From AI to virtual collaboration to the gig economy, technology continues to revolutionize the nature of work. Although it is a main driver, technological advancement is one of many forces that will shape how and where people work in the coming years.
The Kansas City Business Journal recently gathered several industry experts to discuss how business owners and managers can not only adapt to the rapidly changing workforce trends, but also harness new tools and employ strategies to help their companies and employees prepare for the changes ahead. Publisher Stacie Prosser moderated the discussion.
Note: You can learn more about the moderator and the panelists by viewing the attached photo gallery.
Stacie Prosser of the Kansas City Business Journal: We’ll start with a big picture question. Matt, I know you didn’t bring your crystal ball, but what does the workplace of the future look like?
Matt Sharples of TriCom Technical Services: We’re in the most rapidly changing workplace of the last 100 years because of technology and other factors coming together. First, we will see a lot more remote work. Currently, over 50% of people work one day a month from either home or a third place. I think you’ll see more of that.
We’re experiencing more freelancing as well.
Technology will be an enabler. People worry about being displaced by technology. But if you look at the past, technology has always helped people get better jobs and allows them to work on bigger problems while technology works on the lower level things. It’s a trend that can actually increase wages.
And you’re right. None of us has a crystal ball. There are a lot of things in play, and it’s moving rapidly. It’s scaring a lot of people, and I can see why that would be.
Steve Beck of PARIC: I agree with Matt; technology and behavioral health will play a large part in the workplace of the future. The future is moving more toward open conversations, and both technology and behavioral health are playing a large factor in these conversations. They both will dictate how culture evolves, work is done and the workplace moves forward.
Erica Brune of Lever1: My crystal ball tells me that the workplace of the future is a culture that is less stressful than traditional work environments have been. The feedback we get from employees — and employers, too — is that the pressure and stress are alienating some of the newer generations from wanting to take full-time, in-house jobs.
They want a flexible work environment and a workplace infrastructure that supports that. You can have unlimited PTO, but if you don’t feel like you can use it, your anxiety goes up. If you’re so nervous about what somebody may say about you or that your client won’t be taken care of if you take PTO, you don’t enjoy your work and don’t want to stay in that environment.
Employers can create more cross-training and documented processes and procedures so employees are more comfortable stepping away to attend important personal events. Employees are still putting in their hours, and they’re still reaching their deliverables, but without this weighted pressure that is causing the health issues and mental illness we’re seeing. People don’t want to stay in these full-time, traditional cubicle jobs anymore. And that’s a problem for people who have to fill those jobs.
Jasmine Baudler of Stellar Image Studios: The workplace of the future is focusing more on mental health and making sure that there’s less presenteeism — when you’re at work but you’re not mentally present.
I always encourage our employees to take mental health days. I’m hoping that the workplace of the future will encourage more of that, because your mental health is just as important as your physical health.
That starts at the top. As a business owner, it’s hard to take those personal mental health days. But in order to encourage my team to do it, I have to do it as well.
Sharples: In some ways, the workplace is no longer a place. It’s an experience. People want to feel not just a part of a workplace, but also feel connected. But as both of you have mentioned, it’s stressful now because you’re always connected. You’re almost always on-call.
We have to be mindful of keeping people connected human to human versus through email or devices. Employers have to create ways for employees to build relationships voice to voice and face to face.
Prosser: With more people working remotely, it does get harder and harder to build teams and to create that employee experience. Jasmine, how will we use video in the workplace to help employees communicate internally?
Baudler: Because my company is in video production, we use a lot of remote workers, and that has really helped us propel our business. We have a small but mighty team in-house. We also have the option to employ top talent from anywhere in the world when we need to. And although we’re not under the same roof, they’re providing an excellent service.
It allows us to keep costs down and still provide that excellent service. Many different, very affordable virtual tools are available that allow you to collaborate. It is as if you were in the same conference room. We can relay what our client wants to those remote workers very easily through these tools.
Prosser: And how will this remote workforce be used as a marketing tool to generate business?
Baudler: We provide a better product and a better service because we have access to the best talent. Our clients are happy because they’re getting a great video.
Prosser: Matt, because of your industry, I would think that a lot of your people can work from just about anywhere.
Sharples: Yes, and we’re doing less than some of our competitors. One trend in the tech world is East and West Coast companies hiring people in Kansas City to work for them remotely.
When I was thinking about the video piece, I was reminded of one of my directors giving job reviews over the phone. When he switched to video, he found that he was much more effective. Being able to see facial expressions helped a lot.
Beck: We are embracing technology and video within the construction industry, especially in the field. We have capabilities to include video and remote communication tools so our teams (internal and external) are able to communicate in real time and work together to keep a project moving forward.
With PARIC having offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, we do embrace video technology to keep face-to-face meetings and the team involved with each other.
We have invested heavily in our virtual design construction group and have a team of highly skilled people who are continuing to elevate our technology and capabilities.
Prosser: Erica, how do you see automation and advanced technology affecting your workplace?
Brune: We’ve come pretty far in the HR world with time-tracking. It has gone mobile, and we can geo-target.
The onboarding process has changed, too. It used to be that new hires had to come in and sit down for half a day and fill out their address 50 times. Some people are still doing that, but technological advancements exist that allow all of that to be done remotely, including the I-9 verification.
Baudler: A lot of people have been reaching out to us wanting videos for their HR department so that the HR director does not have to spend as much time in a conference room onboarding new recruits. They want a condensed, comprehensive video that can tell their message and story in just a few minutes. And watching a video is easier for an employee than reading a 50-page manual.
Beck: In relation to the HR aspect, PARIC has expanded our video training through our HR team this year. While we have provided training in the past, we have taken it to another level this year to allow employees, at all levels, to further their education and advance within their personal and professional lives.
Prosser: I want to shift gears and talk about the labor shortage. What do you perceive will be the impact on the future workforce if the labor shortage continues?
Beck: Within the construction industry, the continuation of a labor shortage will have a very detrimental impact. We heavily rely on skilled and unskilled labor to be able to build, and it is a current challenge to find talent in both of those groups.
It has been exciting to see what some of the economic development councils, schools and other industries are doing to help educate our community about the advantages of skilled labor. We hope to see this type of momentum continue.
With every problem come solutions. This labor shortage has forced the industry to think outside the box, and we are now creating numerous ways of prefabrication in nearly all aspects of construction.
Sharples: I think it’s going to get worse until we pass some sort of immigration reform and restart a more robust immigration program into the United States. At some point, you can’t create people, and 2 million baby boomers are moving out of the workforce every year. They will work longer, but still they’re highly specialized workers within certain segments. We have quite a few baby boomers who are contracting for us with very specific skills. And when they decide to retire, there’s not a millennial or a Gen Xer who has some of those old-school coding skills.
It’s going to get tough. Companies are going to have to think more strategically about how they upskill people within their own organization, how they bring people on and what they require of people. For example, you’re starting to see some of the big tech firms do away with the four-year degree requirement. I don’t know if that’s going to happen across the board, but companies are going to have to get a lot more creative about how they bring talent on board.
Brune: There’s a big shift from checking resumes for a degree to applicable skills — do they know how to do this with this software? The high schools are already tuned in. They’re already gearing students and parents to understand what jobs are available and what skills are needed to fill those jobs. But it’s not going to impact the workforce for another five to 10 years because they’re still grooming those people.
My generation was told, “You get any degree, and you’ll get a good job, and you’ll stay in that job and grow your career.” It has completely shifted.
Outsourcing is a great solution. Stop thinking you need to invent a product or a solution in-house. Create those strategic partnerships. Go to somebody who is already doing it well. Figure out a way to use their service as a product within your company versus starting from scratch.
Sharples: Upskilling is also a big component. We need to find people who are working other jobs and want to get into technology. Getting skilled training is one of the best ways to move beyond living paycheck to paycheck. We’re seeing incredible raises within tech. People are doubling their salaries within two and three years.
Prosser: Because of their increased certifications?
Sharples: Yes, as well as their ability. Who they are is more important than what skills they have initially because people can learn. You have to build continuous learning into your organization no matter what. The job’s going to change. Even what you need today is going to be completely different in two, three or four years.
Prosser: How do we overcome the stigma of college versus trade to encourage a path for a stronger workforce?
Beck: As relayed earlier, education will be a key factor. College is not for everyone, and by continuing to promote the benefits of skilled labor within the high schools, even in middle schools, we can make an impact on the labor shortage and begin to get people trained earlier. Our society has long since heavily promoted college as “the” way to get ahead in the workforce.
Whether it is in the field or in our office, we view talent as the key. We can teach smart people a lot of things and view college degrees as a positive yet not a requirement.
Our current team is a prime example that have varied backgrounds and types of degrees along with those who have no college degree, including myself.
Prosser: In your industry, Jasmine, I’m sure change is rapid. How do you stay ahead of that and hire the right people?
Baudler: It’s forever changing since we’re in a tech field. We’ve experienced a shortage of women in video production. It’s hard to find a camera operator who is female. We are trying to combat that by starting at the college level. We have an internship opportunity for a freshman in college who’s interested in the field.
We just hired a camera operator from the University of Missouri. She took photos for Mizzou athletics, but she had the foundation in Adobe products. Because she already had that foundation, my sister, Amber, who is head of creative, was able to groom her to become a very skilled video editor.
We’re starting to look at people in colleges in those fields that provide a foundation so that way we can bring them on and train them. We want women to know that this is a field that they can be in.
Sharples: I’m a big advocate of Johnson County Community College and all community colleges for sponsoring coding bootcamps and other initiatives to bring women into the industry. Women make up only about 25% or less of the tech workforce. And that’s wrong.
There’s a huge digital world being created mostly by men, and that’s not going to be a good thing. Over time, we’re going to build in some of our biases. We’re all biased, and we can’t take it out of us. Bringing more women and diverse people into technology is hugely important as we grow.
Baudler: You technically don’t need to have a degree to do video production. My sister, Amber, has a bachelor’s degree in art and advertising with a minor in photography. But she will tell you that she learned video production through YouTube — literally. She always jokes that she went to YouTube University.
Sharples: It shows she has the grit to get through something and learn something. And that’s what college shows. Often, that’s why people look for that four-year degree. But now we can show grit through other ways.
Beck: Since arriving in Kansas City, we have focused on building a team with local talent. We have partnered with others in our industry to work by word of mouth as well as joined forces with local high schools and colleges (at career fairs, etc.) to obtain and build our team.
We continue to look for new talent. With the market as saturated as it is, it is still a challenge. We have had some success hiring people who want to work in this market and have at times assisted with relocation to bring in the necessary people.
It is not a hard sell due to all the exciting things happening in Kansas City and the growth of the market.
Prosser: Community colleges can be far more nimble than some four-year institutions, and they’re focusing on how to get people into better jobs, whether that’s through certifications or coursework.
Brune: I was giving a presentation on this topic recently and discovered in my research that the number one job available or unfilled job was solar panel installation. And I was like, “Who’s training people for that?” I found out that Johnson County Community College already had a certification program. They are in tune with what economists are saying.
But employers need to realize that being a successful employee is very different from having the skills. Employees, especially new entries, still need someone to manage, mentor and educate them to be successful. Often, new employees don’t understand how to be productive in a business yet.
In HR, we’re constantly firing people who have successfully completed some of those training programs but don’t meet the employer’s expectations. And we’re like: “Guys, this is the right person. But you have to train them and continually provide mentorship and guidance.”
Certainly, small employers need employees to be accountable for their own role. You’re not going to get that from somebody who has just completed some skills training. They have the skills but not the professional etiquette.
Beck: Whether it is cultural or generational, the work ethic is changing, and we will have to find ways to adapt to the younger generations versus them readily accepting our methods.
Sharples: We look for character, attitude, motivation when we hire people. Are they a good person? Are they going to ask questions when they get stuck, and can they get unstuck? And then, are they going to be good to other people? Can they play nice? Are they a jerk?
There are a lot of brilliant jerks out there, especially in the tech world. Sure, they could solve your problem, but no one wants to work with them.
Brune: I have fired a lot of people in my day, but I have never fired the nicest person in the office. Never.
Prosser: That’s a good segue into culture. Erica, as more companies begin to outsource their key business functions, how will workplace culture be affected?
Brune: We’re seeing it already. Employees have buy-in and acceptance of the vendor service solutions, such as IT, accounting and marketing. It’s harder for employees to adjust to C-suite fractional solutions, which has become very popular and is very effective for business owners. Now you can have a fractional CFO, a fractional COO and a fractional CMO. You can get very high-level marketing and strategic branding expertise from someone who doesn’t need to sit there and do the work full-time.
But then staff has to adapt to that and execute the strategy, which is coming from the top down. They may not have buy-in with that person. That’s a real challenge when you’re using some of those fractional people.
I encourage companies to use someone local if possible. Start by interviewing candidates through Skype or in person with your current key staff people, and get their buy-in. What kind of strategy would they like? What’s keeping them from being successful in their job today? When you bring in that C-suite person, you want them to be able to address those concerns so you get immediate buy-in from the rest of the staff.
In addition, make sure the fractional C-suite employees have a lot of face time with the frontline people. You don’t want frontline employees saying, “I never knew who my manager was.” That creates a lot of angst and uncertainty among employees.
Employees like to know what to expect and how their success will be measured. By encouraging interaction between that C-suite person and the frontline people, you create buy-in and are more likely to overcome some of these issues.
In theory, if you’ve asked your employees what is getting in their way and addressed their needs, you will get better engagement and retention. As the business owner, you want to make sure you’re not alienating your bread-and-butter employees who are sticking with you every day.
Prosser: Matt, how do you foster the culture you want?
Sharples: In my company, culture isn’t what I say it is. It’s what everybody else says it is, especially when I’m not around. It’s important to know what your culture is.
We basically went through a process of saying, “Here are the things that we believe in.” We put it on the wall, and we put it on everybody’s desk. But it’s more than a framed list sitting in someone’s office. It’s about living it and making sure that we also reward it.
One way we do this is by giving out a culture award every week. We recognize employees who are living the culture we espouse with a small, traveling trophy and a $100 gift card. It’s a way to keep our culture going.
Baudler: That’s great. I’ve been in two different work environments: one where there’s trust, transparency and a sense of belonging, and one where there’s a top-down hierarchy. The hierarchy approach makes employees feel powerless over their future in the company. If you’re transparent with your employees, then they will feel comfortable communicating with you on what they need to grow within the company.
When we started Stellar Image Studios, I wanted to create a culture in which people were excited to come to work and collaborate with one another no matter who they were within the organization.
Beck: At PARIC, culture is important. We have created an environment in which we are a team. We have an entrepreneurial spirit in St. Louis and Kansas City. As I said earlier, as it relates to talent and degrees, sometimes culture is the most important. We often have our team meet with some of our candidates to get a feel for that as well as providing skills and personality assessments at certain levels to understand how candidates think.
As I said earlier, we can teach smart people a lot. If they do not fit our culture, they can easily do more harm than good. With a smaller team in Kansas, this is even more important.
Prosser: How do companies successfully transition to more unified and less siloed cultures?
Baudler: Employers need to shift their mind-set to a more inclusive culture. Employees will be happier. Their performance will improve, and most importantly, the bottom line will improve. I think that’s the key. Happy employees are more productive.
Prosser: Erica, what strategies for retention are you seeing your clients use?
Brune: During exit interviews, good employees often say they are leaving because of the lack of opportunities to advance. In some of the larger organizations, employees can see a clear progression from one steppingstone to the next. That can be a challenge in small businesses. A small employer has to be very specific about how people can advance their careers.
That’s key in this full employment economy. All of these issues that affect employee satisfaction — from clear career paths to employee parking — become more important.
Prosser: Sometimes, employees don’t know what’s available to them because we haven’t communicated it well or we haven’t asked them. Employee engagement studies can be very valuable to get a real read on what’s going on in your organization.
Sharples: We do that as well. You have to do it in an unbiased way that allows them to actually be honest. And then you have to respond to it and let them know that you’ve heard it, even if it’s not something that you like hearing.
We also use Net Promoter Score, which is a way of measuring customer satisfaction as well as our own internal satisfaction. We’ve just started doing this with recruiters. There’s a PS in their email saying, “Let me know how I’m doing.” And it’s in real time. It shows right away how they’re doing. We actually base some incentives on the Net Promoter Score.
Brune: We do a lot of employee engagement surveys for companies. A great example is an experience we had with a client located downtown. Employees were frustrated with the lack of downtown parking, but there was virtually nothing the company could do to solve that problem. There were no spaces in their vicinity that they could buy even if they had the money to buy them.
But they did have some visitor parking. They decided to convert one space to the “employee of the month” spot. That signaled, “We hear you, and we’re addressing it. Here’s our situation, but this is what we can do.” It turned a difficult situation into this fun contest that everybody celebrated and vied for every month.
There are great ways to use information from employee surveys, even if you can’t give everybody 30% pay increases and allow them to work from home. There are little things you can do to let them know they’re being heard.
Baudler: When we bring someone on, we have a “100 policy,” which is slang for, “Be honest with your feelings.” Communicate with us about what you’re feeling, even if it’s a hard conversation to have. I’ve had an employee tell me that they felt that I took credit for something, and it was very apparent that it was a very difficult conversation for them. But instead of getting defensive, you show that you heard them, and then you change the behavior. We always say “be 100” because having a difficult conversation is better than contempt.
Compliments go a long way, too.
Sharples: Absolutely. You have to celebrate little victories.
Prosser: To close out our discussion, what can businesses do now to prepare for the workforce of the future?
Beck: For PARIC, we have to continue to understand the market and growth areas. This approach will impact how we grow as an organization and how we hire talent.
We are fortunate to have strong diversity within our culture, and this provides an advantage to how we grow in Kansas City. We have strong women in our office as well as those from various backgrounds.
We also are enhancing our training to allow our employees to grow with our organization and in the direction that will be best for their skills and vision. We believe this is another benefit for our industry, and by encouraging growth to our teams, we can continue to prepare for the future and keep up with trends and changes that will take place in the workforce.
Sharples: Start focusing on how we can get more inclusive with women, people of diversity and people with different socioeconomic backgrounds in professional workplaces.
Upskilling is another important component. There’s still a huge disconnect between the who and the what. Companies often want five years of this, six years of this and eight years of this. Tell me why you want five years. Why not three years? Why not two years? Why not 10 years? It gets down to “What do you want them to do today?”
When you get down to what they are going to do today, it’s more about who the person is. Obviously, they need to come in with some baseline skills. But we can upskill them and bring them up to a standard. They may not know this part of job, but they may be the right person for the job. They can collaborate. They can solve this difficult problem for you.
A critical component of how we start to fill the skills gap is looking at people who may not have the credentials yet and helping them get there. Maybe we put ourselves on the line and pay for their training.
We also have to help parents think about careers differently. When I was growing up, you were brought up to think you had to be either a doctor, lawyer or astronaut to be successful. I never thought about staffing. I have recruiters who are making great incomes, and they’re not killing themselves. They’re working 40 hours a week, and they really enjoy what they do. Most people don’t know about my business or have even heard of it before.
We need to start communicating to elementary and junior high school students that there’s a huge world of opportunities out there, and it’s not just these four or five occupations.
Brune: Three things come to mind. First, as a business owner, think through ways that you can create a little bit of that flexible culture. Is it creating a redundancy so people feel like they can take time off? Is it allowing people to wear jeans? Give employees a little bit more flexibility than what we were used to.
I grew up in an era when the longer you stayed at the office, the more committed you were and the more successful you were going to be. It’s a total mind shift, and it’s a hard pill to swallow if you put in those years yourself.
Second, employers need to rethink some of their hiring requirements because they may be unnecessarily passing over an available workforce. There are a lot of underemployed demographic groups. Employers have a lot of these stigmas of “I can’t have this” or “I must have this.” And the reality is, that may not match with what the job is at all.
My third suggestion is to solicit feedback from your employees. People don’t leave jobs because of the work. We rarely hear people say, “I just really didn’t enjoy this.” If you can find out employees’ sources of dissatisfaction, you can address them and retain your good people.
Baudler: I think we all can agree that the workplace of the future is going to forever change. So don’t be afraid of the unknown. Try to be the first to innovate internally. And if you can’t, contract with professionals.
In addition, place an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, whatever that means in your industry. And then as a company, figure out how you are going to combat that. For our industry, it is a lack of women. So, we are seeking out women in junior and four-year colleges and training them internally.
Sharples: I agree. Experiment a little bit. Companies often get caught in, “This is the way we’re going to do things.” And we’ve found ourselves doing that, too. Now we’re starting to experiment with different things. We’re not always sure that it’s going to work and sometimes we’re like, “This is probably going to go really badly.” And sometimes it has. But you’ve got to continually try to disrupt your business and innovate.
The dirty secret in my business is, companies are bad at hiring. About 50% of hires fail after one year. Each year, companies have the opportunity to look back and say: “Who have we hired? Who’s still here? And of those people, are they good? Are we retaining the right people? Are they A and B team players versus C team players?” Then, start building a way to get better at hiring the types of A and B players that you want in your organization.