Hi, I'm your host, Kevin Eikenberry, and usually these episodes are about me
sharing a short piece of information with you or bringing on a guest.
But for the next six weeks, as a part of this very special series called
The Evolving Workplace, I'll be handing the mic over to Wayne Trammell.
Wayne's been my coauthor of the long distance leader, twice
the long distance teammate in the long distance team,
and he's been the host of an ongoing podcast called
Long Distance Work Life Podcast, which has just come to a close,
although all those episodes are worth your time,
go to Long Distance worklife.com to learn more.
In this series, Wayne will give new context
and new ideas for us as leaders to understand
the evolving workplace and how we can lead our organizations and teams through it.
I hope you will enjoy all of these episodes in the series,
and I hope you'll continue to enjoy everything else we bring you
on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, and now here's Wayne.
Hi everybody.
We're now
a master trainer and the subject matter
expert on the evolving workplace for the Kevin Aitken Barry Group.
And this is the fourth of our six part
podcast series on the evolving workplace.
We started with some context, right?
Episode one was how did we get here?
Episode two is the world
is kind of divided between remote, hybrid and in office.
Last episode we talked about the technology trends
that we're all going to run into in the next five years.
And now we want to answer, so what?
So this episode will be about so what does this mean
at an organizational level?
Next time we'll look at what does it mean for individuals.
And then the last episode will be what does this mean for leaders.
All right.
So what are the choices that organizations are going to have to make
in the next five years or so?
To stay ahead of the competition, to serve their customers,
to stay in business in some cases.
And I want to look at
kind of all of this.
Here are five trends that I think are going to happen, in the next little bit.
The first and stop me if you're sick of this already
is the use and increased power of AI.
It's happening now.
The famous and wildly overused William Burke's quote.
The future is here.
It just isn't evenly distributed yet
is more true than it's ever been.
And also it's a little bit restrictive
because it presumes that we're all chasing each other's tails.
But AI is going to be
a huge part of any decision maker
making that organizations are going forward.
I'm not being alarmist, but, you know, we've already interacted with chat bots.
We may think that Dwane, that customer service is a live person.
He probably probably isn't.
But this is going to
change the very structure of what companies work like.
We've talked before
about how the fact that in 1990,
somewhere between 6 and 7% of the workforce was in admin,
secretarial jobs, jobs, we don't even call them that anymore.
But 6 to 7% of the workforce, that's around seven,
8 million people were employed in jobs that
to a great degree don't exist.
I mean, less than 2% of the workforce is now labeled
as admin or secretarial.
And even then,
the jobs that those people do are very different
than when my mom was a secretary back in the day.
Another example.
And this is important because it's more recent
and we can get our heads around this one is the concept of bank tellers.
If you look at the raw
data, the number of people employed as bank
tellers has dropped about 60% since the introduction of the ATM.
Banks are opening
new branches, and if they are, they are smaller,
and they are designed to serve
largely older people, poorer people,
people who maybe aren't technologically savvy.
And the role of the teller itself is very, very different.
If you look at what a bank teller does
now, as opposed to what they did ten years ago.
Bank tellers never used to be allowed to open accounts.
You had to go to a camera opening specialist.
Well, now you can do that on the counter.
If you've ever had to replace an ATM card
and had them knock one out right at the desk.
You know that it's a very different world.
And so the role of a bank teller, just as an example, has wildly changed.
The people who work in customer service facing roles are filling
largely what those roles used to be.
And, and
this has an impact on things like productivity.
Individual people handle much
more productive interactions.
The actual productivity of any per person has skyrocketed, despite the fact
that apparently humans are lazy and easily replaced.
But you don't need to perform the simple tasks.
I will do that.
But there are going to be roles for humans that look very different.
Similar change happened after the introduction of the PC and laptops,
and some of you listening to this will understand.
You know.
The reason that the number
of secretaries and admins reduced was suddenly people were able
to handle their own course, bond and build their own presentations,
do their own, invoicing, for example,
because it's all automated.
And yet that took time from other functions that people were supposed to do.
So the average salesperson, the average manager
now does not only more work than their person
in the past in terms of number of calls and all of that,
but it's also
they're doing the admin work on top of the stuff that they're doing.
So the productivity is way more than it used to be.
And the expectations of a salesperson and are now so very,
very different.
What is your organization's business?
What do the people in your organization do and what will
they be expected to do in the future?
Are important questions that organizations
need to figure out, and the sooner the better.
Of course.
As is often
the case, the people on the bleeding edge of this are the sales department.
Businesses do not exist unless somebody is bringing in revenue, right?
Well, the role of a salesperson is
different than it's ever been.
And knowing that
reaching customers and interacting with customers and what salespeople
are expected to do with their customers has changed dramatically.
It used to be very simple.
You were either inbound, you sat by the phone and you took orders
and you serviced your customers that way, or you reached out.
You did things like cold calling and emails
and mailing and visiting and dropping by offices.
And the problem is that with cell phones, with people working from home,
that kind of outreach
largely doesn't work anymore. And,
you know, people block their cell phones.
When was the last time you made a phone call and the person actually answered?
Unless they were expecting you?
Heck, if you're a parent, you can't even get your own kid
to answer the phone and you're paying the phone bill, right?
That culturally we don't
pick up the phone.
We don't check voicemails.
We largely reject any email
coming in that we don't recognize the source from is spam.
Well, if I'm an organization trying to grow my business.
These are challenges that we're going to have to overcome.
And some of this AI is assisting some of this,
helping us write more targeted, more focused emails.
Although there is some personal touch that's being lost in that.
But organizations are going to have to adapt to new ways
of reaching their customers because the old ways, quite frankly,
no matter how hard you work, aren't effective anymore.
And you have to find people to do the work.
The problem is, if you eliminate a whole group of jobs,
you know, you eliminate 60% of the bank tellers
and you still need to replace existing bank tellers.
But they're now doing very different jobs than the people
that were let go.
Finding, employing and training
good people is going to be more important
than ever and also more difficult.
The paradox is that there is no shortage of human beings to do the job.
If you look at the number of jobs
versus the number of people in the country, it shouldn't be a problem.
The problem is,
of course, that those people don't know how to do the jobs that there are.
And so this creates a couple of challenges for organizations.
It means that those people who are trained and able to do
the job are able to charge a premium.
Salaries go way up for very specific.
Employment categories.
And what are the jobs
that are left are not considered terribly desirable.
They don't pay a lot of money.
If you look at retail, for example, if you wonder why retail service
isn't as great as we imagine it used to be,
and largely that's a figment of your imagination, by the way.
But if we consider that retail and food service
isn't as good as it used to be, it could be that
over half of the people hired in those jobs quit every year.
The turnover rate in retail, for example,
is 60%.
So that's a problem, right?
Then we look at things like, where are we going to work?
Remote work mandates have large easily
resulted in reduced headcount.
Now some of that, by the way, is intentional.
We're thinking of, dropping 15% of our management staff if we
use a go back to work policy, you go back to the office
policy, we're going to lose about 15% of our people.
That's no coincidence.
Now, are you losing the right 15% of
that headcount is a legitimate question.
But this doesn't address
some of the changes in public policy that are going on.
Think about challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Think about back to work mandates that are fairly arbitrary,
but no less strict.
You know, on one hand, organizations are going to celebrate, hey,
we don't have to invest money in people that we don't want working for us
anyway, which is a strange way of looking at it.
But you hear this all the time.
It's going to cause a rise in the cost of hiring certain people,
especially in pools,
that are largely ignored or not accommodated.
Employees, especially women, visible minorities and the disabled,
are likely going to suffer in the upheaval.
But all this talk about
returning to the office and going back to the norm,
it's still going to cause a major upheaval
in facilities, real estate operating costs.
Because what does a company really need?
Even if you return to the office and pretend like Covid never happened,
and we go back to the blessed before times,
you may have fewer people when you had before,
if you have a hybrid workplace, for example,
Wednesday and Thursday, you might need as much space
as you ever had because everybody is in the office,
but you're still paying for office space that people aren't in the other
five days a week.
How many people do we need on site?
What facilities to those people need?
Do we need assigned desks?
Do we need assigned offices?
Can we do hotels without causing all kinds of major problems?
Is the work designed so that people doing
social, interactive, collaborative work
can get that done while those needing quiet and focus can do that.
What the office is going to look like is going to change,
and everybody who renewed their office leases lately
or built space are going to find
in the next five years that what they need and what they have
are probably not the same thing.
This is really going to impact collaboration,
how people work together, how they,
face the public.
Since the idea of giant buildings with our names on it
are probably going to become more and more impractical.
So the nuts and bolts
that we've kind of kicked down the road by having everybody return to work
is now a challenge that organizations are going to have to face.
Finally,
and I have to be very careful here because I have some
very strong opinions on this that may or may not match with yours,
but whether you like it or not,
we are about to enter a period of increased consolidation.
In times of uncertainty, a lot of entrepreneurs
say the heck with it.
They retire, they close their businesses,
others, sell to a bigger entity.
And this creates fewer
but larger organizations.
Whether or not the consolidation of entire industries in
a few is a good idea is for someone other than me to decide.
But just as an example, if you think about all the thousands of newspapers,
radio stations, television stations and streaming networks in the world,
and then realize that in the US,
90% of those are in the hands of six companies,
you understand that this is going to have some impact.
It's easy to say
that organizations have to choose
what they're going to do, that,
you know, just make a decision and move on.
But it's not that easy because organizations
don't do anything.
Organizations do not make decisions.
Organizations do not take action.
It's the people in those organizations
that make those choices. So.
This is going to require
a whole new, not a new set of skills.
We've always needed things like resilience and good decision making,
but we're going to have to actually build and cultivate those skills
in the next few years so that the people leading
organizations are making good decisions.
Now, in upcoming episodes, we're going to take this
because just as how we got here was context
for this conversation,
the challenges that organizations are facing
is context for what does this mean for individual workers,
and what does it mean for leaders inside these organizations?
So if these are the challenges that organizations are facing,
what it means for individual humans
depends on satisfying these needs.
So in future episodes, we're going to examine that.
If you haven't heard the previous episodes of this podcast,
please check them out at Remarkable
podcast.com and
we'll talk to you next week about what all of these changes
and all of these challenges mean for individuals.
In the meantime, please check out Kevin eikenberry.com.
We are at your service.
If you have questions about how we can help
your organization tackle these challenges.
Don't be shy.
My name is Wayne Trammell.
I'm Wayne at Kevin.
I can bury com, and we'll hope to see you
on the next episode of The Evolving Workplace.