Future is of those who are ready to change

‘Change is the only permanent thing we have’. A common sentiment was echoed amongst the industry leaders as the market undergoes series of disruption, making the employers decode the future of their respective workplaces.
The organisations today have become much more virtual, with geographies becoming smaller. Shantanu Das, CHRO, Amway talked about the changing composition of the workforce with almost 75% of the workforce falling under the millennial category. The organisations are already geared up with parallel structures for the same.
“With changing industry, the composition of workforce is bound to change. More important is the change in the skill sets that would be required with performance metrics remaining the same. In such a scenario it is not important to protect the jobs but people,” said Das, speaking on the sidelines of BW Businessworld HR Strategy Conclave 2017. The panel of industry leaders came together, moderated by Rituparna Chakraborty, Co-Founder, Teamlease Servies to decode the future of workplaces.  
“Future is of those who are ready to change”, said Amitabh Akhauri, CHRO, Jindal Stainless Limited. As the millennial overtake the workforce, the ‘attitude’ of the same needs to be correct with faster learning cycles. He further added, “The only thing that would keep us afloat is the capability to learn, as the skills we learn today will become redundant tomorrow.”

A recent study by PwC- ‘Workforce of future’ elaborates on the future of workforces with different set of criteria and ambition. “There would be workforces who would have their own set of demands and expectations and on the other hand, there would be organisations trying to decode where they would want to pull themselves towards, elaborated Chaitali Mukherjee, Partner, People and Organisation Practice, PwC India. The two forces are in short termed as – ‘What would define the workforce and what would control the workforce’, with both being interlinked to each other. 

Drawing a futuristic picture, based on the study, there would be four different organisational structures. First, termed as Red, would be ‘innovation’ driven with few employees, where the organisation will be governed by innovation, a way to move forward. Second, termed as Blue, would be few big giant corporates where performance augmentation will be the focus. The employees would go to any extent to be a part of such organisations. Third, Green, would be organisations and the employees care about the society at large. Last would be Yellow, where the humans come first and the demand of people would take preservance.
Automation has instilled fear of job risks, but at the same time brought in a greater degree of flexibility in the workplace. Speaking from the perspective of a conservative organisational structure, Surbhi Mittal, HR Head, Lanxess explained how the risk at job of workforce safety is getting eliminated with automation. Therefore, the future workplaces would have much better standards of working in terms of safety, for instance. Automation has reached to the level of hiring as well. Organisations have started using Artificial Intelligence for hiring practices, as articulated by Abhimanyu Choudhary, VP, sales, XOXO Day. According to Choudhary, smarter people have more chances of surviving in the future workplaces.