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Over the last five years, technology has been evolving at a pace which is hard to keep up with – and these executives argue that employers need to provide their employees with more visibility in order to thrive moving forward.
In recent years, the rapid pace of change has impacted organisations, leaving HR departments with a number of critical questions in the current market.
Speaking on a recent episode of the HR Leader Podcast, produced in partnership with Cornerstone and Pinpoint HRM, Cornerstone APJ group vice president and managing director Paul Broughton and Cornerstone practice head at Pinpoint HRM Katie Mangraviti discussed all things workforce agility and the readiness gap.
Cornerstone and Lighthouse recently conducted some research around the workforce readiness gap – something which Broughton said the organisation had been doing for a number of years now.
“We've actually done this for a multitude of years, so there's a continuum of research, but the outcome of that is thousands of organisations across the world are uncovering from them what are the problems that they're facing now. The results were really meaningful for us because we've been capturing this over a period of time and it's come down to us identifying one major problem that they're all facing now. The outcome was that the biggest problem is the pace of change that organisations are facing today,” he explained.
“Now, if you look back through history, change is all we've ever been facing, whether it's going from hunter gatherers to establishing states and all the way through the industrial revolution. But if you actually look at the technology change over the last 20 years, let alone the last five, it's accelerating and businesses are finding it very hard to keep up with that. And that's leading to a variety of challenges that underpin this pace of change and what it means for them.”
The changes creating a cumulative effect upon both organisations and employees, Broughton added, fall into “four main dimensions”.
“The first one that we're all living with in the workforce – today is the first time we've got five generations coexisting in the workplace, all with really different expectations on their employers, their experience and their expectations. Moreover, how do they interrelate with each other? The communication that they need to have, from a baby boomer to a millennial can be really different. And how they even think about technology.
“The second one that we've identified is there's a lot of geopolitical and geoclimatic issues. Naturally, COVID was a big catalyst for this with the supply chain. If you tried to buy any furniture or a vehicle, [it’s] six months wait. And that's just one example. The third one that we look at is the pace of technology and data. You've got fragmented technology systems, you've got a piece of change happening around tech that is again causing more problems for businesses,” he explained.
“And the fourth dimension is the tight labour market. If you look at unemployment even just where we're sitting today here in Australia, it’s extremely low. So, that creates a hyper competitive environment for organisations to not only attract the right talent, but certainly retain the best people that they have today. So you've got this environment of change.”
The study also revealed a gap: 89 per cent of businesses around the world believe they are meeting the needs of their employees in terms of skills and development, but only 39 per cent of employees feel the same way.
This gap can lead to significant problems in the current workforce and have a variety of different impacts, according to Mangraviti.
“If I think of a few industries here, let's look at manufacturing, transportation, they're going through a huge change right now in regards to automation of technologies and they needing to pivot and upskill their employees to be able to utilise those technologies or train them on those different tools, do they look to reskill? Do they look to redeploy? Do they look to make these people redundant and rehire? These are massive questions that organisations typically don't have the answer to because they don't have access to the data to make those decisions,” she said.
“So, that's just one industry that's going through that transformation. But we could talk about banking and finance. They're all going through these technology transformations that are having this huge impact on employees from that skills perspective.
“Whether it's the big transformations or the small organisations that are even just looking to bring in AI across their business and people don't know how to utilise that tech or how to upskill on that. Everyone is underskilled in every organisation that we're speaking to.”
These issues, particularly around “visibility” need to be addressed as a matter of urgency, added Mangraviti.
“For so long businesses have not changed – or executives believe they're changing, but they're not actually asking the employees what they need. It is that siloed approach that we're seeing every day that businesses are looking from their strategic perspective, but not actually for an individual. Are you giving them access to information to reskill them, upskill them? Visibility of where they can go and grow within an organisation? It's the simple things of providing that visibility that isn't happening across many organisations today,” she said.
“I would definitely say it's an urgent problem that needs to be addressed. But I fear that lots of organisations today almost put in the bucket of too hard because it's a big problem and they don't know where to start because what they see is this huge boulder that they need to fix and overcome. But my advice is don't put it in that too hard basket. Kind of think about what are the small incremental things that you can do to make that transition, to really bridge that gap and create that agile workforce.”
For businesses, an “inability to pivot quickly” and remain agile has also been proven to result in lost revenue, emphasised Broughton.
“There's this pace of change. You've got to upskill, reskill, keep up with it. But they don't even have the visibility of the skills they have today, let alone the skills they're going to need in the future. So, in 2027, 44 per cent of our skills are going to be obsolete,” he said.
“The ability to engage AI in an effective way was the number one [searched for] skill on Google last year. So, we've all got to go on this journey. I'm feeling it myself. How do you keep up with so much that's changing so quickly? But yeah, 2027, almost half of our skills, they're just not going to be useful anymore, so we've got to do something about it.”
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Paul Broughton and Katie Mangraviti, click here.
