Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

The Future of Jobs in the Age of Adaptability

Around 20 years ago, leaders started to ask me if nascent AI-based technologies would eliminate the need for human workers. My response then was the same as it is now: not quickly and not totally.

Nevertheless, human jobs are transforming at a rapid rate. According to a 2023 McKinsey report, in the period from 2019 to 2022, the labor market in the U.S. alone experienced 8.6 million occupational shifts. This is a 50% increase from the prior three-year period, and by 2030, an additional 12 million shifts are projected. McKinsey also estimated that 30% of all hours worked by humans today could be automated by 2030.

It might be simpler if the march toward an AI-driven future meant that all human workers would eventually lounge their lives away on cruise ships – depending on technology for their very existence as in the 2008 Pixar movie WALL-E. In reality, though, humans will continue to work as we always have. The work will just look different.

The exact manner in which human jobs are evolving is driven by organizational concerns around profit and productivity. As we shared in our 2024 Age of Adaptability trends report, companies seeking to boost flagging human productivity must focus on finding the right blend of people and technology. We can do this with a thoughtful approach to job redesign and how human work can best be distributed and evaluated in the near future.

Job Redesign

I briefly talked about job redesign in the first article in this series. Job redesign is the process of rearranging or replacing tasks to better align work with real-time conditions inside and outside the organization.

While leaders may be focusing a lot of attention on job redesign now, the need for it is not unprecedented. For example, the bookkeeper job, once essential for every organization no matter how small, was redesigned in the 1980s to reflect the widespread adoption of accounting software. Back then, if you were a bookkeeper who wanted to remain gainfully employed, you had to determine how to add value beyond the software’s capabilities.

To be fair, job redesign is a more complex proposition today because the onslaught of AI-based technologies in our workplaces is impacting a larger number of jobs. But the transition shouldn’t be overwhelming, as the progression to more complete AI integration is occurring more slowly than most people think. Despite the excitement around generative AI, for instance, practical use cases are still limited. Industry analysts at Gartner even predict that in the next few years, we are likely to fall into a “trough of disillusionment” regarding what AI-based partners can do and what they can’t.

Many organizations have already learned the hard way that strategic job redesign does not involve blunt force – or bringing in a new piece of automation or an AI-based software program and letting go of all of the human employees related to that function. The most effective job redesign initiatives assign smart technology components to handle straightforward, repetitive tasks while human employees remain to provide essential oversight.

Firms like Accenture have already quantified how this shakes out. According to a recent analysis on the impact of generative AI, a current human customer service role can be broken into 13 distinct tasks. Of those 13 component tasks, four must still be fully performed by humans, four could be fully automated, and five involve human and machine partnership. Although Accenture didn’t say this, I’ll point out that the five partnered tasks require substantially more human skill than the four transactional tasks technology is replacing.

For the rest of this article, check out the ManpowerGroup Global Insights blog.

The Future of Skills in the Age of Adaptability

In ManpowerGroup’s 2024 Age of Adaptability trend report, we shared how current demographic shifts are exacerbating labor shortages. Specifically, by 2030, members of Generation Z (born 1996-2012) will compose 58% of the workforce and a majority of the large baby boom generation will have retired.

The resulting knowledge deficit means it’s paramount to forecast the future of skills and use this understanding to fill gaps as efficiently as possible. However, for all of the talk about skills-based organizations – which deconstruct traditional roles, break them down into component parts, and then hire people to handle each part – the progress toward this shift in protocol isn’t as rapid as some would prefer. Between now and 2030, the evolution to a true skills focus will be gradual, and not as simple as merely declaring yourself a skills-based organization.

In this piece, we’ll explore how in the near future, the composition and acquisition of an in-demand, workforce-wide skills portfolio can move organizations toward the goal of a skills-based organization.

Skill Composition

The future of skills is complex and rapidly evolving. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report, 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted within five years.

But what skills will be most essential in a world of global, distributed, and automated work, where more surprises are likely around the corner? WEF’s 2023 research found that the hottest skills from an organizational perspective include cognitive and analytical thinking, creative thinking, self-efficacy (resilience, flexibility, and learning agility), curiosity, empathy, social influence, and quality control.

It’s notable that technical AI and big data skills ranked of lower importance than all of these. Why is this the case when AI-related skills are the third highest priority in company training strategies from now until 2027 (nine percent), and the top training priority for companies with more than 50,000 employees?

Leaders may be realizing that it’s not the hard AI and automation skills themselves that are most critical, but the ability to have an effective partner orientation toward working with smart machines. In other words, honing our human “soft” skills is the best way to differentiate our capabilities from AI’s capabilities and provide competent and ethical oversight to the technological “employees” in our workplaces.

In a 2024 LinkedIn Pulse article, systems engineer Arif Sheikh agreed with this take, suggesting that as AI-based technologies automate a greater number of tasks, the value of traditional human skills might at first seem to diminish. But this perspective overlooks the foundational role such skills play in personal development, social interaction, and professional experience.

Sheikh suggested that individuals who learn to navigate social interactions without social media before relying on these platforms will have better outcomes. “This highlights the importance of direct, human connection – a nuance that AI, for all its sophistication, cannot fully replicate,” he said.

In any case, it’s likely that by 2030, the most marketable employees will be those whose skillsets are a blend of job-specific competencies and those that make it possible to work successfully with machines and other humans in a variety of contexts. This means that in terms of training dollars, we might want to put the horse before the cart.

We should also note that within the next ten years, a majority of jobs will have a green component, which may require the development of new skills such as carbon footprinting, sustainability consulting, and climate data analysis across a large swath of industries and functions.

For the rest of this piece, please visit the Manpower Group Global Insights blog.

 

The Future of AI in the Age of Adaptability

For the next several months, I'm going to be featuring a "Future of..." series I'm working on with ManpowerGroup as part of its new Global Insights team.

Within the next five years, we anticipate that the democratization of AI-based technology will lead to greater accessibility across the organization and that employees at all levels will be empowered to integrate AI into relevant job tasks as they see fit. 

As we discussed in “The Age of Adaptability” report, businesses anticipate a 23% churn in jobs over the next five years between the creation of new roles and the reduction of others. But, because more cross-industry examples will emerge detailing how best to deploy AI, organizations won’t be as mystified by its presence and impact on the workforce. AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good!

One might imagine that a futurist has extreme ideas about the future of AI. And while it’s true that I believe AI-based technologies will be true partners in work moving forward and will play a role in the development of the metaverse and immersive work environments that Manpower recently researched, I don’t think the AI of science fiction is likely to come to fruition anytime soon. We are still far from achieving what’s called artificial general intelligence, which is a form of AI that thinks and creates on its own, essentially surpassing human abilities in all types of work.

Since AI-based technologies are not in a position to take over all human jobs as is still feared, this piece will focus on the technologies that are available now – namely generative AI applications and talent intelligence applications – and the role they can realistically play in the workforce in the coming years.

Generative AI Has Legs, But It’s Not the End

Generative AI is capable of generating text, images, or other media by learning the patterns and structure of input training data and then generating new data that has similar characteristics. A workforce-related example involves the development of sophisticated digital assistants that can use an existing arsenal of HR information to respond more accurately to online employee queries, even if they weren’t trained on those exact questions.

The technology has been introduced to the market at a very rapid pace. ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, and then shortly thereafter, OpenAI released a large language model called GPT-4 that was a measurable improvement over the original ChatGPT. Microsoft, Google, and other big technology players are quickly getting in on the action. 

But generative AI is not necessarily the massive breakthrough people think it is. Its release is more the result of a logical linear progression, as we’ve had smart chatbots for quite some time now. Although there has been significant media interest in ChatGPT, it’s not substantially different from what came before. In its current state, generative AI still requires a great deal of human oversight and regulation, and the majority of organizations are just figuring out how to use it effectively for various business purposes. So, if you haven’t cracked the code yet, you shouldn’t lose sleep over it. You’re not behind.

For the rest of this piece, head over to the ManpowerGroup's Global Insights blog.

Don't Be Intimidated by Job Redesign

The need for job redesign is on most HR leaders’ radars in 2024. But in most organizations, it still seems to be more of a talking point than a reality. However, given that Dayforce’s 14^th Annual Pulse of Talent survey found that 37% of respondents said there is a different role with their current employer that better matches their skillset, the process seems ripe with opportunity.

Job redesign is the process of rearranging or replacing tasks to better align work with evolving conditions both inside and outside the organization. And it’s really nothing new. For example, the telegraphist or telegraph operator was one of the first tech-related jobs of the 19^th century. The telegraphist used the most modern equipment available at the time to send and receive Morse code via radio and telephone.

In the 1970s, the telegraph was mostly replaced by telex, a communications network to send text-based messages. So, if you were a telegraphist and you wanted to remain gainfully employed, you had to adapt and learn telex. In other words, the telegraphist job was redesigned with a lot of the same skills and responsibilities – minus the telegraph.

Job redesign may feel more complex and overwhelming today because the pace of technology is faster and has a broader impact in terms of affected occupations. In particular, the arrival of generative AI has leaders wondering exactly how to execute job redesign to incorporate the benefits of this technology.

Before we get into how to make the process more turnkey, let’s address what job redesign is NOT. For example, job redesign is not bringing in a new piece of automation and letting go of all the human employees previously involved in the job targeted by the automation. When integration of automation is done well, the technology takes over more straightforward, repetitive tasks while human employees provide the necessary strategic input, creativity, judgment, and oversight. And that’s where job redesign comes in.

Three practical steps for job redesign
In most knowledge-driven and in many frontline worker occupations, shifting business requirements and emerging technologies mean that employees need new skillsets. Therefore, the process of job redesign involves understanding the individual tasks that encompass the work being done, and then matching or training for skills necessary for those tasks.

Step one: Engage in task analysis

Target a small category of jobs to start, and then assemble a diverse group of stakeholders from across the organization. Make sure this group includes people across levels, and not just leadership, so you have representation from those who are close to the work.

Document the critical tasks currently associated with each job, and note where there are redundancies, areas where technology could be efficiently deployed, and places where you can build a job to become more flexible in structure and environment. You can also rank your tasks according to importance, how often they are performed, how long they take, and the skills required or how people learn how to do each task.

Step two: Create new job titles and descriptions

Next, based on your analysis, group related tasks into new job buckets. With smart technology now helping in new ways with some tasks, there may be room to remove or combine previous jobs. This may involve creating new “super jobs” that cross departmental lines. For example, the new job of people analytics manager might be technically housed in HR but include tasks traditionally housed in IT such as selecting appropriate technology applications, ensuring data quality, and communicating data-related insights to leaders and other constituents.

You can also use this exercise as an opportunity to standardize jobs titles and descriptions across the organization.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the Dayforce blog.

Building Culture with a Distributed Workforce

As we close out 2023, the post-pandemic return-to-office question seems to have resolved. Most organizations have embraced a hybrid model, mandating that non-frontline employees work onsite between one and three days per week. However, this structure doesn’t necessarily equate to a positive work culture that employees are reluctant to leave.

According to the forthcoming Dayforce 2024 Pulse of Talent research, nearly 70% of employees are either looking for a new job or would leave their current organizations if the right opportunity came along. Thirty-eight percent said they had issues achieving their performance goals in the last year, with the main reason being too large of a workload. Only eight percent said their employer is giving them everything they need to be productive.

It's clear that despite having more flexibility than ever before, employees are not as satisfied as they could be. And this does not bode well for a business climate that will continue to be plagued by labor and skills shortages.

Understanding how to build a strong culture in a distributed work environment, a task that few attempted before the pandemic, has now become an organizational imperative. The following five strategies infused with the right employee experience technology may prove useful as you navigate this new terrain.

Conduct ongoing employee needs assessments.

The move to permanent distributed work requires a culture shift in all organizations, but instead of viewing this as an insurmountable task, leaders should look at it as a valuable opportunity to understand the unique requirements of all your employees and address concerns impacting specific groups.

For example, caregivers may report that office commutes are a hardship, while employees who are underrepresented minorities may experience greater bias and more microaggressions in an in-person office environment. Leaders should know about these issues before they result in quiet or actual quitting.

Employee pulse taking doesn’t have to be a ton of work. You can automate an employee experience platform to survey your employees on a regular cadence and determine what they need and want as well as general workplace sentiment.

You can also leverage an employee experience platform to create a real-time, two-way path to more in-depth dialogue and feedback with senior leaders and HR representatives. Once upon a time, the flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization might have been more of a trickle, and c-suite communication may have lacked transparency, vision, and purpose. When an organization is empowered by employee experience technology, this no longer has to be the case.

Reimagine office space as a destination.

Since employees are in the office less frequently and often have a choice whether to be there on a given day, leaders must make attendance worth their while. Facilities like onsite daycare, a gym, and open, casual lounges to support informal interaction are great-to-haves, but if your budget doesn’t allow for such things, offering a space employees want to visit could be as simple as providing extra time with leaders via scheduled and unscheduled office events. It’s also okay to spend a little money on offsite gatherings as the rapport-building that takes place at these is often priceless.

Finally, if your online employee experience is immersive enough, it will complement the -person experience beautifully. Used to market and generate excitement about upcoming events at the office and bring your employees’ great work to life, these platforms can add depth and creativity to your in-person culture and be a fun destination in their own right.

Watch out for proximity bias.

A Prezi survey found that over 66% of hybrid workers feel that workplaces favor employees who are together in a physical office. Additionally, according to my own research, a majority of employees feel they are not as effective when communicating via videoconference. Leaders can remedy this issue by restructuring meetings, revamping performance expectations to focus on output, and ensuring there is a fair mix of in-person and online platforms to network and show off one’s skills.

An employee experience platform can also assist with combatting proximity bias. Select technology that can highlight individual employee profiles on the manager’s home page so everyone on the team – remote and non-remote – is front and center. Managers can also be offered the option to easily develop and send targeted employee communication that calls attention to each direct report’s personal and professional development.

Offer assistance specific to distributed work challenges.

Always-on employees require easy access to systems that allow them to complete work wherever they are, and “hoteling” at the office should be a seamless, non-chaotic experience. Match your in-office policy with more flexible benefits for taking time off when needed, and coordinate team office time so your employees reap the full benefits of in-person collaboration and aren’t simply sitting in an empty cubicle farm alone.

A distributed work environment in a constantly changing business climate also requires your HR information delivery to be comprehensive and on point. Consider an employee experience platform with mobile and device agnostic capabilities, which can customize content for particular teams and roles, and help employees find what they need through intelligent search.

An AI-enabled platform has the additional benefit of screening incoming HR issues and quickly routing them to the correct person, which is essential when leaders cannot guarantee that an employee who walks down the hall to HR will be able to speak to a live human.

When your people are running at a million miles an hour and spread out all over the country or world, it is unfortunately easy to lose sight of what makes your organization a special place to work. While a distributed work environment requires leaders to put more conscious effort into culture, ultimately this renewed focus is probably for the best!

This article was originally published on Ceridian.com.

 

A New Era in Tech-Based Recruitment

Communicating with the passive candidates whose email addresses you’ve stored in your CRM isn’t a new idea. Taking a page from the marketing team’s playbook and segmenting those candidates into groups based on a common qualifier (location, career stage, etc.) isn’t necessarily new either.

What has changed in recruitment segmentation, however, is the power of technology to help talent professionals do it more effectively. First of all, since recruitment segmentation came onto the talent acquisition scene as a popular strategy, the ability to automate email campaigns and customize their cadence to the individual has grown far more sophisticated. This is done by creating intelligent workflows.

According to IBM in a recent white paper, intelligent workflows are processes created by combining artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to enable organizations to segment candidate pools and decide how to modify the experience based on the candidates’ expectations and needs.

Organizations can use segmentation and automation hand in hand to design the recruitment experience based on candidate availability, work effort and experience and to provide different levels of service at the right point in time in the hiring process.

“Automation is especially crucial in terms of speed of engaging candidates — and keeping them engaged throughout the entire process,” wrote the IBM authors. “Even with higher unemployment rates, top candidates are in high demand, and competition to hire is fiercely competitive. Organizations that do not automate the process to the degree that it both entices and meets the candidates where they are are likely to see top recruits accept offers with competitors.”

The IBM authors pointed out that by deploying intelligent workflows, HR leaders can access real-time information that gives them a complete picture of their labor and talent pools. The strategy also allows for a more conscious approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). “Instead of having to wait for historical data and react to changes that have already occurred, recruiters can create and change experiences to open doors for candidates in ways previously not possible,” they said.

They cited the example of one company that shifted from a center-based employment model to a co-location model, which meant that 40% of their employees would work virtually. But many employees in contact center positions preferred working on site, and attrition occurred.

The company then used segmentation to determine talent availability and virtually manage the recruiting process through texting, self-scheduling and video interviews. Because so many of the organization’s employees did not want to make the move to remote work, the organization added a personalized touchpoint to encourage top talent to remain in the pipeline. As the organization examined the data and was informed of the shift in preferences, recruiters adjusted their approach to improving hiring success.

Of course, the best use of software-driven intelligent workflows incorporates human recruiter creativity. My favorite example is from a Recruiting Daily blogger, Christine Hampton. She has used intelligent workflows to segment and automate communications to passive candidates by, among other things, the rejection reason and recruitment event.

“If a candidate tells me they are on a contract till December, then slamming them with jobs right now will just frustrate them,” she wrote. “I note if the candidate is interested, and I set up a multi-channel cadence to stay in touch till their contract is complete.”

Christine explained that you can have separate segments for a myriad of rejection reasons – “just started a new job,” “happy in current role,” “can’t meet salary requirements,” etc. Not only does this approach align with future recruitment marketing campaign messaging, but it also saves time and creates a platform for starting personal conversations with candidates.

She added that if you’ve been recruiting for a while, you have likely attended many events. “You meet a candidate at a job fair, and they pique your interest, but the timing isn’t right. Three months later, an opportunity arises, and you think, ugh, what’s the name of that lady I met three months ago? She had red hair, about five feet five inches, and had glasses,” she said. “I am sure I’ve had a few missed connections in the past before the CRM existed.  Now I keep a folder for the specific event and date, and the candidate is easier to find (and communicate with).”

The bottom line is an ironic one. In this new era of recruitment segmentation, the best TA professionals will leverage technology to become even better at developing strong human relationships with their top candidates.

To learn more about how to leverage technology to build a stronger talent pipeline, check out my recent webinar with SilkRoad and ERE Media!

Trends Shaping Talent in 2023

Now that we’re into the second quarter of 2023, we can see that the talent acquisition (TA) world has a different tint. Despite the specter of recent layoffs and a looming recession, widespread skills shortages and a low overall labor force participation rate (LFPR, or the number of people in the workforce or actively looking for work) mean that organizations have had to deploy more innovative recruitment strategies.

These trends are reaching critical mass:

Internal Mobility

When it comes to lateral moves and internal opportunities, most organizations have always talked a good game. However, in practice, managers were more likely to hoard top talent. A poor infrastructure often restricted employee movement from one team to another, even if a manager was supportive. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders recognized the utility of redeploying workers from a slow area of the business into a more viable one. Since then, internal mobility has gained momentum.

This year is different due to the more widespread usage of technologies that drive internal mobility – namely, talent intelligence and predictive analytics. Rather than waiting for an individual employee to express interest in a given position, artificial intelligence allows leaders to proactively determine who within the existing workforce might have the right skill set to meet a current or near-future need or who could be easily trained to do so.

Executive Freelancers

The professional contract workforce has been growing for the last decade, but traditionally, freelancing was mostly limited to individual contributors in professions like writing, marketing and information technology. Because these workers usually completed work that could be more narrowly defined within the scope of a “project,” this made sense.

In 2023, however, pervasive contract work has expanded to other professions, including law and finance. We are increasingly seeing organizations using “interim” c-suite executives to take over for a leader who is on leave, to trial a new hire for fit, or to temporarily fill the position while they search for a permanent hire.

Unfortunately, it is still the case that organizations often treat contract workers as second-class citizens. But as they become a more significant percentage of the employee mix, TA leaders must leverage technology to nurture their relationships with this population and deliver the appropriate opportunities, training and communications.

For more trends, or to check out my recent webinar on talent intelligence, head on over to the SilkRoad blog.

The Future of Skills-Based Hiring

A few weeks ago, I attended a dinner where some colleagues emphatically insisted that the future of hiring could not and would not become skills-based until organizations stopped selecting people based on educational pedigree.

I pointed out that this is already happening. When I graduated from college in the late 1990s, you had to have a bachelor’s degree to get an entry-level professional position. It didn’t matter what skills you had. Today, depending on the role, if you can show skill competency, many organizations will overlook a lack of formal education.

The real question is: Have we moved the needle enough to combat ever-increasing global labor shortages? The answer may indeed be no, and that’s likely because there’s no sense of urgency. Many organizations still think the traditional mode of hiring – via resumes and follow-up, subjective interviewing – works just fine.

Let’s look at the problems with the status quo and how your organization can reap the rewards from a new approach to talent acquisition. Skills-based hiring will be the future, but there’s no time like the present to move in that direction.

The trouble with resume-based hiring

Resume-based hiring has a variety of flaws, namely that people are notoriously bad at self-assessment. A resume only captures a small amount of what a person has done and can do. And even if their skills are presented somewhat effectively, the hiring manager may be negatively influenced by factors like what font the candidate used and whether too many words are crammed onto the page.

Resumes (and LinkedIn profiles) also capture just one moment in time. This means that unless a hiring manager is reviewing information that was just sent to them by a candidate for a specific job, the hiring manager has no idea how current the information is.

Finally, resume-based hiring assumes that the organization wants to hire someone for a static role. The hiring manager wants to see straightforward evidence that the candidate has already performed this role because they aren’t expecting it to change much. But this is an outdated view of jobs. Today, employers must approach hiring with career flexibility in mind.

Organizations need to hire people with as deep of a skills bench as possible so that those employees can move fluidly through the organization as business requirements evolve. It's hard to assess how well someone will be able to do this from a resume.

But if an organization isn’t going to hire employees based on resumes and wants to get to the heart of the skills candidates possess today, how can this be achieved?

How to get started with skills-based hiring

I’ll readily admit that skills-based hiring is a difficult task without technology, and specifically, without artificial intelligence. But new talent intelligence platforms allow organizations to leverage career data points to paint a much broader picture of the skills a given individual might have. Talent intelligence tools also allow organizations to focus on the skills necessary for success within a particular career path, which might not always be what human hiring managers think they are.

This technology is especially good at uncovering skill adjacencies. Using skill adjacency, you can infer that a person who is good at skill A often excels at skill B. For example, we can infer that someone who is good at trigonometry is probably also good at geometry. Or we could guess that an experienced marketing professional could more quickly learn public relations.

The rise of the flexible career experience

 

For recruiters who are accustomed to resume-based hiring, this is a whole new world. For example, when a company is hiring for a customer service manager, a recruiter may search for candidates with resumes containing that exact title. Until recently, we simply have not had the tools to surface candidates who may have the right customer skills based on their life experiences instead of the positions they’ve held.

By focusing on workers’ capabilities rather than exact job titles, companies can build a broader pool of diverse, qualified candidates. This is an especially useful approach post-pandemic, given that most workers accumulated a wide variety of transferable skills inside and outside their main jobs in the areas of communication, problem solving, and adaptability. Skills like this support success in any role but may not be found on these candidates’ resumes, so it’s wise to have another way to account for and assess them.

In short, hiring based on educational pedigree and resumes is the past while hiring based on skills and potential is the future. And technology can go a long way to help us transform hiring practices – both culturally and operationally.

For the original article,  head over to the Ceridian website.

Announcing My New Book, DEEP TALENT (in Partnership with Eightfold AI)

The world is at a societal and technological inflection point. Business leaders cite talent recruitment and development as top challenges due to talent shortages, long hiring times, and high turnover. Meanwhile, key challenges for engagement and retention include managing employee expectations in line with post-pandemic norms.

We know from research and experience that nearly 50% of top talent leaves within two years, but also that most individuals would happily stay if given the right learning and growth opportunities. But as companies grow and gain thousands of employees, CEOs tend to lose track of their workforce’s abilities. They don’t know what skills employees have already acquired at work, what skills employees are well-equipped to master next, or how certain skills can be used to grow individual careers.

We talk often about the global skills gap, but what's really behind this? After all, the jobs are there and the people are there. It turns out there's not an HR or a workflow problem, but rather a matching problem between the best people and the most critical jobs you need to fill.

Having studied the talent gap for more than a decade, I was intrigued when I learned that there is technology available today that can solve this matching problem at scale. And that's why I was so excited to have the chance to write a book with Ashu and Kamal, who have a company, Eightfold, that makes one of the most promising talent intelligence platforms available today.

That book, DEEP TALENT: How to Transform Your Organization and Empower Your Employees Through AI, is now available everywhere books are sold. You'll leave us with an understanding of how to use talent intelligence and deep learning (AI) to assess skills adjacency (if you are good at skill A, you will also be good at skill B) to open non-traditional pathways for candidates who don’t have the experience doing the exact job needed but have every ounce of capability required. You'll also be able to determine your current organizational capabilities and future needs by taking into account a global dataset of standardized job descriptions and requirements.

Although the future is uncertain, we have reason to be optimistic, because talent intelligence has the potential to facilitate a meaningful career for everyone in the world. If we’re looking, talent intelligence will show us the work to take on next to feed our skills and passions and the careers we’ve always wanted but haven’t known how to find.

 

Is Employee Monitoring Right for You?

For about a decade, donning my workforce futurist hat has required ongoing dialogue about employee monitoring tools and their inevitable march toward greater sophistication. Often, the question has not been “Will we monitor our employees?” but “What will we monitor about our employees?”

Today, employee monitoring is routinely making headlines. Stories abound of employers using monitoring software to track the location of their staff, detect signs of quiet quitting, record how much time employees spend on different activities, and take screenshots of their devices – sometimes without employee consent.

In August, the New York Times reported that eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers are using software and other technologies to track the productivity of their employees.

According to a Capterra study reported in The Globe and Mail, 35% of Canadian employees work for a company that uses at least one monitoring tool that they know of. Another 18% weren’t sure if their employer was tracking them.

Canadian employees are divided on how they feel about being tracked. While the majority said using such tools did not affect how they work and did not impact workplace culture, 23% said it added stress and made work feel more “hostile.”

Overall, I’m not a fan of using software to track things like keystrokes, screenshots, and how much time employees are spending in various applications. If an employee wants to waste time on the clock, chances are they’re going to figure out a way to do it without their supervisor finding out. Presumably, you hired an adult to perform responsibilities as an adult would, so there’s no need to deploy technology as a babysitter.

As for efficiency, we need only look at individual and team performance metrics to determine if there’s an issue. Generally speaking, we shouldn’t care how long a specific task takes as long as quality work is executed consistently and delivered according to deadlines.

Instead of putting your technology dollars into monitoring workers and risking diminished morale and complaints over a loss of privacy, direct your investment toward cultivating a vibrant employee experience that fosters autonomy and trust. Such an experience should ideally include a mix of online and offline and human and technology-driven touchpoints.

In fact, you can use a purposeful lack of monitoring as an opportunity to survey your employees about their perspectives on company policies and start a dialogue with them more frequently about their individual goals and workload.

You might be thinking: Is any kind of employee monitoring appropriate? Given how vulnerable remote workers are to cybercrime, there may be a time and a place. Consider this: In a recent study, 80% of security and business leaders said their organizations are more exposed to risk because of remote work.

If you’re going to monitor employees for cybersecurity purposes, just remember that the goal should be protecting rather than calling out your people. And make sure you’re transparent with employees about why you’re collecting data and what you’ll be using it for.

For the original piece, head over to the Ceridian blog.