For some time now, a business contact, Paul Lyons, has been coaching professionals on mental toughness. Even as a strident optimist, I do not think Paul anticipated how important mental toughness and resilience would become the required leadership trait in 2020.
In recent discussions with clients and business colleagues around the emerging work environment, three main topics arise: Leadership, Ways of Working and Data.
Leaders are finding it challenging to lead more humanely. More than ever, they are being required to consider inclusion, equality and social justice. Mass media publications such as the New Daily, CNBC and The Atlantic all quote research showing that at least 50 percent of employees will now work remotely for the foreseeable future. With this model of employee engagement, it will require a different leadership approach and new tools to measure, track and monitor employee engagement, experience and outputs. These changes and challenges require leaders with resilience and mental toughness.
The ways of working for employees are continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. Who are the employees? Recent conversations include full time, part-time, contract, AI and bots making up the emerging employee team. Teams are already evolving to be smaller, less specialised, with fewer managers and the concept of a revolving team leader. AI and bots can handle specialised repetitive tasks. The trend for human employees is to be problem solvers; usually for unique or “outlier problems”.
For some time, we used data to forecast requirements for people and business. Forecasting is now giving way to deeper "here and now" analysis using insight dashboards. Insight dashboards are now an essential business tool. Dashboards are providing data which give a deep insight into employees, suppliers, partners, customers, regulation and compliance and the critical business financials. The data tools require leaders to be knowledgeable about technology and to be able to make timely and accurate decisions.
#futureofwork #humanisedworkforce #waysofworking