This space and most of the Future of Work Exchange’s thought leadership revolves around the concepts of automation, technology, and the platforms revolutionizing the greater world of work and talent. In fact, our definition of the Future of Work pointedly refers to these advancements: the evolution of talent engagement and talent management through new technology, as well as the introduction of exciting platforms that are actively pushing the boundaries of “work optimization,” are two distinct components at the very core of this movement.

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During post-pandemic times, there remains a sense of “resettling” that has not yet fully stabilized. There are still back-and-forth battles over remote and hybrid work. Enterprises still struggle with humanity and conscious leadership. Not enough business leaders prioritize the emotions of their workers. Organizations are in the midst of configuring just, exactly, how artificial intelligence should be utilized and integrated into their core operations.

This is a moment in time when “work” means many different things to many different leaders. And workers. And businesses. And people.

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Introducing a New Subscription Model from the Future of Work Exchange.

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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While there are many trends and corresponding predictions that generate headlines and steal thunder, there are several other trajectories that may not be front-page news, but nonetheless, are deserving of business leadership attention as we move further into January and, of course, into 2024.

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Introducing a New Subscription Model from the Future of Work Exchange.

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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Workplace Humanization Arrives

How has business leadership transformed? Quite simply, leaders today have a newfound focus on “humanity,” and the need to be more talent-oriented to thrive during uncertain times. During the height of the pandemic, there was no separation between how leadership and employees experienced this global event. Everyone went through it together and had similar fears, anxiety, and concern for others. Many leaders recognized this fact and rebooted their workplaces by retaining employee flexibility and remote/hybrid models once the world started to normalize.

Bridging of Human and Skills-Based Objectives

Along with the humanization of the workplace, the need for skills-based talent became apparent as well. The criticality of enterprise agility, flexibility, and business continuity is now a central part of talent acquisition strategies. It is no longer about filling a job role, but rather hiring candidates that bring specific skills and competencies while also being a good cultural match. Business leaders today actively bridge the human aspect with skills-based execution. Understanding, for example, the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of the cultural fabric, leaders have integrated DE&I into hiring and operational objectives.

Business Leadership Evolves

The Future of Work Exchange and Ardent Partners have identified five ways business leadership is evolving.

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As time passed, however, something incredibly interesting brewed below this layer of pandemic-specific responses: the so-called “Great Resignation” quickly became an outlet for workers and professionals to prove that the workforce needed the power, control, and better conditions to perform productively and effectively.

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The post The “Why” We Work is Just as Important as the “How” appeared first on The Future of Work Exchange.

As the COVID-19 pandemic expanded and ultimately disrupted billions of lives, many workers used this time as an opportunity for personal introspection, reevaluating their goals in life and at work (and their career journeys to date). Workers newly entrusted within their organizations also felt empowered to take ownership of their careers. Many discovered renewed passions for social causes, a need for work-life integration, and career journeys that defined their sense of self. Those pursuits began playing out at the end of 2021 — referred to as “The Great Resignation” — and continued throughout most of 2022. The millions of workers who left their jobs during this period sent a message to their employers that a new set of workplace criteria was being considered. Issues like empathy, diversity, equity, inclusion, and other business culture considerations were identified as critical needs of the new-normal enterprise. Suddenly the need for a strategy to develop, communicate, and realize corporate values became an important way to retain current talent and attract new workers.

This sets the stage for 2023 as a critical year for “the human factor,” as businesses now have to contend with managing through economic uncertainty, an increasingly-tightening labor market, and a delicate balance between hanging onto pandemic-era reliance on remote and hybrid workplace models and desiring workers to return to in-person collaboration. Simply put: leading with a human edge might be the only way for enterprises to truly enhance talent retention while improving the ways they get work done in a challenging business environment.

Throughout the past 18 or so months, many business leaders were anxious to call their workforce back to the office out of fear of waning productivity and a loss of visibility and control over their teams. What they discovered, however, was a sense of empowerment that had been missing from the ranks of professionals for far too long; while compensation and benefits will always, always be critical factors in selecting (or staying at) a job, aspects such as flexibility, better working conditions, transparency into career journeys, etc. became top-of-mind and non-negotiable attributes of their roles. While we know this as “The Great Resignation,” this was, in fact, a true “talent revolution” that signaled a new era of work and labor.

Throw all of these concepts into a blender marked “2023” and what we get is a workplace environment that requires so much more than just appreciation and empathy. Leadership in the year ahead does not just need to implement more humanity, it requires it to truly be effective in what would be (yet another) watershed year for the business arena.

While not all industries fear the specter of a recession, there are many workers are shifting their mindsets from “revolution” to “survival,” a sharp turn from the months past when, on average, over four million professionals voluntarily resigned from their positions for a 16-month period. This type of thinking can wreak havoc on already-stressed professionals who are facing burnout and wellness issues, leaving leaders with only one option: infuse humanity into core leaderships strategies in order to develop a stable workplace that is supportive of its talent.

“The human factor” has been oft-discussed since the pandemic began. Many of us faced personal reawakening in the face of mortality and sickness, watching as the world faced a public health crisis unlike anything we had experienced before. People reevaluated their lives and the role of their careers as part of their identities, meaning that there was much more at stake than just “work.” Workers desired purpose, craved flexibility, and wanted an overall sense of alignment between their human personas and workplace characters. This translated into the need for business leaders to be more human in their management approaches.

Which, of course, leads us to a new year and new vision. Upcoming Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research found that nearly 70% of businesses see worker burnout as a core challenge, in addition to another 74% who perceive recession risks as a driver for worker anxiety. This all means that leaders have to strike a balance between managing costs and driving productivity and ensuring that they emotionally support their talent in a more deliberate and meaningful way. Empathy-infused management, flexible workplace options, more appreciation, and enhancing worker wellness and wellbeing (especially mental health) are all critical attributes in this regard.

However, there is one overarching strategy that leaders can adopt to ensure that their workforce is engaged, productive, rested, and stable in 2023: place humanity in the center of all business strategies. By doing so, enterprises will create a workplace environment in which talent feels trusted and valued. In the wake of uncertainty, this is the most powerful approach of all.

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2022 was another watershed year for the business arena. We grappled with Year Three of a pandemic, dealt with the fallout and reshuffling from The Great Resignation, tapped into the power of new and exciting technology, learned the meaning of humanity in how we work, and continued to experience the growth and impact of the extended workforce.

And this is the just the beginning of what is up ahead. 2023 will surely challenge us, with the specter of an economic downturn lingering overhead as well as continued uncertainty regarding the volatility of the labor market. However, as we have done over the past three years, we will persevere, we will thrive, and, most critically, we will innovate.

Today, on the Future of Work Exchange, we unveil four laser-focused predictions for the year ahead:

• Skills, skills, skills…talent acquisition and workforce management will revolve around skillsets and expertise. Globalization, digitization, flexibility, and agility, mixed with labor market volatility, equates to a brave new world of talent acquisition and talent engagement. Executives will seek cost-cutting measures to combat economic uncertainty, but in 2023, it won’t affect the overarching need for top-tier skillsets and expertise. Businesses have experienced a massive skills gap over the past several years and the only way to thrive (not just merely survive) in today’s business arena is to pump resources, innovation, focus, and technology into revamping talent engagement and talent acquisition strategies. Skills are the centerpiece of the Future of Work today.
• Intelligence becomes the nexus of the Future of Work. Businesses were living in a Big Data world long before the term was applicable. As machine learning infiltrated analytics and artificial intelligence became a foundation for workforce data, business leaders were enabled with the power to infuse real-time, on-demand insights into their core talent-led decision-making processes. Today, and into 2023, that concept will evolve as enterprises develop “skills catalogs,” seek to shift expertise where it is needed given changes in the market, and infuse AI into talent acquisition and recruitment approaches to maximize skillsets and eschew archaic talent engagement methods.
• Omni-channel talent acquisition is 2023’s gold standard for engagement. This is something that the Exchange discussed recently (especially during last week’s predictions-focused webcast). Direct sourcing, talent communities, talent marketplaces, digital staffing, and freelancer networks are all deep and viable outlets of candidates; thus, businesses can take an omni-channel approach and optimize their hiring by aligning their talent acquisition strategies with these sources of talent. And, the omni-channel approach traverses beyond this type of alignment: by maximizing various sources of talent (through VMS, ATS, direct sourcing, etc.), businesses are able to boost candidate engagement by providing a worker-specific experience to each prospect that is inclusive of assessment, opportunity, and clarity.
• Humanity shines through in every facet of how and why we work. The pandemic didn’t just result in Future of Work accelerants like remote/hybrid work and the shift to flexibility; it truly humanized the way we, as both professionals and people, perceived the role of work in our daily lives. The Future of Work should be predicated on humanity in such a way that it cascades into how leaders manage their people via empathy, understanding, appreciation, and transparency. Workers today face a variety of issues: economic uncertainty, burnout, poor mental wellbeing, challenges with workplace culture, etc. Leaders have a new role in 2023: continue managing towards organizational goals and objectives whilst focusing on the human side of business. ensuring that workers and candidates are provided the flexibility and emotional wellness that they require to succeed.

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And the most interesting idea around the Future of Work movement is that there are so many attributes of work, talent, technology, and business leadership that serve as real-time accelerants and harbingers of things to come.

Here are the five things the Future of Work Exchange believes are driving this moment today (and will drive tomorrow):

1. The “human” elements of work and talent. From pandemic-driven anxiety and the desire for more purposeful work, today’s business professionals crave more than just a paycheck. These workers truly require an emotional connect with their work in such a way that it solves both the work-life integration problem and allows them some semblance of flexibility in both their personal and professional lives.
2. Direct sourcing’s continued impact on talent engagement and talent acquisition. Many large-scale enterprises have begun “reactive layoffs” in anticipation for a possible recession. However, as many news outlets would note, there are more job openings right now than there are job seekers. This weird labor market translates into the need for businesses to harness the power of talent pools, talent communities, and talent clouds to essentially overcome the rigidity of engaging and acquiring talent through traditional means.
3. The transformation of business leadership. This item has long been a foundational element of the Future of Work movement; however, the way leaders lead has been continually evolving since Day One of the pandemic. There is, of course, the notion of conscious leadership and being in-tune with the workforce. And, on top of that, especially today, business leaders must fuse empathy and flexibility into their strategies. They must contend with the remote vs. in-office conundrum, the specter of a recession, and applying the best talent retention strategies to their talent. Transformation, in this case, isn’t a one-shot alteration.
4. Artificial intelligence drives decision-making. AI can be considered “vaporware” to some executive leaders, however, many of the prominent solutions in the workforce technology industry provide real-deal AI to help procurement, HR, and talent acquisition leaders understand the best-fit talent for a role, how their workforce will look given current economic trajectories, and support DE&I initiatives, as well as fuel enhanced candidate screening and candidate assessment.
5. The strategic application of new and innovative work models. Worker-led work structures. Digital collaboration augmented by infrequent in-person meetings. AI-fueled process management. Consumerized capabilities across core enterprise functions. An enhanced hiring manager experience. Developing a path to total talent acquisition (and then, perhaps, total workforce management?). The reimagination of worker productivity. These are all innovative ways of rethinking the boundaries of how work gets done, and, true extensions of the Future of Work movement.

The post The Five Things Driving the Future of Work (Right Now) appeared first on The Future of Work Exchange.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the way we now get work done is dependent on access to the tools and technology necessary for total interconnectivity and on-demand collaboration. There should be no more silos of innovation, but rather a free-flow of ideas and insights that permeate a “open” and automated realm from which to strategize the way projects, operations, product development, manufacturing, etc. are executed.

No matter how far we traverse into the ether of technology, however, the Future of Work always comes back to one thing: the people. The workers. The professionals. The leaders. The expertise. The skillsets. The humans.

If we just take a step back, the answers are vividly clear. Why did the Future of Work and its accelerants sweep through the world over the past two years? Because of the human elements of work and the workforce, of course. Consider that:

• The so-called “Great Resignation” happened (and is continuing to happen in some form) because of a human-led desire for flexibility and better working conditions.
• That need for flexibility is a driven by a human-level need for a better balance between personal life and professional life.
• The concepts of remote work and the hybrid workplace reside firmly in the greater need for businesses to support the human elements of the workforce while boosting productivity and attempting to curb burnout.
• The very idea of “open talent” was catalyzed by the need to address skills deficiencies with agile talent…especially extended labor that is tethered to socially “open” concepts of working and collaborating.
• The value of an empathy-led, inclusive workplace culture has sparked business leaders to lead with a nurturing touch that, of course, takes into context the fact that workers are human.
• The role of purpose (and purposeful work) are perhaps the most critical drivers of the Future of Work today, with enterprises focusing on passionate and talented individuals who prioritize the ways their work contributes to something greater in their lives and aligns with their overall human journey.

The great revolution of talent and work is upon us. Technology, artificial intelligence, and innovative tools with surely lead and direct us, but is is the people, the humans, that spark the real Future of Work.

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