Work and the Future

If you watch any kind of high level sports, you have to marvel at how much training it takes to get to an elite level as well as the training it takes to perform on game day. Doing things under pressure is not the same as doing them day to day in practice, and that is something to think about in the business arena as well. What are the lessons that elite athletes can give business leaders in terms...

  At one time mental health may have been a subject that organizations wanted to avoid discussing, but those days are rapidly disappearing .  With the pandemic still ongoing, this is a very difficult time for many and as it is taking a toll on mental well-being.  In turn, organizations are starting to realize that supporting their workers means supporting their productivity.   Our guest today...

It is  the fourth quarter of 2021 and we are still in a state of flux in the work world.. Companies are struggling with whether to bring everyone back to the office, there are labour shortages all over, and just what normal looks like in terms of work is not really clear. But some organizations are handling things better than others. Our guest today is Tammy Browning who is President of KellyOCG. ...

Even in a post-pandemic world, it seems unlikely that we will ever go back to an old-style workplace where everyone comes into the office on a daily basis. Work from home arrangements and hybrid workplaces will be the norm, which means we will lean on technology more heavily than ever.  The digital workplace will be our reality, but what makes an effective digital workplace?  Our guest on the epis...

With the pandemic not behind us yet, how can organizations be agile and  willing to change up how we do things, maybe several times more before we get to the end of this? And how can workers come together to get things done effectively as we go through this phase of the pandemic? Jason Brommet,  Head of Modern Work and Security Business  with Microsoft Canada. joins us on theis episode to give us...

Can you turn departing employees into loyal alumni? When a worker leaves, most companies bid them well, perhaps doing a hasty exit interview on the way out.  That, however, may be a short-sighted way to do things. Today’s guests are Dr. Alison Dachner of John Carroll University and Erin Makarius of the University of Akron, author sof a recent article n the Harvard Business Review on the subj...

Sooner or later we will be going back to offices and work space, but we will be doing it with a different mindset. Partly that is around how safety how do we set things up so we don’t spread the next virus, but there are other considerations as well. We have gotten used to working from home, maybe from outside on our patios or in different places and we are going to bring a different sensibility t...

How do you create a corporate culture where workers have a voice, and if you are a worker how do you decide to speak up? Employees are the ones on the front lines, the ones who know what is going on in a organization and who could point out burgeoning problems before they become real trouble. That said, they often find it better to not speak up rather than raise their voices or they do raise their...

Is there a way to fairly adjust salaries so that there are no disparities by race or sex or anything else?  Our guest today says there is and she has put it into practice at her company. Marie Rose Roiux is CFO and VP Business Operations at  Unito, a tech company that has developed a meticulous system to weed out disparities and ensure fairness – although that process means undoing some of w...

Can you use scenario planning to prepare for the future and the future of work? As the pandemic has shown, you can never be completed prepared for what might happen, but planning and imagining scenarios can definitely give you an advantage. Our guest today is Lance Mortlock, the author of Disaster Proof; Scencario Planning for a Post-Pandemic Future and he joins us to talk about how organizations...

Have you ever been ghosted? Not on  a dating app or by a friend, but in your work-life? It happens all the time. It may be the old we should have lunch thing- someone says it, you try to follow up and they never answer your call. Or, much worse, you are looking for a job and all seems to be going great with a company  you are interviewing with and then you get radio silence. Why do people do that?...

Is data-driven hiring the future, and if it is should we be happy or a little bit scared? With the economy heating upm we are seeing a surge in hiring, or at least a surge in companies trying to hire.  As they look for the best hires, some are turning to ‘data-driven hiring’ basically making the best use of technology to fill roles rather than culling through resumes the old fashioned way and rely...

How do we present and communicate now that we are in hybrid work world? .We have gotten used to presenting virtually to a team that is perhaps far-flung, so what happens now when we have to get back to the office and  communicate to a team that partly in person but partly somewhere else? Do the same rules apply? And what about in-person presentations and interactions – do we even remember how to d...

As we move towards the future of work, it is becoming increasingly clear that that  that might mean re-thinking education models. We tend to think of education as being a few years after high school then maybe the odd course to pick up new skills when you are working, but really we should be thinking in terms of continuous retraining and reskilling. That can be done a lot of ways, but one that is...

Australia is held up as an example to those of us in North America and elsewhere in the world. They did not completely escape the pandemic, but they came pretty close and for the most part, they are back at work in offices, if they want to be. Still, things are not exactly the same as they were before the world had heard of Covid-19.  What lessons  does Australia have for us about post-pandemic of...

We are getting good news on the economy and the labor market but are the statistics telling us the whole story? Even with a surge in hiring and a fall in the unemployment, there is a core of people who have been out of the labor market for a while and who are not being absorbed back in with the upswing in the economy. It is a problem that existed before the pandemic and which cannot be vaccinated...

Whatever else is going on in the economy or the world, one thing that never seems to change is our battle to have enough time to do everything we feel we need to get done in our work (and in our personal) life.   We all have these lofty goals of what we are going to accomplish, but at the end of the day we often find that we are disappointed in what we had intended to do? So how do you get control...

Is getting an MBA super important and the key to success, or is it an expensive waste of time that will not necessarily get you where you want to be? The market seems to go back and forth on it:some years it seems that there is a ton of demand for MBAs and other years they are not nearly as coveted. It is particularly compelling question right now, since coming out of the pandemic many people are...

The pandemic may be ending, but that does mean that workers are headed back to where they were in the spring of 2020. In some cases, their positions have been eliminated and they are going to be forced to reinvent themselves. In others, their jobs may be the same but they themselves have changed in some way and now want to reinvent their career. Reinvention may be the labor market topic of the pos...

  How important will reskilling be to our economic future and what role should business play in making it happen? And what about continuous training? Business has always been reticent about training because there is always the risk that you could lose those trained at your expense to the competition In the tech sector though, there has been a mindset shift and the focus now seems to be on tra...

How do you take someone with one set of skills and gret them ready for a job market that needs a completely different set of them? It is an issue that we had started to grapple with a lot before the pandemic, but the pandemic has really put it into sharp focus as some industries have waned while others have flourished. The reality is that there are skills in demand, and there are workers available...

Over the past year we have leaned heavily on technology, but it has kind of been a love-hate relationship. We love technology it because it is cool that we can work from home, but we also get frustrated when it does not work, and we freeze up on screen, or things that are supposed to work flawlessly don’t work at all. So as much as it takes away stress, it seems to create it – or does it? Our gues...

Our major economic problem right now is the pandemic and its offshoots, but that does not mean the economic issues we had before the pandemic have gone away. One of those issues is technology, or rather the speed of technological change and what that means for the labor market. With the fourth industrial revolution in full swing, the future may mean a very altered reality for workers, or at least...

Remote work used to be looked at with suspicion, but after nearly a year of trial by fire, everyone knows it is great – right? Actually, not right. Despite having tried it out for months, many managers still view remote work as very much second best and are counting the days until they can go back to (the old) normal. Is that because the old normal was better, or do we just need to do better...

Guest: Bretton (Brett) Putter is an expert in company culture development who is consulted by companies and leaders worldwide to help design, develop and build high-performing cultures. Company culture can be a fairly murky concept. Roughly defined as ‘how we do things’ it should be reflection of company values and it should be well-communicated to workers, but that is often not the ca...