Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

How to Think Like a Futurist

Being a futurist means paying attention to new patterns or trends that are slowly percolating up through the market and/or society that have the potential to catch on in a major way. It's about coming up with possible scenarios for the future given these developments.For me, the ideal timeframe for futurist thinking is 5-10 years, because although no one can successfully predict the future, in this window you are more likely to be able to clearly see where things are going according to current operating models. Now, in 2019, I think anything beyond 10-15 years is reasonably futile because we bump up against the technological singularity (the time when machine intelligence becomes so sophisticated that it causes currently unfathomable changes to human existence).  

The simplest way to imagine and prepare for the future is to devise intelligent strategies that will serve your company well. You can do this by reading a ton and consulting experts in your field about what they're seeing. Futurists use tools that systematize these recommendations including scenario planning, environmental scanning, Delphi surveying, and individual software programs like Fibres, Futures Platform, and Athena.

Through your research, you will probably determine that financial markets and corporate structures are likely to change dramatically in the next few years. Blockchain will democratize, streamline, and improve the efficiency of ownership. Other potential developments in the financial sector include the increased use of algorithms to boost trading effectiveness, and the inclusion of machines and machine learning in individual and corporate financial planning.

For the rest of this piece, please see the Strategy Business site.

Announcing Workforce 2030: A New Podcast About Our Most Critical Workplace Disruptions

Today marks a very special occasion. Alongside my partner of 10 years, SilkRoad Technology, a global leader in strategic onboarding for workforce transformation, I am releasing a new podcast: Workforce 2030. The show features discussions with leading talent management experts, business leaders and industry disrupters on topics about the future of work and how the workforce will transform to meet the needs of 2030 and beyond.

In my tenure as a workforce futurist, I’ve spent a great deal of time on the microphone with fabulous hosts, and now the tables have been turned! The inaugural episode of Workforce 2030 features Robert Dvorak, CEO and President of SilkRoad. Bob was incredibly fun to talk to because he’s been working in the technology field for 30 years and as you can imagine, has witnessed an incredible amount of growth and change.

In our lively, 30-minute conversation, Bob and I addressed what makes a successful brand a successful employer, why establishing strong employee relationships must be a combination of high tech and high touch approaches, why there’s one human managerial skill that’s essential for effective onboarding, and how tech-based systems facilitate assimilation and prevent quit quits. You’ll also hear why Bob and I are against the word “retention” and why it’s now everyone’s job to be in continuous learning mode.

Whether you’re leading an organization or a team, whether you seek the secret sauce for your own successful career in the mid-21^st century workforce, or whether you read Humanity Works and are looking for a bit more guidance, this is the show for you. Our next several guests include Jennifer Fondrevay, Chief Humanity Officer, Day1 Ready™ M&A consultancy, Grant Zallis, CEO, Founder IAR Consulting, and Ravin Jesuthasan, Managing Director, Willis Towers Watson. If you have a question you’d like me to ask these knowledgeable experts, please send it along!

Tune in to the first episode or access the whole series.

Trends You Must Know About If You Produce Anything

When you produce basically anything, strong supply chain management is imperative. When a supply chain works well, the customer experiences better product quality and distribution. When it doesn't, productivity, revenue and customer satisfaction plunge.

Fortunately, business innovation in the supply chain management space has flourished over the last few years, mainly due to digital advances. Here's a look at 10 business innovations that are positively impacting the space.

1. Data Analytics

Big Data analytics improves in sophistication every year, allowing supply chain managers to derive knowledge and insights from huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data coming in via a variety of sources. Solutions powered by machine learning algorithms analyze data to predict machine malfunctions and transportation delays and help managers make more cost-effective decisions up and down the supply chain.

2. Transport Management Software

Known as TMS, these programs are a critical underpinning of supply chain management. They provide a logistics platform allowing supply chain managers to optimize fleet operations and efficiently execute the physical movement of goods. This business innovation is increasingly important as shipping costs and customer demand for faster delivery continue to rise. Using TMS, supply chain managers can better track inventory and materials across the supply chain in real time.

3. Radio Frequency Identification

RFID has been around for a few years now, but its integration into supply chain management has experienced stops and starts. This business innovation uses electronic fields to automatically identify, follow and track data like the temperature of objects that have attached RFID tags. The tags look like barcodes, and their implementation has recently become less cumbersome and expensive due to smart advances in sensor technology and increases in data processing speeds.

4. Geolocation

RFID isn't the only business innovation improving the tracking aspect of supply chain management. New geolocation solutions leverage low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks and are decreasing both the cost and the energy consumption associated with more traditional tracking. By securely connecting trackers and sensors to the cloud via the Internet of Things, supply chain managers can view and transmit data globally.

For the rest of the trends, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Modern Businesses: Local Versus Global

Not long ago, offshoring of goods and services was a foolproof way to keep costs down—if you could manage it. Now, however, due to changing markets, local sourcing is experiencing an upswing. Helped by Gabriele Rizzo, futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations, and Alexander Bird, CEO of micronutrient food manufacturer Kiss My Keto, let's look at the pros and cons of local versus global supply chains.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Local and Global Supply Chains

Since local supply chains are often smaller, local suppliers may require less of an initial investment and allow smaller orders, which results in lower stored inventory costs.

In some foreign countries, worker wages are increasing, so the gap in labor costs between local and global supply chain strategies is diminishing. For instance, according to Eurostat data released in the fall of 2018, wage growth in the eurozone reached its fastest rate for two years, accelerating in the second quarter of 2017.

Also, goods and services production is becoming more specialized and geared to local customers, and in such cases, there is often an advantage of being physically close to the buyer. These factors led global management consulting firm AlixPartners to report that 69 percent of the 106 U.S. and western European manufacturing firms that responded to their 2016 annual survey were considering moving production closer to their home bases.

But global supply chains have substantial benefits as well. Today's economy is unquestionably global and having only local operations may result in lost opportunities and stalled growth.

Also, depending on your industry—and especially if you are in manufacturing—you may face significant skills shortages in certain U.S. regions, but can readily find available labor in countries such as China and Mexico. Raw materials may also be less expensive in a foreign market, and global supply chains also allow businesses to take advantage of the innovation afforded by emerging markets.

That said, time lags, shipping delays and language and communication barriers associated with global supply chains may negatively impact a business's speed, agility and on-time delivery record.

Finally, political situations can sour quickly, so global supply chains in certain regions of the world may carry a higher risk of business disruption overall.

For more where this came from, check out the American Express Business site.

2019 Market Trends to Expect

The overall financial health of the global economy, as well as the resources we have available to make intelligent projections, will greatly impact business success in 2019. Let's have a look at two of the major market trends to expect this year.

Continuing Stock Market Volatility

We enter 2019 with the financial sector in a bear market. (A bear market is an economy in which security prices drop 20 percent or more and stay low for a long time period.)

The 2018 market was volatile and the stock market is currently in the correction process. The most critical factors relating to stock market volatility are trade policy and interest rates.

“The trade war can expand suddenly into multiple industries and cause spillover effects," says Juan Carlos Arancibia, markets editor for Investors Business Daily.

What does this mean for your business?

In the simplest terms, market trends indicate a sluggish economy—you should pay closer attention to your finances to avoid unnecessary losses. When it comes to investing, try to avoid having a knee-jerk reaction. If you can, stay focused on your long-term goals even if the pull to sell is strong.

On the customer spending side, if you are in the business of non-essential products and services, you can expect sales to decrease in a bear market. You may need to adjust your offering so that it's more in line with what customers need today.

Finally, it's a good idea to decrease your own expenses so that you don't need to borrow more money during this time. Due to rising interest rates, be very careful with new credit lines so that you don't get into an irreversible debt cycle.

Another of the critical market trends is trade policy. Keep an eye on new tariffs being issued by the U.S. government. A tariff is a tax on an import or export, and recently, we have seen new tariffs levied on goods coming from Canada, Mexico and the EU—not to mention China. These tariffs can increase costs, but you should balance how much of these costs you can safely pass on to your customers (i.e. through raised prices) without damaging your cash flow.

For more of what to expect this year, head on over to the American Express Business site.

Business Innovations of the Future

As a futurist, I often get asked to predict the business trends that organizations can afford to ignore, because, while they generate a lot of buzz, they are also likely to fizzle out. On the other hand, we must also pay attention to business innovations that are gathering such rapid strength that adoption is now essential. Let's look at a few.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a data structure that builds a digital ledger of transactions and shares it among a distributed network of computers. Using cryptography, each participant interacts with the ledger in a secure way without the need for a central authority. Bitcoin was the first app built using the platform in 2008, with a premise of sending digital payments between any two parties without the help of a financial institution. Bitcoin has now been joined by hundreds of other cryptocurrencies, and the model has moved out of financial services: organizations, employees, and customers are using it for all types of transactions.

Deep Learning

Deep learning (programming machines to mimic the actions of the human brain), is driving a whole new set of business innovations. It's the process of training computers to recognize patterns in data and then classify and categorize them as a human brain could. Together with complex algorithms, deep learning is already helping machines to participate in defining project scope, analyzing risks, developing budgets and allocating resources. It's catching on because it has massive implications. 

For the rest, have a look at the American Express Business site.

Key Findings from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey (Part II)

Last week, I shared some compelling results from the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Future of Jobs Survey. To recap, this research set out to represent the current strategies, projections and estimates of global business, with a focus on large multinational companies and more localized companies of significance due to their employee or revenue size.

Let’s examine some additional highlights from the report:

• Emerging in-demand roles: Among the range of established roles that are set to experience increasing demand in the period up to 2022 are Data Analysts and Scientists, Software and Applications Developers, and Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists, roles that are significantly based on and enhanced by the use of technology. Also expected to grow are roles that leverage distinctively ‘human' skills, such as Customer Service Workers, Sales and Marketing Professionals, Training and Development, People and Culture, and Organizational Development Specialists. There will also be a variety of roles related to understanding and leveraging the latest emerging technologies: AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Big Data Specialists, Process Automation Experts, Information Security Analysts, User Experience and Human-Machine Interaction Designers, Robotics Engineers, and Blockchain.

• Growing skills instability: Given the wave of new technologies and trends disrupting business models and the changing division of labor between workers and machines transforming current job profiles, the vast majority of employers surveyed for this report expect that, by 2022, the skills required to perform most jobs will have shifted Global average skills stability—the proportion of core skills required to perform a job that will remain the same—is expected to be about 58%, meaning an average shift of 42% in required workforce skills over the 2018–2022 period.
• A reskilling imperative: By 2022, no less than 54% of all employees will require significant re- and upskilling. Of these, about 35% are expected to require additional training of up to six months, 9% will require reskilling lasting six to 12 months, while 10% will require additional skills training of more than a year. Skills continuing to grow in prominence by 2022 include analytical thinking and innovation as well as active learning and learning strategies. Sharply increasing importance of skills such as technology design and programming highlights the growing demand for various forms of technology competency identified by employers surveyed for this report. Proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the 2022 skills equation, however, as ‘human’ skills such as creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation will likewise retain or increase their value, as will attention to detail, resilience, flexibility and complex problem-solving.
• Current strategies for addressing skills gaps: Companies highlight three future strategies to manage the skills gaps widened by the adoption of new technologies. They expect to hire wholly new permanent staff already possessing skills relevant to new technologies; seek to automate the work tasks concerned completely; and retrain existing employees. The likelihood of hiring new permanent staff with relevant skills is nearly twice the likelihood of strategic redundancies of staff lagging behind in new skills adoption. However, nearly a quarter of companies are undecided or unlikely to pursue the retraining of existing employees, and two-thirds expect workers to adapt and pick up skills in the course of their changing jobs. Between one-half and two-thirds are likely to turn to external contractors, temporary staff and freelancers to address their skills gaps.
• Insufficient reskilling and upskilling: Employers indicate that they are set to prioritize and focus their re- and upskilling efforts on employees currently performing high-value roles as a way of strengthening their enterprise’s strategic capacity, with 54% and 53% of companies, respectively, stating they intend to target employees in key roles and in frontline roles which will be using relevant new technologies. In addition, 41% of employers are set to focus their reskilling provision on high-performing employees while a much smaller proportion of 33% stated that they would prioritize at-risk employees in roles expected to be most affected by technological disruption.

Overall, said the World Economic Forum, the report’s findings suggest the need for a comprehensive ‘augmentation strategy’, an approach where businesses look to utilize the automation of some job tasks to complement and enhance their human workforces’ comparative strengths and ultimately to enable and empower employees to extend to their full potential. However, to unlock this positive vision, workers will need to have the appropriate skills enabling them to thrive in the workplace of the future and the ability to continue to retrain throughout their lives. Crafting a sound in-company lifelong learning system, investing in human capital and collaborating with other stakeholders on workforce strategy should thus be key business imperatives.  A mindset of agile learning will also be needed on the part of workers as they shift from the routines and limits of today’s jobs to new, previously unimagined futures.

Want to learn more about how you can prepare for the future of work? Check out the new book, Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future.

 

Key Findings from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey (Part I)

What is the future of jobs? The answer to that question depends on who you ask, and in what context. The World Economic Forum has its point of view, which it explored in The 2018 Future of Jobs Survey. This original research set out to represent the current strategies, projections and estimates of global business, with a focus on large multinational companies and more localized companies of significance due to their employee or revenue size.

The survey was distributed to relevant companies through extensive collaboration between the World Economic Forum and its constituents, amplified by regional survey partners. The survey collection process was conducted via an online questionnaire, with data collection spanning a nine-month period in 2018. In total, the report’s data set contains 313 unique responses by global companies, collectively representing more than 15 million employees in 12 industry clusters and 20 economies. This makes it one of the broadest reaching studies of its kind.

Some of the more compelling findings included:

• Drivers of change: Four specific technological advances—ubiquitous high-speed mobile internet; artificial intelligence; widespread adoption of big data analytics; and cloud technology—are set to dominate the 2018–2022 period as drivers positively affecting business growth. They are flanked by a range of socio-economic trends driving business opportunities in tandem with the spread of new technologies, such as national economic growth trajectories; expansion of education and the middle classes, in particular in developing economies; and the move towards a greener global economy through advances in new energy technologies.
• Accelerated technology adoption: By 2022, according to the stated investment intentions of companies surveyed for this report, 85% of respondents are likely or very likely to have expanded their adoption of user and entity big data analytics. Similarly, large proportions of companies are likely or very likely to have expanded their adoption of technologies such as the internet of things and app- and web-enabled markets, and to make extensive use of cloud computing. Machine learning and augmented and virtual reality are poised to likewise receive considerable business investment.
• Trends in robotization: While estimated use cases for humanoid robots appear to remain somewhat more limited over the 2018–2022 period under consideration in this report, collectively, a broader range of recent robotics technologies at or near commercialization—including stationary robots, non-humanoid land robots and fully automated aerial drones, in addition to machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence—are attracting significant business interest in adoption. Robot adoption rates diverge significantly across sectors, with 37% to 23% of companies planning this investment, depending on industry
• Changing geography of production, distribution and value chains: By 2022, 59% of employers surveyed for this report expect that they will have significantly modified how they produce and distribute by changing the composition of their value chain and nearly half expect to have modified their geographical base of operations. When determining job location decisions, companies overwhelmingly prioritize the availability of skilled local talent as their foremost consideration, with 74% of respondents providing this factor as their key consideration.
• Changing employment types: Nearly 50% of companies expect that automation will lead to some reduction in their full-time workforce by 2022, based on the job profiles of their employee base today. However, 38% of businesses surveyed expect to extend their workforce to new productivity-enhancing roles, and more than a quarter expect automation to lead to the creation of new roles in their In addition, businesses are set to expand their use of contractors doing task-specialized work, with many respondents highlighting their intention to engage workers in a more flexible manner, utilizing remote staffing beyond physical offices and decentralization of operations.
• A new human-machine frontier within existing tasks: Companies expect a significant shift on the frontier between humans and machines when it comes to existing work tasks between 2018 and In 2018, an average of 71% of total task hours across the 12 industries covered in the report are performed by humans, compared to 29% by machines. By 2022 this average is expected to have shifted to 58% task hours performed by humans and 42% by machines. In 2018, in terms of total working hours, no work task was yet estimated to be predominantly performed by a machine or an algorithm.
• A net positive outlook for jobs: About half of today’s core jobs—making up the bulk of employment across industries—will remain stable in the period up to One set of estimates indicates that 75 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines, while 133 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labor between humans, machines and algorithms. These estimates represent two parallel and interconnected fronts of change in workforce transformations: 1) large-scale decline in some roles as tasks within these roles become automated or redundant, and 2) large-scale growth in new products and services—and associated new tasks and jobs— generated by the adoption of new technologies and other socio-economic developments such as the rise of middle classes in emerging economies and demographic shifts.

Stay tuned for more highlights next week. In the meantime, want to learn more about how you can prepare for the future of work? Check out the new book, Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future.

 

Are You Strategic About Military Hiring?

Many organizations have prioritized the hiring of military veterans in recent years. This is commendable, as military hiring requires a different strategy than civilian hiring because veterans do not have exactly the same needs as traditional hires. For instance, they are often attracted by different things during the recruitment process, and sometimes respond better to alternative training and development approaches.

The Talent Activation, the Employee Experience, and Skill Development survey, conducted online within the United States by DeVry University on behalf of the Career Advisory Board in August 2018 examined how organizations are currently designing and executing specific employee experiences at the recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, and performance evaluation stages.

Survey respondents included 505 US-based individuals (53 percent male, 47 percent female) with full-time positions at the supervisor level or above, in companies with more than 500 employees (mean company size was large at 15,000). Our respondents’ primary job responsibilities include the hiring, development, and management of employees.

In parts of the survey, we looked specifically at military hiring and development practices. Specifically, we asked our respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: My company has implemented a successful military veteran hiring strategy. Sixty-four percent agreed, confirming that not only do such strategies exist, but also that they have been honed in a majority of organizations.

 We also asked the participants how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement: My company has implemented a comprehensive talent development program that capitalizes on the professional strengths military veterans bring to the workplace. Refreshingly, 67 percent agreed.  And, according to our respondents’ verbatim responses, material is often customized to resonate with veterans’ unique perspectives.

On the subject of the verbatim responses, the survey inquired about where respondents were focusing their thoughts and energies with respect to military veteran hiring and onboarding. Some of the initiatives they cited in the verbatims included:

• Hiring talent acquisition staff with military backgrounds
• Matching current employee veterans with new hires
• Engaging with Military Transition Centers
• Using regional military outplacement centers effectively
• Performing outreach to veteran groups in relevant locations
• Maintaining strong relationships with local VAs
• Holding veteran-specific job fairs
• Partnering with military recruiters
• Sourcing talent from military leaders who have commanded troops
• Participating in military-sponsored job events
• Offering interview and hiring preference to veteran candidates
• Creating onsite affinity groups for military
• Providing tuition assistance and educational incentives
• Emphasizing how military experience translates to work experience
• Understanding and communicating about PTSD and other symptoms veterans experience
• Placing veterans into supervisory or leadership jobs
• Developing veteran-specific onboarding programs to ease the transition to civilian work

For more survey results, check out the DeVry WORKS website.

Why You Probably Need More Training, Not Less

In my work as a business and workforce consultant, I’ve observed that in times of change and uncertainty, some organizations stop spending money – and especially money that goes to employee training and development. However, given the future work trends of cross-functional teaming, workforce-wide digital fluency, and an emphasis on uniquely human skills, this may be a short-sighted approach. Let’s look at these one by one.

Cross-Functional Teaming

I’ve noticed that employees are starting to move around organizations with greater speed, and so they may need to know more skills than were required in the past. Even if they received a solid university education, employees might well be moved to a role in which nothing they learned in their degree program applies. For instance, it’s not unusual for someone trained in finance to end up in marketing, and vice versa. And, even those schooled and working in marketing often find it beneficial to have cross-functional expertise in finance.

My hunch is that employer training might not be able to keep up with the reskilling and upskilling requirements of cross functional teams, and this is why there are gaps. And, in the Career Advisory Board’s 2018 survey, Talent Activation, the Employee Experience, and Skill Development, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: In my organization as a whole, I am concerned about employee skills gaps.

In the study, the greatest skills gaps were observed in the areas of technology/digital fluency (cited by 62 percent of respondents), communication (56 percent), business acumen (48 percent), diversity and cultural awareness (46 percent), and customer service (42 percent), and skills gaps affect employees at all levels. And, when asked about barriers to closing skills gaps, our respondents cited a too-small training budget most frequently.

If anything, it’s my opinion that cross-functional teaming requires larger training budgets, not smaller ones.

Workforce-Wide Digital Fluency

In the Career Advisory Board’s 2017 Job Preparedness Indicator survey, we defined an applied technology skill as a skill that is needed by employees to leverage the right technology to do their jobs. It’s another way to talk about digital fluency, and the research indicated that a majority of employers is now looking for these skills in new and existing employees.

Training existing employees in applied technology skills is a major challenge, in part because current professionals did not receive this type of instruction via traditional education paths. In response, many survey respondents are ensuring that their workforces continuously train and retrain on applied technology skills through the development of internal courses (40 percent), internal trainings (38 percent), tuition reimbursement (35 percent), and external trainings (31 percent). Only one-fourth said their organizations are taking no actions to develop this skillset.

As discussed above, however, developing skillsets can be expensive – especially when one round of training isn’t enough. So, in my recommendation, employers should have a specific and ongoing budget set aside for applied technology skills alone – in addition to other training requirements.

For more where this came from, check out the DeVry WORKS website.