There is a great deal of fear-mongering in the mainstream media about how technology, and artificial intelligence, in particular, is poised to disintermediate humans in the world of work. The sentiment is shaping an international discourse of anxiety fueled by forecasts that automation will lead to an economic dismantling resulting in joblessness and wage erosion. It is also infecting politics, as can be seen in one person's bid for the White House in 2020. Andrew Yang, the New York-based businessman and tech entrepreneur is hoping his campaign slogan—The robots are coming!—will mobilize voters to support his platform calling for universal basic income.
While we like to think that business is ruled by calmer heads, there is enough research to prove that the future of work is a leading cause of sleepless nights. The impact of automation on how and where works gets done, as well as who will do it and what skills are needed are all top of mind. Talent attraction and retention, leadership development, and cultural transformation are now perceived by CEOs as key to successfully adapting their organization to a digital business paradigm.
While the sense of urgency is new, talent has been the elephant in the C-suite for a long time, historically side-stepped in the face of more pressing concerns. McKinsey's 1997 paper on the war for talent was a momentary wake-up call for CEOs to take a longer-term view. At the time, however, it did little more than position talent as a tactical matter of labor supply and demand brought on by a workforce of aging baby boomers inching towards retirement.
The paper's greater impact was to raise providers' consciousness that consulting on people issues was about more than payroll and benefits. This realization launched an era of corporate development and investment in strategic human capital consulting services, shaping what has grown to become a multi-million dollar market. Nearly all providers across the consulting spectrum offer some element of talent and workforce management consulting, if not a full service capability, which brings us to today.
The start of 2018 finds workforce consulting at a turning point, where providers are redirecting consulting philosophies and service offerings towards a holistic approach for helping organizations navigate a rapidly evolving employment landscape. Under the future of work banner, many are shifting service delivery to an integrated model, where the discrete capabilities of talent and workforce management consulting are not only better connected, but also are part of a broader transformation solution that is technology-enabled and embedded with analytics.
Although it is still early days, the leading providers are placing bets that an organization's ability to plan for changing workforce dynamics will only increase in importance and that their investments in new services, solutions, and assets will provide meaningful differentiation for their own and their clients' businesses. The trends certainly seem to point in the direction of increasing demand.
While no one would argue this is the first time in history that technology innovation has changed the nature of work, the pace and content of the change feels different this time. This is largely due to a host of factors outside an organization's control that are converging to transform work, e.g., geopolitics, the gig economy, and of course, digital disruption.
Even more powerful is a fear factor that pervades the sensibilities of stakeholders anxious about their vested interests. Employees view the impact of cognitive technologies on labor models as esoteric corporate strategies, at best, and life threatening, at worst. Managers resist paint-by-numbers headcount reductions that often transpire before technology has a chance to establish new ways of working. Meanwhile, the C-suite struggles to develop a plan of attack that will put all the pieces of the puzzle together in an organization design that is both adaptive and connects talent to value creation.
The challenge is complex, and as neuroscience explains, the human brain can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. This is metaphorically why most organizations continue to approach workforce management as a siloed activity, abandoning the bigger picture to more immediate needs. Workforce consulting providers are changing the stakes, however, with services that help clients make sense of the media hype foretelling a workforce apocalypse and map a coordinated strategy for keeping pace with the future. All said, it's not a moment too soon for leaders seeking to outsmart the trends.
Liz DeVito, Associate Director, Consulting Research, ALM Intelligence.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.