The Futuristic Workforce: How to Prep Up Your Employees for an Uncertain Future

Currently, the makeup of our workforce has shifted. However, the most significant changes are taking place in how businesses treat the talent they have, the talent they need, and the expectations their talent has of them. After looking at the future of work, let’s look at these three futuristic workforce characteristics and what they signify for businesses in the future.

3 Elements of the Futuristic Workforce

The Current Workforce

The management of talent is a critical catalyst for unlocking your competitive advantage. Organizations should assess present resources to make the most of existing talent post-pandemic and prepare them for the futuristic workforce. This assessment should review skills to see if the current workforce is appropriately equipped to help the firm achieve its strategic goals.

According to McKinsey’s findings, there is a strong link between talent management and organizational success. Although just 5% of respondents think their people management system has improved company performance, 99% of those who have said their system has improved company performance say they are more likely to outperform competitors. Furthermore, respondents at organizations with highly successful talent management are six times more likely than competitors to report a greater total return to shareholders (TRS) than those at companies with pretty inefficient talent management.

The Talent Firms Will Require

Organizations must establish a clear connection between their strategic aims and talent requirements to prep the futuristic workforce. To put it another way, businesses must know what they need to do in the short and long term, as well as who they need to do it with. After establishing that link, businesses must consider investing in the capabilities of their current employees and attracting and maintaining the best new talent.

Because of the talent shortage and the high cost of external recruits, firms should prioritize developing existing talent. A new reskilling contract between the business and the employee is required; firms should actively invest in upskilling to meet changing demands, and employees should expect to learn constantly.

This approach not only boosts employee productivity by 6-12% but also boosts employee loyalty and happiness, lowering the likelihood of them leaving. According to a recent survey, 77% of leaders believe retraining is highly or moderately crucial for their company’s futuristic workforces.

Companies must employ people to cover present and future gaps in functions where reskilling or upskilling is less desired. COVID-19 provides an opportunity to rethink existing jobs’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes and significantly rethink future positions’ requirements. Recent progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion is jeopardized, and businesses must take proactive measures. Organizations can find various talent pools for futuristic workforces by using a strategic lens. Partnerships with the greater talent ecosystem are also in high demand.

Employee Expectations

Current and potential companies must meet the needs of the post-pandemic workforce. Employees today expect purpose and a positive employee experience as strategic priorities. Paying little respect to these domains or ignoring them would have disastrous effects, including losing talent. However, thinking about these investments from the perspective of the losses we can avoid is shortsighted. Instead, think of them as a source of competitive advantage to equip your futuristic workforce.

The significant correlation between organizational success and diversity is the financial argument for diversity. Companies in the top quartile of gender diversity in executive teams are more profitable than those in the bottom quartile. Cultural and ethnic diversity follows a similar and much stronger pattern.

Every business relies on its employees. The central element to executing strategic initiatives and giving a company the best chance to thrive in an uncertain future is an investment—through growth, recruiting, empowerment, and inclusion.

How to Prep Up Your Futuristic Workforce?

With the fast rate of change in today’s business climate, your talent’s attitudes and preparedness are also evolving. And the secret sauce of talent development is empowering people to grow, change, and find fulfillment in their work. Talent development must become self-sustaining as agile brains collaborate with evolving business models. 

Companies are currently looking for skills development to satisfy the demands of learners and the business. However, if upskilling and reskilling activities are undertaken in isolation, they will result in a disconnect, which will work against creating a resilient, human-centric firm. Committing to growing learners by teaching core skills, business understanding, and their sense of self-awareness is a strategic imperative for L&D executives to prepare for the futuristic workforce.

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Learners develop learning agility, resilience, and flexibility due to their foundational knowledge. They acquire increased accountability, career fulfillment, and spiritual well-being by expanding their sense of self-awareness.

When these abilities are combined, employees have a professional poise that allows them to connect with the futuristic workforce in the realm of learning and work. Regardless of the organization’s size, market agility, or limits, these strengths should be culturally ingrained, along with skilling activities. However, achieving core skills and a culture of self-awareness and intrinsic satisfaction remains a big struggle. 

The following are some of the difficulties:

Diverse Backdrops

Diverse backdrops in three areas — learnability, learning agility, collaborative attitudes, and adaptability– create substantial talent development obstacles for the futuristic workforce.

Employee Perception of Success

Many people have been socialized to think of success in terms of power or money. We need to rethink what it means to be successful in terms of finding meaning and purpose in our work.

People Are the Future

Organizations must consider their people as individuals, not merely as resources but as change enablers. Many leaders prioritize task readiness over human-centric strengthening despite the classic people-first concept of building a comprehensive futuristic workforce.

CSR

Consider learning and development as a kind of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Recognize talent development as a component of CSR to increase people’s flexibility and psychological well-being to maintain a long-term social ecosystem.

Foundational Acumen’s Advantages

Unwittingly, the art of leveraging talents for learning, exploring, and adaptability has its origins in core knowledge. The fundamentals, a thorough understanding of the business-technology environment, ignite contextualization and rational thinking, drive people to learn and contribute, solve issues, and generate value. This approach improves learners’ learning agility, resilience, and flexibility, preparing them for the daily grind of value chain operations and maximizing their potential.

Agility in Learning

All learnability and learning agility are tiered characteristics that make up the continuous learning attribute and the ability to cope with change, both of which are essential qualities for a learning organization.

Learnability is the ability to work in new business and technology contexts while being coachable. Learning agility refers to quickly picking up new skills and knowledge to succeed in new business and technological contexts. Because of a lack of learning agility in their workforce, most companies have a persistent constraint in their ability to transform. However, this strength is frequently disregarded as a key to talent development.

Perseverance in the Workplace

Employees who are persistent assist organizations to be resilient. Professional resiliency results from a structured mind that is based on fortitudes of core knowledge and emotional stability. It has grown increasingly important as a collective strength for any business since the ability to deal with the unexpected has become the norm. When cultivated and embedded in the culture, this strength can help any business dramatically minimize the quantity and size of issues it faces.

Adaptiveness

The ability to alter and perform to meet new work requirements is called adaptability. Foundational knowledge functions as recesses of the mind, allowing people to connect and evolve, motivate people to come up with new ideas, and co-create the future state to satisfy changing corporate, operational, and organizational needs. Because agile operating models are a commercial necessity, this assumes strategic proportions.

According to research, businesses fail to comprehend the steps necessary to achieve adaptability. This observation is particularly true for organizations based on [size and process] efficiencies.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the most crucial skill to master. We typically take on new difficulties without first improving ourselves. This is a severe flaw. Employees can enhance their ability to actively analyze thoughts, emotions, perspectives, and behaviors by increasing their self-awareness, resulting in increased clarity and emotional balance. Employees with a self-aware mentality are better able to encourage themselves and others, empower and enforce accountability, and foster career fulfillment and spiritual well-being.

Accountability

Accountability necessitates the development of one’s highest self – the inner power to deal with undesirable feelings, events, and final outcomes. When this is fostered, it allows for a developing sense of ownership and accountability, allowing them to change themselves and the company for a better future. In each situation, pursuing self-awareness is an organic method to promote accountability.

Career Satisfaction

Careers occupy a significant chunk of people’s life. The first step toward work contentment is to clarify what you want out of life. It enables people to discover meaning and a higher purpose in their lives, including what they do for a livelihood, meaningful employment, and future goals of the futuristic workforce. As a result of this clarity, they develop a personality that is grounded on fulfillment and reflects their true self.

Spiritual Satisfaction

Spiritual well-being entails being at ease and joyful in your own company. This is an attempt to keep a sense of self, live in harmony with self and others, and remain free of the stresses of daily life by going to a higher level of perception. Transitioning from a compulsive state of action to a conscious state of action is the crucial benefit of spiritual well-being. This transformational endeavor is meant to establish being for action — the essential aspect of skills in action — in other words, moving from a compulsive state of action to a conscious state of action is the crucial benefit of spiritual well-being.

Employers Should Set the Example

The speed and scope of technological disruption, with its associated concerns of job loss and rising economic inequality, is a social, political, and financial challenge. On the other hand, employers are ideally positioned to be at the forefront of change and have a beneficial societal influence.

On the other hand, employers stand to benefit the most if they can successfully convert their futuristic workforce in this way. Many prominent companies recognize that they will be unable to hire all of the new capabilities they require. The best solution is to search within and develop existing talent, as this is frequently faster and more cost-effective, and better for morale and the company’s long-term attractiveness to recruits.

We already know from our executive surveys that most leaders consider talent to be the most significant impediment to the successful implementation of new initiatives, particularly those based on digitalization and automation.

Regrettably, there is a significant disconnect between these executives’ remarks and their organizations’ conduct. Only a third of worldwide executives say their companies have started any new reskilling programs, even if they are tiny pilots. However, as incumbents in conventional industries actively seek people with digital abilities, digital skills are in short supply as tech companies expand.

The good news is that organizations can position themselves for success in this new competitive environment by taking meaningful efforts today to develop an infrastructure that supports the future of work.

A 3-Phase Roadmap Toward Building a Futurisctic Workforce

First, there is a time of scouting. The organization establishes a single vision of its digital and automated future and the total value of that future at this point. It also highlights the most critical skill gaps, considering future requirements rather than just extending them from the past (the norm in much workforce planning). The organization’s readiness to deliver is then assessed.

Second, there is a time of shaping in which work is redesigned to meet the demands of a more futuristic workforce, and upskilling programs are developed, typically in collaboration with employees. This phase also entails creating the infrastructure for a talent accelerator, which will make it easier to deploy people in the most crucial future roles.

The third phase entails expanding the scope of the organization’s talent-related initiatives. This analysis demonstrates that institutional capacities to assist people in adapting to the futuristic workforce are just as crucial as near-term (and ostensibly more pressing) talent goals.

Conclusion

Talent development must assume mechanisms to assist learning, unlearning, and transformation to realize the dynamic nature of value for the futuristic workforce. It also necessitates the sparking of intrinsic knowledge to harness the power of the human mind for introspection, large picture thinking, value creation, accountability, resilience, flexibility, and a greater purpose to achieve career fulfillment. Learning begets evolution and action for sustenance and progress, and such wholesome coherence and competency should form company culture.

Business and learning and development leaders should base talent development on the noble goal of imparting these strengths to bridge the gap between formal education and modern skills, evolve to adapt and facilitate change and live a happy and meaningful life. And, most importantly, to instill adaptable DNA in their businesses.

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