8: Who Is Your Workforce: Past, Present & Future

Organizations both large and small alike, are finding it increasingly difficult to understand who exactly their workforce is, and how it is defined. The workforce has now developed into a complex ecosystem, with strategic orchestration required to align needs with outcomes.

When designing a workforce framework to exist within this ecosystem, factors to take into consideration include strategic alignment, worker satisfaction and safety, optimizing productivity along with job security and workforce planning. More detail can be found in the infographic here. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/intentionally-orchestrating-workforce-ecosystems/? 

In today’s podcast episode, Dyan Finkhousen and her co-host Vik Shyam sit down with Liz Altman and Jeff Schwartz, two of the co-authors of the new book ‘Workforce Ecosystems’, to discuss the changing nature of the workforce and how people and technologies can work together to create value.

Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners, and Technologies https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047777/workforce-ecosystems/

Show Highlights:

“We're starting to see, and I think it's becoming a very accepted number, that between 30 to 50% of a total workforce is in some way a contingent workforce.” -Elizabeth J. Altman

“Employees and workers are asking for new degrees of flexibility, new degrees of growth. They're interested in the purpose and the values of their organization.” -Jeff Schwartz

“We need to redefine and rebuild our educational and our public policies for these 100 year lives in workforce ecosystems versus for the 60-65 year lives, which is what social security was based on when we passed it in the 1930s where a typical career was you studied for 20 years, you worked for 30 years and then you retired. So there's some big reframing going on both on the technology side and on the policy side as well.” -Jeff Schwartz

Guests:

Jeff Schwartz, VP of Insights and Impact at Gloat, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, author WORK DISRUPTED, and co-author of WORKFORCE ECOSYSTEMS

Elizabeth J. Altman  Assoc. Professor of Management, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell; Guest Editor, Future of the Workforce, MIT Sloan Management Review; Co-author of WORKFORCE ECOSYSTEMS

Co-hosts:

Dyan Finkhousen, Founder & CEO, Shoshin Works

Vikram Shyam, PhD, Futurist, Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project, NASA