How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work

How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work

Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work initiative aimed to accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization and prepare its workforce for a digitalized and highly automated era. But despite its success over the last three years, the program still faces significant challenges in its implementation. How should Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, best prepare and upscale its workforce for the future? How should Unilever adapt and accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization? Is it even possible to lead a systematic, agile workforce transformation across several geographies while accounting for local context? Harvard Business School professor and faculty co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work Project William Kerr and Patrick Hull, Unilever’s vice president of global learning and future of work, discuss how rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation are changing the nature of work in the case, “Unilever's Response to the Future of Work.”

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Brian Kenny:

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched the latest version of ChatGPT, the largest and most powerful AI chatbot to date. Within a few days, more than a million people tested its ability to do the mundane things we really don't like to do, such as writing emails, coding software, and scheduling meetings. Others upped the intelligence challenge by asking for sonnets and song lyrics, and even instructions on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of King James. But once the novelty wore off, the reality set in. ChatGPT is a game changer, and yet another example of the potential for AI to change the way we live and work.

And while we often view AI as improving how we live, we tend to think of it as destroying how we work, fears that are fueled by dire predictions of job eliminations in the tens of millions and the eradication of entire industries. And while it's true that AI will continue to evolve and improve, eventually taking over many jobs that are currently performed by people, it will also create many work opportunities that don't yet exist.

Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor William Kerr, joined by Patrick Hull of Unilever, to discuss the case, “Unilever's Response to the Future of Work.” I'm your host, Brian Kenny, and you're listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.

Professor Bill Kerr is the co-director of Harvard Business School's Managin

Impacting Work With Generative AI

New Report Details How Generative AI Impacts Work

Aberdeen's latest research offers insight into the ways professionals use generative AI today, as well as how AI might affect work in the future.

By Adrianna Nine March 29, 2023

We hear a lot about how artificial intelligence—particularly generative AI like ChatGPT—might impact the labor market, but how are people viewing and integrating AI into their work right now? A report published Tuesday offers insight into how professionals use generative AI today and how those professionals believe AI might impact their work in the future. 

The report is the latest out of Aberdeen, a market research division of Spiceworks. (Editors' Note: Aberdeen and Spiceworks are owned by ExtremeTech's parent company, Ziff Davis.) Aberdeen analysts surveyed 642 professionals about their familiarity with tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, how they leverage generative AI (if at all), and how they believe AI might “shape the future of the internet.” 

Of those 642 people, 59 percent had tried using generative AI tools. Over half of those professionals had used an AI chatbot at least once; only 20% had tried using text-to-image tools, like the art generators that have exploded in popularity and disfavor over the past year. A decent chunk of respondents had “extensively used” generative AI tools to find information faster than a conventional search engine (64%), write long-form content (41%), seek out solutions to business problems (33%), or answer questions they’d typically address themselves (49%). Only a few professionals (7%, 1%, 3%, and 8%, respectively) had not used generative AI for these purposes, with the remaining respondents sitting somewhere in between.

A bar graph showing the number of respondents who said they'd use AI chatbots vs search engines to find information online.

Information-seeking seems to be a popular use of generative AI among professionals. Nearly half (42%) of respondents said they’d likely use AI-powered chatbots to find answers online, while just 24% said they’d use search engines. (The remaining respondents were undecided.) Aberdeen notes that this could be because chatbots can provide answers without requiring users to click through to a website, where they’d likely have to sift through more information than they need. However, most respondents (84%) said they’d like to see AI-generated answers cite their sources using the links that would otherwise be found in search engine results. 

Generative AI’s climb toward ubiquity understandably has many people wringing their hands. When asked whether AI would bring about positive or negative societal change, 41% of Aberdeen’s respondents said they were hopeful (positive), 39% were worried (negative), and 19% were unsure. Slightly more universal was the notion that advanced AI would “alter society greatly, and in unexpected ways,” at 67% of respondents.  .... 

What Workers Want Now

Seeking the new World of Work. 

Workforce

What workers want now  in Strategy-Business

Episode 8 of the Take on Tomorrow podcast features Standard Chartered’s group head of human resources, Tanuj Kapilashrami, and the joint global leader for PwC’s people and organization practice, Pete Brown, on changing workforce expectations.

November 16, 2022 Share to:  

Having found new confidence in the shifting world of work, employees around the world are making their voices heard. How is this flux altering the employer–employee relationship? And what is it, exactly, that workers are telling us?

The new work–life balance

By Adam Bryant 

Determining “nonnegotiables” in the new hybrid era of work

BY EARL SIMPKINS, BRANDON RAPP, AND VARUN BHATNAGAR

“A number of things,” said Pete Brown, joint global leader, people and organization, and partner with PwC UK. “Clearly, they want to be paid fairly for what they do, but they actually also want to have purposeful work and work that’s got meaning.” In Episode 8 of our Take on Tomorrow podcast series, Brown and Tanuj Kapilashrami, group head of human resources at Standard Chartered, help listeners who’ve seen the headlines about hybrid offices, the “great resignation,” and the ever-changing future of work separate the signal from the noise.

PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2022 underscores the unsettled nature of the employer–employee relationship. One in five respondents said they’re extremely or very likely to switch employers. And because workers with in-demand skills feel particularly empowered to test the market, retaining these employees will require more than just pay.

“What they also expect is an organization that’s investing in them in terms of their capabilities, their skills,” Brown added. “And, last but by no means least, they expect to work for leaders who have integrity, who are open and transparent, and leaders who genuinely are listening, embracing ideas, and actually showing some vulnerability.”

Kapilashrami agreed: “Sometimes showing a little bit of vulnerability and saying that this is all very new to me; I don’t know what the answers are, but I’m willing to be open-minded and I’m willing to learn goes a very, very long way in creating a level of trust within the workforce.”  ... ' 

Thoughts on the Future of Information Work

 Important in many ways.

The Future of Information Work

By Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri

Communications of the ACM, July 2022, Vol. 65 No. 7, Pages 27-29    10.1145/3538638

COVID-19 caused approximately one-third of U.S. workers to shift abruptly from working in offices to working from their residences.1,6,16 Early evidence suggested short-term output of knowledge workers did not drop and might have increased slightly.10,13 Furthermore, working from home has advantages such as time saved by not commuting and, for some, the flexibility and autonomy to set work schedules around home-life responsibilities such as child-care.9 As a result, many technology companies (for example, Twitter, Facebook, Square, Dropbox, Slack, and Zillow), announced remote-work policies to enable some or all employees to work remotely after the pandemic.4 Employees at other companies have threatened to quit if made to come back to full-time in-office work.11 Few think work will go back to how it was pre-pandemic, but our and related research suggest remote work also presents challenges that should be addressed going forward,11 both by improving remote workers' ability to connect with each other, and by effective use of hybrid workers' in-office time.

We analyzed data on the work patterns of Microsoft employees before and after Microsoft's firmwide work-from-home mandate in March 2020. For employees who worked from home prior to the pandemic, we assumed any observed change in behavior after the work-from-home mandate was not due to working remotely, but to other factors, perhaps COVID-related. For the many Microsoft employees who worked in the office prior to the work-from-home mandate, we assumed changes in their behavior were due to a combination of working from home and the same outside factors that affected the employees who had worked from home to begin with. As illustrated in Figure 1, if work outcomes for these two groups moved in parallel prior to the pandemic, we could subtract out the differences in behavior changes between the two groups to isolate the causal effects of working from home.16  ..... ' 

Looking at the Current stats of Remote Work

 Good look at US remote work stats.

92 million US workers now have the opportunity to work remotely: survey

58 percent can work from home at least part-time, 35 percent full-time

By Thomas Ricker@Trixxy in theVerge

58 percent of US workers now have the option to work where they want at least one day a week, while 35 percent can work remotely up to five days a week, according to a new survey conducted by management consulting company McKinsey. The report concludes that flexible work arrangements implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are here to stay.

“After more than two years of observing remote work and predicting that flexible working would endure after the acute phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we view these data as a confirmation that there has been a major shift in the working world and in society itself,” reads the report.

The survey found that when given the choice, 87 percent of workers embrace the opportunity to work remotely and spend an average of three days a week at home. That means 92 million American workers have the opportunity to work remotely and 80 million are currently doing so at least part time, when the survey data is extrapolated to the entire US population. 41 percent of those surveyed say they don’t have any option to work remotely.  .... ' 

Back to Work

Now seeing the direction spreading, here reported in the BBC

Tesla boss Elon Musk has ordered staff to return to the office full-time, declaring that working remotely is no longer acceptable.

The new policy was shared in emails that were leaked to social media.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the messages, one of which appeared to be addressed to executives.  ... '

Getting Hybrid Right

Irving Wldawsky-Berger looks at return to the office trends and outcomes, as usual lots of links to studies done, the click through is worth it. 

The 2022 Work Trend Index: How to Get Hybrid Right

“The people returning to the office are not the same as those who left in March 2020,” wrote Jared Spataro, Microsoft Corporate VP for Modern Work, in a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, 5 Key Trends Leaders Need to Understand to Get Hybrid Right. The article summarized the findings of Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index, a report based on various sources of information, including a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries, labor trends from LinkedIn, and trillions of signals from Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps.

“The data shows that the past two years left an indelible mark on the psyche of workers, altering their expectations and fundamentally shifting the way work gets done,” said Spataro. “This is a pivotal moment, where leadership matters more than ever. Those who embrace a new mindset and shift cultural norms will best position their people and their business for long-term success. Adapting to the influx of change in this business environment is no easy feat.”

“After many false starts, organizations are finally making the shift into a true hybrid work model. Like every other turning point over the past two years, there’s no shortage of perspectives on what this next phase will look like.” However, there’s no going back to the way work once was. Adapting to the many changes in this business environment is a challenge now facing every leader. To navigate the transition to hybrid work, leaders need to understand five key trends.  .....  "

Gig Economies in the Post Pandemic

Good piece in Knowledge@Wharton  ....  How will it change post Pandemic? 

How Workers Create Meaning in the Gig Economy

Jan 31, 2022 Research North America

Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron was so committed to her research on gig workers that she became one, driving part-time for Uber for three years as she studied how people in the sharing economy give meaning to their work.

Her time spent as both a driver and a passenger helped Cameron forge a deeper understanding with the 63 ride-hailing drivers she interviewed over five years for her formal study. Questioning them, she drew out intimate details about their experiences and learned about the mental games they play to find satisfaction in jobs that are transactional, temporary, and downright lonely at times.

“There’s a cultural narrative that the gig economy is so terrible and so exploitive,” Cameron said. “I honestly came into the research thinking that was true, but that’s not what many of the drivers told me. They really liked it.”

Her paper, “Making Out While Driving: Relational and Efficiency Games in the Gig Economy,” which was recently published in the journal Organization Science, adds to a growing body of research into what is quickly becoming the new normal for many — workplaces without walls, bosses, co-workers, or any of the traditional structures that keep employees engaged and socially connected. As many as 55 million Americans were gig workers in 2017, a figure that has risen during the COVID-19 pandemic. And policy debates continue over whether those workers should be classified as employees who deserve benefits.

“We’re going into a world where there are weaker organization and occupational mechanisms for socialization. You can get hired by a company and work there and never talk to a single person face to face,” Cameron said. “It raises the question of what keeps people in the work game? Hopefully, this paper is helping you understand what it’s like to be literally in the driver’s seat.”

“Hopefully, this paper is helping you understand what it’s like to be literally in the driver’s seat.” .....'

Pew Research on the Gig 2021 Economy

FromSmallBizLabs, reporting on the Gig Economy: 

Pew Research on The State of the Gig Economy in 2021

The Pew Research Center, a highly regarded non-profit, non-partisan D.C. think tank, recently released The State of Gig Work in 2021 report.  

The report covers the results of an in-depth survey of Americans who earn money from the gig economy, which Pew defined somewhat narrowly.  They only included workers who earned money by providing the following services via online gig platforms: 

"... driving for a ride-hailing app; shopping for or delivering groceries or household items; performing household tasks like cleaning someone’s home or assembling furniture, or running errands like picking up dry cleaning; making deliveries from a restaurant or store for a delivery app; using a personal vehicle to deliver packages to others via a mobile app or website such as Amazon Flex; or doing something else along these lines.

This leaves out many independent worker segments and platforms, including professional services.  

But by only looking at a subset of consumer services platforms, the study zeros in on the most controversial online gig platforms and work - ridesharing, deliver services and personal errand services.  

Pew found that 16% of adult Americans have earned money at some point via platforms included in their study, with 4% currently earning money via these platforms and an additional 5% saying they've earned money via these platforms over the past 12 months.  

Since there are about 258 million Americans 18 years and older, these percentages translate to roughly:

10.3 million Americans currently earn money as gig workers

23.2 million earned money as gig workers over the past year

41 million have done this type of gig work at some point in the past

The study's results echo the results of almost every other study done on the gig economy.  The quick summary is:

Most (78%) report having either a very positive experience (24%) or a somewhat positive experience (54%) doing gig work.  Only 17% report a negative experience.

Most work part-time, with only 8% saying they do this type of gig work more than 30 hours per week.

Most (58%) say the income they earn via gig work is either essential (23%) or important (35%) to meeting their basic needs.

The study chart below (click to enlarge) shows the reasons gig workers take on this type of work. 

Just as other studies have found (including ours), most gig workers do this work because it's a flexible way to supplement income.     ..... '

Restaurants Ready for Robotics

 Seen lots of evidence for this.   Are robotics ready to take up the slack?  Have yet to see a robot in action at a restaurant.  Inevitable to take up significant work, but how much and when?

 Desperate for Workers, Restaurants Turn to Robots

The New York Times, Janet Morrisey,  October 20, 2021

Restaurant and hotel owners are using robots to compensate for the pandemic-fueled worker shortage. Miso Robotics' Mike Bell said his company is seeing 150 inquiries weekly for its Flippy robot, which can fry fast food using artificial intelligence (AI), sensors, computer vision, and robotic arms; he said such robots improve cooking accuracy and consistency, reducing errors that could lead to foodborne illness. Bear Robotics' Servi robot employs cameras and laser sensors to carry plates of food from the kitchen to tables. Knightscope's robots patrol outdoor or indoor areas using AI, video, and two-way audio, and also feature thermal imaging and license plate recognition capabilities. Industry experts think labor shortages have ramped up robots' acceptance in the workplace. ... ' 

Digital Nomads Surging

A look at studies of the surge.

The Number of Digital Nomads Surged Again in 2021  

The pandemic-driven seismic shift to remote led to continued strong growth in the number of American digital nomads in 2021.  By Steve King

The MBO Partners 2021 State of Independence research study found that 15.5 million American workers currently describe themselves as digital nomads, increasing 42% from 2020 and 112% from the pre-pandemic year 2019 (click on the study chart below to enlarge).   .... ' 

Thoughts on the Great Resignation

Quitting vs Keeping

With So Many People Quitting, Don’t Overlook Those Who Stay

by Debbie Cohen and Kate Roeske-Zummer,  October 01, 2021  in  HBR

Summary.   The marketplace for talent has shifted. You need to think of your employees like customers and put thoughtful attention into retaining them. This is the first step to slow attrition and regain your growth curve. And this does not happen when they feel ignored in the...more

For anyone who doubted, the data is in. The Great Resignation is real and it’s happening. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that during the months of April, May, and June 2021 a total of 11.5 million workers quit their jobs. And it’s not over. According to Gallup research, 48 percent of employees are actively looking to make a change, and according to Personio research, nearly 1:4 will do so in the next six months. Those looking for new opportunities will find ripe opportunities; in June the U.S. hit an all-time high of 10.1 million job openings.

What does this all mean to your organization? You are likely juggling two pressing needs: hiring to backfill people who have left and hiring new people to support business growth. The scarcity is real — too few people for too many jobs. The imbalance of this supply-demand highlights more than ever that productivity is about people. ... ' 

AI Driven Video to Enhance Work Environment?

Seen hints of this in my increased use of  Youtube for keeping connected with tech changes.    Of course it is Google that is controlling the details of the AI driving what I  see.  Not always ideal, but if I could train it to optimize my needs?

How AI in Video Will Enhance Work in the Modern-Day Work Environment  by 7wData

Shaking off the dust from what could be described as the longest year known to man — remote work is a hot topic in the world of employment. By establishing both its benefits, as well as its challenges, remote work has people talking about its permanence. What is more, employees have become accustomed to remote working, in fact, many of them actually prefer it to the office. According to a FlexJobs survey, 65% of employee respondents reported wanting to be full-time remote post-pandemic, and 31% want a hybrid remote work environment — that’s 96% who desire some form of remote work.

These numbers inevitably mean that the methods in which we worked during the pandemic, primarily via the screen and through video calls, will have some longevity.

In the past year, there has been a daunting amount of “incidental” or unintentional content creation via the many different digital platforms we now operate on. With massive amounts of data, however, there are large sums of insight to be had.  ... '

Study on Aging Workforce and Robotics

Makes sense. How do we make such uses most efficient?   Teach both to collaborate well. Have my own ideas on that, lets collaborate. 

Robots Readily Adopted In the Aging Workplace, Study Finds   By MIT News  in CACM

Robots are more widely adopted in places with notably older workers, filling gaps created by a shortage of middle-aged workers in manual production tasks, according a study on robot adoption.

"Demographic change — aging — is one of the most important factors leading to the adoption of robotics and other automation technologies," says Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist and co-author, along with Pascual Restrepo at Boston University, of "Demographics and Automation,"   published in The Review of Economic Studies.

The researchers' model predicts that the effects of demographic change should be more pronounced in industries that rely more on middle-aged workers and in those that present greater technological opportunities for automation.

Acemoglu and Restrepo found a strong relationship between an aging work force — defined by the ratio of workers 56 and older to those ages 21 to 55 — and robot deployment in 60 countries. "Our findings suggest that quite a bit of investment in robotics is not driven by the fact that this is the next 'amazing frontier,' but because some countries have shortages of labor, especially middle-aged labor that would be necessary for blue-collar work," Acemoglu says.

From MIT News   View Full Article 

A different kind of Work from Home

 Thoughts on different kinds of work. 

The Rise of a Different Work-from-Home  by Jeff Jordan

Early in the COVID pandemic, my colleague D’Arcy Coolican and I penned “COVID-19 and the Great Rehiring”. The premise of the piece was that the magnitude of the disruption to employment during the pandemic would require a better set of tools to enable the unemployed to be efficiently rehired.

But there was one thing that we missed in the piece – that as the pandemic reshuffled workers’ priorities and revealed new ways to work, a ton of employed people would start quitting their jobs, what is now referred to as “The Great Resignation”.

It’s not exactly clear why so many people are deciding to quit their jobs — a myriad of reasons have been reported. Maybe the pandemic motivated them to re-evaluate their career direction. Maybe their employer put into place pandemic policies that they didn’t like, be that forced return-to-office or forced remote (depending on the person). But it’s also not clear what these people plan to do next.

I love businesses that enable individuals or small businesses to be economically empowered; platforms that give people the opportunity to build and run their own business, to reach potential customers or open up new active and passive revenue streams. I operated companies that do this, including eBay.com, PayPal, and OpenTable, and I’ve invested in companies that do this, including Airbnb, Instacart, and Shef among others. I track the category very closely.

What has become clear to me is that thanks to a rise in new marketplace platforms — there are new ways for many people to earn additional income or even a living — all from the comfort of their homes! A decade ago, I read a book called “What’s Mine is Yours; How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. My key take-away from the book was that each home has a plethora of assets that are badly utilized, and sharing them collaboratively could be good business for the owners. And sharing these assets means that others won’t need to purchase them, promoting sustainability.

And the earnings from these activities can be substantial. Take the example of Airbnb. The average earnings for new U.S. hosts who started hosting a single location during the pandemic was $8,000 for the year. TOP earning new hosts generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in income for the year. And many of these activities can be done at the same time – one could host guests in a spare bedroom on Airbnb, store goods or vehicles in your garage through Neighbor, cook meals in your kitchen through Shef, etc. There certainly is the potential to earn enough incremental income to quit a job!  ... ' 

Adapting to Gig Law

 Gig Law,  of how do we manage, or even define part time work, is increasingly important.  Here a first example of how this might be managed. 

Judge rules California Prop 22 gig workers law is unconstitutional

Voters approved the law in November, By Kim Lyons

California’s gig workers law, which allows companies like Uber and Lyft to treat workers as independent contractors— not employees— has been ruled unconstitutional and unenforceable by a judge. Voters approved the law as ballot initiative Proposition 22 in November, with companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash spending more than $200 million to campaign for the measure. Labor organizations, including the Service Employees International Union, opposed it.  ...  ' 

Towards Workforce Ecosystems

The Future of Work Is Through Workforce Ecosystems 

Workforce ecosystems can help leaders better manage changes driven by technological, social, and economic forces.

Elizabeth J. Altman, David Kiron, Jeff Schwartz, and Robin Jones  in SloanReview

Ask leaders today how they define their workforces, and you’ll immediately hear some version of “Well, that has become a very interesting question, and even more so recently.” Today’s workforces include not only employees, but also contractors, gig workers, professional service providers, application developers, crowdsourced contributors, and others.

Effectively managing a workforce comprising internal and external players in a way that is both aligned with an organization’s strategic goals and consistent with its values is now a critical business necessity. However, legacy management practices remain organized around an increasingly outdated employee-focused view of the workforce — that it consists of a group of hired employees performing work along linear career paths to create value for their organization.

More than 75% percent of respondents to our 2020 global survey of 5,118 managers now view their workforces in terms of both employees and non-employees. Growth in the variety, number, and importance of different types of work arrangements has become a critical factor in how work gets done in (and for) the enterprise.

We see many companies experimenting with ways to manage all types of workers in an integrated fashion. Several novel management practices have emerged across the business landscape. Even so, few — if any — best practices exist for dealing strategically and operationally with this distributed, diverse workforce that crosses internal and external boundaries. Executives seeking an integrated approach to managing an unintegrated workforce are left wanting.

We contend that the best way to conceptualize and address these shifts and related practices is through the lens of workforce ecosystems. We define workforce ecosystem as a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

Managing a workforce ecosystem goes beyond efforts to unify the dissimilar management practices currently organized around employees and non-employees. It’s a new approach to a new problem that demands a fresh solution. Our view draws upon two years of research that includes two global executive surveys and interviews with leaders and academic experts. This brief article introduces the concept of workforce ecosystems and discusses how they can help managers rethink the way they align their business and workforce strategies.

Four Reasons to Focus on Workforce Ecosystems:

Below, we highlight a series of shifts — driven by technological, social, and economic forces — that current management practices do not sufficiently address.  ... '

Power Shift to Employees?

Tech Pay Survey Shows Power Shift to Employees, By The Information, July 23, 2021

The technology-business boom is giving white-collar workers more leverage with employers.

At tech companies, the traditional practice of allowing employees' shares to vest only after a worker reaches a full year of employment appears to be eroding. More than 20% of surveyed managers and employees said their stock begins to vest right away or after the end of their third month of employment.

The findings from a survey about compensation and workplace practices show how the balance of power has started to shift toward employees amid the surge of capital for startups and record earnings of bigger companies.

Separately, the majority of respondents said their companies rarely use hiring practices that are shown to improve diversity ....

From The Information  

Which Companies are Transforming Work?

Useful thoughts.    What have we really transformed to? 

Readers Ask: Which Companies Are Transforming Work?   by Kristen Senz  in HBSWK

Joseph Fuller answers readers' questions about automation, virtual internships, and the future of work on Working Knowledge’s “Office Hours” series.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated workforce shifts that had been gaining momentum before the public health crisis, thrusting employers and workers into a new era within months.

Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-leader of the School’s Managing the Future of Work initiative, recently answered reader questions on Instagram, as part of our ongoing “Office Hours” series.

Fuller’s research probes the "skills gap" and the paradox that many employers struggle to fill jobs while millions of Americans remain unemployed, underemployed, or have left the workforce. He has also written about the caregiving roles of employees and strengthening the education-to-work pipeline.

The following is a transcript of questions posed by Instagram users and Fuller’s answers:

Should we be worried about the current “worker shortage”?

"We should absolutely be worried about the current worker shortage, for three or four reasons. One is it reflects in part stagnation and actually decline of the workforce participation rate. We have a large number of prime working age adults, particularly males, who are neither in school, in employment, or somehow involved in the criminal justice system. They’re just not working.

"WE DO A VERY POOR JOB OF TEACHING THAT IN THE UNITED STATES—GIVING PEOPLE A BASIC FAMILIARITY WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY."

"The second is that a lot of the shortage of workers is coming in the form of digital natives who can deal with the types of technologies that are going to be more and more prevalent in the workplace. We do a very poor job of teaching that in the United States—giving people a basic familiarity with digital technology that they’re going to need going forward.

"The final thing is that a lot of this shortage covers up the fact that there’s a significant population of lower-skilled, lower educational-attainment workers out there, many who speak English as a second language, who have worked in service industries that have been very, very badly damaged by COVID. They’re going to have a hard time finding work that accommodates their skills and pays them decently going forward."

Are there any companies standing out from the others in how they’re transforming work?

"Through COVID, the two companies that jump out at me as being most innovative in their work practices and in mobilizing people are companies of great size that have been hugely affected by COVID positively—namely, Walmart and Amazon.

"I know those are not always companies that people view favorably in terms of work, but in the last 10 years, Walmart has been an amazing innovator in the space in terms of skills development and upskilling its own workforce. Amazon has shown incredible resilience in scaling up its workforce and using technology to make people more productive and to enhance workplace safety."

Is automation a threat to jobs? If so, how should government, business, and employees respond? ... 

Labor Intensive Work and Analytics

There will continue to be labor intensive jobs, with key skills required. 

Labor-intensive factories—analytics-intensive productivity

April 21, 2021 | Article in McKinsey

By Manuel Gómez, Jorge Riveros, and Kevin Sachs

New analytics tools can help manufacturers in labor-intensive sectors boost productivity and earnings by double-digit percentages.

Amid the extraordinary transformation of manufacturing over the past decade as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) advances through sector after sector, some manufacturers still face a challenge almost as old as manufacturing itself: how to achieve lasting productivity gains from labor-intensive operations.

  00:00   Audio  Listen to this article

The seemingly obvious solution is sometimes summarized as swapping labor for capital, in the form of automation. Despite the availability of ever-more-sophisticated machinery at ever-lower cost, in many situations a more attractive alternative is to use digital and analytics technologies to support people rather than supplant them.

Even today, labor-intensive sectors can include everything from toys, apparel, and jewelry to medical devices, consumer-electronic products, electrical goods, and automotive components. These sectors are a critical force in emerging economies, providing employment that reduces poverty and strengthens social stability.

Where labor is so instrumental in creating value, managing a workforce becomes a matter of strategic importance. Companies that perform better at hiring, retaining, and—most crucial of all—engaging their workers can build a substantial advantage over their competitors. To do so, they must overcome a host of challenges, some of which became even more vexing under COVID-19. Ensuring that workers feel safe must, of course, be the highest priority. But providing a protective environment may not be enough to persuade every worker to come into factories—particularly workers juggling responsibilities to care for children and families that may have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Companies that perform better at hiring, retaining, and—most crucial of all—engaging their workers can build a substantial advantage over their competitors. ... '  ( 6 pages)