Fifty-four years ago, best-selling American futurist Alvin Toffler wrote: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Today, his prediction seems remarkably prophetic. The skills landscape employers are facing in Australia and globally is dynamic, unpredictable and rife with opportunity.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the average half-life of a skill is currently about five years. Skills that would have carried previous generations through a career of 40 years now require endless updates and expansions to keep pace with technological advancement. 

As a result, the importance of technical skills has been eclipsed by the importance of skills adaptability, says Ravin Jesuthasan, author, Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer.

“The only thing that will keep us relevant is the ability to keep reinventing ourselves,” he says. 

“The skills where the premium is going to go up exponentially will be things like learning agility, curiosity, the willingness to look around corners and anticipate, the ability to see connections across two or more disparate domains – those are the skills that are really going to stand us in good stead.”

Building skills security

While much has been made of the potential negative impact of new technologies on job security, the WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 found the majority of technologies being implemented across organisations are anticipated to create more jobs than they will displace over the next three years.

Artificial intelligence, arguably the defining aspect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is expected to generate a net increase in jobs of 26 per cent by 2027. Meanwhile, big data analytics is set to create a net 58 per cent increase.

The only technologies forecast in the WEF’s data to have a net negative overall impact on employment data were robots; both humanoid (designed to mimic human behaviour) and non-humanoid (machines devised for specific tasks, such as drones and industrial automation).

In light of this, future-proofing the workforce will mean focusing less on job security and more on skills security.

“It’s much easier and more important to understand how work is changing, rather than looking at what new jobs are being created,” says Jesuthasan, who will be a keynote speaker at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition⁠ in August. 

“A job is a blunt instrument. It contains so many different things. But if you can understand how the work is changing, that gives you a precise view into the types of skills that are going to be in demand because it’s much easier to map skills to tasks than to understand the myriad of different skills that might underpin a job.”

“The only thing that will keep us relevant is the ability to keep reinventing ourselves.” – Ravin Jesuthasan, Author, Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer

Shifting towards skills-based hiring and mobility

When organisations are facing skills challenges, employers often assume that targeting candidates with qualifications from familiar institutions will be their safest bet, says Jesuthasan.

“In my industry, there’s an old adage, ‘No one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey,’” he says. “If you think about how talent is resourced today, it’s largely based on credentials and what you’ve done previously. Those two things reduce the risk to an employer that a person can’t do the job. 

“But if we move to a skills-based approach, it takes us from competing for the five per cent of people we might have traditionally looked at to looking at the 20, 30, 40 per cent of the population who could actually do the work.”

Rather than adhering to rigid roles, a skills-based approach breaks down the individual capabilities required to perform a given task and assigns them to employees with the appropriate skills and capacity, regardless of whether it’s part of their job description.

With skills shortages increasing in severity and complexity, this approach is likely to grow in popularity over the coming decade. We’re already seeing companies becoming more flexible in the qualifications they consider, says Jesuthasan. For example, in 2021, IBM announced it had stripped bachelor’s degree requirements for more than half of its US openings. At Google, job postings requiring a bachelor’s degree fell from 93 to 77 per cent between 2017-2021. 

At banking and financial services company ANZ, the benefits of a shift towards skills-focused hiring and mobility are already beginning to shine through. 

“I think that job roles will persist as a means to organise work, but now we’re getting a deeper skills-based view of what’s behind each role,” says Arun Pradhan, General Manager of Learning at ANZ, who will also be speaking at AHRI’s Convention.

“We’re developing the frameworks and investigating the technology that will allow us to look at a role and see that it’s 40 per cent adjacent to that role over there, even though it doesn’t look like it. And we’re trying to provide a faster way for people to match up those skills.”

Ravin Jesuthasen and Arun Pradhan will both be sharing their insights on future-ready HR practice at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Don’t miss the chance to hear from inspiring thought leaders and master practical strategies for now and the future. Secure your spot today.

Planning for the skills needs of the future

During the past decade, we have witnessed immense shifts in our ways of working, from mass digitisation to the proliferation of hybrid working. With the pace of change accelerating, it’s safe to assume future decades will bring even more transformative developments. 

For many employers, this begs the question: If we don’t know what tomorrow will look like, how can we equip our people to succeed when it arrives?

According to Adina Leu FCPHR, Director of Workforce Strategy and Planning at the Australian Public Service Commission (APS), the difficulty of answering this question deters many employers from investing enough strategic thinking into their skills development. 

“Across the economy, there is little incentive for employers and managers to look at longer-term skills planning and invest in their current workforce to build the skills they’ll need, or that the sector or Australia will need, in five to 10 years’ time. Because of the high levels of turnover, they think, ‘Why should I? They’re not going to be here anyway.’”

As a result, future-focused employers must find ways to convince leaders to plant trees under whose shade they might never sit.

“It’s about moving away from [the mindset of], ‘I’m going to look after my own interests,’ and towards being part of a bigger ecosystem – whether it’s at an industry level or in the Australian economy,” says Leu.

As a government organisation with a workforce of over 170,000, the APS recognises the strategic imperative of mapping future skills needs by conducting in-depth scenario planning based on a variety of potential workforce futures.

“Of course, there’s a need to prioritise, because you’ll be generating 10s of scenarios, but you can’t plan for all of them,” says Leu.

In order to identify and plan for the most likely outcomes, the APS refers to the ‘megatrends’ published by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the long-term insights briefs developed by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.  

From digitisation to the global push to reach net zero, these trends are predicted to be the main drivers of evolving labour markets and skills demand over the coming decades.

“We are building out the workforce implications of some of those scenarios,” says Leu. “For example, we’re looking at the green transition, and the skill sets we’ll need in government to progress that transition and the green economy agenda for the country and globally.”

The APS is also actively engaging with educational institutions and early career programs to address skills shortages from the ground up. 

Exposing young people to career pathways available to them is particularly important to ensure skills pipelines are as diverse as possible, says Leu. “For example, we know there are shortages in some occupations and roles which are highly male-dominated – [things like] construction, engineering, cybersecurity and so on,” she says. 

“We also know that the seed for some of those career decisions is planted with kids as early as five. So, we need to have more interventions to get girls passionate about occupations like these ones in early childhood.”

“Learning is most effective at the point of need. The opportunity to immediately and constantly apply learning provides a reality check, learning reinforcement and a feedback loop.” – Arun Pradhan, General Manager of Learning, ANZ

An upskilling strategy fit for the future of work

One challenge that often arises with big-picture upskilling and reskilling strategies is push-back from employees asked to take part in them. 

In recent years, the speed of transformation has left some employees experiencing varying levels of ‘change fatigue’. According to Gartner, employees’ willingness to embrace change has dipped sharply, from 74 per cent in 2016 to 38 per cent in 2022.

To avoid employees feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of upskilling and reskilling required, getting the timing right is crucial, says Pradhan.

“Strategic workforce planning can mean developing three-year modeling, but we need to consider an overlay of how early we can initiate upskilling before those skills become relevant,” he says. 

“Learning is most effective at the point of need. The opportunity to immediately and constantly apply learning provides a reality check, learning reinforcement and a feedback loop to accelerate learning.”

To provide this opportunity, ANZ will be rolling out a new Academy for foundational skills around data, digital and human skills.

“The ANZ Academy has team-based learning at its core, so people can apply what they learn immediately in their work with their peers,” he says. “It’s getting away from having a learning bubble over here and a work bubble over there, which forces busy people to make their own connections.

“Instead, we’re using blended experiences, team activities and contextualised stories to reduce the friction of on-the-job learning.”

In order for HR to formulate and deliver upskilling and reskilling strategies effectively, it’s imperative that they lead by example. 

“Use every opportunity to build a new skill,” says Pradhan. “Be that curious person who collects skills from work, parenting, hobbies or anywhere else, and is creatively combining those skills to deliver your unique value proposition and greater adaptability.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2024 edition of HRM magazine. Sign up to become an AHRI member to receive a bi-monthly copy.

Hear more from Ravin Jesuthasan on the shift towards skills-based hiring in the latest episode of AHRI’s podcast, Let’s Take This Offline. Listen to the episode below.

The post Cultivating the skills Australia needs to become future-ready appeared first on HRM online.

In an era of rapid technological advancement, with the demand for certain skills rising and others becoming obsolete, preparing for the future of work requires foresight and adaptability. 

In this episode, Ravin Jesuthasan, global thought leader and Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer, talks about how HR practitioners can navigate the evolving skills landscape and prepare their organisations and employees for these changes. 

You’ll learn how to take advantage of the shift towards skills-based hiring, how artificial intelligence might reinvent the graduate-level position, and discover models and frameworks to think about skills and job design as a small, medium or large-sized business.

Skip to the section that interests you most:

• 3:40 minutes: Three things HR can do to prepare for the evolving skills landscape
• 6:09 minutes: How to effectively map skills
• 12:51 minutes: The most crucial skills for businesses to focus on
• 16:03 minutes: How AI might change (or remove) graduate level positions
• 22:24 minutes: How to get started as a skills-based organisation
• 29:24 minutes: How to apply these skills as a small to medium-sized business
• 40:44 minutes: Jesuthasan responds to a scenario about a company that is moving towards a skills-based approach and has created agile teams working on project-based assignments.

View the podcast transcript here.

Extra resources:

For more conversations to inspire HR, listen to season one of Let’s Take This Offline here.

If you’d like further information and resources to help put Jesuthasan’s insights into action, check out the links below:

Learning opportunities

• Sign up to AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition⁠ in Melbourne on 20-22 August to hear more from Ravin Jesuthasan.

• Sign up for AHRI’s new short course, GenAI Integration Essentials.

Further reading

• Learn more about Jesuthasan’s books.

• Read HRM’s article where Jesuthasan talks about the future of leadership skills.

Member-exclusive content

• Join the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge to connect with your peers and for access to a bonus episode later this week.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can follow the podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the LinkedIn AHRI Lounge.

The post Podcast: practical tips to prepare your organisation for the evolution of skills appeared first on HRM online.

With our ways of working changing rapidly, relying on traditional leadership approaches could put organisations at risk of falling behind in the future of work.

Some aspects of the traditional leadership model, such as command-and-control structures and rigid roles, are slowly losing relevance as organisations traverse the rapidly evolving technological and economic landscape, says Ravin Jesuthasan, Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer and upcoming speaker at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August.

Below, Jesuthasan unpacks four key capabilities leaders of the future will need in order to navigate emerging disruptions and harness the opportunities presented by technological advancement.

1. Shift from hierarchical authority to empowerment and alignment 

There are several forces at play in the current business environment which make the traditional hierarchical model of leadership difficult to sustain, according to Jesuthasan.

One example is the shift towards hybrid and remote work models, which challenges traditional dynamics of control and requires a more trust-based approach to management.

Another is the emerging shift towards more agile ways of working. 

With skills shortages continuing to impact employers, many are recognising the value of a skills-based approach to work, where work is allocated to employees and non-employees based on their capabilities rather than whether it’s part of their job description. The rapid shifts in the skills landscape mean this strategy is likely to become more prevalent in the coming years.

While this approach allows employers to allocate resources more efficiently, effectively and with greater impact, the move away from rigid roles requires a significant mindset shift on the part of leaders.

“As we move towards these more agile, skills-based ways of working, leaders’ ability to empower teams and align them to a mission becomes increasingly important,” says Jesuthasan.

“And leading through empowerment and alignment has one prerequisite, which the hierarchical model doesn’t. And that’s trust – trust in your people that they are motivated to accomplish the same things you are and their trust that you have their best interests at heart.”

HR should keep in mind that this transition might be uncomfortable for leaders who might be used to functioning under a command-and-control model, he says.

“All of this is a reversal of about 140 years of learned behaviour on the part of leaders. So it’s really important that they have the space to experiment, practice and fail.”

Enjoying this article? Help HRM create useful resources to enhance your HR practice by completing our reader survey. Share your thoughts for the chance to win one of five $100 shopping vouchers.

2. The ability to redesign work

With the shift away from rigid roles and towards skills-based ways of working, leaders will need to hone their ability to redesign work so talent (and AI and automation) can flow to it, says Jesuthasan.

“[Leaders need] that skill of being able to take an emerging body of work, deconstruct it into its elemental tasks, understand the skills required and the work options available, and figure out how to deploy that work,” he says. 

“For example, where should I use automation versus using the skills of an employee? Where should I use a gig worker or shared services? And then continuously reconstructing new ways of working that optimise speed, profitability and the workforce skills.” 

With work being resourced based on skills and capability rather than roles, leaders will need to adapt to having fewer dedicated teams, he adds.

“[There needs to be] a pivot from leaders who are really good at process execution to leaders who are increasingly exceptional at project guidance.”

3. Humanistic automation

With technological advancement moving at an unprecedented rate, it’s no surprise that digital literacy is projected to be a critical leadership skill of the future. To remain competitive, leaders need to constantly ask themselves if they are going far enough in understanding and leveraging emerging technologies, says Jesuthasan.

“What the past two years have taught us is that just being digitally savvy is too low a bar. We need business leaders who really understand AI in all its forms, understand the tools available and understand how it’s going to reshape their operating models.”

In the future, it will become increasingly important for leaders to strike the right balance between harnessing the capabilities of AI alongside the capabilities of their workforces.

“[Ask yourself], ‘How do I automate in a way that ensures that I’m not compromising ingenuity and innovation in my business? How do I automate in a way that makes the most of the human skills I’ve invested in for decades?’,” says Jesuthasan.

As AI takes on more and more of our repetitive, rules-based work, leaders should be placing more focus on cultivating human skills such as communication, problem-solving and critical thinking in both themselves and their people.

According to research from the World Economic Forum, the half-life of a technical skill is currently about five years. While it remains crucial to develop technical skills to navigate emerging technologies, employers should remember that the so-called ‘soft’ skills will always be necessary for success.

“What the past two years have taught us is that just being digitally savvy is such a low bar. We need business leaders who really understand generative AI.” – Ravin Jesuthasan, Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services, Mercer

4. Cultivating diversity of thought, experience and perspective

The most effective leaders in the future of work will be those who can leverage the benefits of diverse workforces, says Jesuthasan.

“A key skill is managing diversity, equity and inclusion – not episodically like we typically do when we hire someone or promote them, but continuously by opening the aperture to having different skills, different perspectives and different experiences being deployed to work,” he says. 

“Because that’s the only way any business stays ahead of the competition – that diversity of thought, experience and perspective.”

Inclusive hiring practices are essential not only to innovation, but also to business stability, he says. He offers the example of a US airline that set up its own flight school as its traditional talent pool of ex-military pilots began to dry up. 

“Because of who was accepted to fly in the military [in the past], most of their pilots, unsurprisingly, were older white men. But with their own flight school, their first class was 80 per cent female and minorities. 

“By opening the aperture and creating their own school, they know that in less than two years, they’ll have a flight crew that is exponentially more diverse than the talent that they’re going to be replacing. It’s a win-win – we secure our supply, and we ensure that the supply is more diverse than the legacy supply chain.”

This strategic approach to diversity ensures that organisations are not just keeping pace with change, but are actively shaping the future of work.

As we move into the next iteration of work, HR plays a critical role in cultivating this next phase of leadership. As the champions of human-centred ways of working, HR practitioners are in a unique position to support leaders as they develop the skills to lead through empowerment, implement humanistic automation and enhance their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Ravin Jesuthasan will be speaking on the deconstruction of jobs and the reconstruction of work at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Sign up today to hear from Ravin and other experts, including Seth Godin, Dr Pippa Grange and more.

The post 4 skills leaders need to thrive in the future of work appeared first on HRM online.

In today’s fast-paced environment, HR and learning professionals face the challenge of staying abreast of technological advancements and translating them into effective learning and development strategies. This complexity is compounded by the need to rapidly acquire new skills while maintaining compliance and cost-effectiveness.

AHRI’s latest research report, Shaping the Future: How Learning Helps Us Embrace Unprecedented Change, created in partnership with Melbourne Business School (MBS), aims to demystify these challenges and shed light on the evolving landscape of learning. 

Below, two members of AHRI’s Future of Work Advisory Panel and Dr Nora Koslowski of MBS offer their thoughts on elements of this report and share advice on how to put these learnings into action.

Learning needs to be co-designed with employees

By Dr Nora Koslowski, Chief Learning Innovation Officer at Melbourne Business School

Given the possibilities offered by technology and by the data available, learning pathways can now be much more personalised to an individual employee’s context, experience, knowledge and preferences. 

I recommend that L&D practitioners build pre-assessments of employees into their learning programs. This could be a self-assessment of knowledge or confidence in a topic area, or a task they have to complete which measures their level of competence in a skill area. 

Based on the outcomes of this pre-assessment, L&D practitioners can then offer learning pathways that are appropriate to the level a learner is at. 

Similarly, the context of an individual’s role and likely career path can be taken into consideration. For example, if an organisation is rolling out a learning program about a topic, such as data analytics, the actual learning pathway for someone who will only require surface understanding should vary from someone who requires deeper expertise. 

And lastly, the personalisation of learning methods should be considered. With the abundance of content available, and in different modalities, consider giving employees a choice about whether they go on a learning pathway with an emphasis on video content, reading, audio or practical tasks.

Learning isn’t a calendar of events; it’s an organisation’s sensing mechanism

By Dr Ben Hamer, futurist and AHRI Future of Work Advisory Panel member and board director.

Some organisations see learning as an overhead rather than an investment, which is why it’s seen as an easy cut. But by working with and influencing our friends in finance, we can do something as simple as shift where learning sits on the balance sheet to protect it, and, in doing so, send a massive signal to the organisation about the value and importance of investing in our people.

Part of demonstrating the value of learning is in who we hire and the skills we look for. In my experience, there are too many people in L&D teams who do administrative work such as coordinating vendors and managing a calendar of events. We need more instructional designers to help create and curate impactful training. 

We need our learning professionals to be consulting with other functions to help not only respond to current skill gaps, but anticipate and plan for emerging skill gaps. 

This means sitting down with people who work in strategy and workforce planning teams to make sure that a learning and skills lens is brought to the table.

Part of creating a learning ecosystem is recognising the role that individuals play in taking ownership of their own upskilling and reskilling as part of the equation. We think about it a lot as formal learning, but there’s so much more available. In fact, it’s the microlearning opportunities that are best for us. 

We need to spend 15 per cent of our working week upskilling and reskilling just for our skills to remain current. So think about how you can listen to a podcast on your way to work, watch a quick YouTube video on how to perform a particular function in Excel, for example, or ask a colleague to explain a particular concept or topic to you, such as how to write good prompts for generative AI.

AI should augment our learning practices

By Peter Burow, Founding Partner at Neuro Group

AI has enormous potential in the field of learning. It can deliver learning content in a contextualised way, personalise the learning experience according to the individual, and allow for dynamic interaction with vast amounts of content. 

By ingesting large amounts of content, paired with automated support that employees can access at their convenience, AI eliminates the inflexible ‘carwash’ approach of traditional learning. This presents a rare opportunity for learning professionals to reimagine their roles and embrace the transformative potential of this technology. As AI takes on the task of content delivery, learning professionals can focus more on the human aspects of learning. 

While AI can make learning content accessible, flexible and dynamic, it’s the role of human learning teams to link learning with people’s aspirations, engage people in understanding the deeper meaning behind the content and translate content into insight and wisdom that drives lasting capability uplift and behaviour change.

By leveraging technology and neuroscience, learning professionals are freed up to explore and design genuinely transformative experiences that tap into the innate human capacity for growth and change.

The full Future of Learning report includes five insights in total and goes into more depth, including practical applications. Download now and find out how you can contribute to enhancing your organisation’s learning functions.

The post What could the future of learning and development look like? appeared first on HRM online.

You’d be forgiven for feeling that the Government’s latest Intergenerational Report was filled with doom and gloom. An ageing population, climate-related challenges, our aged-care and disability needs outpacing the resources available today by double and further complications in the geopolitical space – it feels like the synopsis of a dystopian novel.

But these are just predictions based on current trends. 

“While [these predictions] can be cause for concern, the very nature of the report should give us hope. It gives us a 40-year outlook as to what the future might look like if we follow the same pattern as today. We’ve given ourselves plenty of time to fix it,” says Dr Ben Hamer CPHR, AHRI board member and Chief Futurist at CreativeCubes.Co.

It’s worth considering reports like this with healthy scepticism, as some people perceive it as a vehicle to push the agenda of the current government or that the numbers aren’t as scary as some might have you think.

Despite this, the Treasury’s Intergenerational Report, the sixth released since 2002, still holds some interesting predictions for the future of our workplaces, which are worth attention and conversation.

Here are five predictions from the report paired with insights from a range of HR experts.

1. Ageing population

Prediction: Australians are expected to live longer and spend more years in full health. Despite the report showing a three per cent decline in working age, this could mean some employees are working later into life.

“[The ageing workforce] should form a key component of any future-of-work strategy, with HR framing the discussion around the risks and opportunities of demographic change,” says Alison Hernandez,  JPAC Lead at HSM Advisory and Ambassador for Family Friendly Workplaces.

Some of the business risks, according to Hernandez, are:

• Loss of legacy skills and expertise as subject matter experts retire
• Inadequate succession planning and knowledge transfer
• Inability to backfill critical roles
• Potential increase in WH&S costs.

We have a great opportunity right now to redesign work through the lens of a longer working life, she says. Based on conversations with thousands of late-career professionals over the past 20 years, she says these changes could look like:

• Flexible career pathways enabling employees to work longer, but differently
• Internal mobility and relocations across Australia or overseas, so people can “embrace their inner grey nomad”
• Continuous learning, development and reskilling in digital literacy
• Mentoring and multi-generational knowledge sharing
• Career breaks for care giving, travel or as a wellbeing reset.

Read more on Hernandez’s thoughts on redesigning work here.

“The key to success is understanding what employees want and need, now and into the future, and letting go of traditional employment structures that no longer serve us well,” she says. “HR leaders are grappling with the next 40 hours and 40 days, let alone the next 40 years, but it is so important to keep an eye on the horizon and reimagine the future of work.”

“By the time we hit 40 million people in Australia, we’ll proportionally have two times as many people aged over 65 and three times as many people 85+ [as we do today].” – Dr Ben Hamer CPHR

2. Productivity rates 

Prediction: Productivity rates are predicted to be in line with average growth rates of the past two decades, at 1.2 per cent a year. The future path of productivity is not a foregone conclusion, and will be influenced by decisions taken by governments, businesses and investors, as well as the big shifts underway in the global and domestic economy.

The report paints a picture of the “lowest levels of productivity since World War II,” says Hamer.

The biggest driver of reduced productivity will be the ageing population, he says, which will be driven by lower birth rates and improved healthcare, which will see Australians living longer, as outlined above.

“By the time we hit 40 million people in Australia, we’ll proportionally have two times as many people aged over 65 and three times as many people 85+ [as we do today].”

“This becomes tricky because we’ll have less working-age people to pay taxes to fund critical areas such as health, education, defence and infrastructure.”

HR professionals will be critical in supporting a productivity uplift, he says.

“A lot of this uplift will come from engaging and retaining older workers. In the past, I’ve seen organisations put an ageing workforce as a risk in their strategic workforce plans. Instead, we need to look at it as the norm and, in many ways, an opportunity.”

He cites a UK study on McDonald’s workers, which found that employees over the age of 60 were responsible for a 20 per cent higher customer satisfaction rate.

“McDonalds went out looking to actively recruit older workers. It’s this kind of mindset that we’ll need to see more of, as well as the creation of new job roles that better cater to the skills, expertise, expectations and life stage of this important cohort.”

Hamer adds that organisations should also continue to invest in new technology and reskill their workers to boost productivity rates.

AHRI’s most recent Quarterly Work Outlook highlighted the importance of Hamer’s points, with respondents reporting that one in five employees are currently not proficient in their roles, and only 20 per cent stating they were investing in AI/technology to boost productivity.

AHRI’s CEO, Sarah McCann-Bartlett, said at the time, “Australia’s productivity is falling short of many of our OECD competitors… Australia’s future prosperity will be built upon a skilled workforce that helps our nation to remain globally competitive.

“Now is the time to invest in workplace training and the broader set of HR practices that boost organisational performance.”

3. Climate change impacts

Prediction: Climate change will have profound impacts on the economy and society. It will affect where and how Australians choose to live and work, food and energy security and our environment.

Jonathon Woolfrey FCPHR, AHRI board member and West Australian State President and Managing Partner of Talenting, says that, although the 40-year horizon set out by the report seems distant, there are some immediate actions that employers need to consider.

“With regard to its statements about climate change, which can be overshadowed by politically-charged debate, employers should focus on pragmatic workplace responses to manage external risks.

“One of the most immediate impacts is on the psychological contract,” he says. “Modern employees expect their employers to be environmentally responsible. This expectation isn’t a distant concern; it’s a current necessity that should be communicated through the employee value proposition and internal engagement tools.”

Those working in outdoor settings, such as tradespeople, miners and first responders, will need special consideration, he adds.

“Employers must address both their physical and psychological safety, and consider strategies such as job redesign and psychosocial risk assessments and actions.”

“Now is the time to invest in workplace training and the broader set of HR practices that boost organisational performance.” – Sarah McCann-Bartlett, AHRI CEO

This might look like changing shift times to be outside of peak heat periods or shortening work hours to minimise exposure.

“In the medium-term, sectors such as retail and hospitality may also be affected. For example, retail workers could bear the brunt of supply chain disruption, while changes in tourism and lifestyle preferences stemming from changing climate could impact the nature and locations of hospitality jobs.”

To prepare, Woolfrey suggests employers:

• Define and communicate their environmental commitments
• Assess and address risks related to climate change for different occupational groups
• Evaluate the psychosocial risk elements across their workforce.

4. Digitisation of work

Prediction: Digitalisation will change how we work, raising productivity, improving workplace safety and providing us with the agility we need to face the challenges of the future.

Timothy Bartram, Professor of HR Analytics and Head of Department HRM & Industrial Relations at RMIT, says digitisation and AI present both opportunities and challenges for HR.

“Such technology is in its infancy in HR management, [but] there is an expectation of the growing use of AI in HRM in the future,” he says.

“However, most HR departments are generally not aware of how to implement and use such technological tools. Organisations and HR professionals need to invest in greater education and skill development around HR analytics and AI. 

“This represents an important opportunity for universities and other education providers to develop programs that engage with HR analytics, AI and HRM with the emphasis on ethical governance, the engagement of key organisational stakeholders and the consequences for human beings.”

Dr Gerry Treuren, senior lecturer in UniSA’s School of Management, says employers will face challenges in “systematising new work processes to capture the efficiency gains”, and says internal and external training will be important.

“Some skills will become irrelevant and disappear via attrition or by management design, but new skills will be added to existing roles as needed, and as new roles are created. Over time, many more jobs end up getting created.

“[It] will be a turbocharged and larger-scale version of the office automation of the 1970s. Yes, typists lost their jobs, but whole new types of more interesting, high-skill, career-path jobs then emerged.” 

5. Gender pay gap

Prediction: Australia’s gender gap is expected to narrow as further labour market opportunities increase and contribute to a more inclusive workforce.

This was a sliver of good news to come out of the government’s predictions. In order to work towards eliminating that gap entirely, employers need to lay the groundwork for gender-inclusive workplaces now.

“If HR want to prepare workplaces for the future where gender inclusivity is not a nice-to-have, but a necessity, they may want to consider a few different things,” says Renee Alexander, AHRI Northern Territory State President and Group HR Manager at Primary Resources Investment Group.

She suggests assessing your policies and processes to see if they are skewed towards one gender.“Parental leave is a good example. There may be medical reasons why the birth-giver requires a period of leave. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will be the primary caregiver. Do your policies have flexibility in this space?”

Employers can conduct a benchmarking assessment to see how family friendly their organisation is with this free tool from Family Friendly Workplaces.

Read HRM’s article: 37 per cent of men face “discrimination and harassment” for working reduced hours.

She also says it’s worth auditing processes to see if any are “stuck in the 80s” and thinking about how/if you should set gender targets, noting that there are many arguments for and against this.

“At the end of the day, the best advice I can give HR is to meet your organisation where they are at. Incremental change in the right direction is better than no action at all.”

Learn how to incorporate business strategy into your workforce planning and mitigate future risk with this short course from AHRI.

The post Unpacking the Intergenerational Report: What could work look like in 40 years? appeared first on HRM online.

The concept of the ‘future of work’ is a fallacy. It’s like saying, “I’ll learn how to be a good listener for my partner someday to benefit the future of my relationship”, or, “I might book a doctor’s appointment one day for the future of my health.”

Work is happening in the here and now. By thinking we can push lessons, change and transformation into the future, we are giving ourselves a free pass to sit on our hands and do nothing, and organisations are suffering as a result.

“We’ve been hearing future-of-work conversations for decades. It’s probably a 30-year-old idea,” says Keith Ferrazzi, Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, entrepreneur, best-selling author and speaker at AHRI’s upcoming Convention in August. “But people still haven’t changed because they didn’t have to in the past.”

But now, they do. Business, environmental and social conditions are forcing work to change, which means executives and HR leaders can no longer kick the can down the road.

That’s why Ferrazzi and his co-author Kian Gohar call their new book, Competing in the New World of Work, a book about the ‘present of work’. This is an important re-frame, and it’s exactly how we need to start thinking when faced with challenges around new ways of working, changing employee expectations and more complex economic environments.

“I feel like some executives are clinging to old [methods] that are no longer working,” says Ferrazzi. “If we continue to [hold on] to old ways of working, we will continue to be exhausted.”

Some leaders are demanding employees come back to work. They’re looking over people’s shoulders to make sure work is getting done the ‘right’ way and they’re forcing prescriptive processes because “that’s how things have always worked around here”. But this approach helps no one. Instead, employers need to embrace ‘radical adaptability’, says Ferrazzi.

See HRM’s article on how to manage a micromanager.

The radical adaptability framework

Ferrazzi’s radical adaptability framework has four elements:

1. Foresight – “You’ve got to be constantly looking around corners. You also can’t simply focus on your own insights; use the wisdom of the crowd,” he says.

2. Agility – “[Agile teams] are constantly reassessing their paths. This is the absolute opposite of the laboured, bureaucratic work processes that many of these same organisations were practicing previously.

“Agile [work styles] push teams to ask critical questions like, ‘Where can we create value? How can this project keep getting better? Who else can we include to solve the problem?’”

3. Collaboration – “[This] has nothing to do with where employees show up for work. It has everything to do with how they show up.

“If we listen to the same echo chamber of voices in our heads and don’t question ‘Who else should we be listening to?’, ‘What information should we be gathering?’, ‘Who should be challenging us?’, we’ll end up on our heels in a crisis.”

4. Resilience – This is the glue keeping teams together, he says, and it needs to be modelled by its leaders.

There have been plenty of challenges in recent years that have warranted drastic change within the business community; some companies rose to the occasion, while others perished (think Blockbuster). Ferrazzi wants us to avoid making the same mistakes in these post-pandemic years.

“If we continue to [hold on] to old ways of working, we will continue to be exhausted.” – Keith Ferrazzi

“We hit this massive disruptive inflection point [in] the pandemic, and we were forced to do work differently for a period of time. But now, I see the elastic band of old ways of thinking and working snapping back.

“But now, we’re dealing with a global crisis again – in terms of the softening of the economy – so that provides a level of [impetus] to change how we work.”

But to take that step, HR leaders need to be curious about how they can change not only strategies about work, but mindsets too.

“When I talk about radical adaptability, it’s not just about changing products or pivoting to understand new markets, it’s about the importance and power of being curious about the way we work.”

This is a topic Ferrazzi will dive into more deeply when he visits from Los Angeles later this year for AHRI’s National Convention in Brisbane.

Learn how to become crisis-agile

Radical adaptability is a natural state that many teams and individuals experience when faced with a crisis. A fire is lit beneath them, forcing them to come up with workarounds for the challenges placed in their way.

“During the pandemic, we were focused on taking in information from wherever possible and adapting and analysing it over and over again. We were used to being curious as opposed to the typical nose-to-the-grindstone approach,” says Ferrazzi.

He calls this ‘crisis agility’, which is breaking down your work into “bite-sized sprints” with clear outcomes and autonomy given to the owners of each task. This allows you to change plans last-minute should you need to adapt to new circumstances without getting bogged down in month-long timelines or time-consuming preparation.

“Delta Airlines is a good example [of crisis-agility in action]. We were working with them to help re-engineer the airline industry. I was meeting with the Chief Operating Officer and their direct reports quarterly to talk about how to strategically reinvent travel.

“When the pandemic hit, Delta lost nearly 90 per cent of its revenue, so those quarterly agile sprints moved to twice a day. This idea of breaking work into short bursts means you can raise your head up from working and say, ‘What happened? What did we learn? What’s going wrong?’ You have a lot of transparency and candour.”

You might only work in a crisis-agile manner for a brief period while you get through a rough patch. Or, sometimes – as we experienced in 2020-2021 – it can be drawn out for longer.

“The most important thing for leaders and HR to ask themselves is, ‘What is the velocity of this change that we have to adopt? And what should the frequency of the check-ins look like?’
“Organisations often have big annual plans that end up drawing on for months and months.

“[We make the work] overly complex, it meanders all over the place… but if you have meetings every other week, talk about progress candidly and have the whole team offer insights, you can arrest failures well in advance [of them becoming bigger issues].”

Becoming sustainably agile

While crisis agility is an effective strategy in the short-term, teams can’t run on the smell of an oily rag forever. At a certain point in time, you need to learn how to shift your approach into more sustainable practices. You could argue that we’re at that point in time now.

Take Target, for example. When lockdowns prevented the usual swathes of shoppers from entering its stores on foot, it had to come up with an entirely new model of delivery. Within a matter of days (yes, days), the retail giant launched the first version of its mobile app.

This was possible largely due to its leadership team’s decision to invest in in-house software capabilities and training in leadership and change management in the years prior to the pandemic.

Detailing the process in an article for Forbes, Ferrazzi notes that it would have likely taken other companies months to develop the plans for an app before briefing it into their development team, let alone the entire app itself.

“With agile project management, business teams drive the planning and prioritisation of technology investments,” Ferrazzi wrote.

“Because [Target] had already started to learn agile ways of working, when the crisis hit, it was able to get on with it. They were able to work in short sprints,” he told HRM.

After moving to its digital strategy, it launched 30 new brands in 30 months using the Agile framework.

“In the past, [Target] was only able to achieve four brand launches in that same timeframe. That’s [multiplying] their results by almost 10,” he says. “Once you begin to run an Agile work cycle, you’ll become addicted to this way of working.”

“When I talk about radical adaptability, it’s not just about changing products or pivoting to understand new markets, it’s about the importance and power of being curious about the way we work.” – Keith Ferrazzi

Develop high-return practices

A common mistake business leaders make when trying to transform ways of working is taking a short-sighted approach, says Ferrazzi. They loosen the reins and abandon unhelpful bureaucracy when they feel they have no other option. But then, as the dust settles, those old, unhelpful processes and mindsets creep back in. Why? Because humans feel safest in their comfort zones.

“I’ve seen this in the mandate to come back to the office, because [some leaders] think that’s how we build culture. Well, I can prove to you – and we’ll do this when we’re together [at AHRI’s Convention] in August – that the reality is that companies that choose to reinvent the way they work improve their cultural attributes, sense of connectedness and bonding by doing work differently in a remote environment.”

HR needs to help leaders and managers reject old notions that can inadvertently prevent experimentation from taking place.

“It’s all about getting your teams to adopt new practices that yield better value and create a contagion of wanting to change the way we work. We call those high-return practices,” he says.

These practices might include:

• Embracing asynchronous collaboration. Recognise that collaboration doesn’t have to start with a meeting. We can be bolder and more inclusive when communicating asynchronously. To help achieve this, Ferrazzi suggests creating a decision board –  a document that people can feed into with information about the problem they’re trying to solve, the solutions they’re considering and the people who need to be involved.
  
  “If you can use other forms of collaboration outside of meetings, you can reduce the number of meetings you have by 30 per cent and improve the number of people who feel heard. In the average meeting of 12 people, four people feel they’ve been heard. But when you shift to asynchronous communication, ten people feel they’re heard.”

• Starting each meeting with a ‘sweet and sour’ check-in, where people share something sweet happening in their lives (perhaps a personal achievement) and something they’re struggling with. This is a great way to develop trust and break down walls, he says.

• Asking powerful questions, such as, ‘What’s not being said here?’ or ‘Whose perspective have we skipped over?’

“HR has not traditionally been responsible for changing the practices of work,” says Ferrazzi. “The negotiation of getting that responsibility is not going to come through a pitch deck. It will come from introducing these high-return practices.”

He gives the example of trying to get executive buy-in for a project.

“Instead of booking in meeting after meeting and hoping you get the executive sponsorship you need, do something different. Put a three-minute video together about where the project is heading, where it’s struggling, what you think you’ve achieved and what you want to do in the next month.

“Send that, along with a spreadsheet, to the executive sponsors and say, ‘There’s a three-minute video attached. You’re welcome to watch it and then shoot me a video back if that’s easier, or here’s a spreadsheet with a few questions that we have. Answer me how you like. The main thing is that we co-create the solution together.’

“That is a very powerful way of interacting with someone that they have never experienced before.” 

A longer version of this article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of HRM Magazine.

Don’t miss out on hearing from Keith Ferrazzi on the power of radical adaptability and more at this year’s AHRI National Convention and Exhibition in August. Book your spot today.

The post Want your business to thrive? Adopt the radical adaptability mindset appeared first on HRM online.

“Sorry, that’s not in my job description.” 

Sound familiar? 

While this response may prompt an eye roll or two, it’s easy to understand why an employee might say something like this. After all, you likely began the working relationship by sharing a document outlining your expectations, down to their day-to-day duties and KPIs. 

Traditionally, a job description (JD) is designed to clarify an individual’s function and purpose within the organisation. The document might include their job title, duties, required qualifications, employment type and work conditions. And while technology has sparked a meaningful transformation in many areas of work, the humble JD remains largely unchanged. 

But as work becomes more fluid, managers are calling for teams that can work more collaboratively and cross-functionally. So, is the traditional JD preventing this? Or, does it simply need a shake-up so it can evolve with the needs of the modern workplace? 

Job descriptions are crucial for clarity 

A JDs key purpose is to provide job clarity – critical for ensuring employee productivity and engagement, says Joseph Pritchard CPHR, Principal Consultant at workplace strategy consultancy, Mapien. 

“Gallup research has identified two hygiene factors that employers must get right for an employee to feel engaged in their role. One is making sure they have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs. The second is job clarity,” says Pritchard. 

After all, he argues, if someone feels like they’re operating in an area of uncertainty and doesn’t understand what success looks like, it might make them feel anxious, directionless and, in the worst case, burned out. 

This is especially important when it comes to award roles in industries such as manufacturing, service or insurance, says Pritchard. 

“Yes, work is more fluid. But, there are still many roles out there that are tied to job descriptions and classifications. An accurate job description can prevent things like underpaying employees who have not been classified correctly.” 

Forced to stay in your lane

On the other hand, there’s the argument that JDs might be too rigid for increasingly agile workplaces. As a result, they might be doing more harm than good; potentially hampering collaboration, innovation and flexibility. 

Dr Tyrone Smith is a people analytics leader and executive coach. He’s also part of the Future of Work Industry Advisory Board at the American Psychological Association. 

“Future roles will need a combination of different skill sets and require a person to work across different domains. Charting rigid professional boundaries in a JD will stand in the way,” says Smith. 

He believes that prescribing a list of duties could be unintentionally advising an employee to stay in their lane. This might stop them from seeing opportunities to stretch, innovate and advance their skill sets. 

“They might not be able to visualise the potential competencies and skills needed for the role they choose to progress to further their career,” he says.  

Removing strict accountabilities might also unleash untapped potential. For example, the Baltimore Museum of Art made headlines in 2022 with an exhibition called Guarding the Art. Seventeen of its security guards were asked to curate their own exhibition, drawing inspiration from their diverse backgrounds, experiences and interests. 

The event was a roaring success with critics and visitors alike – art administrators were intrigued to see pieces that hadn’t surfaced in decades, while audiences loved hearing the stories behind each selection. Had the security guards stuck to the traditional tasks in their job descriptions, the museum would have missed out on their creativity and unique voices. 

Prioritising skills over tasks 

Technological advancements and automation mean that the jobs of today will look different in the future. 

“[Restrictive JDs] may put an employee in a box and prevent them from seeing potential for growth. They might not be able to visualise the potential competencies and skills needed for the role that they choose to progress to further their career.” – Dr Tyrone Smith, people analytics leader and executive coach

According to Smith, if job descriptions aren’t keeping up with these changes, they’ll quickly become outdated and irrelevant, doomed to gather metaphorical dust on some HR system. He argues that as automation removes mundane and transactional tasks, work will need to evolve to become more skills-based, agile and strategic. 

“Humans will remain at the centre of most industries, but our role will change. For example, if a decision is actioned by technology, there will still be some sort of human strategic decision-making involved,” says Smith. 

JDs need to account for this and adapt accordingly, moving focus to skills – such as design thinking, strategic decision-making or presenting – instead of set tasks. 

“Ultimately, job descriptions that have flexibility and rigour will be more effective than ones that keep employees in a box,” says Smith.  

Effective ways to improve JDs 

Reimagining JDs doesn’t necessarily mean doing away with them altogether. It’s about making sure they’re relevant, flexible and allow wiggle room for skill development.  

First, think about how you perceive the JD: is it simply a box on your onboarding checklist? Or is it a helpful resource that helps employees do their jobs? 

“Sometimes it’s treated as a legacy document,” says Pritchard. “You might think ‘Rather than reinvent the wheel, let’s just see if anybody else in our business unit has something similar and then we’ll copy that.'”

This will leave them grappling with an inaccurate document that doesn’t actually reflect what they do, which creates the opposite of job clarity. 

Here are some helpful tips for ensuring a JD stays useful and adaptable:

• Interview people doing the role. Gather their insights on what they think should be included and what can be skipped. 
• Don’t create an exhaustive list of expectations. Keep accountabilities simple, and where possible, give them space to choose their journey there. 
  
• Keep it concise and simple. Avoid jargon and acronyms and use plain language.
• Revisit them regularly. A great time to review a JD is during their performance review. When evaluating, ask questions like:

1. What’s this employee’s purpose?
2. What has changed?
3. Are these accountabilities still relevant? 
4. What are their goals? 
5. Can we add anything to help the employee develop new skills?

• Consider advancements in technology. Has the organisation introduced any new technology or software that might have changed a person’s role? Account for this in your review.
• Omit irrelevant inclusions. Do they need to be highly proficient in spoken and written English? Do they really need 10 years’ experience? Only include the most relevant accountabilities. 

Move away from prescription 

An exhaustive list that tries to stipulate everything an employee could ever do in the role will likely hold an employee back, says Pritchard. 

“But ultimately, I’d hate to think that a document would limit someone from moving beyond the scope of their role if they want it to.” 

Pritchard believes leadership will make all the difference between whether an employee feels compelled to stay in their lane, or whether they feel empowered to develop and gain new skills. 

“The job description provides clarity around the parameters of the role and what success looks like. If you’re meeting those expectations, a great manager will find opportunities to help them develop and expand their skill set.” 

The post Do we need to reimagine job descriptions for the future of work? appeared first on HRM online.

A recent survey of over 2000 Australian employees conducted by Deloitte and Swinburne Edge found that nearly four in five (78 per cent) of workers who can work remotely would prefer to work hybrid or from home, and around two in three (67 per cent) would forgo a pay rise for more flexibility. 

Better work-life balance, less commuting, improved mental health and more physical activity were among the most common benefits of flexible working cited by the survey respondents.

Dr Damian West CPHR, Deputy Director-General of Workforce Capability, Governance, Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations at the Chief Ministers Directorate, spoke with HRM about how the public sector has been adapting to the new world of work and the progress that still needs to be made.

Wellbeing in the new world of work

While the fact that most employees would swap a pay rise for a flexible work arrangement may be surprising to some, perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that wellbeing was on a par with remuneration in the ranking of employee priorities revealed by Deloitte’s research. Pay and wellbeing shared the top spot on the list, with both factors considered highly important by 93 per cent of survey respondents.

Although it’s clear that employees associate flexible work arrangements with increased wellbeing, this poses a challenge for employers, since remote work also makes it considerably more difficult for them to monitor and tend to the health and safety of their people.

To try and bridge this gap, the public service has equipped employees with a swathe of resources to help them create a physically and psychologically safe workspace for themselves, says West. 

“We have been using tools to help people think about how to set up a home office and identify things they should be considering, such as techniques to ensure their own wellbeing, managing screen time and disconnecting from work.”

As well as provisions to help manage mental health, public sector employees also have access to resources such as virtual physio and virtual home office assessments to support their physical wellbeing, he adds.

A culture of trust

When crafting new policies and procedures around managing flexible workers, some organisations rush to implement monitoring software or site blockers to ensure that remote employees are actively performing their roles. 

However, West says going overboard with such measures can make employees feel micromanaged or worse, distrusted. They also often don’t add much value when considering the types of outcomes that we are seeking to achieve, says West.

“We’ve been very clear from a philosophical point of view that we focus our intention on the 95 per cent of the workforce that are engaged and committed to doing the right thing, rather than design a system that is focused on the small percentage of our workforce who are not. 

“If we empower and trust our employees and give them autonomy, they will reward us by performing really well.”

Excessively monitoring employees during work hours also undermines another key aspect of flexibility: while employees want more autonomy over where they work, they also want more say in when they work. 

Being open to flexible hours as well as remote work is a key step forward for inclusivity, says West, particularly when it comes to fostering greater participation and addressing gender imbalances that impact the workplace. 

“If we’re saying we’re prepared to acknowledge the other calls on [employees’] time throughout the day, and that as long as the job is being done, we’re flexible about how they’re achieving it, that provides an opportunity for more participation in the workforce, particularly from women.”

This sentiment is echoed in Deloitte’s research, which showed that female flexible workers were more likely than men to choose home as their ideal location (41 per cent versus 28 per cent) and less likely to choose the workplace (14 per cent versus 21 per cent).

Looking to the future

While organisations in both the public and private sectors have already taken huge steps to accommodate their employees’ desire for flexible work, there is still progress to be made in designing flexible work to bring the maximum benefit to both employers and employees.

“One of the things [employers] should do now is think about how we actually build these concepts into the enterprise agreements and the legal frameworks that guide our employment offering,” says West.

Another factor that leaders must not overlook is the importance of adapting learning and development initiatives, particularly for management, to suit the new operating model and  landscape.  

“If we empower and trust our employees and give them autonomy, they will reward us by performing really well.” – Dr Damian West CPHR

“It’s important to realise that some of the flexible approaches to work and the things employees are demanding of us now as employers have made the life of a manager, supervisor or leader even more complicated and difficult. That’s a different skill set that we need to continue to foster, to be effective at communication and engagement.”

By taking further steps to embrace flexible work, he says, public sector employers can not only accommodate the preferences of their employees, but also arm themselves with another weapon against the continuing skills shortage.

“Certainly for the public sector, particularly for many state governments, there’s always been a tension about where people are working; many state governments retain rules or directions that you have to permanently live in the state where you work. Particularly in skilled roles, where there’s a massive war for talent, it’s a very short-sighted view. 

“If someone can contribute really well to your organisation and they are the best candidate, then where they are based should be a second or third order question. Because the contribution they can make to your organisation has to be the thing that is front and centre in your mind.”

Want to hear more from West and other experts on the government’s future with flexible work? Book your spot at the webinar on the 18th November.

The post The future of flexible work in the public sector appeared first on HRM online.

When a company begins to focus on a new priority – in today’s climate this might be mental health, diversity or sustainability – the emergence of new job titles tends to follow soon after.

Here are four emerging job titles we might see cropping up more and more in the coming years.

1. Chief Happiness Officer

A role solely dedicated to improving employees’ happiness sounds great in theory, but whether or not it’s a useful addition to a company depends on the purpose, structure and expectations of the role, says Clements.

“In many cases Chief Happiness Officer or Chief Heart Officer (CHO) roles are simply a rebrand of traditional HR roles in areas such as employee experience or health and wellbeing,” says Clements.

Importantly, despite what the title implies, employers should be wary that the CHO isn’t solely geared towards the pursuit of happiness for all employees.

“We have to be careful that these roles are not creating a culture of unrealistic positiveness but rather continue to be structured around best-practice frameworks that focus on identifying and addressing psychosocial risks, supporting employee wellbeing and creating psychologically safe team cultures.”

Although Rebecca Houghton, CEO of BoldHR, hasn’t personally encountered many organisations with a Chief Happiness Officer, she’s a strong proponent of the idea.

“There’s a strong culture and engagement piece to the role, and it could improve inclusion and diversity in the company,” says Houghton. 

This is particularly true if the CHO establishes initiatives to support vulnerable groups in the workplace, such as migrants or single parents.

She also thinks while Chief Mental Health Officers and Chief Wellness Officers might take root in larger organisations, it’s smaller companies that may be more likely to appoint a CHO.

2. Chief Mental Health Officer

In response to increasing mental health concerns and greater emphasis placed on managing psychosocial risks in the workplace, many organisations have established a new position: the Chief Mental Health Officer (CMHO).

Rachel Clements, co-founder and Director of Psychological Services at the Centre for Corporate Health, says creating a role around mental health is indicative of how “organisations are putting mental health and staff wellbeing front and centre”.

“This is a fairly new space for organiastions. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve seen businesses start to appoint roles such as the CMHO.”

One such business is Commonwealth Bank, which appointed organisational psychologist Dr Laura Kirby to the position in January 2021.

Kirby says her role straddles two key areas.

“One is around how we support people’s mental health, particularly in the midst of COVID-19, and the other is around enhancing systems, making the workplace safe and healthy from a psychological perspective.”

To address the first point, Kirby and the wellbeing team at Commonwealth Bank have provided holistic wellbeing support for employees during lockdown and when working from home.

“We’ve supported teams to have good practices when working from home and have given them strategies for psychological detachment so they can maintain clear work-life boundaries.”

On the second point, Kirby has embedded a psychosocial safety framework and risk management system within the company’s broader health and safety model.

This has entailed evaluating work design, the structure of roles, managers’ expectations and mitigating the risk of psychological harm for certain positions, such as customer-facing roles that may expose employees to emotionally challenging situations.

All aspects of Kirby’s role are geared towards making an impact on an organisation-wide and systemic level.

“While you could have an entire role dedicated to individual case management, it won’t make a difference to the structure or system of work that could be causing the issue in the first place.

“If we create a healthy and thriving work environment for people in the first place, we limit the number of people who then end up feeling unwell. It’s a more preventative focus that identifies the work practices and looks for opportunities to improve upon those so people are much healthier and happier.”

Do you have experience recruiting for one of these new job titles? Or want to hear from others who do? Join the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge today, exclusive to AHRI members, to discuss topical issues in the world of work.

3. Chief Community Officer

Keeping culture alive in a hybrid world is now leaders’ number one concern, according to Gartner’s latest research into hybrid cultures.

Speaking at AHRI’s Convention last month, Aaron McEwan FAHRI, Vice President of Research and Advisory at Gartner, said: “Leaders aren’t asking me about productivity, interestingly enough, because every measure we get is showing us that productivity and performance have been [steady] – it’s starting to decline a little bit now, but there are different reasons for that… But everyone is petrified they’re going to lose their culture.”

[You can read more about the current state of workplace culture in HRM’s wrap-up of the Convention].

Introducing a Chief Community Officer (CCO) to your ranks might help companies to facilitate connections between employees and maintain a strong culture in increasingly dispersed workforces.

“It’s proving to be  hard to rebuild connection at a distance, and it’s going to take an expert in behavioural psychology to work through how to make this work,” says Houghton.

“If we’re going to stay this physically disconnected, how do we rebuild our digital relationships in such a way to be as robust, but totally different, to what they were before?”

But CCOs won’t be able to create a supportive culture of psychological safety on their own.

“Building a sense of community and psychological safety within an organisation and its various teams heavily relies on the style of leadership exhibited by its senior leaders,” says Clements.

“The biggest predictive factor of an employee’s wellbeing in the workplace is based on the quality of the relationship they have with their direct manager… As well as Chief Community Officers, building the capabilities of an organisation’s leaders so they exhibit a supportive leadership style is a wise investment.”

Other employers might view the role of CCO as having a more outward-looking focus.

They might build and strengthen relationships with a company’s external stakeholders, including customers, suppliers and the wider public.

“The role could look more holistically at how to minimise the separation between the employee and customer,” says Houghton. “In a super fast-paced environment, and with more online communities, the CCO could help to connect an increasingly disparate group of people.

“Ultimately, it’s about connecting everyone: customers, candidates, employees and the community.” 

4. Chief Sustainability Officer

People expect companies to not only support environmental causes, but to also walk the talk. There’s increasing scrutiny on companies’ emissions and expectation that they take steps towards a more sustainable future.

Does this mean we might be seeing more companies appointing Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO)?

A 2022 report by Deloitte and the Institute of International Finance suggests we might.

The companies’ research found that less than 15 per cent of survey respondents had a CSO in place at their workplace. Nearly half had a Head of Sustainability or equivalent position, and 12 per cent reported having a Head of ESG. 

“We expect the role of the CSO to gain prominence over the next two years,” the report reads. 

“CSOs see their skill set as primarily linked to strategy, influencing, raising awareness and making the repercussions of ESG concerns tangible for the people in their business.”

Whether they’re named a Sustainability Manager, Chief Green Officer, Director of Sustainable Design or another title altogether, dedicated environment roles will certainly be one to keep a close eye on.

These are just four examples of titles we could see emerging over the coming years. There are plenty others that will reflect the changing nature of work, such as the Chief Belonging Officer, the Head of Hybrid Effectiveness or Chief Metaverse Lead. What are some roles that you predict we’ll start seeing more of? Let us know in the comments section.

The post Four emerging job titles that could crop up in your workplace appeared first on HRM online.

My team and I built this glossary to help expand our understanding of how the future of work was playing out in the present. It’s a collection of lesser-known words and phrases that reflect the way in which work is changing. 

These are terms that elevate some of the fundamental issues experienced by work’s most important contributors – workers.

Some terms may have multiple meanings or interpretations, and some terms we’ve created ourselves to capture yet-to-be-named emerging phenomena. The semantics and selections will no doubt be debated, but that’s not the conversation that’s intended here. 

The more important takeaways come from the meaning derived from the entire assemblage of terms and the ‘shadow’ future of work story they are hinting at.

In part, the glossary is a subtle push-back against the industrial, technocentric and corporate ‘future of work’ sameness. It asks us to turn and face the strange future of work and to think more critically about whether these are the futures of work we want. 

This is an edited version of Browne’s glossary. You can view the full version here.

A glossary for a new world of work

Algorithmic management

The use of computer algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques to remotely manage, track and govern workers. In algorithmic management practices, workers interact with a computer system which enables the automation or semi-automation of management decisions, such as performance evaluations, productivity and terminations.¹

Boreout

A psychological disorder that causes mental and physical illness (similar to burnout) as a result of a sustained ‘mental under-load’ in the workplace. Boreout typically consists of three elements: boredom, lack of challenge and lack of interest.²

Read HRM’s article on managing boreout.

Bossware
Software that overtly gathers employee device information beyond what is often necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce. Bossware allows employers to track data such as working time, mouse clicks, keystrokes, location, device screen shots and web camera pictures.³ 

Digital leash

The compulsion and/or expectation workers feel to answer calls, texts, emails, etc, even if they are unwell, working longer than required or responding to messages outside of regular office hours (also known as ‘digital presenteeism’).⁴ 

Epiphany quitting

Workers who abruptly quit their jobs as a result of a re-evaluation of personal and professional fulfilment and/or the desire for better life balance.⁵

Ghost work

Invisible working conditions that devalue or hide the human labour that is powering AI and AI-enabled consumer experiences. Ghost work includes high-tech and on-demand tasks such as flagging and removing inappropriate content, proofreading, captioning photos and labelling data to feed algorithms.⁵

Job atomisation

The unbundling of secure jobs into task fragments that can then be outsourced to the on-demand economy at a lower cost.

Leaveism

The utilisation of flexitime, annual leave, rostered days off, etc, by employees to complete work that can’t be completed in normal working hours.⁶

Read HRM’s article on managing leaveism.

Micro work/jobs

A subcategory of ‘gig work’ where independent contractors engage in task-based work accessed via labour platforms. Micro-work typically includes a series of small outsourced tasks (15 minutes to a few hours) which together comprise a large unified project completed by a number of independent contractors sourced via labour platforms.7

N.E.E.T

An acronym used to classify the share of youth who are currently ‘not in employment, education or training’.⁸

The precariat

A class of workers experiencing insecure work. Precariats move in and out of precarious work, have insecure incomes and, apart from receiving immediate payment for their labour, do not receive other social guarantees (e.g. superannuation or sick leave).9

Survival jobs

A temporary job that is considered ‘low-skilled’ and ‘low-paid’. Survival jobs are often unrelated to a worker’s profession and are only taken as a last resort to avoid financial turmoil, bankruptcy or other hardship.10

Surveillance reputations

The beliefs or opinions held by workers on the levels of surveillance undertaken by organisations. Organisations with more pervasive surveillance are likely to have a poor surveillance reputation.

Total work

The process by which people are transformed into workers and nothing else. Work becomes ‘total’ when it centres life; when leisure, festivity and play become work; and when humans believe they were born only to work. Life before ‘total work’ disappears completely from someone’s memory.¹¹

Unretirement

Retirees (or those close to retiring) re-entering the workforce as a result of a number of factors, such as: increasing economic insecurity, healthcare costs, increasing life expectancy and social isolation.¹²

Workism 

The belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centrepiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose. 

Read HRM’s article on the dangers of enmeshment.

Zero-hour contracts

An employment contract which does not oblige the employer to provide or guarantee the employee a minimum number of hours, but requires the employee to be on call in the event that work becomes available.¹³

Reanna Browne is the founder and Principal Futurist at Work Futures and a member of AHRI’s Future of Work Advisory Panel. This article first appeared in the August 2022 edition of HRM magazine.

Footnotes 

1. Mateescu, J & Nguyen, A. (2019). Algorithmic Management in the Workplace.

2.Urban Dictionary. (2018). Boreout. Wikipedia. (2022). Boreout.

3. Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2020). Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers.

4. Inspiring Workplaces (2018) Are we on a digital leash? What are the solutions?

5. Gray & Suri. (2019). Ghost Work.

6. Hesketh & Cooper. (2014). Leaveism at Work.

7. The Engine room. (n.d.). Microtasking.

8. ILO. (2015). What does NEETs mean and why is the concept so easily misinterpreted?

9.Guy Standing. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.

10.Backstage. (2020). An actor’s guide to survival jobs.

11.Taggart. (2017). If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living?

12. BBC. (2019). Unretirement.

13. HarperCollins Publishers. (n.d.). Zero-hour contract.

The post HR’s future of work glossary: learn the words of work appeared first on HRM online.