Work and the Future

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...

Can an organization actively build a a resilient workforce? Are there ways to create resilient workers? It would seem to be to our advantage to do that: according to a study published by PwC, programs that foster a resilient and mentally healthy workplace returned $2.30 for every dollar spent, with the returns coming in the form of lower health care costs, higher productivity, lower absenteeism an...

This is Episode 3 of  aspecial series on Coming back Stronger sponsored by Microsoft. In our first two episodes we talked about how companies can come back stronger, and how workers can build the resilience to cope with their new stresses. Today we look much longer term and address the reality that tomorrow’s workforce will have to continuously ramp up their education and skills over their l...

This is episode 2  of a special  4-part special series of Work and the Future called Coming Back Stronger sponsored by Microsoft. In Episode 1 we talked about what organizations should do to come back ready for the post-pandemic world, but what about individuals?  Their first task is to get through this next phase of the pandemic, and that is challenging in itself. Finding the resilience to keep g...

This is episode 1 of a special  4-part special series of Work and the Future called Coming Back Stronger sponsored by Microsoft. We are still fighting this pandemic but we are also seeing light at the end of the tunnel. But how are we going to come back? Can we come back stronger? Some organizations can and will, and now is the time to plan for that: to get ready for a world that is not exactly li...

The gig economy’ sometimes gets a bad rap – people hear it and they think of ride-share drivers who really want to be full time.   In fact though the gig economy is a much more nuanced place, one that encompasses different kinds of gig workers, including those who are highly skilled and who very much want to work the way that they are doing. Pre-pandemic, they perhaps made up a sliver of the workf...

With the pandemic raging and organizations in flux, is this any time to think about a vacation? In North America in particular, we  have a mindset that taking vacations is a little bit lax and with the pandemic and its stresses that mindset is going into high gear. On top of that too, we can’t really travel right now, so it seems like the right thing to do to put off vacations. But is it the right...