CAREER DESIGN AND THE FUTURE-FOCUSED WORKFORCE WITH ERICA SOSNA, CEO OF CAREER MATTERS - Audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the Vision by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of Vision by Protiviti, where we put megatrends under the microscope to examine the big topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work, and I’m happy to be joined by my guest, Erica Sosna. Erica is the founder of Career Matters, a boutique consultancy that empowers employees to own their career and designs leadership programs and career development for CEOs for top global companies such as Amazon, Capital One, HSBC and MasterCard. Erica is an award-winning speaker on career design and the future-focused workplace, and her powerful and practical career-equation method has become the go-to career-design model for her clients. Erica’s thought leadership on the global trends for virtual teams, digital-nomad lifestyles, and the end of the world — rather, the end of work — as we know it, has been featured in leading publications and on LinkedIn. Erica, I’m thrilled you are with me today. Welcome.

Erica Sosna: Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

Joe Kornik: I just mentioned there in that intro that it’s the end of the world as we know it — and I feel fine. I just couldn’t resist that. I’m dating myself a bit, of course, with that reference. And would I love to say it’s the end of the pandemic as we know it. Maybe we’re getting there, little by little, but I wanted to start our conversation today around how the pandemic impacted our idea of career and career choices — the idea that people have become less willing to settle for work that doesn’t work for them.

Erica Sosna: I used to have a slide at the beginning of my big keynotes, which had the up-and-coming cutting-edge future trends in work, and the pandemic has blown my slide. All of the things that seem to be emerging trends have now accelerated, as so much does in crisis environments. Let’s start by unpacking what has accelerated, what’s changed, why it’s the end of work as we know it — hopefully, not the world, but work — and then we’ll look at the pieces for reconstructing out the other side.

One of the things that was always going to be a major trend, that I was just waiting for everyone to pick up on, was the flexibility that technology has facilitated about where people are working from. Now, of course, there are still plenty of instances and plenty of roles where being in person is indispensable, and for a long time, I’ve been wondering, how long are these big offices here in London, in the City, how long are they going to be filled?

Prior to the pandemic, there were already plenty of companies globally doing telecommuting, outsourcing, remote working and virtual teaming. I know that, because I was part of those — I haven’t worked full-time in person for 20 years — but also, because my clients were telling me that. How do we build an effective virtual team with people across different cultures, different locations, different time zones, who may not have the chance to meet in person very often? So, it’s no news to people that, of course, people are now expecting to be able to have a conversation where appropriate about the hybrid model — about what that looks like for you.

One of the first pointers for the C-suite is to say, “You need a point of view. You don’t have to have the whole thing worked out, but you do need a point of view.” There will be some companies that are saying, “We are an in-person, very collaborative business, so wherever possible, we do want to see people with a higher level of frequency.” There’ll be other companies that say, “You know what? We’re pretty established at our remote-teaming collaboration, and it’s worked well for us in many ways, and so we’re going to move more in that direction.”

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all. There isn’t a rulebook and playbook that says, “It must be this way,” but it’s therefore a very exciting time to redesign what is the ultimate environment for high performance for the work we do now, for the folks that we have and for the things that they want. And will there be, as a result of that, migration and changes? Sure. Some people will say, “Losing the commute has made all the difference in the world to me — I’m never going back to that,” and therefore, looking for something that they can walk to, or something they can work remotely in. Others will be saying “I’m so desperate to spend time with people — and see their feet for the first time in the last two years — and have that connection and conviviality, but if you tell me that you’re going to 100% remote indefinitely, this is probably not the fun for me.”

Joe Kornik: You mentioned the office, and I feel like that’s an interesting aspect of all this, and I’ll continue on that earlier theme: Is it the end of the office as we know it? What are your thoughts about the future of the office, its functionality, its design? What will the office look like in a decade?

Erica Sosna: So many different things to think about here. The first thing is that collaboration spaces of various kinds have been in existence and running very successfully, particularly for freelancers and the self-employed. But increasingly, before the pandemic, I saw that the organizations were outsourcing where their developers lived to a co-working collaboration space, for example. We’re definitely going to see more of those custom-made, drop-in, flexible spaces, and whether those are owned or leased or subcontracted on an as-and-when basis, or your people have a pass to pop in, a lot of things are going to happen around the different places that I might go to leave home, but not necessarily be in HQ, because HQ might be miles away, or even the local office might be miles away.

But there might be great value in meeting a client in person or certain members of my team in person, and so that kind of flexibility about where the office is located is definitely going to shift. A lot will be drawn from those collaboration spaces and the lessons learned from those, aside from the controversies of the big names around collaboration spaces recently. But, that aside, there have been a lot of best practice established about, what makes a nice vibe? What makes people want to come in? What makes the space a place people want to share and connect across

That has been much neglected — not in every office, but in many. Particularly, once we move to open plan and cubicle life and Dilbert-style working spaces, people are now starting to say, “Well, what’s the incentive to come back in? If I’m going to come back in, let’s have a space where we get a chance to connect, to hang out, to have privacy, to do quiet, head-down work,” which is one of the main arguments we have for working from home, if your home is conducive to that. So, you want to make some soundproof pods that people want to do quiet work in, but you also want to make it a more sociable space than we traditionally think about in terms of the architecture of an office.

My encouragement would be, do this in collaboration. It’s a great opportunity to ask your people, “What is the future of our office? What is the function of our office? What is the purpose of gathering a large number of people together, and is that space an office, and for what reasons?” It might be security. It might be collaboration. It might be brand identity. It might be convenience. Getting into a design conversation that says, “In what instances and at what moments in time is it useful for us to function as an entity or a collective, and what resources and geography do we need around that?” — that conversation is going to be huge.

One of my biggest clients here in the U.K. is a real estate firm that has huge presence within the commercial-property space, and development continues in commercial property, but of course, developers are very interested in what you as a client organization might want or need. That would be my other consideration: When you are thinking about what you need, be in communication with the people who might construct that for you, whether that is developers, whether it’s office buildings that are being redesigned. They want to be in that conversation — the landlord wants to be in conversation with you about how to make it right.

I feel excited about that. There will continue to be value in getting together, but I am curious about some of those buildings that are built in a way that is so functionally designed for optimizing the previous working environment. Here in the City, there are lots of fabulous skyscrapers, Manhattan, elsewhere. Is it going to be easy to repurpose those if you don’t need all of that space, and what will they do? But what I do know about humankind is, we’re very enterprising and creative. We’ll find our way of making even better use of the spaces that we have in a way that works for everyone.

Joe Kornik: I want to switch back and then tie in — it goes nicely with this conversation that we’re having, this notion of careers that we started this conversation with. I’ve heard you say that most people don’t choose their careers, they fall into them. The pandemic has accelerated this idea that you don’t necessarily have one career for life. It’s given people the opportunity to step back and think about their career, their life, their working life. How do you see all that playing out?

Erica Sosna: Great question. Let’s ask ourselves, “Considering that most of us will spend 80,000 hours of our lifetime at work, isn’t it surprising how little we think about that decision?” I always found that was an amazing number of hours. It’s probably more time than you spend with the people who are most important to you, and yet, through our education system, wherever you got within that, and then even within employment, there is rarely a live discussion that says, “This is your lifetime passing by, and are you in the best fit? Are you making the most contribution that you could to the things that matter to you? Are you playing within your skills and strengths?”

And that’s of interest both to the employer and the employee. It’s not just a purpose- and-meaning-driven discussion. It’s also about value-add. We all want to feel that that time is counting, and that we’re in a good fit where we can do good stuff in whatever way we define success. That’s a trend that’s going to continue to grow, and I’m fortunate to be in a space where we’ve been thinking about that for a long time. But the reason we’ve been thinking about that for a long time predates the pandemic too: Most people fell into their careers rather than chose them. We know that most people didn’t know what they were going to be when they grew up, and they’re still trying to suss that out and feel their way into something where they can do a good job and find a match for their skills. My time in employee engagement tells me that too.

When we’re looking at employee-engagement surveys at Blessing White, which was an American company that I used to work for, you would see that companies that are very committed to employee engagement, to the relationship, to valuing their employees would still get a big dip when it came to a question like “I know how to navigate the next steps in my career” or “My manager takes an interest in my career development.”

So, while all sorts of companies might have had career-development programs, as in an accelerated program for high potential or a great program for minority talent, what they didn’t have was a way to talk to a person on an individual basis about their career, what they mean by a career and how they define success in that career, and to have a way of doing that that was scalable across the business that regardless of the industry, the seniority, the tenure, everyone could have the same method.

And that is what the career equation has given for so many of the companies that we work for, and, on a very individual basis, it has given that clarity about what matters to me, one of my criteria, on an organizational basis. It’s enlivened the employee engagement by accessing that missing piece of the discussion about “These 80,000 hours, this is how I define a successful use of them. Can I talk to you about that?” That’s what people were telling their employers that they wanted to do for a long time previous to the pandemic.

Joe Kornik: Yes. I’m glad you mentioned that. One thing that’s interesting about your background is, you have insights into employees empowering their own careers, but you also advise CEOs about leadership programs, career development. You’re in the corner offices, so you see it from both sides. I’m glad you brought up your career-equation method. I’m curious how you see that evolving? We’re trying to focus on, let’s say, the work in 2030. Can you talk about that career-equation method and how that will play in the future of work down the road?

Erica Sosna: Let me give you a quick tour of the equation as it stands, because that will help us to know what we’re framing the conversation around, and then I’ll tell you about where the trends around employment are going to take us.

The equation is a word equation. It doesn’t churn out a nice, tidy number and tell you what to do with your life, which is sometimes disappointing to the quants that we work with, but everyone else finds it a helpful way of understanding their key criteria. I worked with thousands of people, and many of them were quite burnt out around what they were doing and looking for a change, and I heard from them a consistent set of concerns — buckets, if you like, of focus area. Because career is a very emotional issue — it’s something we identify on a very personal basis — one of the first questions we ask people is, “What do you do? Tell me about what you do.” It can easily become very overwhelming: People think about a lot of different things when they try to make a decision around career. I wanted to reduce those, and I turned that into what we call the equation.

The equation says, first of all, everyone wants to work in an area of strengths. We all want to play to our skills and our strengths, and we tend to enjoy and be good at things that play to our natural strengths. When you look at employee-engagement data, the key question that drives fulfillment is more opportunities to do what I do best. Of course, what’s interesting and what Joe has a strength at will be different to what I have a strength at.
The first part of the equation says I need to understand where your natural disposition and strengths are, and I need to be able to notice where, perhaps, we might have pigeonholed you, according to one particular strength, when actually there are five, six others that you’re excited about developing, and that may be a flight risk if we don’t know what those are. Part one of the equation: play to your strengths.

We add, play to your strengths in an area that you’re enthusiastic about, and in the equation, for shorthand, we call that passion. Passion is a very overused word in careers, isn’t it? What we mean is either a subject area that you enjoy, you find interesting — travel, economics, entrepreneurship — but also sometimes a way of being, like solving tricky problems or learning stuff and explaining it to others. The kind of behaviors that get you naturally into flow.

We say you want you to take your strengths and apply them to something you care about, something that you’re into. And you want to generate — and this is the third part of the equation: skills plus passion plus impact — an impact that you feel proud of.

Different people will define success in different ways. They were bombarded with the idea that success is primarily about more money, more power, more responsibility. If you ask the question — and this is probably the most useful question you’ll ever ask any of your employees or friends — “How do you define success?” they will tell you a whole other spectrum of measurements that you may not have thought about.

So often, when we think about talking about careers in organizations, we avoid it because we think it’s only going to be about “I want a raise.” “I want a promotion.” But if you ask, “But how do you define success? What are you using as your measure?” you get a fantastic insight into the huge range of things that matter to your people. The more you understand what matters to them, the more you can tailor what they’re up to, and the environment that they’re in, and the targets that you set and the feedback that you give, so that you understand and make the most of that person.

The equation says, “Skills plus passion plus impact.” Then, it says those things are all divided by the conflict between the environment that helps Joe do his best work and the environment that they’re in. So, we want to reduce as much as possible the friction between where you thrive and what’s going on around here. We call that — for shorthand, again, on the equation — environmental fit: We say that you want to maximize understanding the environment in which a person does their best work, which covers hybrid, flexibility, remote, contract, independent, indoors, outdoors, specialist, generalist, fast-paced, slow and detailed, all of that range of the soil in which someone can grow. And so the equation says you need to understand what your environmental fit is, and then you need to try and reduce the friction or disparity between what’s right for you and what you’ve got.

That’s, in broad terms, what the equation is, and explainable, as you see, in just a couple of minutes, but of course, the output from that will be different for each person. In the work that we do, we help them to narrow down their criteria to just between two and four elements of skills, passions, impacts, and as many things as they like on environmental fit, because the more that you can tailor the environment to suit the person, the more likely they are to be completely unpoachable, because it’s environment that makes a difference.

We’ve all had the experience of looking like the perfect fit for us on paper, but then you come into that team or you come into that culture, and it’s just a fit, not a synergy. So, it’s important to be able to understand, what is it that helps your people do their best work, and how much can you be flexible and accommodating towards that, and which things will be harder to find alignment with?

Joe Kornik: Part of VISION by Protiviti’s goal is to push the envelope and be compelling. So, when you think of 2035, 2040 — think out as far as you’d like — is there anything that we haven’t thought about, or anything that comes to mind that you think will be surprising?

Erica Sosna: I see more of some of the questions and some of the challenges that we were exploring already. You’ve got that experience of the mature economies, say, starting to ask the question “Do we even have employment for everyone?” As we continue to outsource and to access expertise in other parts of the globe, what’s going to be the outcome? Where is that going to end up in terms of employment of our own talent? And we still have work to do about salaries, about equity, about the ways in which expectations around education or the way that education is designed make it easy to globally integrate, and access and make use of global talent.

Those were questions before. They’re still questions now. My big prediction for the western economies for the next 20 years would be the introduction of universal basic income. Universal basic income is the idea that instead of expending a lot of energy on both taxation and welfare distribution, we instead reallocate that as a basic income.

So, here in the U.K., it will be around £25,000 per person, irrespective of their current level of wealth and whether they are currently working, because there is going to be a shortage of roles, and that is definitely going to be something that happens in the western economies. It has to, because talent acceleration is exponential in some of those exciting emerging environments, and the appetite there, also, for ambition around work, it’s a fresher opportunity, the same way that for women, in the last 100 years, it was a fresher opportunity. So many things had been outside of one’s reach, no matter your level of talent and ability in education. You see that globally too.

So, it makes sense that the mature is the dropping side of the curve is in terms of opportunity. I do think that’s going to have a massive impact, and so we will introduce universal basic income. You will see a move toward even more senior and strategic roles, a move to different global locations outside of HQ environments, and the skillful use of technology and of connection — not spending all day on Zoom meetings, but also not returning to gadding about on flights every five minutes around the planet. The planet can’t sustain that. We know it’s not necessary to do for business, but there are times when it is important to have that sense of collegia and connectedness, and that will continue.

My other prediction is a bit retro, in a way, which is about humanizing the workplace and scale. For example, W. Gore, the creator of Gore-Tex, they’re into this: Once a division heads beyond 300 people, they swarm like bees and set up a new division. They do this because 300 is about the number of people in a community in which we can all know each other’s names and have a sense of connection. For a lot of time, over the last decade or so, I’ve been looking at the enormity of the organizations that I work with. Yes, they’ve got their entity divisions, and then they’ve got their divisions by activity area, but still, it’s very impersonal.

Part of why you’ll see an attrition — whether it’ll be a Great Resignation waits to be seen — certainly over the next decade or so is because people decide that those environments are hostile to their humanity. They’ve been hostile for quite a long time — and I don’t think that’s deliberate. It’s just the way in which business has evolved, and many through merger and acquisition, floats and PLCs, and all that stuff — the short-term focus on shareholder value, etc. — has meant that we haven’t been paying attention to how that affects the human.

A lot of people will be opting out because of environment, and here, already, we see this enormously, and a particularly interesting community around that is women and ethnic minorities, both groups that have not been involved in the design of these whopping big firms but are now encouraged to be represented and have a presence and a seat at the table, and yet they’re opting out in droves to become self-employed and set up their own businesses. Why? Because even though the seat is there for them, they don’t want it.

My prediction would be that the companies that are going to thrive, the brands we’re still going to know in that 20-year, 25-year time frame that you’re looking out on, 30 years, are those that find ways to humanize, because that’s something now that people have found to be something they can’t live without. How they’ll do that? What that will look like? I’m not at the table making those decisions, but where I am is across the table on a very regular basis with people telling me, “I just can’t carry on like this.”

Joe Kornik: Interesting. I typically end these with a call to action for the C-suite, and it sounds like that might be it. It sounds like what you just laid out, that might be the work that they need to get working on. Is that accurate?

Erica Sosna: Yes. I would get curious. Get curious about your people on a very individualized basis. Bring that call to action. You can’t speak to everybody all the time, so leverage the cascade of that. But also, the conversations across the organization — you don’t have to be senior to someone to take an interest in asking what experiences you’re looking for out of your work. How could we help you get that? How do you define and measure a successful life and career? How could we help you align even better with that?

A career is a series of choices, and in those choices, we explore how we align our gifts with how we spend our time and how we make our money. Career is a series of choices where you explore how to rely on your gifts, how you spend time and how you make money. So, getting curious about, what are the gifts untapped here, what are the criteria on which people are making decisions about their careers? We might be wrongly assuming, or making succession plans based incorrectly.

That would be my call to action: Get curious about the experiences they’re looking for, where they want to do that work, where their best work happens, what they think the future design of working life should look and feel like, to be right by the customer, right by the climate, right by the corporation and right by the team in themselves. There is the possibility to find something that wins for everybody, so get asking the question.

Joe Kornik: Erica, thank you so much. I’m out of questions, and we’re out of time. Thank you for that insightful discussion.

Erica Sosna: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Joe Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to check out all of our content at Vision.Protiviti.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

HOW GAME-CHANGING TECH WILL REVOLUTIONIZE WORK WITH DR. AYESHA KHANNA, CEO OF ADDO AI - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we look into the future to examine the implications of big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

We’ve got a great guest today as we welcome Dr. Ayesha Khanna, cofounder and CEO of Addo AI, an artificial intelligence solutions firm and incubator. She has been a strategic adviser on artificial intelligence, smart cities and fintech to leading corporations and governments. Ayesha serves on the board of the Infocomm Media Development Authority, Singapore’s government agency that develops and regulates its world-class technology sector to drive the country’s digital economy and power its Smart Nation initiative.

Ayesha is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils, a community of international experts who provide thought leadership on the impact and governance of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Ayesha was named one of Southeast Asia’s groundbreaking female entrepreneurs by Forbes magazine in 2018, and Addo AI was featured by the publication as one of four leading artificial intelligence companies in Asia. Ayesha, welcome to the program.

Ayesha Khanna: Thank you so much for having me here.

Kornik: So, you’re the cofounder of Addo AI, an artificial intelligence advisory firm, and I think we can all agree that AI is going to radically transform how we work in the future. There are a lot of technologies I want to talk to you about, but let’s start with AI. Can you talk to me about AI and its impact? It’s already having an impact, but let’s talk about the impact it’s having, and then the impact it will have, on work over the next, let’s say, decade.

Khanna: The biggest impact that AI is having is that it has become a new team member in the workplace, and that’s the way we should look at it. It’s there as everyone’s little assistant, taking away a lot of the grunt work that we did, whether it’s legal, it’s HR, it’s manufacturing on the factory floor or it’s even doctors who are helping personalize their recommendations of diagnostics and prognosis for patients.

Once you have AI, it does a couple of things: First, it makes the work more efficient so you’re taking less time to achieve the same thing, which means now you can do other things that are of strategic value. The second thing that it does is, it allows you to optimize your work as well, which means without changing anything, for example, you’re getting more output in terms of if you are in a factory, you’re actually making a lot more output from the same inputs. Or, if you’re delivering goods, like we do with a large transport company, then you’re able to deliver more goods during the same time frame. These two are really important, and we haven’t even touched on the innovation, where you can transform yourself and serve your customers better.

Kornik: When a lot of people talk or think about AI, they think about the potential, for one. But a lot of people also are concerned that AI may make their job obsolete — it may make jobs go away. I always hear AI and the loss-of-jobs comparison made, and surely, with technology, some jobs will go away and probably won’t come back. But I know that you talk a lot about amplifying human potential in the technology revolution. So, how do we do this?

Khanna: That’s such a good question. People should be asking this question, because it’s true: Parts of every job, some tasks, will get automated, but that doesn’t mean the job goes away, the role goes away. If anything, it transforms into something that is easier for humans to do, which is emphasize the client, think about the larger strategy, enter new markets, design new products — that’s a much better use of the holistic skills that human beings have, the out-of-the-box thinking we’re capable of doing, rather than doing repetitive tasks every day. That’s what AI is.

That’s why I always say, instead of thinking of AI as a threat, if we just changed our mindset and thought of it as our little assistant, then we would have a much better perspective on it, and we would actually then feel empowered instead of threatened to go and get some new skills to go to the boardroom, to go to the leadership, and have ideas because we have a little assistant who’s doing the analytics and the forecasting and the optimization for us.

Kornik: So, Ayesha, I know that you deal with more than just AI. Since I have such a technology-savvy person on my show today, I want to ask you about other game-changing technologies that will have major impacts on the future of work, and I’d like to think like a decade out. If you could think about 2030 and beyond, what are the game changers in terms of technology?

Khanna: There are about three game changers that that are going to immediately have an impact: One is with the Internet of Things and 5G. For the first time, we are going to have data which is just not between people, but a lot more with things. It’s almost like every object around you becomes digital — the building becomes digital, every aspect of your kitchen becomes digital. So, what does that do to our lifestyle, to our work? It absolutely changes the way that we interact with each other and with our environment, and it hopefully makes it easier for us to personalize a more meaningful, efficient environment around us.

The second thing that is going to be very meaningful for the future of work is going to be the metaverse. This is when we’re using virtual reality to engage digitally with social presence in completely alternate universes rather than our physical spaces. This also changes the future of work, in terms of how we work with international colleagues, and, of course, it opens up so many more colleagues than one has just through Zoom. But it also opens up new kinds of work that will emerge — everything from fashion designers for digital clothing to more game makers to entirely new education classes being given in the metaverse.

Then, of course, we have robotics. We haven’t really seen robots — we’ve seen them either in the movies or we’ve seen the Roombas, but even if you come to cities like Singapore, it’s now become usual for us to go into the street and have vacuum cleaners, or in airports everywhere, there are robots that talk to you and say, “Please, could you have some social distancing” or “Could you throw that away?” We go to restaurants, we have robotic baristas and I haven’t seen that so much in the rest of the world, but we will live amongst machines and we will live in machine environments.

There are two things that happened: One, we need to anticipate this as employees, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, and we need to both adapt to it as workers and need to kind of think about it in an exciting and innovative way as entrepreneurs in our company. But then there’s always a third part: We have to have our ethics and our critical thinking hat around us and think about any unintended consequences. This allows us who work every day in our adult life, almost all of our other life, to enter into a new world of possibilities and to exercise every part of our brain and mind and creative juices to come up with responsible and exciting and interesting ways to serve customers.

Kornik: Interesting. Certainly, I’m not seeing a ton of robots around New York City yet. I’m sure they’re on their way. You mentioned the metaverse, and I’m curious: We’re in the early stages of the metaverse, and I’m wondering, the business applications, do you see it more as something that’s just fun to play around with? At what point do you think it becomes serious business, and how will the business applications of the metaverse be utilized?

Khanna: It’s absolutely going to become serious business, and there are 3.46 billion gamers in the world who are used to this environment. Remember, just because we are not gaming all the time doesn’t mean that there isn’t almost half the population that understands what it’s like to socially interact, to do trading — in other words, to have a digital economy. Now, the question is, what else can you do there?

Already, we’re seeing startups that are providing education in the metaverse — where, if you combine virtual reality and surgical rooms, for example, imagine doctors can experience unexpected crisis moments when a vein bursts, for example, instead of experiencing it for the first time in reality. This has shown to help some trainees deal better with unexpected situations. That’s just one little example. Another one is, if you literally want to have a concert for your entertainment, and you don’t want to spend huge amounts of money traveling around the world putting up unsustainably large concerts, Roblox has had many top pop stars earn millions of dollars — some of whom are not very well known.

It also opens up this whole area of independent creators to have access to another place without having to spend so much on marketing. NFTs — owning digital assets, how will it change the way that we actually talk about digital ownership? I’m working on some of these issues with some lawyers right here in Singapore. Everywhere you go, whether it is participating in the use cases in the metaverse or trying to build the structures around it, there are so many new jobs that will emerge that this is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Kornik: That’s fascinating. You mentioned jobs, and obviously, I’ve heard a lot about talent shortages and recruiting and retention and how, specifically, AI could shape that in the future. There’s a role that that AI will play in that. When you look at the future of shaping workforces, will there be a role for AI, and how will that impact recruiting and maybe even retention?

Khanna: Artificial intelligence has a huge role in identifying talent, but not in a way that that takes in the unconscious biases that humans have had. If it’s designed properly, then it can nudge people. You can have an AI assistant, at a minimum, that is your personal HR counselor that you can talk to and that is giving you advice on what other jobs are available, that is communicating interesting things that you want to the leadership. And you can also have the typical ways of identifying talent by looking at job résumés, by looking at people, the way they answer questions, going beyond typical things like looking at your résumé — democratizing access to great jobs, to great work, by looking at your experience, by being a bit more nuanced, by looking at your skills, by giving you tests to do, by looking at the way you speak about your experience, instead of only hiring the elites. I’m very against elitism in the workplace.

It’s also very good when you think about our aging population. I didn’t talk about biotech, but biotech, and the fact that we’re going to live longer, is another big trend that’s going to affect the future of work. We are going to be with people who are 60, 70, 80, maybe over 100, as colleagues. On the one hand, you have machines and robots, and then, on the other hand, you have people who were never in the workforce when we were growing up because now there’s rejuvenative medicine. There was a case study where they said even elderly grandmothers can operate, and do great construction work that young men do, because they’ll be working with robots, and just think of the world of possibilities. Why should we put people in old people’s homes, where they’re bored? That’s what I mean by amplified potential for everyone across ages, genders, races, geographic locations.

But as always, Joe, as you know, technology has a bad side. We have to keep an eye on it. In other words, we have to make sure that any AI that helps in the workplace is not manipulative, is not biased, and you need a very diverse and inclusive team to build AI. And if we use it properly, then it’s very helpful.

Kornik: I was going to ask you about sort of technology’s role and AI’s role in the many traditional HR functions. There’s a role for it in training or leadership development, talent management, keeping employees engaged. For some of the more traditional HR roles, how do you see AI playing in that space?

Khanna: There are a couple of things: First, recruiting — identifying the right people and allowing people to be adaptive. The problem with HR right now is that it is difficult: There’s a quarterly review. People feel shy about what they want as a career change. They don’t know what’s happening. But if there is a little HR assistant that you have, its job is to observe some of the things you’ve been writing in a confidential manner, some of new meetings you’ve been participating in, and it realizes, “Ayesha, you’ve been doing data science for a long time, but it looks like you’re getting some good feedback on your business skills and the fact that you’re doing some strategy. Have you considered doing that?”

There is a talent war, and you have to keep your employees constantly evolving, learning and feeling that they’re doing exciting things. So, build an entirely different HR culture which is rewarding people as they’re learning because it’s observing them, which humans can’t do alone. It’s observing them in a safe, private manner just for them and giving them those nudges. It is very helpful, and if you allow those nudges to be communicated up to HR, then HR becomes aware of these talents as well and can place you in different geographies or locations or different departments, and that’s what’s going to change.

Kornik: What’s your call to action for business leaders as they prepare for their companies to be human-centric in this technology revolution?

Khanna: The most important thing is to not think that the technology is going to solve your problem, but to sit down with your senior leaders — have a design thinking offsite and say, “Guys, what is our goal?” and then you call in either your data science team or a provocateur. We often go in as provocateurs and ask them, “Guys, this is what we want. How could AI help or disrupt businesses?”

You’re always looking at two things: You’re not just looking at “How can it help me?” You’re also looking at your competitors or an Amazon that comes out of nowhere and takes business away, and then you work backwards from what you know is important to your customers, and you’re trying to understand how they’re changing. You keep your eye on the ball, which is your enterprise or your retail customers, and then work backwards from there and see, what are your competitors doing? How are your client’s preferences changing, and what are your investor goals or stakeholder goals? And then, based on that, you have a plan. Then it has to be very agile — actually, the new word is hyperagile. You need to test things. You begin to have small tests for three months each, and then, very quickly, those couple of tests become these rallying calls for the whole organization.

Now, here’s the difference between the old way — and by “old way,” I mean “a few years ago” — and the new way: In the old way, people would do these little tests, and they were these shiny little objects we talked about in the media, but it wouldn’t lead to at-scale transformation for the company. But now, with the cloud, there’s a way that you can make your technique and ask them. But every little pilot we do, make sure that it builds the foundation for 100 more — just make it right from the start — and this is called modernizing your data architecture.

And if you do that, then, even if that doesn’t work, you set yourself up for four others. You trained for the marathon. You didn’t win the marathon, but guess what? You can now do 17 other sports, and you’re much better and more athletic at it, and that’s really the purpose — to think beyond that one thing, to use it to build your muscles, and it starts with that workshop starting with your leadership team.

Kornik: Ayesha, thank you. I have one final question before I let you go, and it’s one that we like to do here at Vision by Protiviti, which is, we look out, and we ask for bold predictions. I’d like you to look out to, say, 2035. Think about all these technologies, all their potential, and, assuming we get it more right than wrong, what does work look like from a technology perspective in 2035. What may surprise us? What haven’t we thought of?

Khanna: By 2035, we’re going to see a massive change with the metaverse. We’re going to see that at least half of our work is going to be not on Zoom or in the office but in these virtual environments, and we are going to have the ability to simulate every decision that we make in the company by doing forecasting analysis with tools, trying to imagine if we build a new factory, what would happen under different scenarios? There will be digital twins for everything that we do, and this will allow us to experiment with more confidence. It will allow us to be agile and be light on our feet. That’s just the way, and where, we’ll be working.

But talent will be very different. I don’t want to say we’ll be highly dependent on these little assistants, but to a degree, we will, and we’ll each have our own, because right now, we don’t have our own. We have this one that we go and talk to, and it’s some FAQs. But we’ll each have our own little assistant.

Some of us are used to personal assistants, but for the vast majority that are not, it’s really fun. It’s nice to have somebody who’s totally helping you, whether you’re a data scientist or a lawyer or anything. You could ask any questions. I could say, “I’m going to meet an economist. Can you give me — on Romer’s growth theory, just give me an update,” for example. They’ll quickly do that for you, or I’m running this forecast, and it’ll all be voice-driven. You’ll just talking a lot more and typing up less. That will free you up. Not only will give you information, it will also free up your mind, and we don’t remember what it’s like. Even CEOs are in so many meetings all the time. A lot of it is just bureaucracy.

And then, finally, in general, people will not tolerate any kind of unfairness, bias, lack of inclusivity, lack of sustainability, and people will use these metrics. People will use AI to rank companies, especially for consumers. And this kind of thing will not just be people speaking in magazines or conference panels, but values will separate the companies that do well from those that don’t. I think that’s a wonderful evolution, and even though AI will not be responsible for it, it will help all these young people and people who care about the planet use AI and technology to get to that point.<>Joe Kornik: Ayesha, I enjoyed our conversation immensely. That was so enlightening. Thank you so much for taking the time be to with us today.

Khanna: Thank you so much for having me.

Kornik: Thank you at home for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, and we’ll see you next time.

TALKING TALENT AND TRAINING IN 2030 AND BEYOND WITH HR EXPERT NIGEL JEREMY - Podcast transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource putting megatrends under the microscope and looking into the future to examine the strategic implications of big topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work and all its implications for employees and employers as well as clients and customers over the next decade and beyond. Today, we’ve got a wonderful guest on the podcast, as I’m joined by Nigel Jeremy, a globally recognized expert within the HR and learning and development space. Previously. Nigel was the chief learning officer for British Airways and, before that, lots of others, including Marks & Spencer, a British multinational retailer with some 78,000 employees, which was voted most admired company for attracting, developing and retaining talent while Nigel was calling the shots. He’s been at this for over three decades, and I’m thrilled to welcome him to the show today. Thanks so much for joining us today. Nigel.

Nigel Jeremy: Thank you, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kornik: Nigel, I thought we’d be past this point of starting these conversations around COVID-19 and all its various forms. But unfortunately, we do need to start there because we’re essentially now two years since the disruption, and I am curious as to your thoughts and biggest takeaways about how it has impacted talent and the workforce. Maybe some of your thoughts on how we’re doing, and how we did, with the pandemic, and then how you think those last two years will impact the next 10 when we talk about the future of work.

Jeremy: The pandemic obviously has affected every life on the planet. As of today’s date, about 382 million people have already caught COVID-19. Very sadly, six million people have passed away as a result of it. So, that this thing is still with us, and it’s likely to be with us for years to come in some shape or form, even if we learn to live with it somewhat. But there are things about COVID-19 that we have to remember in terms of the world of work. There are still some things that remain true that will not have changed, but clearly, there are some things that will have changed quite dramatically.

I’ll touch on both of those areas very briefly to set this up. Companies are still going to need to be profitable in the future. COVID-19 does not change that, and they will need to grow — they’ll need to evolve and develop their people to be successful. They’ll also need to attract and retain talented employees, but clear direction is no doubt going to continue to be needed from the top too, and leaders will need to engage and inspire their people just like they’ve always done. Employees need to be trained, and we will need to be able to spot talent. And significantly, we still do have a multigenerational workforce in the workplace, and we will need to consider those people for their engagement needs as well.

A lot already remains true when we look at business. But what’s perhaps happened is that the context has changed. The world population, for the first time, has experienced what I would cast as home isolation. We’ve experienced fear as a global community, in terms of our mortality, fear in terms of traveling to work and commuting, whether that’s international or more local, and fear of social contact too. These are things that are shifting the way we’re thinking about our daily lives as well as work in and of itself. The working-from-home routine has come up in any Western society, with any office-based working, a significant amount of home working has now started to happen, and that’s, of course, been coupled by the mass adoption of videoconferencing technology too.

We’ve got some things that are shifting the nature of work that we’re seeing right now as well. But from a psychological perspective, we’re also seeing two things going on: one, frustration, sadness and perhaps boredom with individuals who have been isolating for a little too long and miss the social contact with colleagues and friends and family.

Also, what’s become apparent is that people have been using this increased time at home with slightly less commuting time to take time out to reflect on their lives and their desires and their aspirations and asking themselves in the millions, “Is this actually what I want to do anymore? Should I just do things differently, because the old ways weren’t really working for me?” We’re now seeing that manifesting itself in what’s called the Big Resignation. We’re seeing, particularly in the U.S and the U.K., hundreds of thousands over here, millions in the U.S. looking at either changing career paths dramatically or opting out of work altogether and retiring early, and that’s going to create a big set of pressures for us in terms of our recruitment activity as we move forward.

Undoubtedly, this is a global challenge unprecedented in nature — a huge leadership challenge. We’ve done incredibly well as a global society in terms of dealing with it. I don’t think it’s over yet, but we’re certainly at, hopefully, the beginning of the end or the beginning of the return to some sort of normalization. But what this does, Joe, when you put all of that into context, it gives us some hints and tips in terms of a way forward for business — some of the things that we should be prioritizing right now.

I’ve got three for you, and then I’m sure we’ll get on to the next question. First, I would be talking about organization strategy. This is an opportunity for businesses to reshape and redesign their business. They’ve had a lot of employee shifting going on in the last 12, 18 months. There’s an opportunity, therefore, to relook at their business and, in doing so, start rethinking how serious they are about their corporate- and social-responsibility strategies, because we will come on to generations shortly, about how important some of those things are to some of the younger generations.

But if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that businesses that have been seen to do the right thing and support global communities are the ones that will end up winning in terms of brand at the moment. And the companies that haven’t been seen to do that may take a long time to get back to the sort of brand recognition and affiliation that they perhaps previously enjoyed. There’s a piece there on strategy — also, about property portfolio use and real estate use. But again, I’m sure we can cover that in a bit later.

The second piece is the home-working and working-hour activities that businesses now need to start looking at. We have now got to a point where it is seen to be totally acceptable to work from home and, we’ve proven, as a global working society, that it can be done — it can be just as productive — and any barriers to that continuing have to a great extent been removed. But what we also have to consider is that although that might be convenient in terms of efficiency — perhaps not to have to commute so much — we also have to consider that we are by nature social beings, and we do need to be interacting with each other on a physical basis to at least some extent.

We also have to think about how our organization, culture and brand can be maintained if people are spending a little less time in the office than they previously were. We need to be talking about things like reward strategies, because what has definitely come out of the pandemic is that job security and financial security have been affected. Therefore, people are going to want a lot more of that if it can be facilitated by organizations.

But again, for the first time — certainly, in my lifetime — the term “health security” is now being talked about in terms of ensuring that people are in a position that they can feel secure with their health, whether that’s mental or physical. And of course, to finish all of that off, we’re going to need some training and development strategy to talk to our employee workforce in terms of how they adopt new ways of working — things like meeting protocols and meeting etiquette, to name just one obvious example. There’s a lot going on in the whole pandemic, but there’s a lot to be getting after. It’s a very exciting, if not challenging, time for us as leaders.

Kornik: Yes, and certainly, you’ve put a lot on the table there for us to discuss, Nigel, as we go through this, and we certainly will get to a lot of those. I want to start with something you touched on a few minutes ago, and that’s this idea of the multiple generations in the workforce — four, five, even six generations working side by side. I’ve heard you talk about this before, and it’s a fascinating take.

Jeremy: Where this really stems from is that social studies over the last 200 years will show that teenagers, typically, but youngsters under the age of 20 in every major generation, have typically rebelled in some way, and that rebellion might have been something as simple as hair or fashion or food or alcohol. There has been something that is as mark the zeitgeist of that particular age. And, of course, as people grow up, they normalize into society — they’ll go through whatever social processes that we have: They may get partners, they may get families and they may get jobs, and all of that sort of thing will tend to go on, and they will normalize.

But what happens is, from that rebellious piece that happened in those teenagers, driven predominantly by major world or national events that were going on during their childhood and into their teens, those values and belief systems remain, and they’re not maybe at front of mind, and they’re not positioned in front of everybody in terms of a piece of fashion, for example. But the value that was developed as a result of that is sitting there.

That means that in the way that individuals look at life and the way that individuals look at the workplace, that can differ quite dramatically between these generations. And that’s what this is all about. For the first time, because we’re getting older as a society — we’re living longer and we’re retiring later as a society — we now have hit the position that we do have five different generations, five rebellions in the workplace. And it’s very interesting to see the differences between those because as leaders, we therefore have to consider these different generations in what they want in order to truly engage them as employees.

Very briefly, there are five generations right now: We’ve got the traditionalists that are over 75. They only make up about 2% of the working population globally right now. They’re important, and they were incredibly important, but with 2% of the population, we tend not to concern ourselves too much, frankly, with their needs because it’s such a small percentage of the population.

Then, you get into the big groups after that: baby boomers, 60–75 years old, 10% of the population. Generation X, my generation, 39–60, the majority of which are the leaders in their business — most leaders worldwide will fall into that age bracket. They’re 25% of the population. Then you’ve got the millennial generation, 26–38, the biggest working population we have worldwide — 45% millennials, or Generation Y make up the employment pool at the moment. Finally, the Generation Z’s, our new kids on the block up to 25, they are making up already 20% of the working population.

Now, this is not a test. I just wanted to give you a sense of that percentage level. But what this means is — and this has all shifted in the last three or four years — that Generation Y and Z now make up 65% of the global working population. They are in the ascendancy, and they have some very different needs to us Generation Xers and our baby boomer parents, and that’s where this is now becoming very interesting. Technology — baby boomers grew up in the world of paper, emails, everything in triplicate, and of course they’ve adopted new ways of working and some level of technology, but they have adopted it, as have we Generation Xers.

Millennials however, grew up with tablets and iPads and any other form of technology we would class as state of the art today, and they are digital natives, and they, as well as Generation Z’s, are into everything being online, everything being available, everyone being unique. And if you need something, you can get it by tomorrow, and that it creates a whole new paradigm for the way you look at life and work. And the tech natives are truly the Generation Z group. These are the people that are now performing their lives. If it’s not online, it’s not real.

They need constant connection. They absolutely want freedom, flexibility and choice just like the millennials. But they also want time with their manager. They want to feel unique and different and that things are tailored towards them, because online, that’s how they’ve grown up. And the one big shift, and the last big shift, I mention now between the boomers and the Generation Xers together — this is the Y’s and the Z’s — is the embracing of diversity and uniqueness. We’re seeing a sea change.

We only have to look at any news these days to see that social consciousness — doing the right thing, is at the forefront of these generations’ minds, not something that we do alongside, perhaps — as it might have been with us as Generation X, and that that gives rise to different types of issues in the workplace. A big question for any board group will be, how do we innovate? Do we involve the Y’s and the Z’s — particularly the Z’s a bit more — and does our attraction narrative for employees need to be green and socially responsible because they just won’t join unless we’re seen to be a force for good as a corporate entity?

Kornik: Right. That sense of purpose certainly permeates everything. I want to talk about that new generational reality you just laid out for us. It obviously has a lot of impacts around talent models and talent strategy. And you got into this, but if you could put a bow on it for me as it relates to, say, training and development, leadership development, high-potential employees, some of those traditional HR things that you certainly had a lot of success with as chief learning officer at British Airways, where you were responsible for 40,000-plus employees. You’ve certainly had your experience in this. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about how this new reality, this generational reality, turns those talent models and strategies on their head.

Jeremy: For me, the good news is that the talent strategy, in terms of the structural approach to talent identification and development, I don’t believe needs to change. Most strong organizations on the talent front create a language of behavior and look to develop everyone around that in terms of the competency frameworks that they’ve got, and that’s a portfolio of learning for everyone. But then they surround that with a strong performance-management system which identifies who the top-performing employees are. They then match that up to a very clear set of criteria around talent identification in terms of who has the high potential to succeed further in the organization.

When they connect those two — past performance plus future potential — they’re then able to tailor individualized development programs for those high-potential individuals. If they get that right, we’re back to recruitment again, because these kids and older people are going to get promoted if you’ve done everything right.

Now, that process, broadly speaking, will stick. And it’s got its own challenges, but it is a process that will work if you if you’re strong enough to keep deploying strategy of all of those four, five areas that I’ve just talked about. The thing that will shift — that needs to shift — is that first thing that I talked about, that central language.

When we talk about the competencies of today and the high-potential indicators — the specific competencies that draw out the individuals that might lead in the future versus the individuals that are going to be great employees but may not have that leadership potential — when we look at the language, you could pretty much go to most organizations, certainly, in the last 20 years, and they all have a fairly similar competency framework. It would be very rooted in ’80s and ’90s and early-2000s business-speak. However, what we now are in a place of looking at, when we see the new generations coming through and what that will mean for organizations, is that that core language needs to shift quite dramatically.

Kornik: Let’s talk about skills and capabilities that will be shifting, because clearly, not only generationally, the world is evolving, and we’re going to obviously end up at a very different place. When you look out to 2030 and beyond, what skill sets and capabilities do you think will be in the highest demand?

Jeremy: For me, there are five or six major skill sets that we have to be thinking about, and we probably need to start investing in those things now for them to be available and at our disposal by 2030. I’ve touched on a couple already — critical thinking and problem-solving. We’re going to have a lot of intractable issues in the future that we are going to have to try and make some very big judgment calls on not just as leaders, but as individual day-to-day operational activity — creativity, innovation, the ability to self-manage.

If we see technology going the way it is in terms of interaction in the workplace, the ability to self-manage would become a big competence for us. The whale in all of this is quite clearly technology use and technology development. The skill sets associated with big data analysis, building new technologies, those are massive, and I don’t pretend to know anywhere near as much as I should about that particular competence, but it’s impossible to underestimate how big that shift is going to be in the years to come.

The big one I would connect particularly with what we’ve talked about earlier in this discussion would be leadership and social influence and social intelligence. I touched on leadership earlier in terms of that the way we now undertake, and the way we will need to undertake, our leadership activity in the future may need to change. We still need to be good leaders, but how we do it will be somewhat different. The social influence and the social intelligence, this is more about how we get the capabilities within our organization that are going to speak and resonate with the public, our customers — that it’s not just our employees that we need to believe in what we do.

I believe it already is starting — a worldwide movement of, we will only want to deal with people who are doing the right thing. We will only want to spend money with people who are doing the right thing. From an economic perspective and a business perspective, we need that skill. But also, it’s a pretty damn good thing for society in general that we start developing those types of skills and intelligence within our workforce right now. The social intelligence stuff is for everybody. It’s all about diversity, inclusion, the ecology and environment — how we interact with each other and with the planet and with other businesses and with our customers — that helps our organizations be seen and be a force for good. Technology is the whale, but this whole social influence and social intelligence would be the big leap alongside that.

It’s an interesting time to watch this unfolding, because the role-purpose values, the satisfaction engagement, all of those issues, they have been high on the agenda in most organizations, I’d argue — certainly, most I’ve seen — and they will remain high on the agenda in the future. The difference now is that Generation Y and Z’s employees — and don’t forget, within 10 years, they will be leaders of organizations as well — they will demand that purpose, values, engagement are real and meaningful in their organizations.

If organizations in the interim, while we make that journey, don’t deliver on this, we already know that 65% of the workforce are either Y’s and Z’s, are in a place which is, “If you won’t do it, I’ll go and work for somebody that does.” We’re really at a tipping point here in terms of which generation has got the power at the moment. I feel as if I’m handing the X rings over to the millennials literally and figuratively as we speak.

Kornik: What’s the future of the corporate office as we know it today? And look in 2030 and tell me your view of that of that office space.

Jeremy: Certainly, in the initial stages of the pandemic — in that first year, where many people were genuinely stuck at home for months and working from home — there was a thought that perhaps this was a complete sea change, and this was going to be the complete way of working for the future. I don’t subscribe to that. Even today, it’s starting to pan out that there is some level of return to the office. But it is a shift. We are on the journey on this.

My sense is that we will see a typical role by 2030 having — I’m talking for office work, obviously, Joe — typically, two to three days in the office and two to three days at home or, in fact, anywhere. We talk about home working right now. I think it’s going to not necessarily be home working. It could be you’re sitting on the beach in Miami. As long as you’re working, who cares? We’re on that journey, and by 2030, it will be seen as it would be very arcane to think you have to be in the office four or five days a week. That’s coming. Part of it’s here. It depends on the forward-thinking nature of different business leaders in terms of how much that’s happening — clearly, true, open-plan hot desking, these are not new ideas, but I think that it will be endemic in itself. Everywhere you will go, you will see this.

Also, we can expect house builders and landlords, the rental market, to respond. We may see that whereas perhaps somebody right now would get extra floor space in a new house for a bathroom, we might see a lot more new housing going up which has got extra studies or office space within, because there’s definitely a shift going on with that. The builders will go with the marketers where the demand is. We will see that, and landlords trying to convert their properties to be more available for home working too.

Clearly, videoconferencing is already here, but we’ll see, again, technology on this develop in the coming years to an extent that it becomes as simple as a phone call — literally, a press of one button, and you’re with your friends, and you might have six or eight people. I’m interested to see if we can develop — and we will develop — technology that creates a virtual room, a virtual desk around you. I’m not talking on-screen here. I’m talking about chairs around you with faces in there that sometimes you see in movies. That will be coming to a point near us without too much delay.

As we’ve said, business and opportunity to reduce the real estate costs, but which also delivers environmental benefits. Of course, let’s not forget that. There’s a win-win if you think about that social consciousness that we’re talking about here as well. It’s more of the same but a bit more developed. By the time we get to 2035, though, Joe, there’s a real question of whether there will need to be corporate offices. And if there are places of social interaction, work interaction, then it’s certainly growing in the U.K. and the U.S., this ability to rent an office for a day — these types of businesses where you can rent a boardroom and eight of you turn up, and then you do your business for that day, and then you’ll see each other again in two weeks’ time for the one day. But it’s just one-fee-type approach. We will see that, at least, as a market that’s trying to break through amongst, clearly, a number of other things.

Kornik: What about these companies that have built a lot of their success on culture in terms of employees and in terms of having a culture where they bring people together and there’s a lot of interaction and collaboration? Can we do that without a corporate office or an office space? We’ve been doing it for two years, but can we continue to do it? Is it sustainable?

Jeremy: We’re going to have to think differently if we are going to do it. Fundamentally, as I said very earlier on in this cast that, we have to remember that humans are social beings. We need physical interaction. It’s great to have an audio, it’s great to have a moving picture on the screen, but we should never pretend that anything can truly replace looking somebody directly in the eye and feeling their presence in the room opposite you, and therefore creative and innovative ways of making that happen. This is where I came into rental offices, where we don’t necessarily have to be together to create culture, to create brand. You don’t have to be together five days a week. You might need to be together 20 days a year. If those 20 days are beautiful days ingrained in brand-customer relationships, that would be the fuel that we can use when we’re using other media afterwards to sustain us.

Kornik: When you look out, you mentioned 2035, and that’s a nice, round number we can look at, and you’ve made many predictions here. But I’m wondering if you have a bold prediction in your mind about where we’ll be from a work perspective. What will be the most striking difference between 2035 and today? Ultimately, what I would love to know is, will employees be more engaged, more productive, more satisfied — essentially, more fulfilled with their working lives, let’s say — in 2035 than they are today?

Jeremy: I’ll answer your last question first, Joe, if I may. They will, is the genuine answer, and it will be incumbent upon us as Generation X leaders to try and make that shift happen. But that shift will truly embed when we get Generation Y and Z’s leaders into the boardrooms. We can’t rush that. They have to develop their own careers to a point where it’s right for them to join the boardrooms. But when they do, and when they become the large minority or the majority in that boardroom, we’ll see things change very quickly.

By 2035, doing the math, we should be in that in that space by then. We will see corporate responsibility as a business imperative, and that would be driven, as I said, by those Y and Z’s leaders. We’ll see leaps of innovation in technology. We will be solving global societal problems, whether it’s energy, climate issues, hunger, disease. We’ve shown in the last two years what we can do in terms of vaccine programs. It shows that when the world puts its mind to something, things can happen. It’s having enough of a burning platform for us to make these types of things happen.

Kornik: What a far-reaching and deep dive into the future of work that you’ve taken us on here today. I appreciate that. Thank you, Nigel, for your time today.

Jeremy: Thank you, Joe. It’s really a pleasure. Thank you.

Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Be sure to visit us at Vision.Protiviti.com. For Nigel Jeremy, I’m Joe Kornik. Until next time, thank you.

LISTEN UP! THE FUTURE OF WORKFORCES AND WORKPLACES - Podcast transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we put megatrends under the microscope and look into the future to examine the strategic implications of the topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work, and I’m happy to be joined by my Protiviti colleague, Peter Richardson, managing director and architect for the future of work at Protiviti. Peter leads the firm’s focus on the future of work globally, where he emphasizes rebuilding the operating model and future-of-work engine by empowering teams, equipping them to contribute fully in a hybrid environment, and developing and underpinning culture. Today, we’re going to discuss the future of work as it relates to culture, collaboration and location for knowledge workers. Peter, it’s so great to have you with me on the podcast today.

Peter Richardson: It’s great to be here too, Joe. Thanks very much and thanks for the opportunity to discuss this topic, which is very close to my heart.

Joe Kornik: I’m looking forward to it. Peter, as much as I thought that by March 2022 we would be able to be well past the pandemic, it looks like we’re not quite there yet, but I do think it’s pretty safe to say these last two years have had a pretty profound impact on those three things I just mentioned above: culture, collaboration and office locations. We’ll take them one at a time, but before we do, I’m wondering if you could share any thoughts you have on what the last two years have meant in terms of the future of work and what impact, ultimately, you think it’ll have over the next decade of work.

Peter Richardson: Let me say, first of all, I’m going to talk primarily about office-based workers or knowledge workers. My role doesn’t focus that much on manufacturing, retail or other forms of physical delivery, so I’m talking about work that’s not really site-based or particularly equipment-based. The pendulum has swung significantly toward a way of working that we’ve, to be blunt, never seen before. Work is no longer just somewhere we go. It’s something we do and can do everywhere, and we’ve proven that.

That trend has accelerated pretty rapidly over the last two years, and as you say, Joe, there are three major areas where things have changed most significantly. Ever-evolving remote collaboration has been enabled by technology and is changing the way we work, but it’s got potential to go much further in redefining work in a hybrid world that we’re now beginning to inhabit much more fully. Organizations have been keen and remain keen, of course, to protect and enhance their cultures, but what people have experienced over the last 18 months has engendered some significant and more permanent changes in the way people think and behave and interact within their ever-changing organizations.

The spaces that we once called offices are beginning to look and feel very different, so a better world of work is waiting. Now, why do I say that? We used to look at our businesses in a pretty rigid way. It was based on a certain way we work. It was more on a manufacturing model where people worked in fixed locations close to where they lived. They got up at the same time every day. They stayed in the same place to do the stuff we needed them to do. It was an old-world paradigm based on pre-mobile phone and pre-internet operating models — people in the office all the time, people 100% getting up early, people pretty much 100% commuting, pretty much 100% physical presence for management oversight and probably control.

When you think about it, that model had become already pretty outdated, but what we’ve learned over the past 24 months now, as you say, is about the irrelevance of much of that. When we’ve put ourselves to the test, as we have had to do over the past two years, businesses have been pretty good and very able at coming up with better ways of doing things, and doing them quickly.

There was some McKinsey research that asked CEOs about 12 potential changes and how long it took them to execute before and during the crisis, and for many of these changes, respondents said that their companies acted as much as 20 to 25 times faster than they had expected. In the case of remote working, the respondents, the CEOs, said that their companies had moved 40 times more quickly than they thought could be possible before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, executives said it would take more than a year to implement the level of remote working that took place during the crisis, and it took an average of 11 days to implement a workable remote-working solution, but we’re still learning and experimenting with how to deal with some of the paradoxes that have also been created over that time. There’s a question of remote versus in-person time.

Microsoft commissioned some research that concluded that — you have heard numbers like this before — 70% of workers want flexible remote-work options to continue, while at the same time, the paradox is that 50%, 60%, 65% have been craving more in-person time with their teams. Then, there’s a question of, are we more effective and more efficient now? And as a counter to that, what’s been the impact on fatigue and exhaustion? I’ve read some numbers from Unilever, which reported that for their office-based workforce, they had seen an increase of 22% in productivity, 30% in collaboration and 19% in external orientation from those office-based workers.

At the same time, if you look at other numbers, it’s actually the older workers and bosses who are identified as thriving, where the satisfaction index there is about 60%. Whereas, for those without decision-making authority, the satisfaction index is about 35%. And then, if you look at Gen Zers, those aged between 18 and 25, the consensus is that they’ve been struggling more to balance work with life, and they’re more exhausted than their counterparts. They’re not as excited, not as engaged about work, can’t get a word in during some meetings or bring new ideas to the table, and they’re yearning for much more in-person interaction, so there’s a lot going on there.

When you look at office space, office usage, businesses are talking about 30% lower office footprint, lower office usage, still struggling with the question of work from home versus should people be spending a certain percentage of their time in the office? Should we be enabling working from anywhere? When it comes to that, some leaders are still saying — somewhat ill-advisedly — “Let’s get back to the former reality.” “Let’s drop this,” as one leading CEO said, “aberration of remote working,” and others, equally ill-advisedly, are saying, “You will work in the office for three days a week.”

I would advocate specific use cases for bringing people together in-person as the way forward, and I’m sure we’ll come onto that later in the discussion. Looking at it in the round, the last two years have been a tipping point of historic proportions. That’s not to overestimate things. The pace of change is probably likely to slow down for now, but looking forward, more changes will still be required as the economic and human situations evolve.

Remote work has created an opportunity to bring in at pace — significant pace — digital transformation to fruition where many companies have been stuck in pilot mode for years, has created new job opportunities for some, has offered more family time and a better work-life balance for some but not all. There’ve clearly been some who have lost out, and I acknowledge that. It’s provided options for whether or when to commute or not to commute at all, but there are also real challenges ahead. Teams have probably become, over the course of things, somewhat more siloed.

Digital exhaustion is a real challenge, and it will be critical to learn and experiment going forward with how to use technologies to execute a delivery more effectively to change organization operating models, to change at a pace that continues to exceed prior performance, and to address, again, as you’ve alluded to, Joe, the cultural and people implications to focus on new capabilities in people — not just those designed for the crisis but also including digital fluency, data literacy and agile ways of working. In summary, overall, we’ve learned an awful lot and probably surprised ourselves equally with an awful lot too.

Joe Kornik: That’s spot-on. So much has come out of the last two years, but to your point, there is no going back. To try to reinvent the way we worked in 2016, it’s just a losing proposition. Peter, I’m old enough to remember when every phone call didn’t last 30 minutes, though, so we do need to find a happy medium where we used to just call our mate and talk for six minutes and hang the phone up because we were done. It doesn’t happen as much in this new environment, this environment that we’re in today.

You’ve brought up culture, and I feel like that’s a good place to go, to take this conversation next. I’m always fascinated by it. It’s such a tricky thing, because it means very different things to everyone, to very different people. A lot of companies build their brand on culture. It’s one of the differentiators. It’s one of the things that they talk about when they recruit employees, their culture. That’s all been shot in a cannon up into the sky, and we’re going to have to see where it all lands.

Employers, obviously, view it differently than employees. Employees view it differently from each other. For some, it’s all about the office and that interaction and that collaboration in person. For others, it might be all about no office or lack of office, and that’s great culture to them. That’s the way they want to work. Let’s start with employees. We’re going to look at this from both sides, but we’ll start with the employees’ perspective.

Peter Richardson: For me, culture is about survival. It’s about what individuals need to do to fit in and thrive within an organization, and that doesn’t come so much from the physical aspect. It comes from the behavioral ones. The basic underlying assumptions about what’s right and what works within this organization, that’s what drives the way people then behave within the culture, within that organization. Everyone within an organization experiences the effects of culture every day.

Culture manifests itself, of course, in a number of ways, but what you see, hear and feel isn’t always an accurate reflection of the true drivers of the culture in that organization. It’s made up of a number of levels. Starting at the top of what you might imagine as a pyramid are the artifacts. This is what people can see, touch — the physical aspects — and includes things like policies, procedures, mission statements and so on, but it can also include things such as office locations, buildings, who gets what desk on what floor. All of these physical and visible aspects of the organization environment convey messages about the way things are done.

At the next level down in the pyramid, underneath the artifacts, sit what Edgar Schein would call the espoused beliefs and values. This is what you hear as you move around in organization, what people say, how they interact with each other and what they do on the surface. Sometimes, what people say is genuine, but you may also find that those statements at that level could be examples of toeing the company line. And sitting underneath all of that, this is where the culture really manifests itself and what drives the organization’s culture. Sitting under that are the basic underlying assumptions within those individuals and organizations that drive the way they behave when no one’s watching.

What’s interesting is, as we go down through those layers, from artifacts through espoused values into values and then into behaviors, what’s most visible and out in the open reduces, whereas the conclusiveness, the impact, about what drives the organizational culture increases. I argue that, yes, on the basis of all that, as a consequence of what’s been going on over the past two years, cultures will have changed.

At the moment, given the extent of change over the past 18 months, it feels to me sometimes like we’re on a different planet. We’re almost on Mars and not on planet Earth. The environment is fundamentally different. Engagement is different. People are behaving in a different way. In many cases, they almost speak a different language about work. The atmosphere sometimes makes it difficult to think clearly, and the terrain ahead is not fully mapped out and understood.

Why do I say that? If you look at pre-pandemic, as I described in my opening comments, we lived in a well-defined world where people came together into offices, into the atmosphere that was very physical pretty much every day. In the remote working world of the pandemic, people have experienced an entirely different working paradigm, an entirely different skew to their work-life balance. Certainly, since children have been back in school, there’s been less onus on parents to participate as directly in their children’s education, and probably, quite strongly, a positive work-life balance.

If you ask leaders, as I do regularly, which paradigm they most support going forward, some argue that it’s option one — that we go back together again to rekindle our cultures and values is key to them — and others argue that maintaining alignment with this new agile and flexible paradigm supporting flexibility and recognizing work-life balance is the only way to retain and attract talent, which is becoming an increasingly significant challenge and, again, a topic we may come to later, Joe.

The fact is that both sets of people, both paradigms, both are right. The conclusion I draw from that is that in order to satisfy both constituencies, an entirely new paradigm that’s neither based on option one nor option two is the answer, and that still has to be fully designed. In the meantime, there’ll be a lot of experimentation and agility required as new hybrid operating cultures and operating models are tried and tested — so, a lot of change ahead.

Joe Kornik: When you look out over the next decade, I’ve been hearing about a talent shortage, particularly in Europe and North America. How worried should executives be about that, and having the skills and the capabilities and the people to get all the work done that they’ll need to in, let’s say, 2030 and beyond?

Peter Richardson: There are, as I’ve touched upon, some quite complex people and behavioral issues to deal with here, and this world doesn’t suit everyone. There’ve been, of course, losers in the way that things have operated in the last couple of years. I spoke on those pressures, but in particular, there’ve been pressures on women with children, on younger and newer employees. In order to continue to be able to attract and retain those people, organizations do need to look long and hard at the way they approach talent and the retention of their people.

I’d also like to touch upon a couple of ideas — in particular, the threat of how a two-tier system might develop, and what we need to do to avoid that. A lot of articles published in this area argue that people who come into the office will be able to advance more quickly and catch the eye of their managers more easily, and at the same time, those who choose to work more at home are somehow going to lose out from not being there in person, and these are very real concerns.

They’ve been shared privately in many of the events we’ve run and amongst some of our clients, and some businesses are being tentative in their approaches here, while others are making it very clear that being in the office will create opportunities. That’s mistaken and will potentially cause issues as far as the retention of key people is concerned. I do appreciate that there’s a risk of presenteeism coming back, but it’s important that we create a much more inclusive working model in the new models we implement.

Companies can use technology, physical locations and remote locations to ensure that people remain connected, and we can’t assume that all managers will go back into the office either, so let’s define the reasons for people being in the office. If what they’re doing doesn’t require them to be there, then why force them to be there? Why try and use that short shoe on to push people into those locations?

In our business, we’re asking ourselves questions like, “Is this something that people need to be with co-workers to do, or not?” If it isn’t, then it doesn’t make sense, necessarily, for them to be forced to be in a physical location to do it, and let’s try also to understand people’s motivations for social interaction and human connection. People want to be together for so much of their social life. It’s perceived that being in the office and being with their colleagues and friends is what it’s about. People aren’t actually yearning to be in the office, though. They’re yearning for that social interaction, so let’s make sure that we’re addressing that question rather than looking at it from a physical-location point of view, especially if people have got commutes, fixed hours that don’t suit them, or if they’re looking after families and parents.

Now, that’s what they’ve experienced much of over the past two years. That’s where they’ve experienced so much more value above and beyond being physically in an office together, and we need to be able to respond to that in order to make sure that we are able to respond to our people’s needs.

Joe Kornik: Let’s just keep going down that road to the office, because I feel like this is one of the more fascinating things that will develop over the next decade, around what the office of 2030 will look like.

Peter Richardson: It’s interesting, isn’t it? As you’ve just said that, Joe, there’s been a lot of talk about people “going back to the office.” Again, as I’ve said before, some leaders have made it clear that they want people to return, while others are much more active in exploring hybrid models between an office and other physical locations, and still more are confused. People talk about that the office is work rather than a place to go and work, and there’s a big difference. If companies continue to think about the challenge in these terms and focus on where people are on given days, they’ll overlook a much bigger opportunity, and that’s to fundamentally rethink, rebuild and reimagine the way their business operates and where it operates. That ranges from where people work to how they work to what work means through to things like their carbon footprint.

We need to start talking much more about how we involve, include and engage our people wherever they’re located, so our physical locations need to be equipped and designed to achieve that wherever our people are, whether they’re working from home or not. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about a world where people stay permanently out of the office. I’m talking about a world where we’re smart about the reasons for bringing people together.

The old Industrial Revolution-driven office environment is entirely about having people in front of you, and this raises issues about trust. I’m arguing that that’s a completely outdated model, and I can’t understand why people feel that going back to that is beneficial. Demanding that employees come into the office five days a week or three days a week or whatever it happens to be to do what they used to do will create a backlash. Asking employees to come into the office once five days a week from to time to do things that are valuable is a redesign of the way we work, and that’s fundamentally the point that people really need to consider deeply.

I consider that mainly in terms of person activity. The question is, how do we get the most value out of assets that will become scarcer over time and the most value out of in-person activity for our clients, for our people and for our business, and what are the use cases that most require or demand or benefit from in-person activity?

The best definition I heard on this topic was in the relatively early days of the pandemic, when a senior person in marketing in a major confectionary firm talked about, as she termed it, the five C’s, and she used these words: connectivity, collaboration, creativity, celebration and compassion. They were the five strong rationales, as she put it, for needing people in person together.

I’ll add a couple more: culture — things like how we introduce people to the business, how we induct people, how we train people, etc., and possibly something specifically to do with client engagement, although that could equally be probably covered under the term connectivity, but something that specifically focuses on in-person connectivity, relationship building with clients. I agree with that list, and businesses will increasingly bring people together for in-person interaction only when they actually need to, because it’s the right thing to do.

I’m remembering, too, that these use cases need to work for all types of in-person interaction, ranging from when it’s 100% physical, so we have everyone together in one meeting, through to some physical and some virtual for your people and your clients where there’s a good degree of in-person presence in a physical location and a degree of remote presence too — a true hybrid model.

We’re still really learning how the make this work in practice. Remember that I referred to living on a different planet? We need to equip our people wherever they may be to be able to facilitate and manage these types of interaction in an entirely different way, and that doesn’t just mean by providing technology support. It means by training them, developing them, enabling them with new soft skills around facilitation, around client management, around presentation. My job these days seems much more like being a television presenter than in my world, a consultant who visits my clients every day, so I need new skills to be able to do that in the new world in which we’re expected to operate.

Looking further forward, those work environments will be effectively zoned along the lines of those five, six, or seven C’s I mentioned. I look on these zones as being more like film sets or film studios, so the collaboration studio — call it studio one, for example — will be fundamentally different from the creativity or the compassion studio. We’ll call them studios two and three. And each one will have a different script, will have a different technology usage, will have different scenery, will have potentially different costumes, wear different clothes. The direction of the activity in those studios will be different. The production will be different. The locations may be different. We talk about the office. There’ll be many more hybrid office locations, maybe even pop-up locations that we use specifically for specific purposes. There’s a huge amount of change to come there, Joe.

Joe Kornik: Yes, it sounds like it. What an interesting look at the future of the office space. You mentioned how often you are in front of clients, talking about these very same things. I’m wondering if you could boil it down to a few succinct calls to action for business leaders. It’s no secret that we’re facing a tumultuous future of work. We can all agree on that. What do you tell them to make sure that they get that right?

Peter Richardson: I look at it in terms of barriers that need to be overcome: There are a bunch of barriers that will get in the way of creating that new vision and making things happen. There’s a real momentum to refine and redefine the way business is done, but there are some significant challenges. One is, let’s be honest, that many business leaders are grounded in that old paradigm and find it difficult to imagine a way of working that’s fundamentally different. I respond by saying, “Well, what are the consequences of not doing anything?” We’re already seeing companies experiencing highly unusual levels of attrition, people leaving. That is as a consequence of not having answers for those people, including parents with children, millennials, Generation Zs, who are looking for smarter answers. If they don’t get them from our business leaders, then they’ll move on.

Another barrier is a clear communication about what’s next, which is linked to the point I’ve just made above: Most organizations have been good at communicating and engaging strongly with people in the current environment, but as they start to tackle the challenges looking forward, they’ll need to maintain or find a new level of engagement and connectivity that’s about the future, that’s about looking forward. Now is the time to push again, to push harder, and it’s going to require the same level of commitment, involvement and drive as it did during the beginning of the pandemic, when we were worried about communicating with our people and keeping them engaged.

Trust is still an issue that is linked to a model of working that’s essentially based on seeing people and monitoring them, and we have to acknowledge that what we’ve proven and seen in the last 18 months in many businesses is that we should trust people. It’s worked really well in many instances, and what evidence exists to prove widespread failure and bad behavior of people working in this remote world, I don’t think there is much. It’s proven the opposite. There’s more trust now, and we’re more able to be able to rely on our people working in an agile and flexible way that isn’t always under our noses.

There’s a fear of changing the working model that’s familiar, especially when solutions are going to be experimental, and I respond to that that some companies have implemented change programs between 20 and 40 times as quickly as they have done before, as that McKinsey research showed. It’s been an accelerator that’s applied here, and it’s proved that many things are possible that we often feared and prevented ourselves from being able to do before because of legacy concerns. We can’t just take that foot off that pedal now. There’s a danger that I’ll start driving in a slower lane, and if too many companies do that, the bigger opportunity will be lost.

Joe Kornik: Before I let you go, I’d like to ask people to live the VISION by Protiviti mantra one more time and to look out, let’s say, to 2035. Let’s go 13 years in the future and put yourself into that time frame. Any bold predictions about the future of work? What aren’t we considering? What may surprise us about how or where we’ll work in 2035? Have you got any bold predictions for us to share before we wrap up?

Peter Richardson: It’s a long time ahead, Joe, but I’ll try my best. We have this huge opportunity to continue to redefine what work is, what meetings are. We’ve only scratched the surface so far. Our application of the technology so far has been really to apply new technology over old operating models, old processes. We’ve run meetings, the same old meetings we always used to run. We just run them with video. I don’t think we’ve exploited the potential for fundamentally redefining what a meeting is, how we work, where we work, what we do it for at all.

The technology infrastructure is there now to deliver much more remotely, but also that means that we won’t need to go on planes and trains and run around the country as much as we used to do, especially in the context of the ever more important ESG agenda. Just think what the opportunity is in terms of carbon footprint if we continue not to travel to the extent we did.

Now, I know that’s not great for the travel industry, but certainly in terms of people in my industry, it creates a significant new paradigm. There’ll be fundamental changes to the employee value proposition, the employee experience. Cultures will be different. Leadership engagement will need to be different. Working conditions will be different. The opportunity for diversity, equity and inclusion will be different because we can employ people and include people and engage people from much broader environments and backgrounds and locations. Remuneration and progression will probably be different as a consequence of all of that.

The pathfinder, the leading organizations have already recognized that no one actually has the right answer, and they will continue to lead the way based on data and workplace analytics and surveys of staff and of clients. Those organizations, over the next many years, will be prepared to continue to test, review, experiment and throw away if it doesn’t work.

There’s a lot of change ahead, and that’s really exciting. As well as the physical experience and logistics of the workplace environment, there’ll need to be changes in policies in issues such as tax and legal; changes to contracts and employment policies that will all impact the employee experience and will need testing with new workforces; how people get access to their leadership; further opportunities for skills development, digital skills requirements; personal and travel time; and how we will recruit. There is a lot of change ahead, Joe. That’s a bit of a broad answer, but there’s an awful a lot of opportunity over certainly the next 10 years–plus.

Joe Kornik: Absolutely, and we will be here to chronicle it every step of the way. Thank you, Peter, so much for your time today and your insights. It was wonderful having you on the show.

Peter Richardson: Thank you, Joe. I’ve enjoyed it.

Joe Kornik: Thank you, at home, for listening to today’s podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Please do check us out at Vision.Protiviti.com or on LinkedIn at VISION by Protiviti. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time on the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Take care.

HOW WE’LL WORK NEXT WITH NINA HENDERSON, INTERNATIONAL WORKPLACE GROUP DIRECTOR - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, editor-in-chief of Vision by Protiviti, where we look into the future to examine the implications of big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

Today, I’m joined by Nina Henderson, director of CNO Financial Group, International Workplace Group and Hikma Pharmaceuticals. Nina chairs several human resource compensation committees and is a member of the audit, corporate social responsibility and governance committees for a number of companies. She is also vice chair of Drexel University’s Board of Trustees, a commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and a director of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the Foreign Policy Association. Nina, it’s so great to have you here with us today.

Henderson: Great to see you, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Kornik: Nina, when you think about the future of work, let’s say a decade from now — 2030 and beyond — and the people who will be doing that work and how they will be doing it and the impact it may have, what jumps out to you the most?

Henderson: I’ve been thinking about this in general, and there are so many things being postulated now about how going to work, being at work, what we’ll do, who will do it, where we’ll do it, and all that is near-term. So, the more fun thing is that you’re saying, “What about 10 years from now?” and we have to suspend what we used to call work and what we used to call productivity, and there’s going to be a lot of change in both of those aspects.

Also, what’s happened here is, we are enhancing a bifurcated society, and somehow, we’re going to have to learn how to work with that much more effectively. We can’t have two parallel economies funded by workers in two different worlds. That will be surreal, and there won’t be any synergy, and you need synergy to make the world go round. That will be interesting. There won’t be, hopefully, a severe cut between what is now being called knowledge workers — office workers — versus people that are day in day out producing, making, servicing.

Kornik: It’s interesting that you talk about that dichotomy between office workers and the two different classes, because one of the levelers, traditionally, has been technologies and some of the collaboration technologies that we’ve seen during the pandemic. Obviously, we probably wouldn’t be able to get through the pandemic without those collaboration technologies. We had them before. They were on rocket fuel during the pandemic in terms of their adoption and their use. I’m curious: What are their near-term and longer-term impacts on employees?

Henderson: The whole notion of collaboration, maybe we’re thinking about that, about the office workers who went home and/or went to another part of the state or their vacation home or whatever and collaborated on virtual platforms. Collaboration is a wonderful word, but I don’t know that we have propelled the ability for true collaboration against the multiplicity of synergistic employers and employees and deliverers of goods, services, products, etc. That’s one big thing. You have to redefine what collaboration means, and redefine what technology means as far as, there’s a subquestion that you bring up to me when you phrase that, and that is this whole notion of, how are people responding to this?

Now, we get a lot of commentary that people are getting the old ennui. They’re being bored about it. They’re being detached. One of the serious things here is that human nature is that you want to be around other people — you really do, whether it’s socializing, your family, your fellow workers. Even to see people walking around the city is kind of exciting, or out in the woods — it doesn’t matter. We will, as human beings, always want to see other people, and we’ve been in a forced situation here where we’ve had a limited ability to interact. If you’ve got a family at home, you’ve been interacting solely with them.

Yes, you interact a bit on these virtual platforms, but you’re not with anybody. It’s a digitized representation. You’re not with anybody, and the reality is, you can’t see if someone’s looking at you. You can’t get all the other cues of communications that humans have in terms of, am I leaning into you? Am I really interested, or am I shrugging my shoulders, or am I looking down at my desk and doing my email while I’m on Zoom or Microsoft Teams? You just wonder what’s happening here.

There are a couple of things that do concern me as we continue to use this technology. One, it’s very hard to maintain a cultural identity with it — almost impossible. Two, it’s transactional in nature: You get things done. You check a box. You move on. My niece, a 25-year-old, gave me a mug for Christmas that says, “I made it through another Zoom that could have been an email,” and we’re not sophisticated enough to be selective about how we’re doing things — the cultural thing, the transactional nature.

The other thing is that it’s very hard to have a sense of belonging — not just culturally, but also belonging and exchanging. That will become very difficult for human beings to continue. The fourth thing that I’m concerned about is innovation and creativity. Innovation can be sparked by an individual. Yes, but more than likely, it’s brought to life by groups of people working together, 1-2-3. All of that is being lost. If we were to rely on using, in your words, collaborative technology, we would fall behind in a competitive race worldwide.

Kornik: Nina, you make a lot of great points. I just wonder, I think how different even this conversation would be between the two of us if we were sitting in a in a room on the couch, across from each other. All the verbal cues that we’re potentially missing, and we’ve been on so many Zoom calls for so long now during the pandemic. And as we move forward, the key is, how do we position these tools, and how do we use them? You mentioned your niece, who clearly comes from a different generation than you or me, and how they process information is obviously very different. So, there are a lot of generational forces too that business leaders and executives need to be thinking about as they look forward for the next 10 years.

Henderson: First of all, the niece that you mentioned, she’s 25 and she’s working, and she’s out of college, and she went through college, came out, etc., went to work before the pandemic. There’s a big difference, and I’m going to make that point now. We as employers and as people wanting to bring along groups of people to do well for society and for themselves, we have a major issue, and that is, when you look at the high school children and the college-age young adults over the last two years, they’ve essentially spent all of their time in their childhood bedroom. This is a tremendous strain, because many things happen, as we all know as parents and as family members, as teachers, as employers, to young people as they proceed through their last years of high school, enter college or enter the workforce if they don’t go to college — if they don’t want to, that’s just fine.

But all of the adulting skills that would have naturally progressed in a very formative period of these young people’s times have been squashed. From a standpoint of employers and societal needs, we’re going to have to help these young people come along. I’m vice chair of the board of trustees of a university, and I also chair academic affairs there. We used to give a student that was having trouble three semesters to be able to bring themselves up to the capability that was required. We now have expanded that to four because we realized that they just weren’t ready when they came in.

It has nothing to do with how wonderful the high school teacher was or how much they decided. It’s just darn hard when you don’t have the decision-making that comes with having to go — even in high school, when you join the team, all of those things, you were allowed to learn to socialize, make decisions on your own when you went away from home, all of that has been left. We’re dealing with, as employers and a society, a solid 10 years of that group of people needing extra help and some understanding to move forward. That’s one.

Number two, let’s think about the fact of looking up. For most all of us, the reality is that we have spent the last 10 years looking down. We are looking down at some kind of a machine, and if one loses the ability to look up, you are going to lose the ability to notice colors, to notice forms, to notice those communication cues that you and I mentioned earlier. There’s a real issue there.

Also, if you’re spending a large portion of your time on apps, which are predigested information being given to you — yes, you’re selecting which one you want, but basically, what’s in there, you haven’t curated. It’s been curated for you, and as it has progressed from, let’s say, Facebook to Instagram, and now we’re down to TikTok and Snap, what do you do with a population whose attention span is 46 seconds?

I’m not criticizing — that’s really interesting. But how do you work with an entirely different group of people used to receiving things in a quick, shorthand way with attention spans — I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying these are realities, and we have to think about, how do you enthuse people like that? How do you keep them involved? How do you let them work their own magic. Does this resonate for you, what I’m suggesting here?

Kornik: Absolutely. I’ve had these conversations, you know, exploring this topic with several people, specifically around the generational differences between the multiple generations in the workforce leadership styles — how people have come of age in an age of technology versus not an age of technology. It’s fascinating.

One thing that will be interesting for companies and business leaders to think about over the next several years, the next decade, is, where do those people work? Are you going to bring all those people back into a traditional office setting where they get to collaborate or interact with each other or maybe mentor or maybe shadow someone and see leadership styles? There’s a whole generation now, or two years’ worth, of employees who are maybe even more comfortable working from their home office or working from their kitchen table and not having to be elbow to elbow with their coworkers or even clients or customers. That’s a fascinating piece of this. I’m curious as to your thoughts: Do you ever see us returning to what we call a traditional workweek in a traditional office space?

Henderson: There’s still the traditional workweek — actually, it’s been expanded. I feel like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey — “What is a weekend?” because the reality is that your workweek now goes right into Saturday and Sunday, and unless you provide some dropdowns on that, it just stays that way. Work is done when you can fulfill it and when you make the time to do it. I don’t think that’s going to change. That’s going to evolve more. There will be a work time period — maybe not a workweek, but there’ll be a work time period — and depending on whether it’s a team effort, you’ll have to figure things to schedule with other people. Other times, if it’s a sole-capacity or thinking situation, you might do that at your leisure, whatever the case may be. The time parameters around work will change. The definition of work will change, and the word productivity will have to have a whole new definition.

Kornik: I’m curious about what your definition of productivity will be in the future.

Henderson: I don’t think it will be the number of virtual platform meetings that you can throw into a day or how many boxes on those virtual platform meetings you can get on — you know, 20 or 30 people. I do not think that will be a definition of productivity. Right now, we have fallen into the trap of thinking of transactional activity as productivity. That’s not productivity. Productivity is being able to build, to add on, to create, to open new territories, to open new thought waves, to make new products, to open new markets, etc. That’s productivity, and that is pretty hard to do in the way we have been operating the last two years.

Kornik: We talked about a lot here today, and you’ve given us a lot to think about. I’m curious, though; When you look out, let’s say to 2035 — we’ll take 13 years in the future — give me a few examples of how that might look. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed today that you think will surprise us or will be a little bit different or that hasn’t been in the parameters of this conversation? Ultimately, do you think work will end up being a more fulfilling, engaging, positive, enjoyable experience for employees in 2035, maybe more so than it is than it is now, or it was pre-pandemic, even?

Henderson: We have to be realistic. Work is work, Yes, work is to underwrite your capability to live your life, so it should be engaging. It should be rewarding both financially and in terms of personal sense of self. It should give you a place in community, within your overall local community but also within your business community, your operation community. But it’s still work. So, I don’t think that that’s going to change years from now. And sometimes you’ll have jobs where you feel tremendously fulfilled, and sometimes you’ll have positions where you’ll think, “Oh, boy.” That’s going to be there, but how we work and what we value within work and how we will choose who to work for or with will change dramatically as we go forward.

Kornik: Nina, thank you so much for your valuable insights, your unique insights. It was such an interesting conversation. Next time, we’re going to do it in person.

Henderson: Yay — wonderful.

Kornik: Thanks so much, Nina Henderson, for joining us on this VISION by Protiviti interview. We’ll see you again next time.