E160 – Leading & Managing in 2023: Introduction

James. This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane, and just before we start this episode, we wanted to remind you that we don't simply produce podcasts. We also design and deliver leadership and management development programs for a wide range of organizations, and we help leaders understand and improve their teams and organizations, cultures and ways of working, to learn more or to work with us. Check out our website, www, dot World of work.io. For more details, or send us an email on Hello at World of work.io today, we're going to be talking about leading and managing in 2023 So Jen, what are we going to be doing today? How are we going to be exploring this conversation. Okay,

so we're gonna record a series of conversations quite short, and in those conversations we're gonna be looking at three things. We're gonna be looking at what the big global current factors around the world are, particularly thinking about the US, UK and Europe, and how they're affecting the workplace and our experiences of it. We're also going to look at what trends we're seeing in the clients that we work with, in the organizations that we see and we talk to, and what that means to the HR and people space in those organizations. And then lastly, you and I are going to have a little bit of a conversation about what we think that means for the way that people should lead and manage going into 2023

and beyond. Yeah, that's brilliant. And today we're really going to start off with that intro piece exploring the broader context and looking at what we think those main themes are. And then we're going to have a series of small podcasts that follow on. So each of those other podcasts is going to be looking at one of the key themes that we call out, and we'll be sharing our thoughts on what leaders of people and teams can really focus on to get the best out of 2023 for themselves and others. So that's what's coming up. So let's talk a little bit about the world right now and some of that context. And what I just want to put out there right away is this word VUCA. It's a phrase I'm sure many of you've heard. It's not a new phrase or concept. VUCA has been around for a long time as a phrase, since, you know, the mid 80s. And VUCA is a word that pulls together the starting letters of a series of words, so it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And as I've said, it's not a new word, but it sort of sums up this kind of funny place that the world can be in where it's hard to make predictions, hard to assess, hard to understand what cause and effect are, and hard to sort of make decisions. And as we said, it's not a new phrase, but we really think the world is getting even more VUCA and the 2022, word of a year, which we kind of like, is permacrisis from McCollins dictionary. So they call that permacrisis as their word of the of the year, and they described this as an extended period of instability and insecurity. That doesn't sound so nice, does it? But, but like it's a word that we think really sort of captures the moment and captures where we are, and I think that sort of lends itself to that sense that we're becoming even more VUCA we're living through this time of permit crisis. So what sort of things are part of this perma crisis? Well, we've had, and continue to have, fast technological change that's disruptive and unsettling for us as individuals. We've got climate crisis that's ongoing. We had the 0708 fairly recent in broader terms, 0708 big recession, the sort of financial crash that happened. Then we've had political polarization and the rise of strong man politics. And then more recently, we had COVID which significantly disrupted many of us around the world. And even more recently, we've heard the Ukraine war, which is unsettling, and again, disturbing. And we've had the cost of living crisis recently and very big rise of inflation that's been coming in as well, which again, is bringing this layer of uncertainty to us. So we've got this big context of things going on, and we can talk about them as a kind of a perfect storm of separate simultaneous crises, sort of one after another, layering on top of each other, adding to this weight of VUCA that we have. So it is a perfect storm of separate, simultaneous crises. Except maybe, maybe that's not quite the right way to describe it. Some people that we like who've been doing some writing on this, from university Royal Roads, university in British Columbia and University of Potsdam, they say that in reality, the likelihood that the current mass is a coincidence is vanishingly small, in their words. So the likelihood that it's a coincidence is vanishingly small. And they say that in reality, we're almost certainly confronting something far more persistent and dangerous than a coincidence. They say that today's mess is best described as a poly crisis. So what is this poly crisis? Well, really, they believe that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises. So these aren't sequential things. These aren't separate crises layered on top of each other. It's not this persistent chain of one thing after another. This is. Really one large, complex, interconnected, entangled crises that's emerging and appearing in these different factors that we're seeing, like the political polarization of Ukraine war or cost of living. All these things are really connected. And World Economic Forum actually says in some of their writing that the inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems, from health and financial to energy and education are more exposed than ever, so that's some of the language that they use. And again, it's this, this idea of systems being sort of interconnected and having some of the failings of those systems impacting on the other systems that they interact with. So this whole systemic idea is really there. So that's a little bit about that broader context. And in this sort of global space that we're in, a lot of people have found that they feel unsettled. We might not be able to name or identify or pinpoint these different things or think of them as one large crisis, but we are unsettled by them, and through this unsettled, changing state of a broader world and ourselves as individuals, we are experiencing changes in the world of work. And Jane, I was hoping you'd be able to talk a little bit about some of those changes. Yeah, so

there's, there's so much going on, James, and it's so complicated about how it affects us. So I think, Okay, let's start with some of the practicalities. So certainly, here in the UK, who is in the labor market has been changing for a while. So for example, we know that we have 9 million people of working age who are not in the labor market, so some of those are due to ill health and related conditions. Some of those are due to choices around education, but we know that that is changing as a percentage of the of the workforce. We also know that political choices have changed. Who can you access labor markets in various different countries, particularly in the UK. So there's some really practical stuff going on there, but I think there's also something, there's a lot going on about the way in which our work and our organizations interact in the world. And so I think we're seeing things about particularly due to globalization. We're seeing a lot of people question what organizations should, could or can be doing in the world, and what responsibility they have as an organization. And I think that that is a ongoing question at the moment about, what do I think about my organization? What do I think about other organizations and their role in the wider world, whether that's about their role in climate crisis, whether that's their role in paying fair wages, but definitely there are conversations around that. I also think the very practical thing that you called out earlier around technology, right? So a weird combo of the pandemic and the incredible increasing availability of technology at a very reasonable price has changed the way we interview for work. It's the way we build relationships. It's the way in which organizations can influence us. So when I'm not walking into an at workplace, but I'm at my own home, I have much more control of my own environment potentially. But we also know it increases inequalities, because if you've got really nice, lovely living room like me to work in, or if I'm in a cupboard in a flat share, that's a very different experience. There's there's all sorts of things that are constantly changing depending on organizations. And you and I have talked about this quite a lot. Organizations are failing to settle on policies that they feel are working for them and their people at the moment as well. So there's an extra piece of change quite often within the organization. And then I think probably the thing that you and I have talked about the most has been twofold. One is a shift in power balances between the employee and the employer. With less people available in the marketplace, and certainly prior a couple of months ago, three four months ago, we was we were hearing this narrative of, you know, we're struggling to get skills we need. We're struggling to find people. People were offering them jobs, and they're turning it down. And there felt like there was this little bit of a shift in power of employees being able to hold employee, prospective employees, a little bit more accountable. So I definitely think there's something going on there, which I think is interesting to explore, but even more fundamentally than that, I and I think you and I have talked about this a lot, so I think I can speak for both of us, feel like people's relationship with work and what they think work should be doing for them in their lives is shifting, and has shifted in a lot of cases, not everywhere, but in a lot of cases, I think the enforced restrictions of movement during pandemic caused a lot of people to move to a somewhat introspective space about the Balance and the choices they were making in their life, and certainly, with the rise of some of the technology, people are there saying, Well, hang on, why can't I work partially, you know, in a different place that would allow me to be a bigger part of my child's life? Why can't I balance my caring responsibilities for my parents and my job? Why can't I get. Support the things socially and emotionally from work that I would like to and that interaction of work between our wants and needs as people, whether that's our financial security, whether that's our mental health, whether that's our emotional relationship and the feeling of belonging to a community, I think people are questioning that more, and I think there's a bigger conversation about, hang on, what is it I really want work to do in my life? Yes, I want it to pay the bills. Yes, I want it to provide. I wanted to use it so that I can provide for my family. But do I want to do that at the cost of potentially lower mental health? Do I want to do that at the cost of missing out school plays and drops off at work and dinner and things like that and so and I'm not sure people are a conclusion. I think that's shifting around that all the time as we're seeing the economy shift. So I think that, you know, use the word unsettled, right? This unsettled state, and I think that's what certainly you and I have seen in clients, right? The organizations and the people we talk to, there's a sense that there's still more to come before everyone's like, this is how it's going to be now for a while. And I think that unsettled state in itself creates challenges for both the people and the workplaces. So yeah, there's an awful lot going on. I think a lot of those things you called out, those global factors, are still in transition. So Ukraine war is still very much affecting labor markets. You know, we've seen huge shifts of global teams shifting their staff around the world because of it. You know, the pandemic and the restrictions still in parts of the country, parts of the world, are very much in in enforcement in some places. So, you know, unsettled, yeah, that's how it feels right now, right? We're still not sure where we are, and whether this is the place we want, the work we want, and I'm not sure how that shows up for the people desperately trying to manage organizations, people and support them. So

that's a little bit about how some of these, these ways of work are changing, some of the ways the world work is changing, some of the ways what we want is changing from our workplace. And so what Jane and I have done is we've reflected on some of these changes, and we've looked through some of the experiences we've had, working with a range of clients this year and speaking to different people in a whole wide range of different industries and locations about what matters for them and what they see as priorities. And we've also been through and read a whole bunch of publications from groups ranging from academics through to some of large consultancies, talking about what they see priorities being for the coming year, for leaders of people and teams. And we've kind of narrowed this stuff down and ended up deciding that there are four core priorities that we really want to focus on in the coming years. And there as follows. So first up, we think that priority number one is hybrid remote and flexible working, and we've kind of bundled those all together. And we know that we globally adopted hybrid working really quickly as a result of lockdown restrictions and the pandemic, and that since then we've been navigating and evolving what it means and what are sort of expectations and what our contract is between ourselves in relation to hybrid and how we make it really great. We think that's going to carry on for next year. The need to focus on and explore and unravel. What that means is a priority area that we see carrying on into 2023 Next up, we think employee well being is the second of the priority areas to focus on. We know that employee well being currently is and we think it's going to remain a challenge for a lot of people as a result of this unsettled time, but also as a result of pandemic, particularly, and all the changes that have been associated with that. And we think this is exacerbated at the minute by further by the cost of living crisis and some of those simple solutions that we've put forward in the past as leaders of teams and organizations might not be good enough, so employee well being is number two. Number three is all to do with the available skills and people that we have to fill the needs of our organizations and trying to do that at the right cost. And as Jane said throughout the year, it's been hard for some organizations to find people with the skills they need, with the capabilities they need, with the ways of working they need, and to find those people at a reasonable cost, and once they found those people, to retain those people and embed them and really insinuate them into their organization so they're effective. So managing to do that again, we think will be a challenge in 2023 regardless of what happens to the labor market, we think there's focus that's needed in this area to really make sure that we cultivate the skills that we need to succeed, and we think creative solutions will be needed here as well. And lastly, of our four main areas, we think that responsible and kind business really needs to step to the forefront of some of our thinking as leaders of teams and organizations. We think organizations have an increasingly large role to play in society in this world of change, and we think people expect them to do so. We think that employees expect them to, we think investors expect them to, we think consumers expect them to, and we think leaders really should be looking to embrace the. Sort of responsible business or responsible organization ethos into what they do, and that's a role for business leaders, and it's also a role for HR and team leaders to think about how they can bring a little bit more of that responsible mindset to what they do. So those are our four focus areas. So we've got hybrid and remote work as number one, we've got employee well being as number two, we've got skills and people for our futures number three, and we've got responsible and kind business as number four. And we're going to be doing a series of podcasts, one podcast on each of those, and then a final podcast summarizing and reflecting on some specific insights for things leaders and managers can do more broadly in their leadership in 2023 and just before we go, Jane, could you just explain a little bit what we're going to do in each of those episodes? Yeah.

So for the first four where we focus one episode on each of the focus areas, we're going to take a bit of a look of some of our favorite pieces of insight and data from reports from leading organizations in that focus area. Then we're also going to think a little bit and talk a little bit about how we individually have informed our own thinking, what we've what work we've done that we feel has been relevant, and where we've learned on that. And then I think finally, we're gonna offer some key takeaways, thoughts and reflections for each of these areas, and what it means for 2023

brilliant. Well, I'm really looking forward to getting into those episodes. I think there are loads of fun. I think that content in them is great. So until next time, I think it's just time to say goodbye for me. You.