HR leaders are often burdened with the everyday. Fresh organisational demands and global crises mean they’re often forced into reactive mode. Rather than being able to focus on leading people through change, their attention is too often pulled into the here and now. 

This is especially the case following an ongoing four-year marathon that’s included the pandemic, talent shortages, rising cost-of-living challenges and widespread burnout. 

While it will always be part and parcel of HR’s job to be responsive to a business’s needs, it’s also possible for HR practitioners to pull themselves out of the detail and be enabled to focus on the future, when given the right tools and resources, says Amantha Imber, organisational psychologist and founder of behaviour change consultancy Inventium.

“It can often feel like a game of whack-a-mole and always being on the defence across schedules, workloads, emails, calendars and team chats,” says Imber, who is speaking at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. 

“But we need to learn to play offence with our workdays, at both the individual and organisational level – and change behaviours and mindsets en masse.”

“It’s a hard process,” says Imber. “You need to be clear on where you’re going, where you hope to be, then figure out how to close that capability gap and what long-term success looks like to your organisation.”

Here, Imber and two HR leaders share their best tips to move HR professionals into forward-planning mode.

1. Set realistic benchmarks to map progress

Imber says introducing metrics enables HR professionals to establish their organisational strengths and weaknesses and track changes. 

“If you want to drive change, you first need a baseline: what’s going on right now in the organisation? A starting point allows you to measure progress.”

Key, though, is using metrics that are actionable.

“Many organisations come up with so many initiatives, yet struggle to put in place reliable metrics that measure impact,” says Imber. “For example, a client of ours established a goal around disability representation in the workforce. That’s great, but also almost impossible to track in that it’s not mandatory for employees to [disclose] a disability.”

Instead, metrics should be “diagnostic”, she says. They should flag areas for improvement, leading to a clear pathway in which people leaders have actionable recommendations based on results.

This is the approach Christina King FCPHR, Chief People Officer at Cornerstone Medical Recruitment, has adopted.

“We’ve created metrics that flow down and connect with teams, so we know what we need to focus on, while connecting back to the ultimate organisational goals,” she says. “Metrics are crucial – the data doesn’t lie. For people leaders, that means being able to demonstrate in a quantitative and qualitative sense, the bottom-line impact on the organisation.” 

“We need to learn to play offence with our workdays, at both the individual and organisational level – and change behaviours and mindsets en masse.” – Amantha Imber, organisational psychologist and founder, Inventium

2. Eliminate administrative burdens with AI to create more time for proactive HR

The advent of generative AI, and automation more broadly, may free up schedules so teams have more opportunities to look beyond tomorrow.

“We’re already seeing some organisations delegate some repetitive tasks to generative AI, automating the mundane tasks to free up time for more creative thinking,” says Imber. 

However, organisational pressures mean HR is sometimes left out when it comes to experimenting with new technology.

“HR teams often spend time trying to build capability across their organisation, but forget about themselves. The top people teams are able to invest in their own development, and improve their own productivity, so they can free up time for more strategic problem-solving. That’s where AI comes in: creating huge productivity gains for the repetitive, less valued work often given to HR.”

Some tech-savvy people leaders are using AI today – and already reaping the rewards. For example, Justine Cooper FCPHR, Vice President Human Resources, Pacific Zone at Schneider Electric, uses her company chatbot for content creation.

“Alongside automating processes, AI can be used to draft items such as strategy days and HR policies,” says Cooper. 

“It’s an exciting tool that frees up so much time. I’ve used chatbot suggestions as first drafts, then written prompts that incorporate organisational values and fine-tuned the language.” 

3. Segment your time by importance rather than urgency 

Cooper read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, early in her career and still draws on its insights today.

“I apply the ‘Important vs Urgent’ time matrix in planning my daily list of activities. This tool helps you move from urgency to where the real importance lies, meaning you can become more intentional with your time,” she says.  

“Being proactive, and beginning with the end in mind, helps anchor me in terms of the impact I can make, which I think through on an annual and quarterly basis and sense-check on a weekly basis. Time isn’t just given to you – you have to find a way to free it up.”

Imber’s toolkit includes meeting clean-up templates (in which leaders sift through their calendars and identify which calls don’t meet short and long-term goals) and ‘recurring irritant lists’ for regular, tedious and often self-inflicted tasks.

There can also be ‘zombie hunts’, she says, where half-dead products, services and processes that drain time and resources are eliminated. This can enable leaders to work smarter, rather than harder.

4. Move with a rational, systems-driven approach 

Some of the best people leaders adopt a scientific attitude, says Imber.  They come up with a hypothesis, measure data against it, then iterate insights within frameworks supported by systems and processes. This helps HR teams become more strategic and forward-focused, rather than just tackling issues as they arrive in the in-tray.

“From my organisational psychologist background, I see everything through the lens of scientific method, such as using data to measure progress,” she says. “When HR professionals do that, they can measure behaviour – rather than just intentions – and take actions based on metrics.”

King’s team extract data from their HRIS and payroll, which automatically generates month-end reports. They also use a company calendar integrating upcoming events, such as budget planning and quarterly reviews, and established an innovation committee that focuses on finding marginal gains.

5. Get comfortable saying ‘no’

Imber says many of her clients include people leaders who are natural strategists, innovators and holistic thinkers. Where they often come unstuck, though, is taking on too much work.

“Before the pandemic, there were clearer boundaries around which sort of problems fell inside the organisation’s remit, and therefore HR. Today, many people leaders are unclear of their roles. Some are almost acting like therapists for direct reports when that’s not their job.”

If HR leaders want to focus on the future of work, they sometimes have to politely decline present-day challenges. King says this can be done in a way that protects workloads and time, without harming relationships. 

“It’s a learned skill. Many of us in HR feel guilty: carving out two hours for strategic planning while an employee has an issue can feel hard. I’ve learned to go with ‘yes, if’. That means you can say yes to a piece of work, but it will come at a cost to something else. That way, you won’t feel as conflicted and can still manage to demonstrate flexibility.”

Proactive HR leaders also find time in their schedules for deep thinking. 

Every Monday, Cooper blocks out the first hour of her morning to reflect on her organisation’s big-picture IMPACT values: inclusion, mastery, purpose, action, curiosity and teamwork.

“As people leaders building a directional vision, anchoring plans and goals to help inspire our teams and build momentum, making interventions that create time for us to reflect is critical,” she says. 

“Being proactive, and beginning with the end in mind, helps anchor me in terms of the impact I can make. Time isn’t just given to you – you have to find a way to free it up.” – Justine Cooper FCPHR, Vice President Human Resources, Pacific Zone at Schneider Electric

6. Think outside the box when planning for the future

The hope is that by slowly shifting towards a longer-term strategy, people leaders will be better equipped to deal with the challenges of tomorrow, today. 

“In the best organisations, HR teams are able to push boundaries and challenge norms and lean into innovation,” says Imber. 

“They’re able to look at the bigger picture, question what the future of work looks like and prepare for the trends shaping their industry, then build the workplace culture and skills for the next five years.”

The potential benefits stretch far beyond HR teams, though. They extend to the people they lead.

“The workplaces I’ve seen with forward-looking people leaders are often more exciting, inspirational and motivating places to work,” says Imber. 

“There’s just an energy about the place. People are excited to come to work, they’re engaged. They have a deeper sense of meaning in what they’re doing.” 

Hear more from Amantha Imber and Justine Cooper FCPHR at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in Melbourne from 20-22 August. Secure your ticket today.

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In January 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 sent shockwaves through global labour markets, a young British academic released a book that foretold a revolution in the way work would be conducted.

The book, A World Without Work, by Daniel Susskind, details how machines and artificial intelligence are increasingly mastering tasks and activities that, until recently, humans thought they alone could undertake, from diagnosing medical conditions and designing skyscrapers to composing music and reporting the news. 

Susskind, an Oxford University academic, argues that technology is taking over existing jobs faster than humans can create new ones, and that soon we will work a lot less, if at all. It’s a topic he will unpack as a keynote speaker at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August.

He believes most of us will welcome the rise of machines, at least initially. The pandemic has offered us a glimpse of how this might play out. 

“The past year has demonstrated that many so-called face-to-face jobs – those of lawyers, doctors and teachers – can actually be undertaken in concert with machines,” Susskind told HRM.

“Overnight, things like telemedicine, virtual courts and online education became the norm. And people are, by-and-large, happy with machines playing a larger role.”  

A world without work might seem desirable in the abstract, but Susskind believes a utopian outcome is far from guaranteed.

“I wrote the book because I don’t think we are thinking seriously enough about the sorts of transformations these technologies are likely to bring about,” he says. “The implications for society are significant.”

How can we ensure a fair and harmonious society if only a small number of people are employed? And how would a lifetime of non-employment affect our mental health and sense of purpose?

As Susskind writes in his book: “We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life.”

Going against the grain

Susskind is not the first economist to address the impact of new technology on employment rates. In a 1930 essay, John Maynard Keynes suggested that mechanical advances in the fields of mining, agriculture and manufacturing were creating widespread ‘technological unemployment’, contributing to the Great Depression. 

In 1980, The New York Times ran the headline ‘A Robot Is After Your Job’ and warned that “the robot is only one part of a larger computerisation that is affecting virtually every productive activity in society from the office to the machine shop”.

In recent years, however, most economists have concluded that technological unemployment doesn’t lead to a permanent net loss of jobs in capitalist societies. Instead, it frees up the workforce to take on new tasks, improving overall productivity and increasing our prosperity.

This is where Susskind’s views differ from his peers. He believes it’s a mistake to draw conclusions about the future of work based on what has happened in the past. In the era of artificial intelligence, he says, many long-held assumptions are no longer valid.

During his 2017 TED talk Susskind challenges one such assumption: that technology will never be able to outperform humans in certain areas because machines lack qualities such as intuition and judgment.

He says in the talk: “Researchers at Stanford [University] announced they’d developed a system which can tell you whether or not a freckle is cancerous as accurately as leading dermatologists. How does it work? It’s not trying to copy the judgment or the intuition of a doctor. It knows or understands nothing about medicine at all. 

“Instead, it’s running a pattern-recognition algorithm through 129,450 past cases, hunting for similarities between those cases and the particular lesion in question. It’s performing these tasks in an un-human way, based on the analysis of more possible cases than any doctor could hope to review in their lifetime.”

Susskind also takes issue with the argument that many jobs rely on human emotions such as empathy and compassion. 

“It’s not to say that things like empathy and the personal touch aren’t valuable and important,” he says. “It’s to say that we might have overemphasised their importance in particular professions.”

Susskind hears the so-called ‘empathy argument’ regularly.

“I was once talking to a group of tax accountants. At one point, a particularly boisterous tax account stood up and said to me, ‘Look, you don’t understand. My clients come to me because they want me to look them in the eye and tell them how to best manage their tax affairs. They want that personal touch. They want that empathetic interaction.’

“I said to him, ‘I don’t think that’s why your clients come to you. I think they come to you because they want their taxes done efficiently and effectively. And if they can find a way to do it that’s more affordable and more accessible than coming and sitting down with you, I think they’ll probably do that.’”

Susskind concedes that some roles are unlikely to ever become automated. 

End-of-life care, for instance, is the sort of work that demands interaction between human beings. Barristers who deliver arguments to juries could also be tricky to replace.

However, in almost every other setting, he believes consumers want their problems solved efficiently and effectively – whether the solution comes from a human or a robot. 

“I think professionals who make arguments about the personal touch and the importance of interpersonal interaction are soon going to find themselves flat-footed.”

Hear more from Daniel about a world without work at this year’s AHRI convention TRANSFORM 2021, and discover how you can help shape your workforce for the future.

How can we prepare?

If Susskind is correct, significant societal upheaval is just around the corner – and the transition from employment as we currently know it to a largely ‘post-work’ existence is unlikely to be quick or painless. What, then, should workers be doing now to prepare?

“There are two strategies,” he says. “Either you learn to be good at the sorts of things these systems and machines cannot do, or you try to build them.”

It’s a daunting prospect. But Susskind insists his new book provides reasons to be hopeful. 

“There is a feeling today that the traditional professions are creaking. That not enough people have access to a good healthcare system, don’t know what their legal entitlements are, don’t have access to good advice on how to manage their financial affairs, and so on.  

“The promise of a lot of these technologies is the liberation of expertise that has, until now, been locked up in the heads of professionals and has been inaccessible and unaffordable to most people. For consumers, that’s quite exciting,” says Susskind.

“I don’t think we are thinking seriously enough about the sorts of transformations that these technologies are likely to bring about… the implications for society are significant.” – Daniel Susskind, Oxford University professor.

A World Without Work explores various scenarios that could help us adapt to a society in which most of us don’t earn wages. 

One idea that is already gaining traction in Europe is the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to help address economic inequality. But Susskind is not entirely convinced it will work without tweaks.

“I have less of a problem with the ‘B’ and the ‘I’ because I can see how a basic income helps you share out income in society if you can’t rely upon the world of work to do it.

“My concern is with the ‘U’ – the universality, that everyone gets it with no strings attached.

That universality, to me, offends or undermines the sense of social solidarity that exists in society because of a feeling that everybody is pulling their economic weight through the work they do and the taxes they pay.”

Instead, he is in favour of a ‘Conditional Basic Income’ that requires everyone to contribute to society in some way. How such a system might be implemented is explored in his new book.

Susskind does not claim to have all the answers. Instead, A World Without Work maps out several possible policy responses to the changes he believes will soon take place. Importantly, the book also begins a conversation about how we might adapt to a world in which employment is less central to our existence. 

In his closing chapter, he explores the idea that work is not simply a means of generating income, but also a source of meaning and purpose. 

“If technology does indeed hollow out the labour market, it might also hollow out the sense of direction and fulfilment many people have in their lives, says Susskind. “That’s the real challenge.” 

A longer version of this article first appeared in the June 2021 edition of HRM magazine.

The post What would a world without work actually look like? appeared first on HRM online.

When Athena Chintis CPHR discusses some of the management practices she read and heard about at the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2008, she says she simply can’t believe the way people were treated by organisations. 

Now head of people and culture at Cliftons Venues, Chintis was employed by Citigroup in 2008. At various banks and financial institutions she had worked through the ‘recession we had to have’ (early 1990s), the Asian Financial Crisis (1997), the dotcom crash (2000), the events of September 11, 2001, and then the GFC.

“Fortunately, more organisations now adopt a different type of approach to a crisis, rather than just walking people out the door, as I was told some organisations did.

“We’ve learned to behave in a far more empathetic way, in a more humanistic way and with a greater focus on retention, not redundancy as the only option. We’re now asking ourselves a lot more often, is this the way people want to be treated?”

These days, says Chintis, there is a greater focus on open communication. 

In the past information has often come from rumours and media articles. When people were made redundant, often they weren’t even allowed to go back to their desks to pack up their belongings. 

In the past we have also witnessed mass layoffs without any career support offered to those who lost their jobs. Media coverage of crises often included images of shell-shocked workers filing out of a CBD building – Lehman Brothers offices around the globe during the GFC, for example – carrying a cardboard box. 

During the GFC the layoffs really were on a grand scale. In the final quarter of 2008, at the very beginning of the period of financial strife, over 150,000 jobs had been stripped out of the global financial sector. That included 50,000 at Citigroup alone. In one day, Credit Suisse announced 5300 layoffs, having already cut 1800 jobs, and Japan’s Nomura Holdings another 1000. Macquarie Group slashed 10 to 15 per cent of its jobs in Asia, and JP Morgan laid off 9200 employees.

“The biggest lesson from my time in GFC was to utilise my networks, peer groups and internal groups to collaborate on people-related initiatives when there’s little or no budget,” says Chintis, also AHRI’s NSW president. “I’ve brought those lessons into today,” she says.

“I can remember, during the GFC, staff reading stories in the press after decisions  had been taken by a business.” Justine Cooper FCPHR, Head of APAC, Brook Graham.

Communication and collaboration

Now head of Asia Pacific for diversity and inclusion consultancy Brook Graham, Justine Cooper FCPHR worked as an HR director at Barclays Bank during the GFC. She agrees that communication has become a major focus of people management during the COVID-19 crisis – not just more often, but better quality.

AHRI’s Change Management short course is now 100% online. Register today.

“We’ve seen much more collaboration,” says Cooper. “I can remember, during the GFC, staff reading stories in the press after decisions had been taken by a business. Now, at our firm we’re involved in lots of collaboration across the industry, from one industry to another and through the supply chain, with people being much more open around what it is that they’re doing, with the intent of being able to learn from each other. There’s a strong sense that we’re all in this together.

“This year I’ve seen creative ways in which organisations have been leveraging ideas from their people at every level. In our own business we’ve got a shadow board working with our partners and senior leaders. We’ve seen clients leveraging their employee resource groups, hosting community forums, creating new teams to look at different scenarios, etc.

“They’re getting insight from various people and feeding that real-time insight into the decision-making system, to help the business figure out how to respond and take advantage of opportunities. That’s all a result of diversity of thought.”

Compare that, she says, to the almost instantaneous cost-cutting and people-cutting many businesses undertook as soon as things began to go downhill during the GFC and other past crises.

“I was lucky enough to work for a decent employer during the GFC, who had redundancy policies in place and outplacement support, etc.,” she says. “But I saw some horrendous examples of layoffs, of people receiving text messages to be told they no longer had a job, for example.”

In 2020, she says, we’re seeing much more of a people-first mindset, one that focuses on physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

Another change is around the nature of leadership. Throughout the GFC, says Cooper, while communication was often consistent and regular, it was very much top-down. It was all about updates that indicated the captain had a plan and was in control of the ship.

Today, Cooper and Chintis agree, we’re seeing much more honesty, humanity and authenticity from leaders in terms of their communications.

“We’ve partnered with clients where the CEOs have done regular Q&A sessions where nothing is off the table,” says Cooper. “Some really difficult and uncomfortable questions come through, and the CEO responds with honesty and transparency – ‘We don’t have all the answers, but this is what I can tell you’.”

This demonstrates a level of humanity and vulnerability that simply wasn’t there during past crises, she says.

“This year I’ve seen creative ways in which organisations have been leveraging ideas from their people at every level.” Justine Cooper FCPHR, Head of APAC, Brook Graham

Overcoming disconnect

Earlier in 2020 at Unisys, the company’s vice president and general manager of APAC, Rick Mayhew, was holding exactly those types of meetings with various teams across Australia and Asia. The feedback he received from many people who were working from home was that they missed their teams. Some people felt disconnected and physically isolated.

During past crises, in many organisations, such issues wouldn’t have raised any flags.

But with the knowledge we have today around the importance of wellbeing, the response was immediate. The management team developed a fun, physical team challenge in which anybody could participate, whether they’re locked down or not.

The physical and mental wellbeing program was called U-Move and was run during the month of September. Teams of employees from eight countries across the APAC region competed in a step challenge, which could also include other forms of exercise for those unable to leave their homes.

Some teams arranged daily virtual training sessions together. Others involved their families in extra physical activity. 

A Canberra-based team met up to walk 30 kilometres around Lake Burley Griffin. Was there a prize for the winning team? Yes and no. There was a prize, but importantly it went to a charity nominated by the team. And there wasn’t just a prize for the team that completed the most physical exercise. Other awards went to charities of choice for teams that had the best name, the best shared photo, the best social post, and more.

The project was a success – 77 per cent of participants said U-Move was helpful in making them more active. The proportion of employees participating in daily activity leapt from 24 per cent to 86 per cent. And 69 per cent said they enjoyed feeling a part of a team. Most importantly, the percentage of people who said they were feeling ‘very concerned and stressed’ fell from 17 per cent to zero.

It was a very different attitude toward employees than most businesses demonstrated during the GFC. 

Purpose is everything

Employment crises have been occurring throughout various spaces and industries, socioeconomic groups and social backgrounds for decades, says Malcolm Kinns, CEO of Generation Australia, an education-to-employment charity. Generation Australia supports people with significant barriers to employment by helping develop their careers.

For these individuals and for his organisation, every day is a crisis from which they are learning, and every day is a victory over that crisis.

“I think organisations are much more conscious of a process that they should go through to support people,” says Kinns. 

“But I think the reality still exists that those populations who are most vulnerable tend to suffer the most during recessions and downturns,” he adds.

What will benefit organisations as well as communities, he says, is deeper thought around the new shape of the organisation, skills that will be required to move forward into the new reality, and a powerful understanding of the essential nature of diversity in getting there.

“The inherent piece that we need to learn in our hiring practices is to celebrate diversity for what it brings to the organisation, not from the point of view of diversity as a box-ticking exercise, but from what you get from that diversity – a strategic diversity of thought.”

John Alexander FCPHR, AHRI NSW State Council member, agrees that deeper internal thought is an essential ingredient when moving forward into uncharted territory. Organisations he has worked with in the past, including GE, Abbott and The Salvation Army, have wisely used downtimes to upskill staff in preparation for when the curve swings back upwards, he says. 

The most important lessons from the past, he says, reveal that what sets successful businesses apart is organisational purpose.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in for-purpose, community-focused organisations,” he says.

“They tend to be more resilient because the people who work within those organisations feel as though they have a real purpose, and sometimes individuals will put that purpose in front of everything else, because they’re caring for a client or a patient, for example.

“So, for me, the best lesson that can be learned from organisations that have succeeded in the past is that organisational culture that offers staff members a purpose, and therefore inspires, encourages and promotes particular behaviours and opportunities during challenging times, is essential,” he says. 

“Open and honest communication is vital, as is some form of recognition for staff. But to me, culture and purpose are the constant secret to success.”

This article first appeared in the December/January edition of HRM Magazine.

The post What has HR learnt from past crises? appeared first on HRM online.

UPDATE: This article was published in December of last year. We are republishing because the news around COVID-19 suggests that we are headed toward an unstable time economically, and this article has tips that should help HR professionals navigate it. 

During what has become known in Ireland as the ‘Great Recession’, the nation’s financial system almost collapsed. It was the economic equivalent of a violent car crash. In 2008 the country suddenly went from being the success story of Europe, with full employment, and GDP growth touching 10 per cent, to a situation far worse than anybody could have imagined.

“It was Armageddon,” recalls Bill Roche, full professor of industrial relations and human resources in the Smurfit School of Business at University College Dublin. “In 2008 and 2009, Irish GDP contracted by 10 per cent, which is phenomenal. Unemployment climbed sharply, reaching a peak in 2012 of 14.6 per cent.”

The government took equity in the nation’s major retail banks, says Roche, author of the book Human Resources in the Recession: Managing and Representing People at Work in Ireland. Ireland then had to resort to a financial assistance program from the ‘troika’ of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission. In November 2010, the nation was forced, under the ECB’s threat of withdrawal of further liquidity, to accept a rescue package that involved borrowing €85 billion. It was a massive debt for a small economy. 

“It was easily the worst peacetime economic crisis in the history of the independent Irish state, stretching back to 1922,” says Roche. “It drove a major shift in HR practices and also in the HR function.”

As Australia heads into what some economists say will be our first recession in three decades, it pays to look to other markets for lessons around the challenges faced, and solutions developed, by HR professionals. While the Irish experience was one the nation would rather not repeat, the HR industry came out of it in arguably better shape than it was in during the good times. 

“HR became significantly more influential,” says Roche. “There were fewer HR staff, and they had fewer resources to make use of external consultants. They were forced to reduce the cost of HR policies and processes, including restructuring the function so it became leaner.

“But the reason HR became more influential at the same time was straightforward. Suddenly HR skills and expertise – for example, how to implement a three-day working week, how to lawfully introduce a layoff programme, etc – became critical to the survival of businesses.”

During the boom times, HR had been all about delivering services, recruiting people, retaining workforces, etc. But when things turned dark and generalised retrenchment programs had to be implemented without upsetting trade unions in firms where they were recognised, HR was central to the success of those programs.

Communications had to be managed carefully as workers across private and public sectors agreed to pay freezes or cuts in order to hold on to their jobs. Roche suffered three pay-cuts during the period.

“Companies tried continuously to engage in sophisticated forms of communication,” he says. “They would communicate as best they could with staff why they were doing what they had to do. As they were explaining, it was often quite literally a matter of survival.

“A lot of the HR people didn’t themselves deliver the message to their workforces because they quite wisely thought the people would say that HR always says this stuff. They instead mobilised chief executives and very senior managers to front the communication. It was often the first time that HR directors became business partners in a real sense.”

Grace under fire

Communication during good times in business is nice to have, but during a downturn it is absolutely vital to get it right, says Wayne Cascio, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado, and the Robert H. Reynolds Chair in Global Leadership at its Denver campus.

People are more concerned than ever about losing their jobs during these times, so engagement, or at least a sense that we’re all in this together, can only be created by consistent communication from leadership teams.

“It’s essential to have good communication from the top, with the leaders willing to be transparent and having a strong game plan,” says Cascio. “That’s the way they give people hope. Leaders must be very transparent about their plans, so everybody understands there aren’t going to be any surprises.”

Downsizing, says Cascio, should be considered only as a last resort in anything but the direst of economic circumstances. Businesses that performed well during the recent US recession, he says, were those that saw their people as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

The CEO of DuPont, for example, required every manager to meet with his or her direct reports and come up with at least three suggestions for cost-saving. These ideas were then further developed and finessed by a screening committee. 

“They needed about US$35 million in cost savings to avoid any layoffs, and they wound up generating about US$60 million in cost savings because they saw their people as part of the solution,” says Cascio. “Any company could do that, but it takes leadership and communication from the top.”

Another case-study business, Lincoln Electric, makes arc welding equipment. 

“It’s pretty unglamorous work,” he says. “But the company has never had a layoff since the 1930s. One thing it did during the recession was create what it called ‘Leopard teams’. Members of these teams had to change their spots, to get off the factory floor and go out and find opportunities in the marketplace.

“One team identified a market for home welding equipment, and nobody was tapping into it. So they started working with big-box retailers and ultimately generated a US$800 million per year line of business.”

A third example is Southwest Airlines, which put a freeze on hiring during the recession. This left their 80-strong team of recruiters wondering how soon they’d end up on the streets. 

However, instead of downsizing, the airline introduced a corporate redeployment program. Recruiters naturally boasted excellent interpersonal skills, so they were retrained into customer service roles. As the economy recovered, they were gradually brought back into their previous roles, with a renewed sense of loyalty to the business. 

“The best thing a company can do during a downturn is to practise something called environmental scanning. It works around the acronym PESTLE because it involves identifying trends in the political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental arenas.

“The key to success is to identify trends that are likely to affect your business and where opportunity or threat can reveal itself. Some companies set up small groups of staff to be responsible for each area, but why not establish broader networks during a downturn, bringing all staff on board to help solve problems? HR can take the lead in this.”

Of course, no matter what a business does, the last resort of downsizing can always become a reality. This was the case for most businesses in Ireland when the economic situation went from bad to much, much worse. But even then, as long as leaders have communicated well and done all they can to avoid layoffs, staff will feel gratified that the company at least made an effort, says Casio.

Certified HR practitioners can help to build the cultures needed to survive during tough times. Find your certification pathway.

Agile leaders

During a downturn, a different type of leadership is required at all levels of business, says Tina Shah Paikeday, leader of Russell Reynolds Associates Global D&I Consulting Services. Leaders need to be agile enough to navigate difficult and constantly changing circumstances by shifting strategy.

At the same time, HR officers need to have tough conversations with their business leaders around talent within the workforce, and about ensuring great resilience.

“That’s going to be the skill set that will enable you to weather the storm during the downturn. What you want to look for are leaders who are able to change from being pragmatic to disruptive, depending on the circumstances, in terms of their strategic approach,” says Shah Paikeday. 

 “As we anticipate the economic downturn, we’re going to see hiring slow down. So in that case, identifying the people who do have that agility is something I’d recommend. In addition to that, as we think about talent in the downturn, the emphasis from leadership advisory firms like ours will be on development.” 

Most important, she says, is identifying those in the organisation at all levels who already have agile leadership skills. Next up is to develop those people and others. If a large gap is identified, if the organisation does not have enough agile and resilient people available in the current workforce, now is the time to hire for those traits.

What about diversity and inclusion? Is that put on hold when times are tough? Actually, that’s when it becomes even more important, says Shah Paikeday.

“The perspective on this is that organisations able to harness the power of diversity are able to get to higher levels of innovation, which is important when you’re trying to navigate highly ambiguous situations,” she says. 

“You have novel problems to solve in a recession, and the research shows that when you have those diverse perspectives at the table… you’re better able to navigate the circumstances in the same way that I was talking about leadership agility.”

Cascio agrees. If a company is serious about diversity and inclusion at any time, he says, then the best time to demonstrate that is when diversity and inclusion matter most – during the hard times. It says something about culture, and culture backed up by communication is what’s most important during a downturn. 

The reality of a recession is that budgets are cut across the board. Training and development is often brought in-house and recruitment slows or stops. Technology may be utilised to increase efficiencies in HR and other functions. But Cascio points out that new technology has the best chance of being implemented successfully if it is a cost-saving suggestion by those closest to the action, rather than a staff-cutting strategy by management. 

“People like the idea of a shared fate,” says Cascio. “They’re most comfortable when it’s clear that we’re all in this thing together. You’ve got to demonstrate that with your actions.”

The Irish, having been poster children for high-performing economies, are now held up as a great example of effective management during a deep recession. While trade union cooperation with retrenchment measures was important, much of Ireland’s success in surviving the period, Roche surmises, comes down to the extraordinary dominance of multinationals in the Irish economy, which buffered the nation.

But kudos must also go to the HR industry, whose practitioners stepped up and managed relationships with workforces, leaders, unions and the government, and whose roles are still elevated as a result. Sadly, they look likely to be called into action again as the roller-coaster ride seems set to continue.

Roche says, “We’re now back into boom time, extraordinary growth and full employment.  We’re back to the strongest GDP growth in the European Union. But there are dark clouds on the horizon. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, if they ever do, involves major exposure for Ireland. So the HR skills learned during the recessionary period might have to come in to play once again.”

Whether Australia suffers a similar fate or not, it will pay for organisations, via their HR professionals, to ensure they are as prepared as they can be.

This is an edited version of an article that was originally published in the December/January 2020 edition of HRM magazine.

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Good advice doesn’t necessarily come from the sources you might expect. After an absence of 10 months, rapper Kanye West returned to Twitter with some stream-of-consciousness aphorisms that could have interesting application for those working in HR. For instance:

“As a creative your ideas are your strongest form of currency.”

HR isn’t often identified as a hub of innovation but the question is: why not? HRM recently wrote about how HR can measure innovation, and become innovative itself.

From recruiting to exit interviews, and everything in between, there are multiple opportunities to stand out by adopting creative HR practices. Take two companies unique approach to hiring and firing.

Amazon and online retailer Zappos both have a Pay to Quit policy. In order to weed out the really committed employees from the also-rans, Amazon offers employees $2000 in their first year to quit the business. This increases each year after that with a maximum of $5000. At Zappos, the company offers to pay new employees for all the time they spend training, plus one month’s salary and all they have to do in return is quit. They say it saves them megabucks in time wasted on the wrong hire.

Back to our hip-hop sage who also proclaims:

“Distraction is the enemy of vision.”

Here Kanye is right on the money when it comes to one of the central issues for HR right now. The transactional side of HR that has for years occupied the profession – such as benefits admin etc – is becoming a distraction. It’s the part of HR already receiving a heavy dose of automation, and predictions are it will one day be fully automated.

HR can and should be positioning themselves as the ‘people strategy visionary’ of an organisation. Just saying “people are our most valuable asset” isn’t good enough. HR must help shape the vision for what employees can achieve individually and together for the success of the business, and then empower individuals to get there.

When Kanye posted this tweet, it showed how much (unintentional) insight he has into changing management styles over the past decade.

“Make decisions based on love not fear.”

Adopting a stoic, strong, remote persona in the workplace isn’t going to win you any fans. If leaders disregard the importance of connecting with employees, they lose the benefit of a dedicated, long-term team.

While it may not be their obligation, for a lot of organisations people’s personal issues are now being tackled head on. In other companies, organisational resilience is beginning with building resilience in all employees.

If an employee is struggling with money problems, domestic violence or depression, decisions about their working life need to come from a place of caring and compassion. Doing that will create a loyalty that is hard to break.

When it comes to feedback, too, honesty is imperative. An employee will appreciate truthful and transparent feedback if it comes from a desire to help them improve, rather than couched in critical terms.

As Vartika Kashyap, HRM contributor and manager at Proof Hub, put it, “as a leader, you must do your best to eliminate this feeling of feedback being a dreaded commodity. Feedback should be something that employees become willing to accept, and ask for on their own.”

Motivation to be in HR

We’ll leave the last words to the self-help/philosophy book West is tweeting, as we’re pretty sure it’s directed mostly at people working in HR:

Amen to that.

Photo credit: NRK P3  / CC BY-NC-SA

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Think of a traditional family company, in which leadership was passed from father to son (usually the eldest) and you have an analogue of succession planning as many organisations have practised it for the last century or so.

In larger companies, a popular option was to start with a group of candidates who were all considered suitable and during the process, weed out those who were considered weakest until only the strongest remained.

This strategy worked for most organisations. However, it has a major weakness: “What happens if the business does not run ‘as usual’?”

In today’s environment, it’s hard to think of a single sector where business runs as it did 40 years ago. The way we manufacture, buy, move, manage, sell and teach has changed – nobody does “business as usual” any more.

Unfortunately, for many organisations, their succession planning does not reflect this. Today’s companies must anticipate ‘business as change’.

Planning for change

In practice, this means building succession planning on the foundation of your organisation: your business’ strategy.

Examining your strategy should show you the pivot points – the positions where performance is critical to success. These are the roles for which you need clearly defined succession plans. Then, it’s about finding the people that either have, or can develop, the skills that align with the strategic needs of these positions.

This process can be optimised by using the full suite of HR tools, including executive coaching, which is becoming recognised as a fast track to identifying and developing effective leadership skills throughout organisations.

Succession planning is not a set-and-forget operation; it’s an ongoing process that should proceed hand-in-hand with the execution, review and reworking of your business strategy.

In my experience, the consequences of poor succession planning reach widely across many areas of a business. The below case studies describe recent coaching experiences that prove just that.

Case Study 1: Watching frustrated talent leave

Stuart contacted me as he was having retention issues in his team, having lost two members in one month. The question we had to answer was why.

We began by looking for the organisation’s retention drivers and, after spending time with his team members, discovered that they were virtually non-existent. Stuart had little support – and even when he approached his employees upon resignation, he had few resources to convince them to stay – even salary discussions didn’t help. The fact was the organisation’s performance management and succession systems weren’t meeting their needs.

As a leader, Stuart felt he was regularly consulting with his team members, but due to lack of visible opportunity, there was loss of motivation and they eventually decided to look elsewhere. Despite Stuart’s efforts to talk to his executive leadership team about effective succession planning, they were unresponsive.

Unfortunately, in this instance, there was no easy fix; the company’s budget for learning and development had been slashed and there was no appetite to reinstate it.

The result of our coaching left Stuart looking at his own position and wondering whether he might be better off joining his departed team members.

Case Study 2: Managing and motivating an inherited suboptimal team

During a coaching session, Sarah and I were discussing her performance management and how she had inherited a team that was the result of flawed hiring processes.

The skill-sets in her new team simply weren’t diverse enough – and the most competent people had not been placed in priority roles. This created a situation where she found it difficult to develop succession plans for team members, not just in her department, but within the whole organisation.

We talked about solutions that included a review of the hiring process so that her successor would not face the same situation, and knowledge transfer programs to improve the skillsets of her existing team members.

Once Sarah had implemented these steps, she could begin to confidently restructure her team to optimise productivity and develop succession plans that would motivate and retain her best people.

*Names have been changed for this article

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On the third distinction, I am told that the issue of HR certification was repeatedly raised at decision-making meetings of the institute over many years before my time. The discussions turned on the same questions we now ponder.  Other professions set entry standards and appoint gatekeepers to jealously guard against unqualified people practising. Why not HR? But when the dust settled on the discussion, the decisive step was always shelved, and the common stopper was always the same: Fear.

There was never a serious argument about whether certification was necessary. Agreement on that was unanimous because it was accepted that without a standard, a profession is not taken seriously. But that understanding was accompanied by the realisation that the journey to certification would be a hard road. The standard would have to be capable of testing professional knowledge, skills and behaviours, be globally recognised, and would also involve setting up a credible certifying body.  It would then be necessary to communicate to the business world that HR had come of age. Each step could potentially be problematic and would involve a considerable investment of time, money and people.

But in 2014 the decision was made and we are now on that journey. We have crossed the Rubicon, and it has been wonderful to witness the clarity of purpose that now exists. No longer will we tolerate anyone off the street saying they can ‘do HR’, and then casually calling themselves HR practitioners simply because they can.

That step, of course, cannot be taken in a day, so we set a timeframe of three years from December 2014 to December 2017. From that date, all new entrants seeking certified status* to practise HR must satisfy the requirements of the National Certification Council that they have met the standard as signified by the new HR certification post-nominals, CPHR and FCPHR.

The decisive step was put off for so long out of fear, so we knew we needed to free ourselves of our fear to take action.

Two years down the track it has culminated in a brand overhaul that is driven by the idea of pride in achieving HR certification and being a certified HR professional. Failing to establish HR as a profession on a proper footing is now unthinkable. It would amount to a colossal setback for the profession. Thus with failure ruled out as an option, being bold and being proud are the only options.

Over the last two years I have found myself referring back to our pioneers of 1992. In an  HRMonthly magazine column around that time, the then national president, Graeme Andrewartha was calling on practitioners to recognise the “larger responsibility in the next 10 years, not just to our members but to the employers in our members’ firms and the wider community”. He was saying that the profession must be accountable. His words remain a reminder to present-day HR practitioners that the issue is bigger than just themselves. HR has a larger responsibility to leaders of organisations, to assure them that if they employ men and women who present themselves wearing the cloak of HR, that they can be satisfied that they are getting people who know what they are doing and are able to perform accordingly.

This year we will be talking to business leaders and talking to the wider community. And when we do, we will be talking about you – boldly and proudly – and your obligation will be to live up to what we are saying about you. 

Consolidate your HR career by becoming a certified HR practitioner. Find the certification pathway that best suits your professional level by using the HR Certification Pathfinder.

*Correction: The original copy in the print HRM magazine (February 2017) indicated that after December 2017, new entrants seeking to practise HR will be required to have met the standards signified by the new post-nominals. The position is that new entrants seeking certified status must satisfy those standards.

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Most of the changes to the workplace will creep up on you so that, by the time they occur, they will seem completely normal. But when you take a moment to consider everything around you (perhaps as you’re wandering down the corridor to your clients’ lounge area for a meeting, with a coffee in one hand and your iPad in the other), you’ll likely wonder how we ever came so far.

Let’s step back for a minute.

Imagine this. When you walked in to reception, the automated concierge knew exactly who you were and who you had come to meet. Sensors in your phone had alerted the artificial intelligence (AI) to your arrival at the building as soon as you stepped out of the driverless vehicle. As you were on your way up in the lift (you didn’t have to choose your floor – the lift knew where you were going), a bot had scanned through the trail of emails between you and the person you’d come to meet, to find out what the meeting was all about.

By the time you entered reception the AI system had sent various documents, all pertinent to today’s meeting, to your iPad. It had prepared a cup of coffee for you, just the way you like it, and had alerted your client to your arrival.

By the time you and your client shake hands and sit down, the level of lighting and air conditioning in the meeting area will have been adjusted to match your preferences.

Welcome to the future of work. For some, it’s already here

“Through the ‘internet of things’ most devices, such as your washing machine, coffee machine or refrigerator, will be WiFi enabled and will have some sort of intelligence,” says Hank Haeusler, discipline director of the Bachelor of Computational Design at the Australian School of Architecture + Design at UNSW. “There will be a lot of knowledge and data around where we are, what we do, how we behave and what are our preferences. Machines will respond to our behaviour and to our needs.”

Haeusler and his team have been conducting research in partnership with Arup (engineering) and BVN (architecture) around the tracking of people within open-plan and activity-based styles of workplaces. As staff are encouraged to collaborate and to operate without a specific desk, how does somebody in the organisation find them when they need them? How does a business understand where the most important work spaces for collaboration and productivity are? And are staff members spending enough time with the teams they are supposed to be spending time with?

“These are the research questions we’ve been looking at by applying indoor Bluetooth and WiFi tracking,” he says. “We use mobile phones and other beacons to track people to find out what kinds of serendipity you’re developing between people and teams and where the incidental meetings are actually happening. We suspect they are not happening at people’s desks or in official meeting rooms but instead in other areas such as the kitchen or where the sofas are located.”

Buildings and high-tech office spaces will respond to us. This has been referred to as the ‘second machine age’ in the eponymous book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

“The first machine age, driven by electricity and internal combustion engines, meant that suddenly we could pull and push things and move things around. It was all about an increase in our muscle capacity. In this second machine age, our brain capacity will increase. It’s not that we will become more clever, just as in the first machine age we didn’t actually become stronger, but we will have much more intelligence to hand,” say the authors.

The rise of the bot

An increasingly hot topic in the technology world, and in the future of our work, is that of ‘bots’.

They’re not shiny silver humanoids with eyes that glow red. Instead, they’re brilliant pieces of software that will soon take over many of our jobs, explains Dr Kristin Alford, futurist and director of the Science, Creativity and Education studio at University of South Australia.

“Bots can interact with parts of the communication flow. That might be with people or that might be with other bots. When it comes to careers dealing with information that is fairly fixed – the sort of work that accountants do, looking at tax audits, at historical information. That could all be done by a bot. Also the work that lawyers do, in terms of looking for past case law, is the sort of thing that could be done by a bot.”

In 2009, Alford says, thousands of Wall Street staff were made redundant because of the financial carnage of the GFC. As the economy began to pick up, many of those jobs did not come back. Already we were witnessing the rise of programming to replace and automate middle management and analytical jobs.

Traditional robots, hand in hand with bots, will also assist with automation of particular processes, she says. While work that is repetitive and analytical will be taken by bots, so too work that is repetitive and manual will be taken by robots. We are already seeing such examples with drone deliveries, automation of warehouses, and driverless vehicles being used on farms and mine sites etc.

Interestingly, Alford says, the professions that are likely to be safe from automation are traditionally female roles such as nursing, teaching, physiotherapy and the arts. “So it is not just a technological change we’ll be seeing in the workplace but also a social change, or a change in the way we regard the value of certain types of roles,” she says.

How we will communicate

Stephen Minnett, founder and director of workplace design firm FutureSpace, says new innovations will help us to close the gap between the quality of physical connections and technological connections. Meetings and interactions with people who are not actually present will be far more sophisticated and nuanced than previously.

“There might be eight people in an office in Sydney sitting at a table and working. At the end of that bench they have a big, flat screen and a camera. On that screen they can see the team in their Melbourne or Shanghai office, as if they are sitting at the other end of the same table,” says Minnett.

“You become subliminally aware of the people in the other office. If you want to speak to them, you can just glance over and see they are on the phone, so you shouldn’t bother them right now.”

Virtual reality (VR) will also enter into this brave new workplace, although not exactly as we currently know it. Stefan Pernar, managing director of Virtual Reality Ventures, points out that current VR systems are very isolating. The headsets tend to shut everything else out. While this will suit specific purposes in the office of the future – OH&S training, visualisation of new designs, walk-throughs of new buildings for architects/engineers and their clients etc – the next generation of VR will be closer to the definition of ‘augmented reality’ (AR). Information will be projected onto the user’s glasses, onto contact lenses or into the user’s eyes.

“It will be about overlaying all types of relevant information, business intelligence systems that you might usually see on your computer,” Pernar says. “So you walk around a workplace and as you look around, all the information you need that is relevant for that particular scenario is being overlaid over what you are seeing.”

Here’s to your health

As wearables embedded with GPS, heart-rate monitors, WiFi, Bluetooth and other types of technologies continue to advance into the new high-tech office, it is likely that organisations will be able to track levels of health and stress within their workforce, says Bernard Salt, futurist and partner at KPMG. Such devices will be able to tell if an entire department is stressed, for instance, offering the organisation the opportunity to find and fix an issue before it becomes a bigger problem.

“People are aggressive if they’re stressed, or they could have a heart attack, or perhaps they’re feeling depressed or lonely,” Salt says. “Any or all of these indicators may give management the ability to manipulate the workforce’s emotions or emotional state – this may well be a feature of the future office.”

Technology has made people realise that they can work successfully from anywhere. But in the future, Salt says, they will likely turn back to the office. It will simply be a different office to the one we know today.

“I think we’ll see a yearning for the collaboration and the collegiality of the high-tech office,” Salt says. “I think the mainstream is caught up in the wonderment of it all, but sooner or later the need for collaboration of like-minded people in the same geography, in the same space and interacting in a human way, is what people will want. So we will see a revival of the office. But nothing ever comes back as it was.”

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Put simply, it’s all about the process. If boards truly wish to identify new and innovative thinkers that will be able to guide the organisation through change and disruption, they have to pay attention and know the current thinking in HR, and would benefit from having an HR professional assist the process.

Boards have to accept that their own networks – the ones they’re inclined to hire from – are probably quite narrow. So identifying potential candidates from that alone will no longer meet the expectations and requirements of a board you must look more broadly.

It’s also time to acknowledge that it is increasingly important for boards to be diverse so that they maximise their performance. Identifying the diversity gaps in experiences, life philosophies, education and industry knowledge currently not on a board is challenging, yet spending time doing so is extremely valuable.

By challenging the normal recruitment path, you may uncover a truly independent thinker who will bring an outsider’s point of view and challenge the status quo.

Another critical step is finding the passive candidates. Not everyone is actively looking for a board role, but presented with the right opportunity, a passive candidate will respond and engage in a discussion. But how do you search for the people who by definition aren’t looking for you?

In-depth data analysis quickly summarises important information to help identify passive candidates.

Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, says: “One way big data is impacting recruitment is around using social data to identify people who are more likely to be open to new opportunities.”

Another key for recruitment is to know what you don’t know. For example, you may need to create a digital/technology sub-committee to identify candidates with the right skills. This committee would be in charge of identifying potential candidates who understand innovation and disruption. Morgan Stanley in the US created a technology committee way back in 2011 to fill a gap that existed due to the board falling short on understanding IT issues.

Something often overlooked when recruiting for board members is the use of innovative tools that look beyond someone’s written CV, such as psychometric testing. Properly used, a psychometric tool can confirm deep personality traits of candidates and provide an overview of how they will work with the existing team and whether they match the board’s desired skill-sets for the future.

Lastly, don’t drag your feet. If a board takes too long to appoint candidates, it will lose top talent and the fallout might damage your reputation. While it is important to be thorough, it’s equally important to send a message that your organisation handles strategically critical tasks with decisiveness. ; Your recruitment process is evidence of your approach to business. By running a quick, understandable and efficient process, you will demonstrate to applicants that your organisation is equipped to move with the times.

By Peter Murphy, General Manager, Queensland Davidson Boards & Executive

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The acronym VUCA (for those in the dark, that’s volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) has become a go-to business term for all the different kinds of crazy we deal with in our work lives. But as precarious as things might seem, there’s a wealth of information out there on how to prepare your business to forge ahead towards a future full of ambiguity.

You may also be asking what you can do. Yes, you! Not your manager and not your CEO.  Regardless of your position and role, you can personally do a lot to improve your capacity for ambiguity – and that of your workplace – with a better understanding of how your brain works. After all, organisations are not inanimate objects, but the people within them.

When the decisions we need to make lead us to unfamiliar territory, our memories are going to be the opposite of useful. We need to develop our skills in making choices based on limited information – and be comfortable with taking risks.

1. Check your cognitive bias

Cognitive Bias is our mind’s best attempt to “shortcut” the decision-making process. Sometimes this can be helpful but other times it leads us astray. Being conscious of our own proclivity to bias is the first step to avoiding the worst case scenario – a bad decision we don’t realise we’re making. While we can’t wholly eliminate bias, an awareness that it’s very likely influencing our decisions can help us manage it.

2. Ask: What if…

Developing a ‘what if’ attitude and a healthy sense of curiosity can help us roll with the punches more easily. When roadblocks appear and we face unexpected challenges, asking what we learn this helps build a growth mindset. Similarly, asking “what else could that mean?” prompts us to consider different points of view and incorporate diversity of thinking. Limiting the emotional reaction to setbacks and conflict in this way can help our logical brains consider the situation without the emotional part of our brain hijacking the process.

3. Focus on what you can change

Our brain loves certainty. For many of us, mental health has a lot to do with our sense of control over our environment. Of course, in reality there’s a lot we can’t control. In the face of that and to help satisfy our brain’s need for this sense of security, we should refocus on what we do know and what we can change rather than on all the things we can’t.

4. Make time for creativity

Being aware of how insight and “aha” moments occur for you is essential to improving creative and innovative thinking. There’s no one-size-fits all practice or silver bullet for creative thinking; it works differently for everyone. And very rarely is that ‘magic hour’ a team brainstorming session. More often, it’s during our down time that we create space for ideas to flow. When you allow time and space to ponder ideas and problems, our unconscious mind is able to make the random connections necessary for innovative solutions and complex problem solving.

Building self-awareness and emotional resilience is essential to developing the capability to thrive in a VUCA world. Engage with the unknown, be open to learning new skills, and embrace different concepts in order to build up your ability survive – and thrive –  in an ambiguous world.

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