today’s consumer experience into the workplace.
The New Employment Contract: Continuous Learning
Before we address the research supporting an employee’s desire to learn and grow, let’s consider the issue from a company’s perspective. Skills, not jobs, will become the new currency of the labor market.18 We’ve already seen that in today’s rapidly changing business environment the half-life of skills is less than five years. This means we all have to embrace a lifetime of learning rather than continue with the old mindset where we spend the first part of our lives learning, the next phase working and the last stage in retirement. Such a transformation is particularly needed because we are living longer and are likely to experience several different careers in the course of a lifetime.
A study by McKinsey & Company in late 2017 found that 66 percent of top executives said retraining and upskilling their employees were urgent business priorities.19 More than 8 out of 10 global managers view learning as an important or very important issue for organizations today.20 However, companies are aware that they aren’t keeping up with the demand for personalized, dynamic, continuous learning opportunities. As a result, they’re shifting to self-directed practices that enable people to develop themselves: on-the-job learning, access to massive online open courses (MOOCs) or other online content curated for their experiences. Cementing the importance of continuous learning for organizations, recent Glassdoor data reveal that the “ability to learn and progress” is now the key driver of a company’s employment brand.21 So, in today’s highly competitive talent market, continuous learning is a business priority. Furthermore, LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report indicates 93 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if the company invested in their careers.22
Studies of the attitudes of new college graduates in the United States and United Kingdom found some alarming results.23 When new college graduates enter the workforce, they report being eager, prepared, passionate and committed, but one or two years later, those same graduates feel disillusioned, underemployed and undervalued. These individuals are looking for a more personalized experience at work, where their passions will be acknowledged and their career paths or work experiences are customized to their interests.
By creating an Inside Gig experience, companies can offer employees a better learning experience, improved variety in career development, and the possibility of keeping them engaged in corporate strategy, all of which will help them utilize their skills and not feel underemployed. According to a 2019 Mercer report, 51 percent of employees are willing to take an internal gig to gain experience, up from 38 percent in 2018.24
Through a series of interviews with companies experimenting with project-based opportunity platforms, we have learned that innovative companies are trying to help employees identify prospects for real-time learning. While almost all of these organizations provided these learning experiences on top of employees’ regular work responsibilities, the opportunities offered employees the ability to leverage skill sets in new contexts or grow skill sets by applying them in a larger or different manner than they were able to do in the past. Connecting employees to the learning possibilities they desire is perceived to be highly valuable to both employees and employers. Learning has become an important commodity for employees in a constantly evolving business environment where skills can quickly become obsolete if learning isn’t continuous.
The New Employment Contract: Meeting Changing Expectations
As organizations build people practices, they need to consider what employees or managers want or expect. To attract new employees to a company, the research is clear: career advancement, challenging work and opportunities to learn new skills are essential.25 So providing employees with a diverse set of experiences in which they can craft their own path will help organizations entice the best talent in the marketplace.
Most companies that have experimented with internal talent networks have done so for the same reason—they’re trying to retain their best talent. It is often said that it is much easier to get a job in a different company than it is to transfer to a different department within the same firm. Employees today want new and different experiences. Yet most jobs are so specialized that people get “stuck” doing the same work over and over again, which leads to boredom and disengagement. If employees don’t get the work experiences they want, they won’t hesitate to leave in search of better opportunities. A chance to work with different people on different projects is exactly the type of dynamic learning experience today’s employees seek.
So what can we learn from the gig economy? While flexibility and control are the chief reasons people freelance, the ability to choose projects is also important to them, especially for full-time freelancers. Furthermore, freelancers are 24 percent more likely to feel their work gives them the opportunity to pursue projects they’re passionate about or find meaningful, and they’re 14 percent more likely to feel their work provides them with opportunities for learning and growth.26
So two significant reasons for the increase in gig work in companies are freelancers’ desire to select what work they engage with, and the need for companies to acquire greater agility in terms of capacity and capability. With the barriers to free-agent or contingent work being low, talent demanding more diverse work and greater choice, and the opportunity for rapid acquisition of new skills, there is pressure to create an employee experience and mindset like that of a free agent inside organizations.
This is the question for companies to consider: Can you provide people with the experiences they want inside the organization rather than have them rely on freelancing to achieve greater diversity and choice in their work? We believe the answer is yes! The six core principles presented in Part Two create a foundation to attract the best talent, improve organizational productivity, foster innovation and enable companies to be more agile and stay ahead of the competition.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
•The global workforce is more diverse than ever before in terms of gender, age, culture, religion, sexual preference and identification. Creating a one-size-fits-all employee experience no longer works.
•The Fourth Industrial Revolution has created technological advances that have disrupted industries and the way we work, resulting in massive shifts in the skills needed in the workplace. Job losses due to skill obsolescence, though significant, will be surpassed by the growth of new jobs that never existed before, requiring new skills that aren’t widely available in the labor market.
•Organizations need to be more agile and responsive to the changes created by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Organizational hierarchy and functional silos are being replaced by flatter, more fluid structures that rely on purpose-built networks of teams.
•The democratization of work puts more control in the hands of employees. These employees want more choice and diversity in the projects they work on so that they can continuously learn and fully utilize all of the skills they have to contribute to the success of their company.
•By creating an Inside Gig experience, a more agile work environment can leverage the full set of capabilities within an organization and unleash capacity by helping employees tap into their passions and fuel a continuous learning opportunity. This allows a company to build the skills needed as new technologies emerge in the workplace.
REFLECTION POINTS
How are the demographics of your company changing?
Has this change in demographics resulted in a shift in employee
