The future of work is highly fluctuating as technological evolution and economic shifts continually reshape the professional landscape. Organizations are increasingly focused on understanding how to prepare their workforce for emerging challenges and opportunities, which impact WHO will do the work, WHERE the work will be performed, and even the nature of WHAT work will be performed. The rapid advancement of automation technologies and the widespread use of generative AI tools in the workplace are critical drivers of this transformation. This, in turn, is increasing pressures to continuously optimize organizations, profoundly influencing job structures and skill requirements.

Accelerating trends in the freelance and fractional economy, along with the increasing demands for working remotely, are reshaping traditional employment models and introducing more flexibility but also complexity. Evolving expectations from customers and employees, coupled with the need for business process optimization, emphasize the importance of preparing for a dynamic and unpredictable work environment. Additionally, the ethical implications of AI and automation are becoming more prominent, raising concerns about responsible use and potential job displacement.

Perspectives from Thought Leaders on How to Prepare for the Future of Work

To provide practical insights into this area, we have gathered views and recommendations from expert practitioners who have successfully navigated the complexities of preparing for the future of work. Their experiences and reflections offer valuable lessons that organizations tackling this challenge can consider.

Hernan Chiosso
Founder & Product Manager at ProductizeHR

AI is one of the most transformative forces shaping the future of work right now, as shown by a recent Work Trend Index Report by LinkedIn and Microsoft. The adoption of AI by knowledge workers has surged from 46% to 75% in only six months, with employees reporting time savings, enhanced creativity, and productivity gains, with a large majority even reporting that AI support makes work more enjoyable. However, individuals and companies don’t seem to be adopting AI at the same pace: 60% of leaders worry their organization’s leadership lacks a plan and vision to implement AI, yet 78% of users bring their AI tools to work. This misalignment represents a huge compliance and security risk and a missed opportunity to empower employees in their innovation initiatives and to leverage scale.

In my view, organizations that lead -rather than lag- in their AI adoption have a significant competitive advantage in adapting to and leveraging the transformational capabilities of AI. One great example of this brand of leadership is biotechnology company Moderna, which launched a program in partnership with OpenAI that resulted in the creation of 750 GPTs – custom AI prompts – within two months of launching the program. These tools created by employees enhanced their productivity and accelerated the pace of innovation under thoughtful guidance and with the vested support of their organization. This shows that leveraging AI is not about force-feeding AI features to your product nor building or buying highly specialized software. Instead, it’s about introducing a mindset of human and AI collaboration, enabling teams to pursue opportunities for workflow optimization, and creating a safe technological and ethical framework for them to learn through experimentation.

Nataliya Harkins
Workforce Strategies Leader, Ex-Deloitte & Korn Ferry

Automation has been a significant driver of the global economy across various industries. By reallocating the workforce to focus on complex and creative tasks while utilizing technology for repetitive and monotonous operations, the benefits to the business have reached new heights in the past decade. In recent years, the increasing use of AI-powered tools in essential and supportive organizational functions has transformed business processes, people, and overall organizational performance. Yet, the willingness of people to embrace new technologies has historically been a crucial factor in maximizing the power of technologies. 

Two powerful workforce adoption strategies have emerged that should be considered:  

• The first strategy is “Better for All”. It means setting clear expectations by business leaders of what, why, and how daily tasks, processes, and operations will change the work for all ranks of managers and employees for better outcomes. “The better” must be defined by organizational leaders and be aligned with strategic goals and objectives. It will be hard to achieve successful adoption if employees fail to receive robust communication, training, and leadership support about the present and future benefits of the transformation. At this stage, a person or team responsible for communications can propose multiple channels to establish a consistent dialogue between managers and employees. It is also critical for this approach to work that employees’ fears, concerns, and confusions are considered and dealt with.
  
  
• The second strategy is "Support for All." One of the shortcomings during workforce transformation initiatives is the lack of adequate support, whether managerial or technical, tailored to the specific functional needs. Functional groups should be categorized into different support tiers to provide customized assistance, maximizing resources for teams most affected by the changes. Planning a support system based on organizational priorities should be outlined in a workforce readiness roadmap. In this model, HR leaders are responsible for initiating, developing, and monitoring the roadmap, which should detail stakeholders' support, change and communication activities, and major milestones for accountability and evaluations. Most organizations can provide a foundational level of workforce support through town halls, leadership forums, interactive web pages with Q&A sections on the intranet, and updates and reports on achievements and celebrations. Additionally, change champions from various organizational departments can provide extra support, helping employees build trust in the transformation.

Darryl K. Henderson, J.D.
Senior Executive Human Resources

As I prepare for the future of work by, inter alia, leveraging automation and AI, it will be important to build a company-specific skills-based talent management model. Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says, “a new ‘skills taxonomy’ is important so HR-type assessment and selection decisions can be made based upon skills, not pedigree, how a person looks, or other factors that are poorly aligned with qualifications needed for job success.” This process of building a new skills model must begin with clearly understanding the performance problem (or performance opportunity) for specific roles, instead of blindly adopting an enterprise-wide skills model that may not work across the organization. From there, it is about carefully inventorying and deciding the proper order of hard and soft skills to successfully perform roles within the organization.

Josh Bersin says, “Hard skills are soft, it’s the soft skills that are hard, and it’s the way you leverage hard skills in the company that drives value.” This implies that most organizations actually succeed based on a uniform actualization of their mission, core values, alignment with the business strategy, learning agility, innovation, and KPIs. Thus, organizations need a more holistic (“systemic”) view of skills, moving beyond mere technical acumen. Organizations must be more deliberate and balanced in leveraging automation and AI to assess people’s “hard and technical skills,” along with their “soft skills and characteristics,” especially trust, integrity, and EQ, which are guideposts for effectively forming relationships. Additionally, ongoing evaluation and refinement of the skills model will be essential to ensure that it remains aligned with evolving business needs and market demands.

Other Articles in the Series on How to Prepare for the Future of Work

Understanding the lessons learned is just one aspect of this preparation. Equally important are the critical cultural elements supporting adaptability and the impactful advice for leaders and managers to guide their teams through these changes successfully. These perspectives can give organizations and professionals a comprehensive view of what it takes to thrive in the future workplace.

Enabling Practices and Resources

Core Workforce Planning Practices to Identify Near-term Headcount Needs.

Core workforce planning is a business-aligned process that identifies and describes the current level of employee headcount, assesses future needs based on both internal strategies and external trends, and generates an employee replacement analysis.

Projecting Future Headcount Demand Requirements from Business Plans and External Estimates.

An important step in Core workforce planning is to generate a sense of what will be faced in the future when working to maintain the proper level of a workforce that is suited to meeting the business goals of the organization.

Establishing an HR Organization that Drives the ‘Future of Work’ Across the Business.

The "Future of Work" is a construct based on three major components - future or forthcoming changes in work method ("what" is done), the makeup of the worker population ("who does the work"), and the location of the workplace ("where the work is done").