By John Blackwell
Edition 8 – Winter 2016 Pages 20-25
Tags: flexible working • HR • productivity
Just as there was a revolution in the 13th Century when an obscure German blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press which led wide-spread access to the written word and rapid transferred power from the monarchies, ruling political elite and religious authorities to the masses, there has been a similar shifting in workplaces over the last decade. The creativity and inventiveness of Herr Gutenberg permanently altered the structure of society and led to the unrestricted circulation of information.
Prior to this, it took massive dedication and time of monks to handcraft illuminated books written in Latin – a language that was scarcely understood by the masses. Due to Gutenberg’s work, it’s directly possible to link the sharp increase in literacy of the masses to the overthrow of most of Europe’s ruling monarchies, the agriculture and subsequent industrial revolutions and even, with easily reproducible maps, the discovery of America.
A 21st Century workforce parallel
The truth is that we’ve created a very similar scenario to Gutenberg within our 21st Century workforces. Over the last decade, we have successfully educated the workforces across the Western world that ‘work’ isn’t something only understood by an elite senior ruling executive group.
Work has become vastly demystified.
Employees know full well that technology is no longer the preserve of a select corporate ‘IT specialists’ talking in obscure impenetrable three-letter acronyms. The widespread consumer adoption of tablet computing, where’s there’s no serviceable parts, it starts at the single push of a button, lacks the frustrating lengthy boot-up (there’s a word soon to be confined to history), and is driven by highly effective apps that can be created by a teenager in their bedroom has transformed the understanding of technology and its role.
Similarly, employees are equally aware that work can be undertaken from any location. A Starbucks, hotel, a temporary office, a regional hub, a co-working space or indeed any other location that offers high-speed connectivity can be equally as effective as a vast corporate HQ.
However, despite all these advances and understandings, productivity across the UK is down by 17% over the last decade and executive leaders commonly exhibit a hazy understanding of the challenge, never mind how to address the problem of why isn’t work working?
Could it be that the ruling elite are losing touch with the workforce? If so, what needs to change?
Drawing on a recent substantial research study titled “Creating today’s workplace for tomorrow’s talent” where circa 3,000 people provided insight intocorrelations between employee engagement, talent retention, workplace design, quality of life and enhancing productivity amongst knowledge workers.
The most notable findings were around gender balance. While there is an overall 62% male to 38% female ratio in the knowledge worker field, by the time people reach ‘top management’ main board level, the male to female ratio has dwindled to 79% male to 21% female representation. At CEO level, the problem reaches crisis level – just 7% of FTSE 100 CEOs are women and a pitiful 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
This gender imbalance really presents a major challenge for all knowledge worker dependent organisations and sends out a massively bleak message about career development.
For the last fourteen years, we have tracked the output (i.e. graduates) of the top 100 universities. Progressively, women have increasingly dominated this output to the point where today close to 70% of graduates in the UK are now women.
While forecasting the future of work is a fool’s errand – there are just far too many variables – one forward factor can be projected with impunity, and that’s workforce demographics. Every respectable economy around the world knows exactly how many births and deaths there are in their country. This means that projecting future workforce numbers and composition is an extremely precise science.
It’s interesting to consider the significant shift workers over the age of 55. In 1990, about 10% of the workforce was over 55. By 2010 that had risen to 26% and by 2030, the proportion of older workers (over 55) will exceed 50%.
Bringing focus onto these talent dynamics, over the next decade the UKs Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) has projected that there will be 13.5 million job vacancies however hard data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that less than 7 million people will be leaving schools and universities to join the workforce during that time period. This means that potentially half of these job vacancies will go unfilled – presenting a vast gulf must be filled somehow, and quickly.
Clearly, with all these talent dynamics coupledwith slump in UK productivity, it demands that organisations across all sectors must act swiftly and decisively to remain competitive in the knowledge worker market.Given lengthening life spans, there must be a substantially increased focus on keeping working past traditional retirement age and crucially, attracting far more women into the workplace….