E163 – Leading & Managing in 2023: People & Skills for the Future

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. Got another episode for you today as part of our mini series looking at leading and managing in 2023 it's December 2022 when we're doing all these podcast episodes. So it's a bit of a look forward and prediction of key areas of focus for leaders of people and teams in 2023 and today we're going to be talking about people and skills for the future. So this is the third of the four big areas we've called out. We've called out hybrid remote and flexible working as one big area of focus. We've called out employee well being is another. As we're the first episode where we dove into these topics. Today we're talking about people and skills for the future, and then in the next episode, we'll be talking about responsible and kind business. So today is all about people and skills for the future. So Jane, how are we going to do this episode?

So thanks James, and hello everyone, and welcome to the third theme of this end of year series. So what's going to happen today is James will talk to you a little bit about some of the reports that we've been reading and some of their findings around the topic of people and skills for the future. Then I'm going to share a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing this year, and some of my reflections on the emerging themes in this topic. And James is going to do a little bit of the same. So hopefully by the end of this episode, you're going to go away with some ideas about what the big reports are saying, what work we've done, and our own reflections on the topic of people and skills for the future, and what it means for leading and managing in 2023

That's right. And if we talk about people and skills for the future, what we've seen through the organizations we've worked with and the people we've spoken to and the other reports we've read is that organizations have found it hard in 2022 to find the right people with the right skills for their organization, particularly when trying to do so at an affordable price. It's been difficult to do so, and it's been difficult to retain these people. And as we talked about in our introduction to this series, there have been changes to the labor market and participation in the labor market, and things are just a little bit loose in that space, or a little bit unstructured, a little bit movable. So we know that there are changes to what's going on in the labor market, and that's affecting the availability of individuals. But we also know from a skill side that the skills people are looking for are changing, be they technical skills or some of the more people related skills that are essential for success in the types of work that many organizations are driving forward now. So there are two sides, available, availability of people, both for changing needs of skills and these things continue to evolve, but we never to succeed. Organizations are going to need to find creative ways to attract and retain the people they need with the skills they need. But don't just take our word for it. Here are some of the things that some of the reports we've looked into at the end of this year have called out. So I've got three reports again that I'm going to reference. One's from cognizant, one's from Gartner, one's from Korn Ferry. And again, the links and references are all on the website. So if I start with Cognizant, just a few things to call out. They say, when asked about the biggest hurdles to implementing new processes, products, services and technologies over the last 12 months, the two most significant challenges that respondents named were workforce related, a lack of human resources and knowledgeable staff, right? And so this was based on research they've done amongst business leaders, of the challenges they faced, so a lack of human resources and knowledgeable staff were called out. Is some of the biggest they go on to say. But these skills aren't easy to acquire. Businesses either pay exorbitant amounts to hire or invest in developing skills. So it's expensive, it's hard to find the skills that you need. There's been the sort of like strange shifting of the skills needed, and potentially the labor market is not caught up, so it's difficult to get the skills that you need in some industries at least, and in others, we faced other challenges. They also give an example. They say Microsoft uses different interventions for retention, including assigning mentors and opening conversations about opportunities for professional growth. And I go on to say that these these interventions, lead to higher levels of retention. So there's something here about being creative and thinking a little bit differently and providing different things to people in that competitive space where we're. Trying to attract and retain good people for our organizations. So that's some stuff from cognitive Gartner say some other things as well. So again, the reports referenced online, they say that 50% of HR leaders expect increased talent competition over the next six months. So things are a bit tough now, but over the next six months, they're expecting it to get a little bit harder. I think this report was dated in July of 22 by the way, they say HR leaders are under more pressure than ever to fill roles with those critical skills. There's also an effort to optimize costs. So people are feeling this. HR is under pressure to get people in and to do it at a sustainable cost base. They say, to fill skills needs both effective, sorry, to fill skills needs both effectively and efficiently. Broaden the range of talent strategies under consideration. So if you're going to do this effectively and efficiently, you need to broaden the strategies for your years. You know what's gotten us here might not get us there. And I say, for example, you might want to develop the mobility of employees from their current roles to other existing or newly created roles within the organization. So move people internally. I talk about creating internal labor markets and making it easier and more attractive for individuals to move internally as a good way to sort of think in a different way and bring new ways of doing things in this effort to attract and retain so that's Gartner. Last up of our reports for this conversation is Korn Ferry. Here are some things I say. They say it's not just about finding the right talent. It's about keeping the talent you have. 31% of the people they were engaged with or referenced for their documents said they were thinking of leaving their job, even though they didn't have another one lined up. 50% of all employees will need re skilling by 2025 so some real challenges in there. People are looking to leave even if they don't have something to go to. And a lot of the people that we have are going to need new skills fairly soon. They say, with employers no longer able to rely on a steady source of external talent, internal mobility becomes more important than ever. So how can we use the good people that we have? How can we reshape and retrain and develop their roles and their capabilities and their desires so that they fill our future needs in a mutually beneficial way. They quoted very also go on and say, organizations will also need to go beyond traditional buy methods of acquiring talent, to consider build, borrow, bind, bounce, bought and a whole host of other talent configurations and retention strategies to find their optimal solution. So they're saying we really need to go beyond standard ways of thinking about bringing in skills to our organizations. We're going to need to be a little bit more creative. We're going to need to think about working in a joined up way with technology automation and AI to do some of the basics so we free up people to do more. And we'll need to look at sharing internally and creating talent internally, and creating new career paths that help our best people develop skills to support us into the future. So again, across all three of those, there's this big sort of set of consistent messages around the challenge of finding people, around the frequent changing nature of the skills that organizations are looking for, and around the fact that what used to work in terms of strategies for bringing people into our organizations isn't really working, and we need to be more creative about attracting people and about retaining them. So that's a little bit from us consultancies. Jane, do you want to talk about some of the things we've done and lead us into some of our reflections?

Yeah. I mean, it's astonishing how often we had this conversation with clients when it was nothing to do with the work that we were doing for them. So what we noticed it's not, you know, recruitment and selection assessment is not something we do a huge amount of work in. And yet, when we were chatting to clients before and after consistently, you know, how are things? Well, things are really hard because I can't fill this role, and therefore lots of people are picking up, you know, multiple work. And I think there has been a shift in the labor market, certainly here in the UK and the US, I think, as well. And that has meant that their accurate ability to predict whether someone's going to take a job and accept an offer, or where, how long someone's going to take and things like that, has been really knocked right, and that's left gaps where previously they would have been able to handle it for six to eight weeks. Now it's, you know, nine to 12 weeks, or where they could handle it previously because of wellbeing issues and some of the stuff we've talked about previously, now they can't handle it, and so what we have been doing is helping organizations think through their values, their culture and what that looks like in their talent and recruitment process. Because what we know is that if people can, you know, connect with all. Organizations and recognize that the values and the way in which that organization works is going to suit them, they're going to they're more likely to say yes to the role. And so for organizations to be able to better explain and give account for themselves and their talent recruitment process is really important. And you know, we just consistently hear things about people not getting feedback if they don't get the job, or people not hearing for ages, and then suddenly they hear they're at a next stage, by which point they've looked for something else. So helping organizations think through what does that look like from the outside and how does that align to their values is really important. And we've also been talking quite a lot with leaders and managers about how to be more creative about identifying the skill so rather than was buying them in thinking about building them from within, or borrowing them, or job to comments, or job shares or contractors and things like that to help them think differently about how they build their skill sets within their organizations. But what throughout this we've recognized, and I think you know, a lot of what you said from the reports has too is that the old method and the way in which it works is increasingly less common, and the timescales to with which people expect are increasingly less common. You know, the the advent of speedy communication online doesn't seem, at least in our experience, to have been replicated in the Talent Recruitment Process. Recruitment Process. People don't get responses as quickly as they should. They're getting left off of processes. Those processes don't give complete and that's creating problems. But I also think that a lot of what we talked about in the first theme of this group remote working further complicates the picture, because it massively broadens our talent pool, but and it increases competition, but also it makes life complicated, because we've got to select people based on whether they're going to fit within our the way that we want to work. So it may not have mattered so much how able someone was to work completely autonomously and independently, but if your organization has since moved to a pretty much fully remote model that's going to creep up on the character and the traits that you're looking for. And I don't think we've seen that replicated in you know, recruitment processes at all. I don't think there's clarity really about what identifying those skills are like and what a good, you know, remote worker looks like. I think there are some organizations have been doing it WAY longer, and they definitely have an understanding, but they also tend to be in two or three specific industries, and I also think that we are still really struggling to sort of come to grips with the idea that we can build from within. You know, it is, I find it still baffling how often people say, oh, we need to go from outside, but then they refuse requests of internal candidates who want to have some additional training. Oh, yeah, you can have the job, but you should have the job at a lower salary, and the people coming because you don't have the experience, but we also won't help you build that experience. So you're on your own when you do it, and you're just setting up people to fail. So I think you know, looking at different ways of securing skills that you need, looking at different employment models, looking at more flexible options, looking at more flexible job share, all of that stuff. We have to find different ways to do it, and I think that is absolutely still up in the air in most of the organizations we work with, and indeed, my own reflections on it, I still don't know how we're going to do that.

Well, yeah, I agree. And if you're interested in this topic, you might want to check out. We did a podcast with a guy called Dr Jonathan Boudreau, who's from the Marshall Business School and the University of California, and this is kind of an area he focuses on, and he talks about an entire kind of future, different what he talks about is work operating system, a different way of sort of viewing the tasks and the skills that exist within our team, within our organizations, and really a shift towards more of a internal talent marketplace, where things are done in more of a bite sized type of way, and and organizations probably are shifting towards a smaller permanent employee base and a larger use of non permanent skills as they buy in the specific skills they need or borrow those skills in or are better using, you know, internally created teams to deal with things, sorry, project teams, internally created project teams to face certain challenges and use technology more effectively. So this is there's a broader conversation going on about what skills in an organization look like. That really sort of overlaps with this, this conversation about finding the skills that we need, which I think it might be worth checking out. What are some other things then that we can do? What are some things that can help organizations get better at attracting and retaining this talent? We talked about some of those mechanisms of re skilling, importantly being good, of finding new ways to create career paths that help people navigate. But what are some. Other things that we think really matter in this space? Well, we think that helping define and understand and create a great culture can be hugely helpful for organization in this sort of competition for the limited skills that are available. We think that having managers who are strong and who people want to work for is a really great thing. So having the leaders and managers that people want to work for is super powerful. And we think shifting towards more of that sort of learning orientation as an organization can be really helpful, both for attracting people to your organization and retaining them, but also for helping you develop a skill. So we'll touch on each of those in a little bit more detail. I guess we we know that attracting people is hard and it's competitive, and getting people to stay is hard, and we know that in these circumstances where there is this competition, one of the things that employees really value is for culture, for places that they work in. So if we can create these good organizational cultures that are helpful or correct for the type of people we're looking to bring in, then we're more likely to successfully attract those people and more likely to successfully retain them. Fundamentally, if we're given a choice between two organizations that are basically identical, but one has got a great culture and one's got a bit of a toxic culture, we'd all choose to work into one, but feels like it's got a great culture. So that feels really important in itself, that recognition of a role of culture as a as a mechanism for for attracting and retaining people. And if we're going to do that, we really need to be able to step back and understand what our culture is, understand what it's like to be in our organization, understand how we can tell the story of our culture, to tell the story of our organizational values, so people know how they're expected to sort of fit in. They've sort of broken the ice on expected behaviors and decision making processes and all those things. If we can understand what that's like in our organization and tell the story to people, then we'll be better able to explain to people what they can expect and give them this real picture of what things are like in our organization, which will help bring them in. And if that's that's a good story, right? If we've got a good culture, it'll help with people that are there stay and we can continue to celebrate that culture with them internally. But it's really important that we that we sort of define the culture and tell the story of a culture if it's genuine. You know, we can't. We can't tell a story that's just not a true reflection of where we are. You know, if our culture is bad and we tell people it's great, they'll see straight through it, right? If we say it's great and they turn up and see that it's really just a bit of a rubbish place to be culturally, not only will they, you know, not like what's there, but they'll kind of feel deceived along the way as well. They'll think you've lied to them from the start, so you damage that trust right away. So we need to understand our cultures. We need to be able to tell the story of our culture, explain it well, in accessible terms, so that people really can see what it is. But we need to do it honestly so we maintain individuals trust. And if that culture that we have isn't great, then one of the best things that we can do to improve the ability that we have to attract and retain people is to create a good culture, so we can shape our culture through time and effort and leadership awareness and potentially individual chain change at a leadership level and changing ways of working, and all those things we can we can modify our culture and enhance for good bits and reduce the bad bits until we get a good culture that's right for our organization. But if our current culture isn't there, then it's probably something important to think about. Is to do this. There's an interesting quote I saw from a report from one of the large global recruitment agencies, they say 67% of professionals feel they have been misled about company culture during their induction, right? And they feel that, and they're like, why are you lying to me? Right up, it's my induction, and the first thing you do is lie to me about what it's like to be here. Do you think I'm an idiot? And right away, that's changing the relationship we have with our employees and making it less likely that we'll retain them. So really, stepping, stepping into that understanding and creation and shaping of culture positively, and telling that story, we think is a huge, hugely beneficial thing to do in this competition for people and skills for the future. So that's, that's a thought, Jane, do you want to build on that or talk about I think it's probably

worth mentioning. If anyone's particularly interested in that stuff, you should probably have a look at some of the research on psychological contracts, because fundamentally, the particular challenge of communicating the organization that you are to an individual and then not delivering that culture is that you're effectively breaking the psychological contract that they created in their head when they met you and when they applied for the job, and you were like, hey, it's going to be like this, and then you go straight in. So that's in itself, if that's happening, and it does happen sometimes, you know, maybe everyone said it's a really calm, chilled out place to work, and they're in the middle of a merger when you join. But. It's about, how do you then deal with that and make sure that they understand that that initial impression was true at the time? Otherwise, as James said, you can lose trust. The thing I really want to talk about, which will not be a surprise to anyone, is that when you get good managers and good leaders, people come and people stay. And it's really and we said this before in another episode, when we're talking about hybrid, it's not the only thing, and it can't be the only thing, but it's definitely an important thing. Those of you who know me and my story and my career history, that James and I have talked about our own histories quite a lot in podcasts, will know that the two most the two largest career moves that I made. I didn't go and work for the organization. I went to work for the person. I chose it solely on the person, because the belief is that my belief, and I say the same thing to people like I work one to one with, if you find someone you trust who believes you can do the job a they will make the job work for you, because they know you and they trust you and they want you to succeed, but also they probably know more about the culture than you do. So if they've truly got to know you and they think you can do it and you trust them, that's going to be a better way than trusting an organization, because fundamentally, organizations are just groups of people, and the person you're most likely to work with is your manager, and they're the person most likely to have influence over your role as well. So I cannot over state how important it is that organizations give the time, the support and the tools to the managers and leaders that they have in terms of the way that they line manage and support the people they manage in order to be able to create healthy management environments for people. Because fundamentally, we know in remote and hybrid that's an even bigger issue, because that's where you're getting most of your interaction with the organization, with your manager. So for us, you know, it's just really important that if you want the right people, if you want the right skills, the right skills, you've got to create a management environment that they want to work in and that they want to stay

in. One of my one of my favorite little things is this little quote from Gallup, but that we share sometimes, and I know we don't quote Gallup all the time, but, but this is a nice one. They say some nice things. They say a manager's effect on a workplace is so significant that Gallup can predict 70% of a variance in team engagement just by getting to know boss. So I mean, like 70% is a huge, huge impact on how engaged individuals are in their work, and that's just one dimension of the role that a manager plays in the experience that an individual has. But what a powerful what a powerful individual that is in shaping the ability to attract and retain people. I think that really kind of kind of sums it up and and with that, you know, sometimes we talk about managers as being sort of magnets, right? And if you have them lined up the right way, they can really help you attract and help you retain all this great talent that you're looking for and the skills and capabilities. But for managers are not, you know, aligned to that sort of way of working and not not skilled at creating good places for individuals to work. And it's like that magnet sweep swapped around the other way. And it sort of, you know, it can really repel people. We don't have any sort of quotes here or stats, but we know that a lot of people don't leave organizations. They leave managers. So helping to turn your managers into the types of people who can get the job done well for your organization and create great places to work for your people is, you know, can be transformational for our ability to attract and retain. And I think the last thing we were going to touch on here, Jane was to do with learning and that sort of shift to learning and bringing more learning into what we do in an organization, both by embedding it into our culture, so developing more of a culture of learning, but also just creating more opportunity and actually doing more learning of the skills that we need, and trusting in our people to to do more of that, to develop the skills and capabilities that we need. Do you want to build on that a little bit Sure?

I think, Well, look, I think learning is a really interesting thing. I think we know that it plays quite a pivotal place in a lot of people's experience of work. We know the role it plays in psychological safety, for example, because people feel the need to learn and need to feel safe to do so. But we also, we fundamentally know that irrespective of everybody's individual experience of work organizations learn when people learn, because organizations are just a collection of people, right? So if your people are learning and growing, then you have a far better chance of being out there and your organization staying up to date, staying abreast, spotting trends, things like that. Up, particularly around, like the tools that people use to do their work. But it's really funny, I I spend quite a lot of my time around learning and development conversations, telling people that traditional training, classroom training, even the stuff we do around cohort based training, where we do more than just like straight workshops, is not what people are asking for, right? And it's also not where people do for a lot of people, the majority of their learning, it might be the people that place where they start their learning journey. It might be the place where they bookmark it. But if you are going to judge the success of a piece of training as how much someone enjoyed it or took away from it after the first hour of having done it, then you're not really finding out what role that learning's played on the organization, the success of that person and their ability. And I just, I, I find our attitude towards traditional learning in the workplace. I mean, just almost prehistoric. I don't, you know, we all know the way we learn is not solely in that sort of space of formalized structure. You know, we learn because we hear our boss have conversations on the phone. We learn because we sit in on a remote meetings and we watch the way our boss does something, and we think, Why have they done it that way? We would have expected to do it that way. We learn because we get dragged into projects where everyone's a bit short staffed, and suddenly we're exposed to a whole new group of people in the way that they work. And it's and we learn by having meaningful conversations with individuals, one to one, who understand where we're coming from and want, you know, to help us develop our viewpoint just and yet, it's all by accident. So much of that is by accident. I find mentoring programs baffling because quite often they're a one to one relationship, and we know the evidence shows that developmental networks are far more powerful when you've got a host of people that you can go to one to one with, separately and differently. And yet it just feels like learning is not happening in a way that is as intentional, evidence based and structured as some of the other interventions that we see around people planning, people development in the workplace. And I I don't have an answer, because I know it's expensive and I know it's harder to measure, and I know organizations don't it's not neat and it's not simple solution, but I definitely think it's something organization need to sit down and really think about what, where's the learning points in their organization, and how are they happening, and how do

you support them? Yeah, 100% and, you know, maybe one good thing that comes out of this ever shifting demand for new skills and challenges to find them, is that it makes it more worthwhile for organizations to really invest in that learning and to try and bring some creative, wonderful new ways to learn into into their approaches. Because, as you said, a lot of what we're doing isn't really working. It's not really evolving. It's not really thought through as well as it could be, and it could be a lot better. And we know that also employees really kind of like to learn, and they want to learn, and people might not want to be learning all the time, but it's rewarding to learn new things to try. It can improve our well being. It can support our mental health. It can do all kinds of good things for us as individuals, as well as giving us new skills and opening doors for new opportunities

at its at its simplest, it's one of us, you know, according to things like self determination theory, according to a lot of the motivation theories out there, it's one of our most intrinsic needs. It's also valuable for psychological safety, building trust, like everything, all the fundamental little building blocks that we talk about in our organizations, learning is central to so many of them for so many reasons. And yet it's like, we go, Hey, look, we got X 100,000x x 10s of 1000s of pounds left at the end of the year. Quick, let's put on a training program, because that's the way we're going to learn. And I Oh, I'm just I'm frustrated. Yes, the best spaces I've learned in have been teams that have brought me into their group, or I've been leading them, but have we have found ways to cross pollinate, to discuss, to engage, to disagree in a healthy way, and to really expose ourselves and to leave ourselves vulnerable, to showing that we don't actually know the One single best way to do things, and we've also looked beyond our organization, and I just don't think I see enough of that. Yeah,

yeah. So there's a lot, lot that can be done and we can there's some things we can do fairly quickly as organizations to help us with some of this learning. So we can start to do things like promoting and bringing in more opportunities for things like job swaps and secondments or micro secondments, or even, you know, shadowing opportunities and all those types of little things. But we can bring in a little bit that sacrifice maybe a bit of an individual's time, but let them sniff out and find opportunities for learning and and learn a little bit from each other, and find where they might have a passion for out of skills that serves our. Organization well. And so there are things we can do, even now that are fairly straightforward, to start to bring a little bit about learning in. And of course, like all these things, it links back to each of the other points that we talk about. So, shaping the culture for learning, redefining how we think about what productivity is, which is the thing we spoke about earlier, framing our definitions and experiences of failure and how we talk about failure. There's so much that it links into but certainly, if we are going to become organizations that are more successful at finding the people and skills that we need for the future, then harnessing the power and benefits of learning is a is a super thing for us to be doing. So that's why, that's why we bring it in here. And that really kind of gets us to the end of this third of the key focus areas for leading people and teams and organizations into 2023 which is all about people and skills for the future. In the other sessions, we have talked about hybrid we've talked about employee well being. And coming up next, we're going to be talking about responsible and kind business until then. Thank you. Bye.