'We are all living in the age of chaos'

'We are all living in the age of chaos'

How will the disruption of today affect the future of work? To answer that question, we have to first accept that we are being disrupted and there is no alternative but to live and work with that disruption. Indraneel Kumar Das, Head of L&D at Byjus Tuition Centre, talks about how he came to this conclusion By Sudeshna Mitra

Culture has emerged as one of the highly prioritised factors among job seekers globally. A recent study conducted by Randstad has found that as many as 41% of Singaporeans would rather be unemployed than feel unhappy in a job and more than half (52%) would quit if their jobs prevented them from enjoying life.

This finding, and others like it from around the world, clearly depict that going forward into the future of work, leaders will need to be extra cautious about offering the right kind of culture to retain the key talent into the workforce, and efforts have to be made by both internal and external stakeholders to succeed in doing so.

To discuss how such factors are going to affect the investments and plannings of the future of work, People Matters chatted with Indraneel Kumar Das, Head of L&D at Byjus Tuition Centre. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

A recent study conducted by Deloitte states that 80% of the respondents believe it is important for external workers to participate in the organisation’s culture. But achieving this alignment is not easy. As you are associated with a company that works with external stakeholders and workers to a great extent, how do you look at this statement?

At the heart of that study is confronting the challenges of intentionally leading and coordinating workforce ecosystems OR orchestrating workforce ecosystems. In a world changing from VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) to BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) in less than 2 years’ time with a 30-50% contingent work-

force, we are all looking at a recipe for disaster if we do not have a strong cultural foundation in place.

In that context, I would suggest that we not compartmentalise external and internal workers just by their location. Rather, can we develop a gig mindset in every employee and stakeholder? Bear in mind that the first step of culture building is working on mindsets, beliefs, and behaviours. This gig mindset is a mindset of being a self-starter, taking ownership, accountability and initiative (agnostic to role), innovating big and small, constantly failing and learning. By trying a distributed and networking leadership model, we can empower and engage the external stakeholders and employees to participate in a thriving org culture.

Here are some suggestions: • Create and align to a purpose driven culture – define and drive a common ‘Why’ amongst one and all. • Embrace diverse voices and opinions to create the framework of common cultural tenets irrespective of location, geography, mindset. • Storytelling is a great tool to build culture competencies – use it to cascade culture. Intentionally, weave in the gig stories in your meetings.

Are the needs of internal and external employees really that different? The context might be different, but human beings are social animals

• Build an instant hyperpersonalised feedback mechanism for everyone – make time for regular cadence on the same. • Recognise cross functional wins – big or small, internal or external, gig or otherwise. • Be fluid and ready to embrace nimbleness and agility in every experience.

Going forward, to what extent will it be possible for organisations to balance the needs of external and internal employees in the hybrid era of work where even internal employees don’t meet in person very often?

In response to this, I will dig deeper and ask myself: are the needs of internal and external employees really that different? The context might be different, but human beings are social animals. You cannot take away that innate aspect of human nature even in the strictest cases of gig or remote work culture. Given this fact, some of the most basic indicative needs of any employee at work would be to learn, earn, and grow in a connected workplace.

As HR professionals, we should consciously step up our efforts to create employee experiences which speak to these three needs. Any organisation that offers challenging and meaningful work, ongoing learning, and a meritocratic workplace culture has already won the battle.

Key elements of a thriving hybrid work culture can be: • Rethink empowerment in smaller flexible team set ups. • Provide equal opportunity to everyone • Find creative ways to collaborate. • Use core competencies of empathy, communication and inclusiveness to drive connectedness. • Re-align work and life to reduce digital burnouts. • Discover a powerful common individual and organisational purpose.

In an article, Forbes stated, “It’s been predicted that 85% of the jobs that will be available in 2030 don’t yet exist!” Amid such a scenario, what do you think about the relevance of the skills being imparted to the present workforce?

In my experience, I think we are only incrementally

innovating in this space. We need to get more aggressive on skill development. Researchers, academicians, consultants and of course organisations’ talent development should pave the way. Broadly speaking, we know that all the future skills will evolve with tech innovation. So as learning professionals, we need to keep up and improve the pace of largescale workforce capability changes.

Skilling, reskilling and upskilling is the name of the game. Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time on the first one. We need to pivot to the next two – fast. The World Economic Forum estimates that, by 2025, 50% of all employees will need reskilling due to adopting new technology. Industry 4.0 is here, already. Both individuals and companies need to commit to reskilling and upskilling and make career development basis these an essential element of the future workforce. Great efforts should be taken to make these learning opportunities, such as reskilling and upskilling, accessible, available, and affordable to the large workforce. Current skill building is largely limited to help employees do their current jobs better, and hence it is myopic.

So, amidst all this harsh reality, what can we do? If I must define the change in one sentence – create a culture of lifelong learning in your organisations, backed by an unheard-of rate of technology adoption.

How do you plan to restructure your own leadership style to match such changes penetrating the workforce?

I think the first step I took was accepting the fact that we are all living in the age of chaos. The next step was to acquire knowledge around understanding these chaotic patterns and the effect they will have on my work.

My further steps were to find out the answers to these questions and embed them in my leadership quotient, in no particular order: • Am I leading with trust, empathy, and mindfulness ,or with control? • Do I know the values and motivations of my team members across generations? • What am I doing to keep my team agile and future ready? • Do I have a ready pool of talent prepared to face black swan events, if and when? • Am I building resilience in the team? How am I ensuring my new workforce is not fragile? • On my priority list, where does learning, re-learning and re-orientation feature? • Am I creating leaders who can be self-responsible, self-driven and conscious? • Am I leading with clarity and purpose? • What changes do I need to make amidst increased digitalisation and new age teams? • Am I creatively collaborating more?

Have I figured out all? No.

Have these impacted my leadership style? Oh, yes!