ImagineeringTomorrow: Future of the workplace

To start with,
• At $68bn valuation, Uber is more valuable than major car companies GM, Ford, and Honda. (Source: Forbes; Business Insider)

• Amazon at $355.5bn market cap is worth more than Walmart, Target & Costco combined. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

• Netflix's market cap at over $56bn is at par with media giants such asTime Warner-- owner of top premium cable network HBO, other popular cable channels like TBS, TNT, and CNN, and one of the major Hollywood studios (Warner Brothers) (Source: The Motley Fool)

• With $45.6bn market capitalization, Paypal has become the fourth largest payment company after Visa, MasterCard and American Express (Source: DigitalTransactions)

Increasing number of CEOs are facing the heat of business disruption across multiple channels of their value chain. Customer relationships are rapidly evolving on the back of integrating digital and analog worlds. In the context of these changes, CEOs highlight following top 5 talent risks to their business:

1. Rising Salaries
2. Critical Skills Shortage
3. Inability to Retain Talent
4. Inadequate Leadership Pipeline
5. Low Employee Productivity

Their new competitors from Digital World are worsening the impact of these challenges by having singular focus on talent with digital skills, attracting them with an aggressive rewards philosophy, and creating a culture that thrives on higher productivity expectations (madness at start-ups).

Traditional business’ CEOs have to thus wage a battle both at an external and internal front.

And it has never been fiercer than today!

As they invest in newer Digital capabilities with eyes on the vast future potential, multiple decision points face them, namely:

1. Assimilation of “Digital” leaders into an older environment
2. Perceptible culture gap between “Optimization” and “Expansive” mindsets
3. Misaligned organisation structures and decision-channels against the future business strategy
4. Lack of pay and performance measurement parity between old and new worlds
5. Fear of driving employees too hard during this period of change
And time is not on anyone’s side. Bit by bit, all parts of value chain are being opened and reassembled, much like Lego blocks. Block chain is yet another example of a change that will disrupt multiple industries (financial, logistics, supply chain and many more).

So what can CEOs do to be better prepared?

During one of my recent meetings with the CEO of a Technology Services organisation based in US, he commented “we are engineers; we are used to fixing problems. In the past, inordinate focus has been on tangibles with visible outcomes; we haven’t focused on the inspirational”. That to me is the fundamental difference in managing today’s environment.

Leaders need to answer the question - Why?

For years, organisations have defined their purpose through Vision & Mission statements, which were mostly a quick job between CEOs, few senior leaders and the marketing / communication team. New-age leaders aren’t writing fancy lines on company walls – they are living them in their day-to-day behaviors.

Elon Musk articulates his life mission as “making humankind inter-galactic” and he backs it up by investing, failing and re-investing into the same purpose. He attracts talent of the future by inspiring them with a grand vision and showing his personal commitment, drive and passion towards it.

Beyond purpose and passion, leaders need to encourage “Why” across all parts of business. Curiosity, agility and willingness to learn are the most critical skills required to disrupt one’s value chain before competition does (none of these are traditional “left brain” problem solving approaches at work).

And last but not the least….

Empathy drives business performance. It is fundamental to design-thinking approach for solving customer problems and co-creating solutions. Steve Jobs may not have had high empathy for his employees; however his deep understanding of customers’ unstated “desires” created products that became bedrock of today’s Digital brigade.

Beyond people, an organisation represents itself as culmination of systems, policies and processes. These are equally important to provide employees structure, predictability and a sense of comfort. Understanding this duality of existence and managing the inherent creative tension will be the prime differentiator in evolving the Digital Culture.


(The article is authored by Tarandeep Singh, Partner, Talent & Performance Consulting - ‎Aon Hewitt. This article is part of the six-article series, ‘Aon #ImagineeringTomorrow: A Co-creation Journey’, with Aon Hewitt)

(Image: Thinkstock)