By 2022, employers could fragment into three distinct types, according to a PwC report: the ‘orange’ world, made up of smaller companies who collaborate with one another; the ‘green’ world, where companies’ agendas are dominated by corporate social responsibility; and the ‘blue’ world where already large successful organisations grow bigger.
The emergence of these three worlds was going to create fresh challenges for HR, it warned.
PwC’s report, The Future of Work: a Journey to 2022, looks at how disruptive innovations are creating new industries and business models, and destroying old ones.
“New technologies, data analytics and social networks are having a huge impact on how people communicate, collaborate and work. As generations collide, workforces become more diverse and people work longer; traditional career models may soon be a thing of the past. Many of the roles and job titles of tomorrow will be ones we’ve not even thought of yet,” it said.
The report considers how these three worlds are likely to be shaped by the changes coming up over the next eight years and look at the recruitment, reward and employee engagement strategies that are likely to be most relevant as these worlds evolve.
By 2022, the radical change in business models will mean that companies will be facing further issues such as more sophisticated people measurement techniques, the increasing importance of social capital and relationships and vanishing boundaries between work and personal life as companies assume greater responsibility for the social welfare of their employees.
To engage employees and maximise their value, organisations need to design new reward mechanisms that meet these needs
Encouragingly, PwC found that most HR professionals were prepared for these seismic changes. Almost a quarter are “actively considering the evolving and multiple visions of the future” as part of their long-term business planning, while more than half anticipate changes and are building possible future scenarios into their talent pipelines.
“We are also seeing these trends in Malta,” Claudine Attard, responsible for HR advisory services at PwC Malta, said.
“Companies are increasingly recognising the need for more tools such as HR systems that enable them to analyse human capital metrics such as productivity and to use these metrics for improving their performance. The elements that motivate employees are also changing, and in order to succeed in engaging employees and maximise their value, organisations need to design new reward mechanisms that meet these needs. One mechanism that is gaining momentum in Malta is the introduction of share options.”
The report is based on a survey of more than 10,000 people across the UK, Germany, the US, China and India and input comes from 500 HR professionals across the world.
The report can be accessed at www.pwc/mt/futureofwork.
Here are some of the findings:
• 64 per cent of people around the world believe that technology will improve their job prospects;
• 65 per cent of people around the world want to work for an organisation with a powerful social conscience;
• 36 per cent of HR professionals are building their talent strategies around their organisations’ social and environmental conscience, which is intrinsic to the brand and matches their people’s values and beliefs;
• 40 per cent of people around the world believe that traditional employment won’t be around in the future. Instead, people will have their own ‘brands’ and sell their skills to those who need them;
• 46 per cent of HR professionals predict that at least 20 per cent of their workforce will be made up of contractors or temporary workers by 2022.