Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The 10 Ways to Know Whether Your Job is Meaningful

In my book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, I made the point that the formula for the traditional deal at work is as follows:

I work... to earn money... which I use... to consume stuff... which makes me happy.

I suggested that this deal is not a sufficient description of what work can and should be. Instead I put forward the following future-focused deal at work:

I work... to gain productive experiences... that are the basis... of my happiness.

But this begs the question – what exactly is a meaningful productive experience, and how do you know when your work is meaningful? So here are the 10 questions to ask yourself to establish whether your work is meaningful.

1. Do you use the majority of the knowledge you have on a daily basis?
   ...because meaningful work provides an opportunity for you to keep your knowledge fresh by using it constantly.
   
   
2. Do you feel intellectually stretched in your work?
   ...because meaningful work both uses the knowledge you have and pushes the boundaries of what you can become.
   
   
3. Are you able to learn something new at least once a week?
   ...because meaningful work creates constant opportunity for learning.
   
   
4. In your view are your colleagues at work knowledgeable and do you learn from them constantly?
   ...because meaningful work is also about the colleagues who come with it, and your learning and development comes primarily through learning from others: what I have called ‘The Posse’.
   
   
5. Are the tasks you do at work interesting and complex?
   ...because at the heart of meaningful work are the day-to-day tasks that you do.
   
   
6. Do you get lots of feedback about how you are doing?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to grow, and feedback from others is a crucial part of this.
   
   
7. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on the business?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to make a clear link in your mind between the tasks you perform and the broader goals of the business.
   
   
8. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on society?
   ...because meaningful work is made up of tasks that you believe do good and, as a consequence, make you feel good about yourself.
   
   
9. In your daily work, do you have the opportunity to reach out to develop networks with people very different from yourself?
   ...because meaningful work creates opportunities for you to develop the ‘Big Ideas Crowd’ that is so crucial to developing your innovative and creative capacity.
   
   
10. Does your work give you time to really develop deep regenerative relationships with people inside and outside of your organisation?
    ...because meaningful work creates time and space for you to develop emotionally.

So where are you on meaningful work?

Score 8-10
Through your active choices, or sheer luck, you are working in a meaningful way. Cherish the opportunities this provides and don’t compromise in the future.

Score 5-7
Some aspects of your work are meaningful. Take a closer look at those you have said no to and search for the underlying patterns. Is it possible to focus on developing these areas?

Score 1-4
Your job lacks meaning – you already know that! The question is – what are you going to do about it?

This is my take on meaning at work – are there any areas you would add?

The Skill Gap: Asian Style

One of the paradoxes of contemporary business life is that, just as unemployment soars, the number of unfilled vacancies increases. In the USA right now there are over 3 million unfilled jobs, while in countries like Spain, youth unemployment stands at a jaw dropping 47%. The extent of the gap between what employers need and what the labour market provides in terms of skills and talents seems to be continuously widening.

 

Why the skill gap is here to stay.

This is not a surprise. There are three trends that we believe will only gather momentum and, as they converge, will continue to impact on the extent of the skill gap. None of these trends will go away fast; in fact, our research suggests that they will only accelerate in their velocity.

The most obvious creator of the gap is technological advancement within work. This has been felt most in semi-skilled work, where business analytics have replaced many clerical activities, while much service work has been outsourced from the high-cost West.

Historically, these were jobs that those with minimum educational qualifications could perform.  But it’s not just about technology replacing semi-skilled work. Increasingly, the knowledge and skills that high value jobs demand has shifted to engineering, IT and the sciences. This is good news for countries like Germany and India, where these disciplines are considered a good professional choice – but bad news for the UK and the USA, where fewer students take these options. To make matters worse, the Asian students who fill the science classrooms of the West are increasingly likely to take the first plane back after graduating, rather than staying and filling those vacancies as they might have in the past.

Demography is also playing a hand in the skill gap: Over the next decade, the largest workforce cohort the world has ever seen - the Baby Boomers - will rete in their millions. Many will take with them the deep tacit knowledge that has come from a lifetime of experience, and which they have often failed to bequest to those members of Gen X who follow them. This demographic time bomb is particularly deadly in sectors such as aerospace and pharmaceuticals, which have traditionally had long apprenticeships.

 

The Asian Response

Anxieties about the skill gap are no less prevalent in Asia. With 15% compound growth rates and, in many countries, a missing management class, companies across the region are deeply aware that this could prove a significant barrier to growth.

However, what is interesting is the speed, depth and complexity of their response. Take Singapore: here is a country, with few resources save its people, with aspirations to play a significant role in the industrial life of Asia. For them, closing the skill gap is crucial. This is achieved by actively creating close ties and a constant information flow between the key stakeholders, be they in companies, the government or educational establishments. The Ministry of Manpower and the Economic Development Board have the role of coordinating this flow of information, and provide the resources to  ‘nudge’ when necessary. This could mean, for example, supporting Unilever’s opening of a major leadership campus, funding scholarships in high value skills, or working closely with pharmaceutical companies and Western universities to build a cluster around bioengineering.

In India, the speed and scale of the response has taken a very different form, spearheaded not by government, but by the private sector. Indian companies face a huge potential skill gap for, while the technical education in the Indian Institutes of Technology is of a high level, the general education standards across the country are poor. For Indian’s rapidly growing IT sector, represented by companies such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS, this could be a disaster. Yet instead of accepting this, these companies have reached out into communities across the continent to significantly impact the development millions of youngsters. Executives at Wipro, for example, work with tens of thousands of colleges across India to train teachers to develop IT skills, build state-of-the-art curricula, and encourage students to become what they term ‘work-ready’. With a recruitment target in 2011/12 of 60,000, the teams at TCS play a similar role in helping young people across India understand from an early age what the most valuable skills for the future are, and how best to acquire them. Like Infosys they also work closely with hundreds of thousands of teenagers to actively increase their skills.

The global skill gap is here to stay for as long as technological advances, globalisation and demography continue to redefine work. For some countries, it will be the government that takes the initiative to bridge the gaps. For others, it will be companies themselves who will step up to the challenge. What is clear is that, if neither of these stakeholders are actively engaged nor prepared to put significant resources into the problem, the unemployment rates now seen in Spain could become the norm for many countries in the West.

It's Education, Stupid

It’s that time of year when I spend much of my time reading the books that have been nominated for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. It’s a judging duty that is both a pleasure and a pain. The pain is the sheer amount of time it takes to wade through thousands of pages.  The pleasure is reading books that would not necessarily cross my path. This year, as with the last, many of these books are written by economists and, understandably, focus on the state of the world economy. It is interesting to read how many agree that education and training are crucial to long-term economic success, for individuals, companies and countries. I made a similar argument in my most recent book The Shift, focusing in particular on the types of education and training that create specialization. Here are the two reasons why it has never been so critical to become educated:

• Rampaging connectivity - will see at least five billion people around the world using some form of mobile device to download information, access knowledge and coach and teach each other. Some will have the intellectual capacity and motivation to really make something of this extraordinary opportunity, wherever they happen to be born. These people will want to join the global talent pool and, if possible, migrate to creative and vibrant cities. By doing so, this vast crowd of talented people will increasingly compete with each other, continuously upping the stakes for what it takes to succeed.

• The technological revolution - brought mobile devices to billions, and is now transforming how work gets done. Robots are taking the place of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, while business analytics, modelling and collaborative technologies are taking away much of what has traditionally been the role of the middle manager. However, while technology may be replacing the mechanical aspects of work, it is not replacing the more complex, skilled work that involves creativity and innovation. That’s the high value piece that remains, and it is once that requires education and training. 

As high quality education becomes more of a premium, we can expect the sector to begin to transform itself even more rapidly. Just what this transformation will look like is difficult to predict with accuracy. But here are two emerging trends that I believe will shape it over the coming decades:

The Gutenberg Project: the race is on to digitalise many of the books and articles of the world, while the professors of academic institutions such as MIT are making their key lectures available on the web. Combined with hyper connectivity and the potentially global reach of the Cloud, this means that knowledge and wisdom will be available to anyone with access to the Internet. This could see the development of new ways of educating that leapfrog those of normal educational institutions, creating more fluid, virtual and vibrant networks of learning. 

Virtual Schools and Universities: there has been a great deal of research over the last decade focusing on how people learn. This has looked at e-learning, face-to-face teaching and over-the-phone coaching. What has become clear is that none of these on their own are the best; it’s the combination of all three that has the greatest impact. This is important for educational strategies since at least two of these processes are virtual, and F2F can largely be substituted by video conferencing. I saw the speed of this transformation recently when I visited UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Its sleek headquarters are the hub of a virtual university that has 60,000 students (and growing) taught by a faculty of over 3,000 virtual educators. Using simulations, games and collaborative environments, the institution is building deep expertise in supporting education across the world.

Some have argued that, of all the institutional forms, education has changed least over the past few decades. It looks as if the need for deeper knowledge and rapid advances in learning technologies may change all that.

When Generations Fight

I have a fascinating insight into the future of work through the 45 corporations across the world we are studying as part of the Future of Work Research Consortium. Last month we asked 2,500 executives from these companies to rate the areas they believed would  be critical for the future, together with the extent to which they believed their company was currently competent. We gave them a list of 20 areas that an earlier study had shown would be important for the future. This list included for example ecosystems, open innovation, flexible working and networked leaders.

What was extraordinary is that almost a quarter rated ‘intergenerational cohesion’ as the most significant risk their company faced, and many more rated it as one of the top three risks. This was not an isolated area of risk, but rather was seen to be a risk by executives in both West and Asia companies, and indeed across all industrial sectors. Their concern was that the potential differences and conflicts between the generations could lead to poor cooperation and knowledge sharing, but might also flare into more open sources of conflict and dissatisfaction.

Five Unique Generations at Work. 

The potential opportunities and conflicts that are arising between generations are a recent phenomena and are a factor of both demographic changes (particularly around reducing birthrates and enhanced longevity) and accelerating technological and societal trends (particularly around the use of social media and family experiences). Over the next two decades, many companies will have potentially five distinct generations in the workforce: The Traditionalists (born around 1928 to 1945); the Baby Boomers (born around 1945 to 1964); Generation X (born around 1965 to 1979); Gen Y (born around 1980 to 1995); and Gen Z (born after 1995).

Generations fight for a number of reason. They don’t understand each other, they have differential access to resources and power, their working style and use of technology is in conflict, or they are not really sharing knowledge and experience with each other.

Of course generational conflict could also be great – really create innovation, remove some old style thinking, bring creative tension. However, if companies are to move to creative rather than destructive tension, it seems to me they have to ask themselves three key questions:

1. Does technology favour one generation? The generations communicate with each other differently and one potential source of tension is that corporate communication typically favours the Baby Boomers’ preferred mode of communication rather than the younger generations. Typically, Gen Z and Y use social media such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning to access information instantly, to multi-task, and to build valuable networks and stay connected; typically Gen X use portals; whilst Baby Boomers are most comfortable with e-mail as their primary technological communication tool. Yet many companies have banned Facebook and social media, which is the lifeblood for the youngest generations and by doing so have inadvertently favoured one generation over another.  

2. Has flexibility become embedded? Each generation would value greater flexibility. Gen Y would like greater work/life balance in jobs that can be overwhelming; younger Gen X’s would like maternity and paternity leave and time off to spend with their young children, the possibilities of sabbaticals, and to temporarily step away from frontline into less demanding roles, and older Gen X’s can find themselves with ageing parents who need care; whilst Baby Boomers would like sabbatical breaks and the opportunities to work more flexibly nearer the time of their retirement through part-time and reduced hours. What is clear is that the inflexibility of work will create ever greater conflict across the generations as those that need it most (typically Gen X) are denied it. There are many reasons why the rhetoric of organizational flexibility has rarely been delivered in practice: a focus on being present rather than making results, few if any senior role models prepared to work flexibly, and under- designed and over complicated jobs. But if generations are to work together, flexibility has to be a reality.

3. Is cross-generational mentoring taking place?  There are important exchanges to be made between generations; Gen Y in particular are keen to build strong functional skills and industry knowledge and insights that those more experienced can help develop and yearn for feedback; whilst Baby Boomers want to develop their expertise in the use of social media and newly developed technology. These can be crucial issues as Baby Boomer retire taking with them valuable knowledge, insights and connections. However, too often mentoring does not take place because executives are too busy, too stressed and feel overwhelmed and under skilled. Yet the generations have so much to teach each other if only the time and resources could be focused on this.

It seems to me that the creative tensions between the generations can be a real source of innovation and excitement. Have you experienced tensions between generations – and what do you think can be done to ensure these tensions are creative rather than destructive?

 

 

 

The New Jobs are in the Wind

As we look into the future, one of the questions for individuals and for businesses is where the high value competencies will be located. What are the skills and knowledge areas that we should be developing now in anticipation of them being valuable in the future – either because they are seen to be the creators of high value, because they are difficult for others to imitate, or because they are in short supply?

In my new book The Shift – which will be published in May – I have taken the view that competencies around alternative sources of energy will come to the fore. 

My initial ideas were reinforced this week reading Anatole Kaletsky’s new book Capitalism  4.0. It’s a far ranging thesis about how politics and economics could develop over the coming years. But what struck me most was not his political or economic ideas – but rather his take on the role renewable energy will play in the future. He remarks that in 2008, the entire global research efforts in all forms of non-carbon energy, including nuclear power only amounted to about double Microsoft’s spending on an upgraded version of Windows and Office and was far smaller than the resources devoted to new weapon systems or cancer research. By contrast to the $10 billion spent globally on alternative and nuclear energy research, an estimated $250 billion is spent annually on subsidizing the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. 

That will change – and it could change very rapidly. His argument is that over the coming years governments and public support will significantly increase for research, development and the deployment of new non polluting energy sources. He believes this is good news for the USA and for the UK, which both have clear comparative advantages in innovative science-based industries and also in finance – the two sectors of the world economy that will prosper most as the world invests the trillion of dollars required to replace fossil fuels. Kaletsky sees over the coming decades significant reshaping of market incentives to channel more resources into new technologies and related industries and jobs. 

That means that entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers will certainly be in high demand in the sustainable energy sector, but the sector will also need PR specialists, planning specialists and indeed everything the traditional energy sector needs. In fact, there should be more jobs available in the renewable energy sector than the traditional energy sector because renewable sector creates more jobs per unit of power, per unit of installed capacity and per pound invested than conventional power generation.

We can expect these jobs will become truly global labour markets. These are jobs that require deep and extensive knowledge, and are being developed in different places across the world. Want engineering skills – better look at India, which graduated over 400,000 engineers in 2009. Or if you are looking for IT skills then 6.1 million graduates in China joined the labor market in 2009.

The implication of this is that the competition for these jobs will become increasingly world wide, and that the predicted labor shortages in much of the developed world could potentially be filled by graduates in these ‘hot’ subjects from anywhere in the world. It’s also important to bear in mind that location will not always be crucial to the delivery of these skills. It will be possible for example for someone in Brazil to be advising an Indian city through networks like Innocentive that regularly post questions about carbon reduction, or for the virtual teams that will be so much a part of the future to create and build highly skilled global teams of experts.

This is reassuring news to me. One of the most pressing findings from our current research on how companies are facing the challenges of the future of work is the extent to which the reduction of carbon is seen as a peripheral rather than centre stage to future development. Perhaps, as in many other aspects of the future, it will be the combination of market forces and government interventions and incentives that will put this sector, and its skills at the very centre of the jobs for the future. 

Creating Future Jobs

I’ve been in New York twice over the last couple of weeks – watching with interest the mid-term elections and what looks like a shift in politics in Capitol Hill. What is very clear, is that the frustration many people feel, is with the economy- and specifically the lack of jobs for the young and the old. A number of the commentators I spoke to talked of this recession showing signs of being a ‘structural shift’ rather than a simple dip in the economy.

As we begin the second phase of our Future of Work Consortium, some of the underlying forces that could be the basis for this re-structuring are becoming ever more apparent – in particular the globalization and specialization of work. These fundamental shifts have implications both for the economy and for those seeking work, or indeed in work and wanting to move to higher quality work.

The globalization of work.

It is not as simple as work in the west moving to the back-offices of India or the factories of China. This is not a one-way road. Instead the market for jobs is increasingly taking on global proportions. For example, the major Indian IT companies – Wipro, Infosys and TCS (all of whom are actively participating in our research), are looking to take on significant numbers of people outside of India over the coming two years. Add to that a labour market increasingly able to both advertise and select on a global basis – and it’s clear that the competition for talent and for work will be fought on the world’s stage.

The implications?

The most talented in any location, will increasingly join the ‘global talent pool’ and their remuneration will over time move to the average of the whole pool.

Similarly, those with few skills in any location, will increasingly join the ‘global unskilled pool’ and their remuneration will also over time move to the average of the whole pool.

In other words – the huge locational advantage enjoyed by previous generations (being born in Boston versus being born in Cape Town) will erode except for the most talented.

The specialization of work.

What has been seen as ‘human work’ is increasingly moving to work that can be outsourced to a computer – giving feedback, managing information, creating reports  - can now be achieved through a combination of micro-chips rather than a human brain. So to be a ‘general’, jack-of-all-trades is not a great place to be. Your competitor is not the kids next door – it’s Wikipedia or an ever smarter computer. So increasingly valuable and interesting work will migrate to people with deep, specialist skills that have been honed through great education and coaching. That puts a huge emphasis on the education system of a state to both up- skill, and as importantly, to create a context where people want to learn and are prepared to put in the time and effort that the acquisition of deep skills creates.

The implications?

Those with few or shallow skills will see their jobs migrate to areas of the lowest cost – unless these are jobs that are locational based (burger flippers, cleaners, shop assistants).

As a consequence, the propensity of a region to flourish will increasingly depend on the resources it makes available to educate the population. Moreover, as we know that many of the cognitive aspects of knowledge development are learnt at an early age – then this puts a real emphasis on pre-school education.

So where does this leave the USA and the frustration of many citizens about the economy and job losses? Simply put, it suggests that ‘Born in the USA’ is fast eroding as an individual source of competitive advantage. That means for those with limited skills, the future could be a lot bleaker as the market for these skills finds its global average. What it also means is that ‘Educated in the USA’ – will increasingly create a source of competitive advantage for subjects which have global currency.