Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Hi everyone, it's Josh Burson. Happy 2022. It's time to talk about predictions for the year ahead, which you can read about in the research report. We're just publishing this month, but lemme spend a couple minutes talking about what's happening. And a lot of this you'll already understand, but I wanna give you some perspectives. The first thing is that it's very clear to me, and this comes from lots of economic data and talking to many, many of you, that the great resignation is going to get worse. In other words, the job market is going to get very, very competitive next year. Right now there's close to 13 or 14 million jobs open in the United States. That's about one in 11, almost one in 10. Next year it could be 15 to 20 million jobs open, which could be one in eight, one in seven, which is a massive number and simply means that there will be a lot of competition for talent.
Speaker 1 00:01:04 As you read the research on who's quitting and why, younger people are leaving the workforce and changing jobs at a much higher rate than older people. Some older people are retiring. About 65% of people over the age of 65 have decided to retire. But I think that number will come down. I actually think more people will decide to work longer as wages pick up speed. But the bottom line for you as an employer or an HR function is everything we've been talking about for the last two years. Employee experience, wellbeing, human-centered leadership, productivity is going to be urgently important to create a fantastic employment brand. And in order to compete for the work and the roles rather that you need to hire, you're going to have to really focus on your brand, your culture, hiring for fit, not hiring for experience, hiring for skills, and internal mobility and the use of tools like the talent marketplace.
Speaker 1 00:01:59 So that's number one. And this is probably the worst it's ever been, at least in my career. I mean around 2000, I remember we went through a period kind of like this, but it was mostly for tech workers. But now we're talking about a shortage of essential workers, drivers, delivery people, and tech workers and salespeople and marketing people. So we're gonna draw in a sense, new people into the workforce. People at their younger ages are going to be drawn up into more senior roles, and you're going to have to create an experience that develops them and rewards them. By the way, in May, I'm going to be launching my book, which has been in work for about five years, and it's got all sorts of great ideas on how to do this, but I'll continue to educate everybody in the meantime. Second thing is re-skilling.
Speaker 1 00:02:43 Upskilling, not a new idea. Obviously it's been going on for decades. I remember why I was very heavily skilled when I went to work at I B M in 1981, and when I went to work for Exxon in 1978, companies have always been skilling and training employees, but things have changed a lot. And as you'll see in a new line of research that we're introducing in January and February, this is not just getting better at one career path, but creating career pathways, teaching people about jobs they don't know how to do yet that leverage their skills because their skills are adjacent to a higher value or more important role. Financial auditors becoming cybersecurity people, administrators in hospitals moving into IT roles or customer service roles or even design roles, you and HR becoming designers and data scientists and moving into creative consultative jobs inside the HR function or rotating out of HR for a while to get some business experience and then coming back.
Speaker 1 00:03:47 And this is going to be massively important. It isn't just career management and career paths anymore. We're way past that. That scaffolding is still needed, but you're going to have to get very smart at what are the roles and careers that are in high demand inside of your company. What are the adjacent and feeder roles that will contribute to those? And how do we get people there from here? Now, many of you know that the answer to that is a little bit complex. There's training, there's education, there's certification, there's exposure, there's developmental assignments. And most of all, it's teaching leaders that their job is not just to manage groups and operations, but to develop people and assess people as part of their role, because there won't be enough people to fill every job with someone who's done it before. And that in a sense means that companies are going to be morphing into development machines where we do more and more automation of routine work, reducing the need to train people on operational things and better and better jobs at career mobility inside of the company.
Speaker 1 00:04:56 Now, underneath that, of course, is the massively complex l and d market, the 360 billion market of training. And we will be introducing a big piece of research in the early year that is actually kind of surprising. What we're finding is that most senior and very experienced chief learning officers are kind of confused about all the options we now have. We have many, many new modalities of learning, lots of new learning platforms, self-authored learning, MOOCs, marketplace of learning, learning experience, platforms, skills taxonomy, systems skills, inference systems, new modes of assessment capability academies, and your learning and development functions. Just gonna have to get smart on that, and we're obviously really focused on helping you learn that. The third thing that I think is an important prediction is the role of society, esg, citizenship and sustainability. There's no question for those of you that watch the news that almost every week there's another climate emergency in some part of the world.
Speaker 1 00:06:01 You know, I live in an area where there's been droughts and fires, and we just had tornadoes in the southeast United States this week, and that means that the millennials and mid-age, and even really everybody in the workforce is wondering whether you or we as employers are helping to solve the problem. I had an interesting conversation with the head of sustainability at Chevron two weeks ago, and he said, you know, we've been thinking about this problem for decades. When we drill a mine or a well in a community in Africa or somewhere in another part of the world, we have to make sure that we have the minimum environmental impact on that location. We have to take care of the community. We have to make sure that even the trucks that drive down the main street are well scheduled so they don't interrupt traffic. You see, we've been worrying about citizenship and responsibility for a long time now.
Speaker 1 00:06:55 They're reducing the carbon footprint by looking at every source of energy they capture, and its carbon efficiency in producing energy. And that means that if you're a manufacturer, a consumer packaged goods company, a food service company, a retailer, you have exactly the same issue. Of course, I don't think it's a surprise that Amazon went out and spent, uh, billions of dollars to buy a hundred thousand trucks from Rivian propelling Rivian to be one of the largest automobile companies by market cap. They don't wanna have a carbon footprint for all those Amazon trucks are driving all over your neighborhoods and a hundred thousand trucks doesn't surprise me. It's probably more than that. And that means that not only are you gonna be involved in that from the HR standpoint as a leader, but your employment brand and how you talk about those things and the roles inside the company and the areas of E S G and d E I too, d e I, is still a totally unsolved problem, but I think it fits into the UN sustainable development goals and it fits into the whole concept of citizenship, and that will be a huge topic next year.
Speaker 1 00:08:01 The fourth one that I'm gonna talk about is something that isn't new and it's leadership development. I think from the research we've done, and we're gonna do a lot of research on this too next year, the leadership development space has really fallen behind. When I first learned about leadership development in the early two thousands, and we studied it the early days, it was a pretty traditional part of a company. You had different programs you went to as you moved up the corporate pyramid, and at the higher levels you would go to executive education and you would do developmental assignments and there would be 360 s and maybe you'd have a coach if you really needed it. That still exists, obviously, and it's still widely used, but two things have changed. First of all, the philosophies of leadership have changed. As you've read about in our human-centered leadership research, we want leaders to be empathetic, caring, understanding good listeners, and know the business and know how to manage people and know man, how to manage projects and know how to hold people accountable.
Speaker 1 00:09:05 And so there's a new dimension and new framework for leadership which challenges existing leaders to some degree because leaders themselves are under stress and they feel a lot of pressure from the pandemic. But second though, modalities of leadership are massively changing. Online coaching, micro-learning, new platforms for learning in the flow of work, experiential learning through virtual reality and ar. These are not just kind of crazy ideas that sound like something that somebody else is doing that maybe you'll experiment with. They're all going mainstream and the reason they're going mainstream is that young people want leadership development too. People in their twenties and thirties are saying they don't necessarily need their company to teach them technical skills. They can learn that on their own. They want their company to teach them how to manage projects, how to manage teams. And so I think in 2022, with the economy growing like it is, you're going to have to take a serious look at your leadership development and make sure you're investing in it in a significant way.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 The fifth thing I wanna talk about briefly is HR tech. And you've heard a lot from me on this and I'm not slowing down, but there's a couple of big things happening in HR tech. The first is that intelligence systems have arrived. Tools that provide what we call talent intelligence are now embedded in most HR technology systems with different levels of maturity. And in addition to buying a new E R P or a cloud-based system for recruiting or a series of tools for learning, there's a proliferation of them. By the way. Most companies have 60 to 70 employee facing systems. You need an experienced layer on top of it. Microsoft is going to be a significant player in that. You need analytics and listening tools and total employee voice platforms, which is another massive emerging growth area. And you need intelligence systems so you can see what's going on.
Speaker 1 00:11:05 It isn't enough to know the turnover rate in different parts of the company. You're gonna want to know the skills gaps, the demographics of workers in different parts of the company, who's progressing and who's not, and why, which teams are effective and which aren't. And all of that data is floating around in multiple systems. In fact, one of the reasons people analytics is so complex is most companies have vital people data in dozens of different platforms. And so we need an intelligence system to bring it together that will become even bigger next year. I know this from the investments going on in all of the E R P vendors and some of the recruiting and other talent vendors, including the talent marketplace vendors by the way. And so I think one of the things in HR is to assign a team to own the skills architecture, the job architecture, and figure out what data is connected to what and what tools you can use that will create a better intelligence system.
Speaker 1 00:12:05 The reason I think this is urgent is as the economy continues to grow, one of the big things happening is industry convergence. Banks are turning into tech companies and FinTech companies. Telcos are moving into 5G and going into media and publishing and entertainment. Retailers are going into mobile commerce and distribution and logistics. Oil companies are going into solar energy and batteries and lithium and other forms of mining. Every industry is converging with its adjacent industries and if you don't have talent intelligence, you won't know what you're missing. You'll just be aware of skills gaps and job openings, but you won't be sure what to do about them, and you can't just fill them one at a time. You need to get a picture of where that's all going. So that's a big theme. We're gonna be talking a lot about it next year. And coupled with that is a topic that we're gonna be introducing in Q1 in organization design.
Speaker 1 00:13:03 Now, one of the things that we do here in our company is we always look for the problems that seem kind of unsolved. And one of the problems that's vexing to most companies is how do we do org design in a company that's morphing industries, growing, transforming to become more digital, becoming more global, becoming more agile? We're gonna try to write the book on that sometime in q1. You'll see a big research study come out from us on org design as well as a whole class, what we call a super class on org design. And the reason we're doing this is that of all the changes taking place inside of the company, the biggest thing that's happening is the way the organization works, how people are being held accountable or not, what is the role of leaders? How do you design teams? What is the role of the hierarchy?
Speaker 1 00:13:49 Those are critical topics that tend to be addressed by business leaders based on their experience without a lot of experience in study, and we're gonna try to help you do that. So that's one that I would put on your agenda for 2022. The final one I want to touch on, so this podcast is not too long, is the HR function itself. You know, I've been preaching in a sense the need to build HR capabilities Now since I left Deloitte and really before that, and I'm more convinced than ever that the biggest upskill opportunity you have is your team. It amazes me the amount of creativity and innovation and really new thinking that HR teams have done this year, and they've done it with very little background. Most of you obviously learned a lot about public health and the pandemic and remote work and hybrid work and mental health and wellbeing and resilience and all of those things.
Speaker 1 00:14:46 Well, underneath that is a new set of disciplines we have to have in hr. We need to better cross-train and connect HR teams to each other. You need to learn about RPA and self-service tools and AI and all the technologies underneath the business environment. You need to understand things about the culture and the economy and what's going on in the job market. You need to understand design thinking and feel comfortable in agile teams working in iterative design. We have a whole new domain of product management entering hr, where HR teams are starting to function like product managers and all of the aspects of product management. Analytics is clearly a big topic in hr, employee voice, employee listening, employee experience, and then the fundamentals of running the HR function. I think the HR function has turned into one of the most interesting and dynamic parts of a company.
Speaker 1 00:15:43 Now, I don't work in IT or or manufacturing. I'm sure other people would say they're just as interesting, but if you think about the way HR teams have to be distributed and centralized, coordinated, but also distributed and empowered, how you each have to know how other people are solving problems in other parts of the world so that you can coordinate solutions, we all need to become designers and consultants. We need to become great collaborators with our business counterparts, and we need to understand our industry and where our industry is going and what are the adjacencies and growth areas in our industry so we can advise our recruiters and talent acquisition teams to hire the right people. It's an amazing time to be in hr, and I really feel fortunate to be part of this profession. We are going to be doing a lot of cool things in our company.
Speaker 1 00:16:32 We're going to be enhancing our professional development offerings in a very significant way. We're gonna be introducing a lot of new research and tools to help you understand these trends, including research on the workforce itself. We're gonna get into some really interesting workforce and economic and job market research. We're going to be continuing to do advisory consulting and help you with strategy, and we will always be here to listen. And I, in closing, I want to thank you all for contributing and being so generous with us in the last year. I started this new business around May of 2018 when I left Deloitte and had no idea the demands and the needs that would be thrust upon the HR profession when I left. And I think we have been able to be really good helpers and supporters and advisors to you because of your generosity in sharing with us.
Speaker 1 00:17:30 And so I want to thank you for that and assure you that throughout the coming year, we will be here to help you. One more thing, the third week of May in 2022, we're going to be having a big conference in Southern California. It will be called Irresistible is the name of the conference. If you go to our website and type josh b.com/irresistible, you can learn more and sign up. If you'd like to speak or you have some really cool things you wanna share, let us know and we'll try to get you on the agenda. Have a fantastic 2022, please read the predictions report and let us know what you think and give us any feedback. Thank you very much.
