re seeing broad cultural changes, such as more relaxed working atmospheres, and less formality in office environments.

Factors For Acceleration

So why are we seeing such acceleration with these changes?

Communication possibilities. The incredibly fast rate of workplace changes is in part due to better and more efficient communication methods. Thanks to the connective potential of the internet, workers can communicate across vast distances with email, instant messages, texts, and even streaming video. This technology is making it possible to find perfect job candidates, even if they live across the country, and is forcing businesses to move at a faster pace.
International diversity. With more countries emerging as major powers, increasingly positive international relationships, and more potential for international communication, globalization is having a substantial effect (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. on this acceleration. Globalization leads to greater levels of workplace diversity, and a more diverse range of potential business partners, both of which open the doors to faster, more impactful cultural changes. Globalization also gives workplaces access to more resources, which in turn increases their potential for driving change.
Automation and machine learning. Automation has been gradually taking over jobs for decades, but the advent of machine learning is opening the door to exponential technological growth (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Our algorithms and tech products are getting so advanced they can improve themselves, which means human jobs will soon start getting replaced at a faster and faster rate.
Pace expectations. It’s also worth noting that the mere fact that business owners expect fast culture change is leading to faster and faster culture changes. Managers anticipate an environment that demands fast, reactive changes, so they push harder to make changes of their own.

Actions To Take In Your Career

Understanding that workplace changes are accelerating is one thing, but what can you actively do to protect yourself from this acceleration?

Keep an eye on the news. Don’t let a new change catch you off-guard; stay plugged in to multiple news outlets, including those specific to your industry. The better informed you are, the more you can prepare for coming changes, and the further in advance you can plan.
Be open to new opportunities. When changes begin to manifest, don’t shy away from them; be open to changes in your career, including cultural changes and new responsibilities. The most successful employees will be the ones willing to change with the times.
Make yourself irreplaceable. Acquire new skills to set yourself apart from your contemporaries, and work hard to build your reputation. You don’t want to be the first person on the chopping block when a sweeping change affects your department.

There isn’t much you can do to slow the rate of acceleration in today’s workplaces, nor would you want to slow it if you could; change is, for the most part, a good thing, even when it’s intimidating or ill-timed. If you’re new to the workforce, this is your chance to adapt yourself to a new environment, and if you’re years into your career, this is your chance to take advantage of those coming changes for your own benefit.