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Influencers Forum
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The future of work is now. Digitalisation and globalisation have sparked radical shifts in how we live and how we work. The pandemic crisis has accelerated these beyond anything we could have imagined. One thing is beyond doubt, the future of work has arrived. Organisations must truly understand the uncertainty of change in order to make appropriate strategic decisions.
To understand the impact of the changes to the nature of work, both momentary and lasting, organisations must first align and invest in a clear set of strategic priorities. Defining these priorities and seeing them through will enable them to derive bespoke value from their financial human and technological capital.
SHARN MANKU
HR Director, Kreston Reeves
Sharn has over 15 years’ experience of HR best practice. She is a self-motivated innovator with a successful record in troubleshooting and problem-solving whilst achieving business goals.
Sharn.Manku@krestonreeves.com www.krestonreeves.com
DESIREE ANDERSON
MD, Crest Coaching and HR
Desiree is an executive coach and work expert. She has a wealth of experience working for leading companies in consultancy, empowering ambitious and creative leaders, business owners and teams.
info@crestcoachingandhr.com https://crestcoachingandhr.com
PAM LOCH
Managing Director, Loch Associates
Pam Loch is an award-winning solicitor and founder of Loch Associates Group. The Group provides clients with pragmatic and commercial solutions from a single, trusted partner.
pam.loch@lochassociates.co.uk www.lochassociates.co.uk
HARRY SHERRARD
Principal, Sherrards Employment Law
Harry Sherrard has been a specialist employment lawyer for over 20 years. He writes and lectures widely on employment law issues and conducts training programmes throughout the UK.
harry@sherrardslaw.com www.sherrardslaw.com
SIMON BELLM
Partner, DMH Stallard
Simon leads DMH Stallard’s Gatwick-based employment group. He works with organisations in both the public and private sectors on human resourcing issues.
Simon.Bellm@dmhstallard.com www.dmhstallard.com
SAM DICKINSON
Partner, Mayo Wynne Baxter
Sam is an employment law specialist and Head of the Litigation department at Mayo Wynne Baxter, expertly advising both employers and employees on all aspects of employment law.
sdickinson@mayowynnebaxter.co.uk www.mayowynnebaxter.co.uk
PROFESSOR YING ZHOU
Director of the Future of Work Research Centre, University of Surrey
Ying’s research is focused on job quality, occupation and employee well-being. Ying received her MPhil and DPhil in Economic Sociology from Nuffield College, Oxford University.
ying.zhou@surrey.ac.uk www.surrey.ac.uk/future-work
MAARTEN HOFFMANN
Publisher Platinum Media Group
Maarten Hoffmann is the facilitator for the Platinum Influencer Forums The Platinum Media Group is the largest circulation business publishing group in the UK, reaching up to 720,000 readers each month across three titles.
www.platinummediagroup.co.uk
LESLEY ALCOCK
Commercial Director Platinum Media Group
Lesley is a marketing professional, having spent many years with Capital Radio in London and the Observer Newspaper, and was instrumental in the launch of the Observer Magazine.
T: 07767 613707 lesley@platinummediagroup.co.uk
MH: If I might come to Professor Ying first. Has the future of work arrived? What does it look like?
YZ: I think the process is an evolving one. First, we have fast evolving digital technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. All these technologies are taking away jobs from humans. And there is a widely cited study suggesting nearly half of all employment is at high risk of automation in the next few decades.
That sounds quite alarming. But later research by the OECD and ONS suggest technologies are unlikely to replace home occupations, because many occupations involve activities that are quite difficult to automate, like public speaking, negotiating, persuading, caring, counselling.
Apart from technologies, we’ve also got a pandemic, which has really changed the way we work. There are so many people working from home, and it’s likely to stay that way in the future. And we’ve also got Brexit. So the future of work implies a lot of uncertainties, which we are still trying to understand.
MH: So in the oncoming tsunami, will there be a retraining exercise rather than people sitting at home having no jobs?
YZ: I think there’s growing consensus that skills will be the key problem. For the majority of the labour force today, you probably need to learn new skills, especially digital skills to cope with what is coming.
PL: The key word here is ‘change’, because some people aren’t coping particularly well with change. That’s caused a lot of anxiety, and we see it coming through in different ways. For example, HR consultants are dealing with a lot more grievances at work. And a lot of that is through this anxiety around the changes that have occurred.
Sometimes it’s also a lack of communication about those changes. People are getting paranoid about what’s happening, because they feel they’re not in control.
I’m not sure if we train our managers to help people to make changes. The pandemic has hampered progress, and made people feel even more anxious about their well being and their job.
SM: The training is there already, and focuses on ‘where do we need to go with our universities, apprentices, colleges?’ The new generation coming up is already involved in technology. AI is not really going to replace everybody.
We really need to think about workforce planning. How are we changing as an organisation? How are we changing as a business? What does our business of the future look like? DA: I find with my clients who are within business, that they’re feeling very insecure about the amount of changes that are coming up. Some are from a generation that is embracing technology, others are of older generations that fear that technology and worry about their own skills in leadership.
❛❛ I’m seeing there’s a real conflict in leadership to embrace the changes while reaching out to your hybrid remote teams ❜❜
I’m seeing there’s a real conflict in leadership to embrace the changes while reaching out to your hybrid remote teams, and engaging them along with the culture of the organisation. And it’s a culture which has to inevitably change to rapidly globalise and beat the competitors’ demands.
SB: The whole issue of engagement has been pushed right to the fore. I think all organisations including lawyers have recognised the change. And they understand that they now have to take a different approach to how you manage staff remotely; how you engage with them.
At the moment, we’ve got a mismatch between resources and need. You can see that in the unemployment figures. There are opportunities which aren’t getting filled. It’s very difficult to recruit, and that’s the major challenge for all sectors, including the legal sector.
HS: Regarding AI, I have a colleague who works in the dairy industry. What they’ve developed in AI – it’s quite scary in some respects – is the cameras focused on the people working in the milking parlour to assess their movements. It effectively marks them; the AI produces a readout to say how well their employees are performing.
From an employer’s point of view, that’s probably music to our ears. It becomes very easy to have a very cogent basis of saying whether somebody’s performing or not performing for the company.
SD: When it comes to training, there’s a place for the government, as well. The majority of people would be happy to retrain, so I think the government can step up here.
MH: The government is also looking to larger companies to deal with their own training.
SD: They are. There’s no one size fits all. What works for one individual or business won’t necessarily work for another.
Some individuals want flexibility - maybe, for example, working nine days out of 10. Because then they can use that extra day that they don’t work to do something that gives them purpose and meaning. Work is not the be-all and end-all. And that’s where employers and businesses need to change.
HS: There is talk of the unemployment figures. For me, the better guide is the employment figure. If you actually look at the number of people that are employed, it’s not that impressive. And that’s the real problem – the number of people that are actually in work hasn’t grown sufficiently.
PL: Do you think that may change though? Could it have been a blip, as a result of the pandemic, people reflected back on their lives?
SM: I’ve been reading about the great ‘unretirement’. The cost of living process is pushing people back into work. And the more it’s in the media and in conversations like this, about the focus on well being and retraining, the more people will want to come back to work but in a different way. The pandemic has changed the way we work.
MH: Knowing that the pandemic is the thing that kicked off this huge change, there’s the ‘work from home’ consideration. Is it here to stay?
SD: For some individuals, yes. Some people will want to work from home. Some people hate it and want to be back in the office.
There isn’t one answer for everybody. Employers know that they are being interviewed more, and they need to look at their rewards and recognition packages. Working from home is only one type of flexible working.
There’s a movement around the four-day week, or maybe nine days every two weeks. There can be volunteering policies; allowing your staff to go off and volunteer somewhere once or twice a month; giving them flexible start and finish hours, so they have more autonomy over their day-to-day work.
MH: How does that help the economics of the country? To get as much done in four days as I do with five sounds good. In my experience, that’s not the case.
SD: I’d have to disagree with you there. I should declare that I only work four days a week, but I absolutely do at least five days’ work in those four days. And I will always be grateful and loyal to my firm for letting me do that.
MH: But if you if you do five days in four, can you do six in five?
SD: I probably could. But I choose not to because in my day off, I do volunteer for a charity. And that makes me feel fulfilled as a person. And then it means I’m more happy at work, and more effective at work. And a great salary is not compensation for an unpleasant working environment.
MH: Ying, is there any research done in this work from home phenomenon?
YZ: Plenty. Remote working has been around for a long time. In 1981, 1% of UK workers worked mainly from home. In 2019, just before the pandemic, that figure was 5%. Then the pandemic hit. And we saw an explosion of remote working. In the early months of the pandemic, nearly half of all UK workers were working from home.
Hybrid working is going to be the future. The problem is how to manage that and how to make it work.
The electronic surveillance by AI has been on the rise. During the pandemic, a lot of companies bought electronic surveillance software. But that’s pretty counterproductive because that sends a clear message to our employees that they cannot be trusted.
SD: In our wider group, nobody cares if you’re not going to be at your desk whether your desk is at home or at work between this hour and that hour. As long as you are doing what you need to get done, then we trust our colleagues to do it.
❛❛ I’m not sure if we train our managers to help people to make changes. The pandemic has hampered progress, and made people feel even more anxious about their well being and their job ❜❜
MH: Sometimes for bosses of SMEs, the change is coming faster than they’re able to cope. There’s also a case, with working from home, of ‘how do you see eye to eye if you don’t meet face to face’?
SD: Learning by osmosis? There has to be a hybrid element to it; so you need to make sure that, if you are normally remote, you have your team meetings at least one day a week where you’re all together.
MH: With large companies with several hundred employees, is it viable for the HR department to be able to do that with each individual employee?
SB: It’s not HR’s job. It’s the managers that need to have the education; working out how you deal with the individual employees means that you need high quality managers.
PL: Communication is always critical, and there has to be an open and honest discussion, and giving managers that skill set. Another thing going on is sometimes oversharing information – sometimes personal information. Again, managers don’t know how to deal with it.
LA: We talk to a whole load of different types of businesses. And there’s a different effect that hybrid working is causing. It’s getting increasingly difficult to get decisions because they don’t meet every day in the office. Has anybody else found that as an issue?
YZ: Sometimes it can take a lot of emails to solve a simple problem, where a chat in the corridors probably resolves it in a couple of minutes.
When people meet in office building, you’re also in touch with informal learning. A lot of learning occurs informally between colleagues who learn from each other. So it’s quite important that people do hybrid working. Remote working should not happen five days a week.
SD: It also engenders a sense of belonging. The environment we work in and the friendships that we make are important for our mental well being.
YZ: Social relationships are one of the most important determinants of mental health and well being. There was an interesting study by Harvard researchers, they followed people for nearly 100 years. The question was, ‘Who lives happier long lives?’
And the results shows social relationships – that’s the number one factor; far more important than income, education, social status etc. Happiness is found in the quality of your social relationships.
Research has suggested some people said they became more productive when they did remote working, whereas some people became less productive.
MH: The phenomenon of ‘quiet quitting’. Do you recognise that?
SD: Essentially it’s working to rule. People doing their nine-to-five or their nine-to-five-thirty.
HS: Has anyone seen it for real?
SD: Work to rule is something that’s been knocking around for ages with some people. Again, it goes back to them not being happy with their job. I think it’s just a nice little social media sound bite.
SM: Within quiet quitting are the issues around retraining. What are the government’s obligations here? We all have mortgages, financial commitments, and so forth.
You’re in a miserable job. And you have to be in this job, because you’ve got no choice. So is it viable to retrain? Possibly not. What do we do for those people that haven’t got those skill sets?
SD: I’ve heard of many people who would like to retrain and go into healthcare, or be nurses, but they can’t. They feel trapped because of their financial commitments.
SM: It goes back to mental health. And that’s a big cohort of people that we need to be putting our arms around. It’s not just the next generation; what are we doing in terms of re-skilling current working people?
YZ: We have been focusing too much on the quantity of work, not enough on the quality of work.
People can adapt to a lot of events, but not unemployment. Work provides a lot of mental vitamins for people who like social interactions, and your sense of purpose. However, if you are employed in a tedious job, where you are only using one skill all the time, that is pretty boring.
Quality is the key to our overall wellbeing, pay is actually quite low on that list.
SB: One of the problems with the pandemic was the ‘good work’ agenda, which was designed to improve the quality of jobs; it’s just been virtually abandoned. That was supposed to produce an Employment Bill, which Boris Johnson didn’t take forward at all.
SD: But it probably shouldn’t need legislation for that. The research is out there. Having a voice, feeling like you can influence your organisation and the decisions it makes, we don’t need legislation to tell us.
MH: One of the biggest issues most companies have at the moment is finding employees. We put out an ad pre pandemic for an event assistant. We had 175 replies. Post pandemic; same ad. We had three. That’s just one snapshot. Is everybody having the same issue?
YZ: There are several factors. One is, during the pandemic, some people who were furloughed didn’t return to the labour force. At the beginning of the pandemic young people were hardest hit. However, later on, it was people aged 50+ who were least likely to come back. They chose to retire or move into economic inactivity.
And some people left the UK after Brexit. The NHS has had a huge recruitment difficulty, and you probably still remember the shortage of lorry drivers last winter. So Brexit makes things worse.
And also, after the pandemic, a lot of jobs which still require people to come to our physical workplace became less attractive – hospitality, retail, tourism, and so on.
MH: I get that. But I wonder, apart from those who’ve retired from the workforce, where have they gone? These things go in a circular fashion. But every sector I speak to seems to be having this issue…
PL: Apart from health and well being apparently. There has been an uptake. And people want to move into those sectors as a result of the pandemic.
LA: I wonder if some of those people that you’re talking about have gone back into education to study.
SM: People have taken a different stance on what they want. I’ve seen lots of people that are yoga instructors, painters and decorators. They just want less stressful roles or responsibilities. DA: Some of the people have gone into starting up their own businesses. With the rate of SMEs failing, are we not seeing some of those people going back into employment in the long run?
❛❛ There isn’t one answer for everybody. Employers know that they are being interviewed more, and they need to look at their rewards and recognition packages. Working from home is only one type of flexible working ❜❜
YZ: The hardest of fields are education, transport, and voluntary sector. These sectors are facing the greatest difficulties to fill.
HS: Agriculture must be high as well as it was heavily reliant on Eastern Europeans who aren’t coming any more.
YZ: That’s the Brexit impact. Also, people who have their own businesses are classified as self employed. These last two employment figures, what we are seeing is very low unemployment rates, something like 3.8%. That’s very low. But also we have very low overall employment.
SD: Also, with a lot of these high salaries that we’re all seeing being bandied about, people will jump for a higher salary. And then they realise that’s coming in with a lot of other issues.
MH: And that’s where we come back to the amount you’re paid being quite low on the list of your satisfactions in life. There are lots of reports that women have suffered more in the workplace during the pandemic than men. Do we recognise that?
DA: Definitely so. Especially women working from home during the pandemic. I think we all know women with younger children were really badly affected mentally.
I spoke with many female clients who felt that that their partner being at home was an extra burden on the relationships.
YZ: Depression in general has increased more among young women during the pandemic. We don’t fully understand the reasons why young people are much more likely to get depression than older people, and in my experience, young women are much more likely to be depressed than the young men.
MH: Men have been slightly knocked for leaving the childcare to the woman, and the pandemic shone a light on that. When and how do we retrain men?
SD: Employers can start looking at their parental leave policies, and making sure fathers are not disadvantaged, and are in fact encouraged to take more paternity leave.
❛❛ In the early months of pandemic, nearly half of all UK workers were working from home ❜❜
MH: Fewer than 9% of men took the parental route in the UK…
SD: We don’t see senior men taking time off, it’s expected that women will take maternity leave.
So employers absolutely have a part to play here. They need to improve their parental leave policies because if we have better paid policies, more men will take time off work, and then therefore they’ll start shouldering more of the burden at home.
SM: 35 to 45 is the worst mental health death rate for all males, And are they able to openly express how they’re feeling? There’s a little bit of isolation there.
At Kreston Reeves – I’ve only been there a short period of time – we have males on parental leave, and I’m really impressed by that. They want an evolution and they are listening, having that open form of dialogue and normalising it.
PL: Unfortunately, I feel the pandemic has resulted in reinforcing stereotypes. I know of situations with females who were pregnant, who had clearly been exited out of the business because they were pregnant. I’ve been working in Employment Law since the 1990s, and I’ve seen the progress that’s been made.
We’ve evolved so much, it’s fantastic. But I think we went backwards by 10 or 15 years with some businesses.
