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    The future workforce: Companies will look for people married to their professions, not jobs

    Synopsis

    New technologies will fundamentally change the way we operate and interact today, says HARMAN India's HR head Vikrant Gupta.

    The future workforce: Firms will look for people married to their professions, not jobs
    By Vikrant Gupta

    Discussions around technologies like AR, VR, AI have been happening for a few years now, but the buzz seems to have reached a crescendo over the past few months with these technologies finally coming to mainstream. Gartner expects these technologies to be present in most new products by 2020. The impact is being felt across industries and verticals. Technology has started to change the way we work and operate.

    While there is no doubting the disruptive and transformational impact technologies will have on the business, I would wager that the effect on workforce management will be even more significant. These technologies will fundamentally change the way we operate and interact today.

    The Rise of the Contingent Workforce
    Our means of communication both professional and interpersonal and our eco system are fundamentally undergoing a shift driven by technology and connectivity. Welcome to the world of “miniaturisation” – the breakdown of currently known bundles of work and outcomes into smaller components that can be reconfigured differently.

    Given that work can be broken into multiple smaller components, many of the job descriptions that we see today will not even exist in the next few years. We will be able to assemble components of work from various providers and this will require a different approach to workforce planning and management.
    The future workforce: Firms will look for people married to their professions, not jobs


    Needless to say, given the fast pace of technology advances, relevant talent will be scarce and geographically dispersed; leading organisations to depend far more heavily on the contingent workforce or gig workforce. A contingent workforce essentially consists of people who are married to their professions and not necessarily their jobs. According to a study by Intuit, 40 percent of American workers would be independent contractors by 2020. There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that this trend is growing in India as well.

    Workforce Management in the Gig Economy
    The gig economy is certainly a big outcome of technology evolution. It is quite apparent that this will have a far-reaching effect on HR, since it will force a change in some of the very fundamental practices related to compensation, engagement and learning.

    The straightforward employment model, where you have mostly full-time employees who dedicate 40 hours per week to your business, will change. HR departments will need to grapple with the fact that the skill-sets that the business requires in order to grow, will mostly reside outside the organisation, rather than within. Practically, it might be impossible to find the right skills, let’s say in ML or AI, in one place in the numbers that we may need. The project teams could consist of maybe one person sitting in Russia, the other in Taiwan and the third in Pune. There are challenges around time zones, integration and culture, we have to think about.

    Given the nature of the GIG economy, there are several issues to be dealt with before we can see organizations leverage this as second nature.

    First, there are the challenges around Intellectual Property (IP) and security. Second, internal processes, including billing and compensation, will need to be rewired to be able to pay a contract employee who’s working in a remote geography. Third, our benefits such as medical and insurance will need to evolve on a “pay as you use” model, forcing a rethink on the way insurance needs to work. Lastly, the existing employment / contractual framework will need a significant departure to be able to accommodate the very nature of this workforce.

    Engagement is the other big area that is impacted. Moving away from an in-person, hands-on engagement model to a relevant virtual engagement framework will require HR professionals to rethink what engagement means in this new world. In a geographically dispersed and dynamic team, how will team building and integration occur?
    The future workforce: Firms will look for people married to their professions, not jobs


    There will also be a major impact on Learning and Development. Given that skills can now become obsolete in six months or so, how do you plan learning such that your workforce is at the top of their game? Given the rate of change, simple technology-skill-based training may no longer make much sense. The right Learning and Development programs will play a significant role in making the gig economy a reality.

    While it poses certain challenges, the gig economy also brings several significant benefits for organizations and the gig workers themselves. Organizations will benefit from flexibility and nimbleness, expanded coverage and reach while maintaining low overheads. Speed to market and the ability to create a high impact with extremely competent experts in their chosen area of work, are some of the more tangible benefits for an organization.

    A Fundamental Shift at the Society Level
    The onslaught of technologies such as AI will undoubtedly necessitate major changes at the organisational level. However, given that the impact will fundamentally change the way we work, learn and live; a lot of action needs to be taken at the industry and society level too.

    For instance, how well-equipped is our education system to prepare youth for the demands of the new economy? Today, people trained in problem-solving, teamwork, cognitive reasoning are the ones who are poised for success. Do our schools facilitate learning in these areas to produce workers who are adaptive, inventive and experimental? Rote-learning of facts may be unnecessary given that one can now look up facts online at the click of a button. Einstein’s famous quote ‘Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think’ rings true in today’s age.

    The second key aspect is to do with laws and the legal framework. How should our labour laws be designed to accommodate gig or contingent workers? Given that we foresee project-based engagements rather than full time employees, the rights and responsibilities of such workers need to be defined globally. There needs to be a framework for cross-border payments. How will that affect taxation? These changes need to happen at the national, and maybe even international, level.

    On their part, organisations will need to partner closely with educational institutions as well as the regulators to ensure that the right frameworks are deployed. Already, we are seeing a lot of encouraging examples across the globe, where companies are working closely with academia to ensure the right kind of skills development.

    The future of technology promises to be challenging, exciting and rewarding. But the steps that we take today will go a long way in ensuring that we reinvent ourselves and be future-ready!
    The future workforce: Firms will look for people married to their professions, not jobs


    (The author is the vice president - Human Resources of HARMAN Connected Services Global & HARMAN India)

    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.
    (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)

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