Podcast: Agility, fluidity, productivity – KellyOCG’s view on the new workforce

Do people have the right technology to foster continued growth in their organisations? That’s one of the key questions that Tammy Browning, President of KellyOCG, the workforce strategy consultants, asks in the latest episode of Matt Alder’s podcast Recruiting Future.

It’s an issue that the KellyOCG’s latest Global Workforce Agility report hopes to provide some insight on, as Tammy goes on to detail the expanse of the data collected: 

“Out of the APAC regions we’ve received such a wide range of feedback from the stakeholders we engaged there. We extended the overall survey to a global reach of over a thousand executives, 20% of them being either C-suite or board member titles and levels in the organizations across 13 different countries, which was Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, the US, and others.

“What we’ve discovered [are] significant findings and well-received feedback around this report related to what we call the Vanguard, those organizations that are very ahead of the curve, and the Laggards, those that are maybe behind the curve but are seeking or aspiring to do something slightly different from a talent attraction or ‘what’s next’ perspective.”

Unsurprisingly, the companies that are really flying are the ones that prioritize not only diversity, equity and inclusion, but also employee wellbeing, in many cases respondents saying that employee satisfaction is as important, if not more so, than customer satisfaction. Another crucial piece of the puzzle for the Vanguard is tech adoption. Having a leading-edge tech environment enables workforce fluidity – as you’d hope it would. Here comes the learning piece:

“We’re seeing some other impactful things in the report as well around how training is a critical component of employees workforce in the future. Vanguards are investing further in trainings and incentive programs. Then in North America, we’re seeing many organizations step out and embrace this full-time work-from-home or optional hybrid model. We’re seeing that more prevalent in North America than we are in some of the other regions, although I anticipate and what the report showed is that in APAC, over 11% of the workers will sustain remote.

“Yet in Europe, what we’re seeing is about 7% of the organization saying that they’re going to allow their workers to stay remote. If you think of the disconnect between what the workers want, what the employees themselves want, and what organizations are saying, it’s vast.”

Europe needs to listen to its employees a bit more it seems. But let’s not leave it there, Tammy thinks we’ll work it out:

“I think many organizations will find ways to enable the work-from-home. When you think about the value that has come as a result of that, particularly in my world where our job is to find work for people, we’ve now been able to open up jobs to the world that can now be done anywhere in the world at any time, and time zones and other issues are not a factor anymore. I do think we will sustain this remote work environment.”

Check out the full episode above.

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