Humanity Works

Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future

Alexandra Levit

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780749483456
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749483463
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

DISTINGUISHED FAVOURITE: Independent Press Award 2020 - Business General Category

The professional landscape is transforming, and the only way to maintain competitive advantage is to maximize the unique skills of your workforce. In Humanity Works, bestselling author, global workplace consultant and futurist Alexandra Levit provides a guide to making the most of the human traits of creativity, judgement, problem solving and interpersonal sensitivity. Revealing what the 'robot takeover' will really look like, how talent and machines can work side by side and how you can make organizational structures more agile and innovation focused, this book will prepare you to lead organizations of the future.

Humanity Works doesn't just explain the fascinating trends of the future of work; it condenses cutting-edge academic and business thinking to show what you can do about the future right now. Original, real-life case studies including Nestle, The Washington Post, Deloitte, and Pepsi combined with exercises and workplace tools will equip you for staying innovative and successful in the wake of major workplace disruption. Everything hinges on capturing the human edge in your organization.

CHAPTER ONE

This Isn’t Your Parents’ Workforce

At a recent conference, I met a 16-year-old high school junior named Josh. Josh patiently hung around after my session so he could introduce himself. In his tailored suit, striped tie and shiny dress shoes, Josh looked much older. Only his socks, neon argyle, belied Josh’s true age and his place in a generation of highly driven but highly individualistic young people.

Josh told me that he attended a magnet high school that specializes in maths and science. Even so, his classes weren’t challenging enough for him, so he spent one period each day working on tough physics problems online with students in Asia. He wanted to ask me if I thought he should go to college. ‘I feel like I can learn everything I need virtually,’ he said. ‘And isn’t my future job competition online, and not in an American college classroom?’

Thanks to steadily decreasing fertility rates in the United States and the recession, Josh is part of the comparatively small Generation Z, which includes people born between 1996 and 2012. I too was part of a small generation, known as Generation X, which includes people born between 1964 and 1979, but when I graduated from college, it was a free for all. There were simply not enough Gen X-ers to fill the employment needs of US organizations. A talented Gen X-er could have any job they wanted.

But Josh had a valid point – his situation is much different. There aren’t that many Gen Z-ers in the United States, but how much does that matter? Josh won’t be competing for jobs with other Americans. Rather, he’ll have to go toe to toe with the very best candidates with his skillset in the world. That’s why he’s practising physics with those kids now, and why he isn’t sure a US college is the best use of his time and money.

Before we go too far down the path of how we’re going to be working in the years to come, it’s helpful to explore who’s going to be working. The twin forces of demographics and globalization will affect who is seeking employment and where. In this chapter, we’ll address documented demographic shifts, extended labour participation by baby boomers, projected skills shortages and the continuing rise of the multinational workforce and global talent pools.

Falling fertility rates impact population

When the US Census Bureau talks population growth, Americans are accustomed to hearing good news. But the most recent figures are a bit concerning. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (Adamy and Overberg, 2016), the population has increased by just 0.7 per cent, the lowest rate of growth since the Great Depression years of 1936 and 1937. In 2016, the US fertility rate fell to the lowest point since record keeping started more than a century ago, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The general fertility rate is the number of births out of 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, and in late 2016 it was only 59.8 births per 1,000 women (Park, 2016).

This isn’t news to Europeans. In many countries on that continent, the rate of growth is below replacement levels, which means that population is declining. And it’s not necessarily a reason to panic. After all, birth rates dropped dramatically in developed nations during the Industrial Revolution and just after the First World War, and everyone recovered.

The population in industrialized nations will be buoyed in great part by immigration. According to D’Vera Cohn, an analyst with Pew Research Center, these countries will become even more diverse in the coming decades (Cohn, 2016). By 2055, for instance, the United States will not have a single racial or ethnic majority. Today, a near-record 14 per cent of the country’s population is foreign born compared with just 5 per cent in 1965. Asia has replaced Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants, and African immigration has doubled every decade since 1970.

Meanwhile, population in the developing world is exploding. According to the United Nations Population Fund, advances in modern medicines and improvements in living standards have significantly reduced infant, child and maternal mortality, contributing to an increase in life expectancy. Although fertility levels have declined, they have not fallen at the same pace as mortality levels (United Nations Population Fund, 2017).

Thanks to improved survival rates and past high fertility levels, there are more women of reproductive age today. This will contribute to a relatively large number of births, even if those women have fewer children on average. The population of the world’s least developed countries will double by 2050, and in some countries it may even triple (United Nations Population Fund, 2017).

India is on course to become the world’s most populous country by 2050, with 1.6 billion people. Then, there’s China. The Asian nation presently has the largest population on the planet, peaking in 2030 at 1.45 billion. And China’s one-child policy was recently amended to allow all Chinese families to have two children, pushing the number of births in the country to 17.86 million in 2016 (BBC, 2017).

What do these population trends mean for your workforce, and what can you do to make sure your operations aren’t upended by labour shortages? By the end of this chapter, you’ll have your answer.

Millennials take over the workforce

As of 2015, millennials, or people born between 1980 and 1995, have become a majority of the workforce. Picturing millennials, we often think of late bloomers carrying huge debt and living in their parents’ basements. I should know – I’ve been talking to organizations about the millennials (otherwise known as Generation Y) since the oldest ones entered in the workforce in 2002.

But today’s true picture of millennials is quite a bit different. I recently worked with Deloitte to conduct a study on millennial leadership, surveying 1,200 working millennial professionals in eight countries including Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. We also interviewed 38 millennial thought leaders and business leaders from the eight countries about their attitudes and concerns around millennial leadership.

According to our research, 50 per cent of currently employed millennials already meet our definition of a leader, meaning that they have decision-making authority and at least two direct reports. Forty-four per cent of them have only three to five years of experience, yet 41 per cent have four or more direct reports. By contrast, at the same age, most baby boomers and Gen X-ers were still in junior-level positions (Smith and Turner, 2017).

Organizations haven’t adequately prepared these young professionals to be managers, and it shows. Of current millennials who are leaders, only 36 per cent said they felt ready when entering the role, and 30 per cent still did not feel ready at the time of the study, citing managing difficult people or situations, lack of experience and dealing with conflicts as their top concerns upon entering a leadership role (Smith and Turner, 2017).

Globally, the workforce developments we discuss in the coming chapters will be driven in large part by the millennials and their preferences, even as Generation X and Generation Z gain influence and the boomers remain in play.

The non-retirement of boomers

Nearly 20 per cent of Americans who are 65 and older are now working, according to the most recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Desilver, 2016). That’s the largest population of employed older citizens since the 1960s, before the United States enacted Medicare. This, combined with the fact that baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1963, are hitting the traditional retirement age of 65 in droves, means that the United States has the largest number of older workers in its history. By 2020, it is expected that a third of British workers will be over 50 (Ansell, 2016).

Several factors play into baby boomers’ newly extended careers. According to the United Nations, China is ageing more rapidly than almost any country in recent history. China’s dependency ratio for retirees could rise as high as 44 per cent by 2050. The dependency ratio compares the difference between those not in the labour force with those who are working, and one this high will put an enormous strain on government resources and may force many elderly Chinese back to work in some form (Rapoza, 2017).

Meanwhile, The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies recently found that almost half of ageing US workers were experiencing money problems that are forcing them to keep working. Some are retiring later than they planned because the financial crisis devastated their savings, while others didn’t have much put away to begin with. Still others are grappling with the escalating cost of living in their geographic areas, and the fact that Social Security isn’t the golden nest egg it once was (Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, 2016).

Healthcare needs, which understandably increase as people age, cost more than they have in the past. At the time of this writing, the Fidelity website tells us that ‘a couple, both aged 65 and retiring this year, can now expect to spend an estimated $245K on health care throughout retirement, up from $220K last year. The figure has increased 29 per cent since 2005, when it was $190,000’ (Fidelity, 2015).

Normal health challenges aside, the average baby boomer is living longer and is physically capable of working longer than the average individual in prior generations. As George Lorenzo reported in a recent Fast Company article, the Pew Research Center found that baby boomers don’t consider themselves old until around 72 years of age. ‘Most long-held culturally and historically embedded notions about how to retire are quickly becoming outdated,’ wrote Lorenzo. ‘Many boomers no longer see themselves playing shuffle board, golfing, fishing and generally relaxing for the remainder of their days’ (Lorenzo, 2016).

This resonates with my experience. My mother-in-law and father-in-law were born in 1942 and are members of the traditionalist generation. At the age of 62, they put in their notice, promptly moved to Florida and never thought about work again. Over a decade later, they still enjoy spending their days hanging out with other seniors in their retirement community. They play mah-jong and tennis and eat out multiple meals. It’s like camp for old people.

My father, on the other hand, is a baby boomer. He ‘retired’ closer to 70, but the lifestyle didn’t work for him – at all. He had way too much time on his hands. I watched him pace around his apartment, breathing shallowly and complaining about mysterious ailments, until I finally suggested he get a part-time job. So, my dad started teaching psychology and statistics online, and then signed up to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Only when he’d filled his schedule with productive activities did my father regain his mental and physical health.

My father is not unusual in this respect. According to Lorenzo’s article, a study conducted by the Rush University Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago points to living a life of purpose (identified as having a strong sense of meaning, which frequently comes from essential paid employment and/or volunteer work) as highly conducive to reducing one’s susceptibility to stroke, dementia, movement problems, disability and premature death (Lorenzo, 2016).

And, a critical factor is that many baby boomers enjoy employment. The Transamerica research, for example, showed that more than a third of those over age 65 are still employed because they like working and want to stay involved. In an article for Bloomberg, Ben Steverman wrote that education comes into play here. ‘The Cente...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 This Isn’t Your Parents’ Workforce
• 2 Technology Advances and the Next Chapter of Industry
• 3 Humans as Prized Commodities
• 4 Evolving Work Structures
• 5 Mechanics of Tomorrow’s Gig Economy
• 6 Choose Your Own Adventure: Career Customization
• 7 The Future of Workplace Culture and Experience
• 8 So Long, Textbook CEO
• 9 The Organizational Puzzle
• References
• Index
• Backcover