In this blog, we will join in a journey with Santhosh Mahalingam, CEO & Co-Founder of Mikro Grafeio, to delve into the transformations taking place in the workplace due to automation and the obstacles that hiring teams may face in those scenarios.
The world will see one of the biggest layoffs in human history by 2030. McKinsey’s report states that automation will make industries lay off 400 to 800 million personnel by then.
The pandemic spread the seeds for the explosive adoption of automation across industries. Pre-Covid, we had traditional offices with employees working in an office in 8-10 hrs of office shifts. The pandemic forced businesses to change the way they conduct their business.
Businesses had to rethink the processes to work remotely while maintaining productivity, data security, and supervision. It was challenging for large companies as they had to adapt quickly, which they were not designed for.
This created opportunities for the faster adoption of automation and brought the remote work culture to the mainstream.
The Clarity in Chaos: The Current State of the Workplace
As businesses refined their processes, they and their employees faced numerous challenges, which will be discussed in greater detail as we progress.
So, one of the many challenges businesses faced was building accommodative policies for remote work while mitigating data and governance risks.
Bringing down the walls of business policies
Post-pandemic workspace has changed drastically, with most processes functioning remotely or in a hybrid setting. The organisations empowered with tools have reorganised the workplace.
Preconceived notions and myths like meetings always need to happen behind closed doors where everyone needs to be present are obsolete.
But now, businesses can do meetings with Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams without hiccups. The sessions can be recorded and shared to accommodate absent team members.
Many businesses in BFSI, ITES, and other sectors are still plagued by concerns about employee productivity and business data security in this setup. Companies are still wary of the employee misusing the freedom given to them.
Similarly, employees reevaluate organisations based on organisational policies and degree of freedom.
The new breed of recruits: Digital Nomads, Moonlighting, etc.
New young breeds of workers have cropped up. Digital Nomads and moonlighting employees are the independent hungry workforce who have chosen to be independent of one employer.
Businesses are primarily worried about Moonlighting. Employees sometimes take up projects from competing firms to earn extra cash in their spare time, which may threaten data security and hamper motivation.
In this, a new generation of employees that started their corporate journey in a remote setting tends to assume it is the only way to work.
They are missing out on mentorship and connections with senior colleagues. They may be good at individual tasks but lose out on building essential professional skills. These skills include understanding the political spectrum, survival skills, and building social awareness in a business setup.
Social awareness includes understanding influencers, sponsors, and mentors and how to connect with them through networking events like meeting for lunch or coffee to establish professional relationships. Doing all of these over a virtual call is impossible.
Moreover, to get things done, there is a limit to what formal communication can achieve; post that, it is all about the connections you build informally through networking.
Vanishing geo-political boundaries in hiring
As employees have moved back to their hometowns and begun changing employers. Businesses faced another challenge. Employers also needed to send the resources and train employees remotely.
Transferring skills and knowledge to remote employees in highly regulated sectors like banking is challenging.
The training sessions become longer in comparison to in-person training. The business loses billable days in training which has become a cost centre.
For hiring teams, the search for candidates is no longer limited to the boundaries of the cities, states, or countries.
Most employees are reluctant to move away from their hometown, as it, in most cases, saves them money, allows flexibility, and to settle comfortably with families.
Now that we understand the state of the workplace. Let’s deep dive and try to foresee what’s in store for the future of the workplace.
Future of Work: Diversity and Inclusivity in a Virtual World
Employees are reluctant to return to the traditional structure as they have tasted the freedom to work remotely. They have seen that most business challenges can be solved through automation securely and are reskilling themselves rapidly to accommodate the changes. Similarly, employers and hiring teams must evolve how they recruit and tap into the potentials of tier 2 and 3 towns.
The Evolving Cost of Hiring
Organisations will have to further break down long-standing policies in future that may hinder remote working or prevent them from adapting to these workplace changes.
For organisations, the variable cost of hiring a digital nomad will increase. Fixed expenses that come with retaining a full-time employee will become considerably lower.
However, this may work for low to mid-level employees and, in some rare cases, senior employees with excellent time management capabilities. These senior employees are today called Entrepreneurs in Residence, which will become a norm in the future.
Inclusivity Through Diversification
Businesses will seek more diversification and inclusivity regarding gender, people from various diasporas, places (tier 2 & 3 cities), and economic backgrounds through a distributed workspace, i.e., integrating onsite and remote/hybrid to full-time and digital nomads.
Infrastructure in tier 2 and tier 3 cities will be developed. Freshers and intermediate-level employees can be hired from small towns. Recruiters will face the challenge of searching for fitting candidates in senior roles. Recruiters will have access to a larger talent pool if candidates can be nurtured in small cities and towns.
For example, Zoho nurtures talents through its development centres spread across rural India. They are later onboarded based on skill, which can be one form of inclusivity and diversification.
Metaverse – The Virtual Workspace
Metaverse will be an excellent avenue for a collaborative workspace. Many businesses, like JP Morgan, Chase Bank, Nike, etc., have taken the first step towards it by opening kiosks and conducting business transactions and operations in the Metaverse.
With the advancement of technology, employees would be able to work and interact with each other in real-time in the same manner as interacting with a real-life person.
Techno Recruiters with People Skills
Hiring teams will have to reskill themselves to hire teams worldwide. As digital nomad culture or the gig economy picks up, the option to pick and choose suitable candidates from available hopefuls for a job will increase.
Recruiters can no longer filter CVs based on keywords only, as they need to showcase two critical skills: learnability and adaptability.
The recruiter needs to talk to a few candidates and see how well they understand the industry and fit the company’s culture.
Automation: The Key to Staying Employed
Automation is helping businesses optimise operational costs. One key contributor is the company’s expenses for retaining full-time employees to run business processes. Most of the current layoffs include the roles that have either changed or employees somewhat failed to reskill as per changing needs.
Personnel not reskilling themselves in automation technology will be left behind, which according to McKinsey Report, can be between 400 million to 800 million by 2030. The one thing that employees can do is continuously challenge and reskill themselves to adapt to changing techno-social environment.
For example, the best surgeons across the globe are the ones who have continually reskilled themselves. They have gone from performing manually to using highly specialised robotic surgeries.
One of the critical factors in being recruited was the prospect’s acumen for learnability and adaptability. The last 10 years have considerably changed the skills required of employees, like cloud technology, data science, machine learning, and now AI-based automation. Employees need to have employable and implementable skills.
Now that we have scanned what the future holds for employers and employees. Let us understand what challenges the hiring teams will face to accommodate hereafter.
Challenges for Hiring Teams: Reskill & Reinvent
Based on the understanding of the industry and the company culture, recruiters will have to put some quasi-parameters to filter and find more relevant candidates.
They cannot rely only on keywords to filter out CVs anymore. The filtering and selection of candidates must be more contextual.
As most candidates have moved back to their hometown, mostly tier-1 and tier-2 cities. Recruiters will face the most challenging task: finding people fitting the mid to senior-level talents. As these towns lack the right resources to nurture these specifically talented candidates.
These towns must be re-equipped with better education and training resources in line with facilities in bigger cities to create talent pools.
Recruiters must use automation, AI-based tools, and psychometric analysis to understand and evaluate the candidates in-depth. Therefore, hiring teams must also upskill themselves with various tools and techniques to reinvent the wheel to find and hire candidates in newer ways.
