Video transcript: Shaping the future workforce

Transcript

Peter Brown: The nature of work is constantly changing. It always has and it always will.

Alexa Highfield: The organisations that are able to constantly adapt, evolve, they are the ones that are going to be fit for the future.

Lilia Christofi: Any change can feel daunting and so it's important that, as we always say, take people on the journey with you.

Peter: We work with many clients across all sectors to help them with their workforce and people challenges, and that ranges from how are they paying people? How are they incentivising people? How are they attracting the right skills and talent in that organisation? How are they then developing those people, giving them the skills to maintain their relevance?

Alexa: I do a lot of work with law firms and they've been under a huge amount of pressure to, in the UK, chase the salaries that are offered by the US firms. But then the reason that people leave isn't salary. It's about work-life balance. It's about other things. They want purpose, they want a great place to work. They want to feel like they belong. So we work with organisations around how to make that really compelling employee value proposition.

Peter: Having that deep sector expertise is absolutely critical. It’s people who understand that environment, they understand what it feels like.

Alexa: One of my longstanding clients is a financial services organisation, and about three years ago they had a new CEO come in that really wanted to take them to the next level. We partnered with them to look at how they were structured, to think about how they drive more efficiency, more productivity, and ultimately got them to a point where they were able to reorganise, to reinvest in their technology, to pay their people more, to bring new talent in, and we're still partnering with that organisation on AI and how they better embrace that.

Lilia: When we try to deal with the challenges of communicating to the workforce around the use and proliferation of AI; the main thing is about making sure that we are engaging with the whole organisation.

Pete: Forward-looking organisations are redesigning work around where do you use AI to automate or augment? What does that mean for human beings?

Lilia: The importance of having skills and culture in delivering AI is actually all about the mindset. If you don't have the right mindset to be able to adopt a new technology or change behavioural habits, then it will be so much more difficult to gain the benefits.

Alexa: We are helping organisations think about AI strategically in terms of the enterprise. How do I integrate AI into what I do, how we operate; and secondly how do we help our workforce to adopt and embrace those AI tools?

Lilia: Just by deploying a tool somewhere doesn't mean people will use it. Shaping their understanding around the benefits that they can get out of that tool is what really makes a difference.

Pete: What I would say is a constant though, is that requirement for human skills; judgement, empathy, problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, creating followership.

Alexa: I just love helping organisations to really think about how they get the best out of their people to drive their performance.