Disruptive tech can help employees

Getting a job has never been easy, and keeping it is becoming increasingly difficult. The machine-human relationship is steadily tilting against people. Businesses are bringing more and more automation into their processes. Not just blue collar or early career professionals, even senior managers and business leaders have to make steady efforts to remain relevant for organisations. 
 

While technology is creating redundancies, it is also creating options for employees to pivot their careers in a new direction. Two recent reports examine the current landscape of disappearing jobs while offering ideas on the path ahead. 

Employers anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23 per cent of jobs in the next five years, according to The Future of Jobs survey by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The largest job creation and destruction effects come from environmental, technology and economic trends, says the survey, which covered  803 companies — collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers — across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions. 
 

In the survey, employers estimate that 44 per cent of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Six in 10 workers will require training before 2027, but only half of workers are seen to have access to adequate training opportunities today. While the pace of automation is not increasing, employees remain at risk. The WEF survey says that reasoning, communicating and coordinating — all traits with a comparative advantage for humans — are expected to be more automatable in the future. 
 

For employers there is more pressure to improve employee engagement, office experience and upskilling. In all of these areas technology can play a critical role. Rising uncertainties lead to lower employee commitment. This can create a downward spiral where employees become disheartened and further hurt their relevance to the larger organisational objective.
 

The solution is offered in a new report by Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) and SAP. Based on a survey, the report argues for using technology to understand employee concerns and to improve employee engagement. “The need for mass customisation had already propelled the HR tech ecosystem over the last few years to grow by leaps and bounds. The pandemic has not only accelerated the adoption of such technology but pushed the frontiers on all other talent management functions, in order to shape the larger people strategy,’’ the SHRM report says. 
 

Generative AI tools with customisation options and IoT communication devices are being used to capture in-person interactions and generate insights from therein in many organisations, says the SHRM survey, which captured the views of over 355 HR leaders and practitioners. By detecting behavioural patterns in search history, learning courses enrolled/ completed, interactions with team-members, specialisation and interests, organisations can draw individual learning maps for employees, according to the survey. This becomes an important input for companies when they begin to reorganise their teams or reskill employees for new functions and roles. 
 

Employers can’t expect high commitment if employees are constantly worried about losing their position. “With mass layoffs making the headlines way too frequently, HR leaders have a mammoth task at hand when it comes to ensuring positive employee experiences. Dealing with empathy has become the new norm to ensure minimum fallout for the future world of work,” says Achal Khanna, CEO,  SHRM India, APAC and MENA. “And the centre of these experiences is the effective use of right technology.”
 

A collaborative, empathetic and technology infused effort should guide HR policies. Understanding the employee mindset is the first step towards identifying the appropriate set of new skills for emerging organisational needs. Technology can aid the creation of new opportunities even as it eliminates existing roles.