Two years. The average length of a millennial work engagement may invoke accusations of disloyalty, but mobility and loyalty can coexist in the new future of work if companies are willing to rethink their employment offer from the ground up.
“Careers are no longer escalators, but portfolios of assignments,” says Jeff Schwartz, principal and strategic initiative leader at Deloitte Consulting. If a company can give a worker a series of challenging assignments, then they will stay. But expecting them to do the same thing for many years no longer works. “The unit of work becomes the assignment, rather than the career or position. What is most appealing to young workers today is an employment offer that invites them into any role in the division.”
Brett Walsh, global human capital leader at Deloitte Consulting, adds that the mantra in the old corporate model was up or out and workers did the same job for their whole career. “In certain industrial environments, technical ladders still exist, but more often than not, job families have sprouted new branches and companies are more accepting of people moving from one family to another. Instead of a ladder, careers have become a lattice.”
In this new work environment, Walsh argues, management’s traditional levers of pay, promotion and job security are being replaced by five new ones: movement, international opportunities, flexibility, the lattice (in which employees can move up, down or laterally) and reputation.
Equally dramatic changes in corporate learning are also required. Training defines the experience and culture of an organisation, but is shifting from a push to a pull model, Schwartz says. Now that career paths are less linear and more flexible, the responsibility to learn is shared between employees and companies. Every employee today needs to be their own chief learning officer, curating the knowledge and skills they need.
Walsh explains that there has been a marked increase in organisations wanting to create corporate universities, as technological innovation reduces the “half-life” of new skills to between 2.5 and five years. Hiring managers, meanwhile, are discovering that it is getting more expensive to recruit skilled people because there simply are not enough of them.
The solution is to re-skill internal talent. Traditionally, training was delivered through campuses to reinforce a sense of place and establish milestone experiences, but today most learning comes from outside the firm. “Those in corporate learning and HR have a responsibility to reframe the learning environment,” Schwartz suggests.
Automation acceleration
In the 1980s, movements in business process re-engineering urged companies to think about combining automation, robotics, augmented intelligence and different forms of talent to reimagine and redesign work. Gathering the HR, technology and business leaders who understood the granular work being done, forward-thinking companies sought to reimagine core business tasks with no bias toward human or automated elements. Only after automated processes had claimed all the tasks they could was labour brought in.
Jump forward 30 years and it is expected that between 50 and 75 per cent of jobs will have some part of their tasks automated in the next few years, Schwartz says. “Whether it involves physical or knowledge processing, if it can be automated, it will be.”
The question then becomes: what are the essential human elements and how are those combined into jobs? Schwartz believes traits such as creativity, empathy, nurturing, listening, management, influence and an ability to move in non-linear ways are all skills that cannot currently be automated. The key is then asking how machines can augment these human processes and decisions. “Understanding this dynamic is the key lens through which workers, particularly younger ones, should think about their career,” Schwartz says.
Hong Kong and China
The rate of workplace change varies by region. Hong Kong employers are moving faster than their mainland counterparts in terms of flexibility and adaptability, but it also depends on the industry, says Jungle Wong, Asia Pacific and China human capital leader at Deloitte Consulting. While the financial services and hospitality sectors are already investing in augmented intelligence and natural language tools, internal mobility in general remains underdeveloped in Hong Kong.
Wong adds that there is good awareness in Hong Kong of the future of work, but clear plans for how to remodel the workforce also remain underdeveloped as many HR departments lack the internal capability to prepare such plans. HR teams need the authority to pursue the opportunities at hand, as well as the courage to pursue explore unfamiliar territory.
In China, Wong says, the workforce contains more millennials than Gen X and baby boomers because of the semi-retirement of workers in traditional industries. These younger workers are more adaptable and accepting of the role of robotics, augmented intelligence and automation. “As long as they are willing to learn quickly, their prospects are stronger,” Wong says.
Chinese businesses are also learning quickly. This is shown by an increase in programmes addressing areas such as women’s career support, virtual working arrangements to counter poor air quality in cities, and “total compensation” assessment to help employees evaluate their current roles.
Across the broader Asia Pacific region, societal perspectives and public institutions create challenges felt across the broader working world, Schwartz says, explaining that there is often an industry, company and even departmental perspective on how each individual role fits into the greater whole.
Asian economies have shown in the last 30 years that they can build and create opportunities quickly, but the challenge for the next decade is to keep creating and building, only in new and different ways. Asian workers need to prepare to retool themselves every few years, while Asian hiring managers need to be aware that a candidate’s first degree is less important than whether they set themselves on the path of constant reinvention.
This article appeared in the Classified Post print edition as The future of work.
