Ready, steady, GO!

A disruptive world brings fast-paced change. Laurna Munro, business performance facilitator, explores disruption types, the effects on the labour force and workplace culture. She offers steps that organisations can take to respond to our disrupted world.

If you don’t take the time to understand what the disrupted world is doing to your organisation and your employees, your culture and the brand you have built could erode, which means you are putting the future of your organisation at risk of becoming irrelevant. Disruption is here, and it is intensifying.

Disruption exists beyond technology

The types of disruptions that are affecting organisations include shifts in economic activity, globalisation, our response to COVID-19, and the acceleration of activity through technology, data and demographic changes.

A briefing note prepared by the McKinsey Global Institute for the World Economic Forum in January 2019 notes that disruption is

intensifying, the gap between those embracing change and those falling behind is growing, and we are moving toward a more inclusive society. The briefing highlights that, although we are facing intense competitive and societal challenges, the opportunity is also there to create value.

The speed and scale of disruption are affecting the New Zealand labour force

The speed and scale of disruption are affecting labour force availability. The statistics below highlight what we can expect to see with regard to access to talent.

• Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report: 11 per cent of organisations believe the whole workforce will need to change its skills and capabilities in the next three years, and less than 5 per cent of New Zealand organisations surveyed are confident they know what the skills of the future are going to be.

• Mercer’s thriving in the age of disruption: estimates 35 per cent of skills used today won’t be relevant in three years. It identifies trust, transparency, inclusiveness, connectedness and approachability as the key evaluative characteristics of a thriving workplace.

• National Labour force projections: the labour force will age, and this is reflected in a rising median age and an increasing proportion of the labour force being in the older generations.

• The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s medium to long-term employment outlook forecast: as we move towards 2026, employment growth will be most substantial for highly skilled occupations (27,400 average annual increase) and weakest for lower-skilled occupations (14,000 annually).

Disruption will affect employees and organisations

Because the age composition of employees is changing, and our employees are living through these disruptions, their points of concern are changing. Employees are worried about financial security, their value, how they will get the new skill(s) they need, and their ability to keep working in the face of any illness or disability issues that occur as they age. For example, Statistics New Zealand calculated that a disabled person is three times less likely to be in work, the Ministry of Health identified that 24 per cent of New Zealanders are disabled and more than 60 per cent of disabled adults aged 45 years and over have multiple impairments.

Disruption is intensifying, the gap between those embracing change and those falling behind is growing, and we are moving toward a more inclusive society.

Disruption plays havoc with workplaces and the personal lives of employees. The changes that come with disruption also bring waves of excitement, uncertainty, noise and stress. We have become more productive in some areas of life and blinded by distraction in others, connected with more people but often feel disconnected. We are empowered with knowledge that we don’t feel empowered to act on, and, as Hans Rosling says in his book Factfulness, “our instincts distort our perspective of the world and prevent us from seeing how it actually is”. In short, most of us are poorly equipped to navigate a disrupted world, but we can take action to help equip our employees and organisation to do so.

Taking action

You can work with your leadership team to define who is responsible and accountable for enabling the following seven actions to help navigate the effects of disruption on your organisation.

1. Monitor and evaluate the characteristic of the positive culture you want to maintain.

2. Help your leadership and management teams to become informed about the implications of disruption on your organisation’s future through the testing of assumptions and seeking perspectives on the resilience of your product or service offering.