‘
Collaboration for the Intelligent Age’ is the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos from 20–24 January. This year’s event will discuss how to stimulate global growth and improve
living standards for all across its 300 sessions. Boosting economic growth to raise living standards is a significant issue, not least for mitigating the risk of social polarisation. The WEF’s ‘Global Risks Report 2024’, which surveyed 11,000 business leaders in 113 economies with Zurich Insurance Group and Marsh McLennan, identified ‘social polarisation’ as the third most significant global risk after ‘misinformation and disinformation’ (first) and ‘extreme weather events’ (second). The key question is how to boost growth inclusively alongside technology adoption, which will significantly change the type of work available.
RE-ATTACHING TO WORK The new year always comes with reports of employees self-reporting as a ‘flight risk’ and actively or passively seeking new work. Given the important links between engagement, performance, productivity and wellbeing, these insights into employee intentions are as important as any other. A US survey by global advisory and analytics firm,
Gallup, found that at the end of 2024, employees were feeling increasingly disengaged from their jobs. Dubbed ‘the Great Detachment’, this trend is the result of interrelated and overlapping factors, including:
• organisational change leading to burnout • the challenges of embedding hybrid working • responding to new customer, employee and employer expectations
• broken performance management practices.
On the employer side of the employment relationship, fewer jobs and higher living costs mean employers largely hold the balance of power in today’s labour market – as well as the solutions to reconnecting with employees. While over half of employees are looking for new work
this year, over 90% of them won’t be successful, according to the survey. This picture runs alongside rising reports of employers ‘quiet cutting’ (reducing responsibilities in the hope an employee will resign) and ‘quiet hiring’ (acquiring new skills through freelancers, associates and gig work without hiring full-time employees), and employees ‘quiet quitting’, practising ‘fauxductivity’ and presenteeism. Neither represents a high road to productivity, nor increases societal wellbeing. The approach with the likely greatest integrity
and sustainability – vital for social cohesion – is getting people motivated and engaged enough to raise productivity and social, economic and emotional wealth. Leaders, managers and employees can all add value to the employment experience and the organisation. By creating workplaces and jobs people find fulfilling and worthwhile and committing to lifelong learning, we can create and populate the tech-enabled roles needed to
deliver on the productivity and quality of life promise of technology. Joseph Briggs, co-leader of Goldman Sachs Research’s global economics team, explains: “Until we’ve seen more significant uptake in the actual application of AI, in the regular work production process, I don’t think that we’re going to see as big of an impact on productivity.” Insights into how to evolve technology into existing
and new roles come from chipmaker Intel. As well as working with schools, colleges and universities, it is adopting in-company skills economies. Intel encourages employees to tap into organisational resources and take the initiative to upskill, reskill, innovate or enhance their leadership skills in line with their personal aspirations and career goals. This agile approach means Intel, which employs 120,000 people worldwide in 50 countries, can move at pace in this fast-evolving sector to retain, recruit and reskill people and ultimately remain competitive. Speaking to the WEF’s editor Linda Lacina in the
World Economic Forum’s ‘Meet the Leader’ podcast, Intel’s chief people officer Christy Pambianchi talked about reskilling and building teams for the future at the company. She explained how the approach has become less prescriptive and is now balanced more towards creating systems and cultures for people to direct their own learning and development. This is especially important because of the company’s distributed teams and the need identified in employee surveys post- pandemic for more connection with colleagues. “I think it’s a super exciting time,” said Christy
Pambianchi. “The rate of innovation continues to accelerate. So I think trends that are going to continue to emerge are really a lot of focus on skills and building employees’ confidence and identifying what are the skills they have, what are the skills they want to acquire and companies making a lot of skill-based training available to people. We’re trying to create more of a skill economy inside of the company. We most recently updated all of our jobs so that they’re refreshed for the new work environment. We’re helping employees capture what skills they have. Then we link that to all of our learning libraries so people can build out a learning curriculum for themselves.
” THE APPROACH WITH THE LIKELY GREATEST INTEGRITY AND SUSTAINABILITY – VITAL FOR SOCIAL COHESION – IS GETTING PEOPLE MOTIVATED AND ENGAGED ENOUGH TO RAISE PRODUCTIVITY AND SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND EMOTIONAL WEALTH.”
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GLOBAL LEADERSHIP SUPPLEMENT
RE SKILLING
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