Ideas For The World of Work in 2024
4 Ideas I'm Thinking About For Next Year
In preparation for next year, I’ve been doing some reading and synthesis around key trends and ideas that I want to explore further in my work with my podcast and in my business.
I wanted to give a preview of some of these trends and ideas that I think are important and want to explore further in 2024.
A) Developing Future Ready Leaders
Developing leaders has always been important, but it takes on a new meaning for the new world of work. First, is in how we develop them. We’re witnessing a shift, a gradual one about who and how leadership development gets done. Technology helps, but so does the belief that people up and down your org chart need leadership skills and to exhibit leadership each and every day, from the front line all the way up to the CEO.
Second, is in who. We’re moving beyond executive development and high potential. Both of these populations are important but are first time & first line as well as middle managers. There is starting to be acknowledgement of how much strain we are placing on these roles, and we need to invest in them properly.
Third, we’re at a point where we’re starting to incorporate new behaviors and models around leading in a new world of work. While there are leadership behaviors that are timeless, the world of work is different and requires a different kind of leadership today.
Fourth, measurement has always been the missing link. We’re getting better, quite frankly, being asked to do more of this, to ensure that the way we train and equip managers and leaders is done in an effective way.
Further Exploration:
Don’t Let your company Culture Stifle Leadership Development (HBR)
Leadership Development is Failing Us. Here’s How to Fix it (SMR MIT)
B) Investing in Organizational Health
Even as technology continues to play an even greater role in our work, people, for now, still play a critical role in enabling the success of your organization. The one thing that employees have in common is that people want to do a good job. Nobody goes to work each day wanting to do a bad one, but there are so many elements in the way we work as well as the infrastructure of the workplace that prevent employees from being successful in their goals.
Focusing on measures and conditions of organization health, so that your employees can work effectively is critical to all business outcomes. Three things to focus on and keep in mind:
Team Effectiveness - While an individual might evaluate the organization and its culture when they are looking for a job, the team is the unit that most people experience work on a day to day basis. That certainly includes their specific manager, but it also includes their teammates and peers. Furthermore, as more and more organizations rely on cross-functional work to get things done, leading teams, especially when you don’t have formal authority becomes even more important. This means organizations need to focus on creating and building great teams, and enabling leaders of teams to understand how to lead effective teams, when they have formal or informal power.
Connection & Social Capital - Between the pandemic, new work models and the coming and going of employees, connection at many organizations is challenged and a top priority for many organizations - Finding ways and methods for being able to foster connection, both between employees and employees sense of connection to the organization is critical to overall employee engagement as well as productivity. Finding ways to encourage and cultivate the social capital of employees is lubricant for fostering collaboration and connection inside of your organization. When employees have the social capital to do their jobs, they can do things like work on cross-functional teams, navigate different work modes, and collaborate to generate new solutions to business problems. Building in organizational capabilities around mentoring and apprenticeship can also help employees advance and get the exposure and social capital they need to advance in their careers, and improve equity and inclusion efforts inside your organization.
Managing Change - It feels like there is a constant and never ending sea of change. While companies have traditionally made investments in transformation programs at various times, it feels like a never ending sea of change since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Evaluating and teasing out the change readiness of your organization has never been more important, as well as truly giving people the tools, space and infrastructure to manage this in their work.
Further Reading
Michael Arena: Intentional Collaboration in The New World of Work
Shopify Cancels All It’s Meetings (Link)
C) Career Development As a Driver of Growth
Career development is not new, but it’s also not something companies have traditionally done well over the past few decades. There are structural, cultural and systemic reasons for this. But for many reasons, getting this right is becoming ’s come top of mind today, as Gartner HR’s report noted it career development is the #5 priority for HR leaders.
Today, it’s common to hear that employees need to “own their careers.” And while it is true that each individual is best equipped for their own career, companies are acknowledging that they must also put in place systems and scaffolding to support their employees in this always on and continuous process as a means to drive both employee growth and business goals.
Four separate but integrated tracks, are coming together that are starting to make career development, especially at mid to large size organizations that have a more strategic and systemic need to drive business goals. Those threads are:
The Skills Imperative - As more companies start and make progress on their “skills” journey, the idea of helping employees understand the skills, paths, and possibilities for their growth starts to enter the conversation. Upskilling and reskilling is often thought of as “top down” but there is also a need to make it bottoms up - how do you get employees to proactively sense emerging trends, and respond by building the skills to take on new opportunities. Furthermore, upskilling often happens today as a reactive measure - But how can organizations “proactively” upskill by empowering their employees to learn and grow on the job, and to enable the growth of your business by enabling the growth of your employees.
Succession Planning - Over the past two years succession planning has also come back into the limelight. Figuring out and identifying key up and coming talent is critical to making sure you have the talent you need inside your organization, not just for today but for the short-medium term.
Employee Retention - Career development has always been a reason why employees join and leave a company. With hiring down in many industries, figuring out how to continue helping employees grow inside the company is critical to retaining the employees who would want to stay if they felt like they had a path. To date, some companies have built internal mobility platforms and job boards, and some have even put places where people can see their skills, and potential career paths.
The Evolving Definition of a Career - People are living and working longer due to advancements in technology and the evolution of culture and society. Professionals age 75+ is the largest growing segment of the workforce, despite the fact that about 10,000 Boomers are retiring each day. Gen Z and Millennials are starting to become the majority in the workforce, and the role of higher education as the sole point of entry to the workplace is going away. For these reasons, how we think about a career, and perhaps even the definition of a career is rapidly changing. If companies want to attract and retain talent, they must start innovating on how they deliver value to their employees in the form of career capital and advancement opportunities.
The net of all of this, is that career development, and making this come to life (with the help of technology, including AI, data and machine learning) is becoming more and more important.
Further Reading
Johnson & Johnson Launches Enterprise Career Development (Link)
How Delta is Driving Internal Mobility (Link)
Examples of Talent and Career Development at Talent Connect (Link)
Why Companies Should Care About Employee’s Networks (Link)
D) Experimenting With New Ways of Working
While the world of work has changed significantly over the past few decades, many of the mindsets and practices that we have about work have stayed the same. A global pandemic forced many organizations to think and work in new ways, and while some organizations have continued to iterate and push on these new ways of working, there’s still a lot more room for growth and experimentation.
Flexibility - Right now, flexibility mostly consists of where, but there’s an opportunity to look at, who, when, how, and why. Going beyond location could be significantly valuable to prospective and current employees as employers look to attract or retain talent.
Employer-Employee Contract - Employees get hired by employers, but employers also get hired by employees. The pandemic gave everyone a free pass to ask themselves if what they got out of work was worth what they put in. Some (many) chose differently as a result. But as we move forward, it has given people more agency in continuing to ask this question as a standard operating procedure. Companies that find new ways to structure their employee-employer contact may be able to find ways to not only keep talent, but also to diversify how they source and attract it. Looking at work models that include flexible work, gig and contract work, part-time work, and others, may find themselves in a better position when it comes to delivering work to employees that they are excited to do.
Further Reading
2024 Predictions For Flexible Work
11,000 People Tell Us What Really Matters to Them About Work (BCG)
Conclusion
There are so many exciting and interesting things to explore at the intersection of talent, culture, and the future of work, but these are the trends I’m super excited to dive into in the upcoming year.