The Future of Work
How we work has fundamentally changed. And it’s opened a wealth of new opportunities
- Employers must rethink approaches or risk losing employees to job opportunities that offer more flexibility or career changes.
- Employers must tap into the combined power of people, processes and technology to become more human-centric.
- Employers are challenged to deliver a superior user experience in which employee engagement is never in question.
Empowered Work: Your Success Relies on Your People
Work, workers and workspaces have been changing over the last few decades, but it took a global pandemic to make fundamental and irreversible changes. As organizations navigate the shifting landscape prompted by talent scarcity, the need for the rapid advancement of skills, fluctuating work models and new social contracts, leaders have quickly realized they need to step up employee value propositions or lose the war on talent.
The new workforce expects:
- To feel connected and aligned with their organization, leaders and work
- Personalized career development pathways with learning and skilling opportunities
- Tools that enhance talent, productivity and engagement
- Competitive pay, health and wellness benefits, financial incentives and flexible work options
Organizations need to recognize that the success of their data, technology, and business strategies relies on success with their people.
Leaders must turn their attention to the human side of business, investing in data-driven talent strategies, skills for the future and driving change adoption.
This change doesn’t happen overnight; many organizations allocate time and energy to implement new strategies only to watch them fail due to a lack of alignment and adoption. A people-centric approach to transformation is the answer. It decreases friction and drives motivation using strategies backed by behavioral science.
Leaders also have an increasing responsibility to look out for the whole employee—their professional and personal wellbeing—and focus on human-centric, empowered work.
Preparing for the New Human-Centric Work, Worker and Workspace
To become a human-centric employer, leaders can no longer think about people, processes, and technology as three separate issues. Employers must play off their strengths and use their combined power to drive impact.
Organizations need to:
- Rethink productivity using efficient tools and technologies
- Focus on impact or outcome, rather than the number of activities or hours spent
- Train and upskill employees and grow new leaders
- Foster collaborative and secure, virtual-on-demand workspaces
- Create a diverse, sustainable, and socially aware work culture
The new, human-centric approach offers incredible opportunities for both employees and employers to rethink what “work” means, how to be successful in the new model and how to balance personal and professional lives.
Key Trends
Trend 1:Employee Health and Wellbeing
Health continues to be top-of-mind for employees and organizations should increasingly look for employee-centric workforce models, and invest in the success, growth and happiness of their team members to drive meaningful long-term business outcomes.
Trend 2:Automation, AI and Technology Adoption
Adoption of intelligent systems is transforming work, and human-machine interactions will continue to replace repetitive and labor-intensive tasks. This will allow organizations to seek talent that relies on social intelligence, people skills and human ingenuity, among others.
Trend 3:Global, Diverse and Distributed Workforce
Workers are accustomed to working from anywhere, anytime. Organizations of all sizes, as well as government agencies are offering flexible work models, including hybrid workspaces and satellite offices, that help them increasingly diversify the workforce, enhance workplace productivity and transcend generational and sectoral boundaries. As a result, organizations are learning how to better navigate global, diverse and distributed teams and finding ways to enhance engagement and productivity in new work models.
Trend 4: Cyberthreat Resilience
The rise of the digital workplace has seen an increase in cyberattacks and this will likely continue with the increase of physical, hybrid and digital workplaces. In fact, nearly five in six organizations (83%) have completely re-thought their IT security to accommodate new ways of working brought about by the pandemic according to NTT’s Global Threat Intelligence Report . Organizations must invest time and talent in cybersecurity and keep their employees, partners and clients safe.
Trend 5: New Leaders, New Culture
Leadership and organizational culture have changed to respond to the world around them. Organizations are finding new ways to create corporate cultures that reward passion, creativity and self-initiative at both the leadership and employee levels to better embrace, navigate and manage change, as well as drive alignment and adoption.
Most organizations have, if only recently, come to acknowledge that progress comes from all the diverse ideas, skills and experiences people possess—while technology provides the tools to heighten their abilities and unleash their full potential.
Prepare for the Workplace of Tomorrow
See how CIOs can empower employees today and get ready for future innovations.
Taking a Human-Centric Approach to Workforce Transformation
Cultural, social and digital technology shifts are resetting worker expectations and in this new workforce, success lies in your people and the employee value proposition that you create and deliver. Empowered work also requires a collaborative, mobile, secure and inclusive work culture, regardless of physical location.
Together this can foster a great environment that ultimately helps the workforce grow and contribute passionately to the organization.
Worker turnover is expensive. It takes eight to 12 weeks to replace an employee, four to eight weeks to train a new team member and can result in almost a 40% loss in productivity. To avoid this situation, it’s critical that organizations provide employees with opportunities and the flexibility to learn, grow, connect, promote equity and make a professional and personal impact. Focusing on the human side of the business, investing and change adoption strategies, and adopting digital tools and processes, requires organizations to lean into four key areas.
Workforce
Attracting and retaining people requires new consideration of human capital
Skills
The new workforce requires employees to learn, unlearn and relearn skills
OCM
A tailor-made and culturally aligned Organization Change Management foundation is crucial
Strategy
Adopting data driven talent strategies to ensure successful modeling and planning
Empowering the workforce requires the right tools and technology for employers to offer simplified and effective operating models, by adopting new digital workplace solutions, while training and upskilling employees.
Planning for future scenarios is a cross-functional, collaborative endeavor that requires expertise from leadership, operations, human resources, finance and each enterprise function.
- Create clear leadership that fosters and sustains growth: Businesses too often take the “if we build it, they will come” approach to implementing new tools and business models and are then surprised and disappointed when adoption does not materialize, and ROI is not achieved. To address this, businesses need to incorporate a tailor-made and culturally aligned OCM foundation in their change programs.
- Provide seamless experience: Cloud-based solutions can modernize field services, while helping reduce risk and complexity, and enable automation, integration, and deployment at scale. Paired with change programs they can also enhance operational efficiency and accelerate adoption of new functionalities to gain business value.
- Develop solutions for human and bot collaboration: Organizations are introducing AI-powered bots to streamline work. These platforms offer a desktop-based experience for business users to automate simple and complex front- and back-office processes in one interface.
The CXO Podcast: Purpose Strategy Meets Talent Strategy
Empowering the workspace means rethinking digital and physical facilities that foster collaboration across locations and geographies for employees and clients.
The next decade will see a significant change in how companies manage commercial real estate and how IT will oversee hybrid, physical and digital work environments that can be instantly repurposed to accommodate various user profiles, with a focus on collaborative space and ideation.
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