HR Predictions for 2024: The Global Search For Productivity2024年的HR预测强调了生产力和AI在商业和雇佣实践中的关键作用。这篇文章讨论了公司在动态的经济条件和不断变化的劳动力市场背景下,如何适应他们的人才管理和招聘策略。强调了员工赋权的增加,劳动力市场的变化,以及技能发展的重要性。文章还探讨了劳动力囤积、混合工作模式和员工激活等关键概念。此外,还涉及领导力挑战、薪酬公平、DEI计划,以及可能的四天工作周。
一起来看Josh Bersin 带来新得见解
For the last two decades I’ve written about HR predictions, but this year is different. I see a year of shattering paradigms, changing every role in business. Not only will AI change every company and every job, but companies will embark on a relentless search for productivity.
Think about where we have been. Following the 2008 financial crisis the world embarked on a zero-interest rate period of accelerating growth. Companies grew revenues, hired people, and watched their stock prices go up. Hiring continued at a fevered pace, leading to a record-breaking low unemployment rate of 3.5% at the end of 2019.
Along came the pandemic, and within six months everything ground to a halt. Unemployment shot up to 15% in April of 2020, companies sent people home, and we re-engineered our products, services, and economy to deal with remote work, hybrid work arrangements, and a focus on mental health.
Once the economy started up again (thanks to fiscal stimulus in the US), companies went back to the old cycle of hiring. But as interest rates rose and demand fell short we saw layoffs repeat, and over the last 18 months we’ve seen hiring, layoffs, and then hiring again to recover.
Why the seesaw effect?
CEOs and CFOs are operating in what we call the “Industrial Age” – hire to grow, then lay people off when things slow down.
Well today, as we enter 2024, all that is different. We have to “hoard our talent,” invest in productivity, and redevelop and redeploy people for growth.
We live in a world of 3.8% unemployment rate, labor shortages in almost every role, an increasingly empowered workforce, and a steady drumbeat of employee demands: demands for pay raises, flexibility, autonomy, and benefits. More than 20% of all US employees change jobs each year (2.3% per month), and almost half these changes are into new industries.
Why is this the “new normal?”
There are several reasons. First, as we discuss in our Global Workforce Intelligence research, industries are overlapping. Every company is a digital company; every company wants to build recurring revenue streams; and soon every company will run on AI. Careers that used to stay within an industry are morphing into “skills-based careers,” enabling people to jump around more easily than ever before.
Second, employees (particularly young ones) feel empowered to act as they wish. They may quietly quit, “work their wage,” or take time out to change careers. They see a long runway in their lives (people live much longer than they did in the 1970s and 1980s) so they don’t mind leaving your company to go elsewhere.
Third, the fertility rate continues to drop and labor shortages will increase. Japan, China, Germany, and the UK all have shrinking workforce populations. And in the next decade or so, most other developed economies will as well.
Fourth, labor unions are on the rise. Thanks to a new philosophy in Washington, we’ve seen labor activity at Google, Amazon, Starbucks, GM, Ford, Stellantis, Kaiser, Disney, Netflix, and others. While union participation is less than 11% of the US workforce, it’s much higher in Europe and this trend is up.
What does all this mean?
There are many implications.
First, companies will be even more focused on building a high-retention model for work (some call it “labor hoarding.”) This means improving pay equity, continuing hybrid work models, investing in human-centered leadership, and giving people opportunities for new careers inside the company. This is why talent marketplaces, skills-based development, and learning in the flow of work are so important.
Second, CEOs have to understand the needs, desires, and demands of workers. As the latest Edelman study shows, career growth now tops the list, along with the desire for empowerment, impact, and trust. A new theme we call “employee activation” is here: listening to the workforce and delegating decisions about their work to their managers, teams, and leaders.
Third, the traditional “hire to grow” model will not always work. In this post-industrial age we have to operate systemically, looking at internal development, job redesign, experience, and hiring together. This brings together the silo’d domains of recruiting, rewards and pay, learning & development, and org design. (Read our Systemic HR research for more.)
What does “business performance” really mean?
If you’re a CEO you want revenue growth, market share, profitability, and sustainability. If you can’t grow by hiring (and employees keep “activating” in odd ways), what choice do you have? It’s pretty simple: you automate and focus on productivity.
Why do I see this as the big topic in 2024? For three big reasons.
First, CEOs care about it.
The 2024 PwC CEO survey found that CEO’s believe 40% of the work in their company is wasted productivity.
As shocking as that sounds, it rings true to me: too many emails, too many meetings, messy hiring process, bureaucratic performance management, and more. (HR owns some of these problems.)
Second, AI enables it.
AI is designed to improve white-collar productivity. (Most automation in the past helped blue or gray collar workers.) Generative AI lets us find information more quickly, understand trends and outliers, train ourselves and learn, and clean up the mess of documents, workflows, portals, and back office compliance and administration systems we carry around like burdens.
Third, we’re going to need it.
How will you grow when it’s so hard to find people? Time to hire went up by almost 20% last year and the job market is getting even tougher. Can you compete with Google or OpenAI for tech skills?
Internal development, retooling, and automation projects are the answer. And with Generative AI, the opportunities are everywhere.
What does all this mean for HR?
Well as I describe in the HR Predictions, we have a lot of issues to address.
We have to accelerate our shift to a dynamic job and organization structure. We have to get focused and pragmatic about skills. We have to rethink “employee experience” and deal with what we call “employee activation.” And we are going to have to modernize our HR Tech, our recruiting, and our L&D systems to leverage AI and make these systems more useful.
Our HR teams will be AI-powered too. As our Galileo™ customers already tell us, a well-architected “expert assistant” can revolutionize how HR people work. We can become “full-stack” HR professionals, find data about our teams in seconds instead of weeks, and share HR, leadership, and management practices with line leaders in seconds. (Galileo is being used as a management coach in some of the world’s largest companies.)
There are some other changes as well. As the company gets focused on “growth through productivity,” we have to think about the 4-day week, how we institutionalize hybrid work, and how we connect and support remote workers in a far more effective way. We have to refocus on leadership development, spend more time and money on first line managers, and continue to invest in culture and inclusion. We have to simplify and rethink performance management, and we have to solve the vexing problem of pay-equity.
And there’s more.
DEI programs have to get embedded in the business (the days of the HR DEI Police are over). We have to clean up our employee data so our AI and talent intelligence systems are accurate and trustworthy. And we have to shift our thinking from “supporting the business” to “being a valued consultant” and productizing our HR offerings, as our Systemic HR research points out.
All this is detailed in our new 40-page report “HR Predictions for 2024,” launching this week, including a series of Action Plans to help you think through all these issues.
And let me remind you of a big idea. Productivity is why HR departments exist.
Everything we do, from hiring to coaching to development to org design, is only successful if it helps the company grow. As experts in turnover, engagement, skills, and leadership, we in HR have make people and the organization productive every day. 2024 is a year to focus on this higher mission.
One final thing: taking care of yourself.
The report has 15 detailed predictions, each with a series of action steps to consider. The last one is really for you: focus on the skills and leadership of HR. We, as stewards of the people-processes, have to focus on our own capabilities. 2024 will be a year to grow, learn, and work as a team. If we deal with these 15 issues well, we’ll help our companies thrive in the year ahead.
Details on the Josh Bersin Predictions
The predictions study is our most widely-read report each year. It includes a detailed summary of all our research and discusses fifteen essential issues for CEOs, CHROs, and HR professionals. It will be available in the following forms:
Webinar and launch on January 24: Register Here (replays will be available)
Infographic with details: Available on January 24.
Microlearning course on Predictions: Available on January 24.
Detailed Report and Action Guide: Available to Corporate Members and Josh Bersin Academy Members (JBA). (Note you can join the JBA for $495 per year and that includes our entire academy of tools, resources, certificate courses, and SuperClasses in HR.)
leadership
2024年01月19日
leadership
Josh Bersin:2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever (Podcast)The podcast "2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever" by Josh Bersin explores anticipated transformations in business by 2024. It highlights the impact of AI, labor shortages, and evolving organizational structures. The podcast delves into the 2023 economic performance, changes in employee engagement, and the necessity for businesses to adapt strategically. It emphasizes a shift towards dynamic, flatter organizations and the critical role of systemic HR practices in shaping future business landscapes.
Josh Bersin探讨了2024年企业预期的转型。这些转型由AI的应用、劳动力短缺和组织结构的变化驱动。播客讨论了2023年的经济表现、员工参与度的变化以及企业为应对未来挑战所需的适应策略。它强调了向动态、扁平化组织的转变和系统性人力资源实践在塑造未来商业环境中的重要作用。
In this podcast I recap 2023 and discuss the big stories for 2024, and to me this year is a tipping point that changes business forever. Why do I say this? Because we’re entering a world of labor shortages, redesign of our companies, and business transformation driven by AI. We’ll look back on 2024 and realize it was a very pivotal year.
(Note: In mid-January we’re going to be publishing our detailed predictions report. This article is an edited transcript of this week’s podcast, so it reads like a conversation.)
Podcast Begins:
Interestingly, the entire year 2023 people were worried about a recession and it didn’t happen. In fact, economically and financially, we had a very strong year. Inflation in the United States and around the world went down. We did have to suffer rising interest rates, and that was a shock, but it was long overdue.
I really think the problem we experienced is we had low interest rates for far too long, encouraging speculative investment. Now that the economy is more rational, consumer demand is high, the business environment is solid, and the stock market is performing well. The Nasdaq is almost at an all time high, the seven super stocks did extremely well: the big tech companies, the big retailers, the oil companies, many of the consumer luxury goods companies did extremely well. And the only companies that didn’t do well were the companies that couldn’t make it through the transformation that’s going on.
On the cultural front we had the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action in education, which led to a political backlash on diversity and inclusion. The woke mind virus by Elon Musk and similar discussions further pushed back DEI programs, which has made chief diversity officers life difficult. We’re living through two wars, which have been very significant for many companies. I know a lot of you have closed down operations in Russia, and anybody doing business in Israel is having a tough time. And we’ve had this continuous period where every piece of data about employee engagement shows that employees are burned out, tired, stressed. They feel that they’re overworked.
Despite this employee sentiment, wages went up by over 5% and people who changed jobs saw raise wages of 8% or more. The unemployment rate is very low so there are a lot of jobs. You could ask yourself, why are people stressed?
I think it’s a continued overhang of the pandemic: the remote work challenges, the complexities and inconsistencies in hybrid work. And something else: the younger part of the workforce, those who are going to be living a lot longer than people who are baby boomers, are basically saying I don’t really want to kill myself just to get ahead. I want to have a life. I want to quietly quit. If my company don’t take care of me, I’m going to work my wage, meaning I’m going to work as hard as I’m paid, no more than that. And that mentality has created an environment for the four-day work week, which I think is coming quicker than you realize. And unions, which are politically in favor, are rising at an all time increase in about 25, 30 years.
Inflation and the need to raise wages to attract talent leads to pay equity problems. This domain is more complex than you think. You can read about it in our research and in 2024 it belongs on your list. 2024 will also see enormous demand for career reinvention, career development, growth programs, coaching, mentorship, allyship and support amongst the younger part of the workforce. And that means that if you’re in retail, healthcare, hospitality, or one of the other industries that hires younger people you have to accommodate this tremendous demand for benefits. These are things that became very clear in 2023.
But let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the biggest thing that happened in 2023 was AI.
AI has transformed the conversations we have about everything from media to publishing to HR technology to recruiting to employee development to employee experience. As you probably know, I’m very high on AI. I think it’s going to have a huge transformational effect on our companies, our jobs, our careers, and our personal lives. AI will improve our health, our ability to learn, the way we consume news (note that the NYT just sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement). Almost every part of our life will be transformed by AI.
I know from our conversations that most of you are trying to understand it and see where it fits. And many of you have been told by your CEO, “we need an AI strategy for the company as well as in HR.” And the AI strategy in HR is one thing, but the bigger topic is the rest of the company. So HR is going to have to be a part of this transformation: the new roles, jobs, rewards, and skills we need.
This year I’m very excited that we introduced Galileo™, which about 500 or so of you have been using. We’re going to launch the corporate version for everybody in the corporate membership in February, so corporate members stay tuned (or join). Galileo brings AI to HR in an easy-to-use, safe, and high-value way, so it will help you get your strategy together. It’s basically ready to go. Then later in the year we’ll launch a version to the JBA community and more. AI, despite all the fear-mongering, is already a very positive technology.
Where are we going next? Well as the title of this article states, I think this is the year that changes business forever. And I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, I really see a tipping point. Let me give you the story.
For about a decade I’ve been writing about the flattening of organizations, breaking down of hierarchies, creating what I used to call the networked organization. And this is now mainstream and we’ve decided to call it the Dynamic Organization.
And what we mean by this, as you read about in the Dynamic Organization research or in the Post-Industrial Age study, is that the functional hierarchies of jobs, careers, organizations and companies are being broken down for really good reasons.
The reason we have functional hierarchies, job levels and siloed business functions is because they’re patterned after the industrial age when companies made money by selling products and services at scale. The automobile industry, the oil and gas industry, the manufacturing industries, the CPG industries, even the pharmaceutical companies are essentially building things, bringing them to market, launching them, selling them, and distributing them in a linear chain. And that “scalable industrial business model” is how we designed our organizations.
So we built large organizations for R&D, large organizations for product management and product design and packaging, large organizations for marketing, large organizations for sales, large organizations for business development and distribution, supply chain, and so on (including Finance and HR). And all these ten or fifteen business functions had their own hierarchies. So you, as an employee, worked your way up those hierarchies. When I graduated from college in 1978 as an engineer, I went into one of those hierarchies.
For each employee you were an engineer, a salesperson, a marketing manager, or whatever and you worked your way up the pyramid. And at some point in your career you crossed over and did other things, but that was fairly unusual. That wasn’t really the career path. You worked about 35-40 years in that profession and then you retired.
And a lot of companies had another construct: management and labor. Management decided “what to do” and labor “did it.”
And all of these designs helped us build most of the HR practices we use today, including hiring, pay, performance management, succession, career management, goal setting, leadership development, and on and on. Today, if you look at how the most valued companies in the world, they don’t operate this way any more. Why? Because it slows them down like molasses. If you have to traverse a functional hierarchy to come up with a new idea it takes months or years to create something new.
Today value is created through innovation, time to market, closeness to customers, and unique and high-value offerings. The “hierarchy” wasn’t designed for this at all.
Here are a few dogmas to consider. We used to think that all new ideas come out of R&D. That’s crazy. Of course R&D is important, but some of the most innovative companies in the world don’t even have R&D departments, they have product teams. The Research Department at Microsoft didn’t even invent AI, the company had to partner with OpenAI, a company that has less than a thousand employees.
Here’s another one to consider. Deloitte consultants used to talk about “innovation at the edge,” otherwise known as “skunk works.” We used to advise clients to “separate the new ideas from the scale business” so they new ideas don’t get crushed or ignored. Well today all the new ideas come from the operating businesses, and we iterate in a real-time way. So there’s another industrial organization structure that just no longer applies.
So what we’ve been going through in the dynamic organization, and we’ve studied this in detail, is that we’ve got to design our companies to be flatter. We’ve got to simplify the job titles and descriptions so people can move around. We have to organize people into cross functional teams, we have to motivate and train people to work across the functional silos. We have to build agile working groups, we have to redo performance management around teams and projects, not around individual goals and cascading goals. We need to build pay equity into the system so you’re paid fairly regardless of where you started.
Let’s talk about pay. One of the problems with the hierarchy is you get a raise every year based on your performance appraisal. And after a few years your pay may have been quite a bit different than somebody sitting next to you simply because of your appraisals. But you may not be delivering any more than them. That wasn’t fair.
If you came into the company with a background in marketing, you made less money than somebody who came into the company with a background in engineering. But five years later you might be doing the same stuff but making different amounts of money. And then there’s gender bias, age bias, and other non-performance factors. In a “skills meritocracy,” as we call it, pay equity has to get fixed.
We’ve got to have developmental careers and talent marketplaces and open job opportunities and mentoring for people. And these people practices are the facilitation of becoming more dynamic. And the problem of not being dynamic is what happened at Salesforce, Meta, and other tech companies last year. Salesforce hired thousands of salespeople during the last upcycle after the pandemic, and then a year later laid most of them off. Meta did the same thing. Google’s probably next.
These companies, operating in the industrial mindset, thought that the only way to grow is to hire more salespeople, more engineers, or more marketing folks. But the quantity of people in one of these business functions doesn’t necessarily drive growth and profitability. What matters is how they work together and what they do, not how many of them there are.
This old idea that we’re going to grow the company by hiring, hiring, hiring is gone. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s still a part of the growth part of the company, you’re always hiring to replace people, to bring new skills, et cetera, and to bring new perspectives. But in a dynamic organization, a lot of the growth comes from within. People grow too.
Even the word growth mindset has become overused. We need to have an organizational growth mindset so that we can grow as an organization. A great example of this is Intel. Intel lost their way in the manufacturing of semiconductors and also in the R&D. Now they’re reinventing themselves internally and their stock is skyrocketing. They didn’t hire some guru to tell them what to do, they know what to do. They just need to get around to doing it.
Google has more AI engineers than OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the other little guys put together, but they didn’t execute well. Now they’re executing better. They brought their AI teams together into cross-functional groups and they’re sharing IP from YouTube with other business areas. I bet they stomp many of the others in AI once they get it going. That’s part of being a dynamic organization.
You as HR people know better than anybody how dysfunctional it is when there are multiple groups in the company doing competing things and they’re not working together because they don’t know about each other, or they don’t talk to each other. There’s no cross fertilization or they’re protecting their turf. All of these are the things that get in the way of being a dynamic organization.
And the reason it’s relevant in the next year is this has taken hold. Things like talent marketplaces and career pathways and skills-based organizations, skills based hiring, skills based pay, skills based careers, skills based development, et cetera… these are not just HR fads, they’re solutions to this big shift: making companies more dynamic. Despite their value in the past, hierarchical stove-piped companies don’t operate very well anymore.
Now this isn’t an A-B switch type of thing. This is an evolution, but it’s taking place very quickly. And the reason we came up with this concept of Systemic HR is we in HR have to do the same thing. The HR function itself operates in silos. We’ve got the recruiting group, the DEI group, the Comp group, the L&D group, the business partners, the group that does compliance, the group that worries about wellbeing. We’ve got somebody over here is doing an EX project, somebody over there is doing a data management project, a people analytics group.
Okay. Those are all great functional areas that belong in HR. But if they’re not working together on the problems that the company has, and I mean the big problems, growth, profitability, productivity, M&A, etc., then who cares? Then you’re at level one or level two in systemic HR. We built the Systemic HR initiative around business problems. And that’s how we came up with the new HR operating model (read more details here or view the video overview).
I think Systemic HR will be a very big deal for 2024, and there are many reasons. Not only are we living in a labor shortage but there’s another accelerant, and that is AI. For those of you that have used Galileo, and I hope you all get a chance to use it this year, it’s absolutely unbelievable how AI can pull together information, data, text from many sources in the company and make sense of what your company is doing.
You know as well as I do, if you’ve worked in sales, if you’ve worked in marketing, if you worked in finance, these are siloed groups. Few companies have a truly integrated data management system for all of their customer data match to their sales, data match to their revenue, data match to their marketing. Customer data platforms are a idea, but it doesn’t really happen very often, and it takes tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and many, many systems to do that. Well, AI does this almost automatically.
So when you pull together a tool like Galileo, and you use our research as part of the corpus, and you add data about employee turnover, for example, in your company, or pay variations, you’ll see the relationship between pay and turnover just by asking a question. You don’t have to go spend months doing an analysis and trying to figure out if the analysis is any good. And that’s happening all over the company in sales and customer service and R&D and marketing – everywhere.
So this more integrated, dynamic organization is happening before your eyes. In 2024, this is the context for almost everything we’re going to be working on now.
The other context is the labor market, which is going to be very tough. You’ve read about from us and others about how tight the labor market is now. Unemployment in the United States is 3.8%, and it’s not going to get much better. Even if we do have a recession, which is questionable, there aren’t enough people to hire. The fertility rate is low, and even if every company gives employees fertility benefits and they all have babies, it will take twenty years for these people to go to work. So all of the developed countries: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Nordics, China, Russia, the fertility rate has been low for a long time. The World Bank sees working population shrinking within ten years in almost every developed economy.
Since hiring is going to get harder and we’ll see fewer and fewer working people, companies have to be much more integrated in hiring. And we all have to look the Four R’s: Recruit, Retain, Reskill, Redesign. This puts HR in the middle of a lot of job redesign, career reinvention, and a serious look at developing skills, not hiring skills, and using the tools we have as hr professionals to help the organization improve productivity without just hiring and hiring and hiring.
I measure the success of companies by two things. One is their endurance: how well have they fared over ups and downs? The second is their revenue per employee. Companies with low revenues per employee tend to be poorly managed companies relative to their peers. Of course there’s a lot of industry differences.
When we went through our GWI industry work: healthcare, consumer goods, pharma, banking, we could see the high performing companies were very efficient on a headcount basis. And we found out these companies are actually implementing Systemic HR practices.
The other driver that we’re living in a service economy. Interestingly enough, in the United States, more than 70% of our GDP is now services. So the people you have, the humans in your company, are the product. And if you’re not getting good output per dollar of revenue per human, you’re not running the company very well.
And this leads to many management topics.
How are we going to build early and mid-level leaders?
How can we rethink what employees really need? The topics of employee engagement and employee experience are really 25 to 30 years old. They need a massive update.
How are we going to implement AI in L&D and replace a lot of these old systems that everybody kind of hates, but we’re stuck with?
What’s going on with the ERP vendors and what role will they play as we replace our HR tech with AI powered systems?
How will we implement scalable talent intelligence? In a world of labor shortages talent intelligence becomes even more important, whether you think of it for sourcing and recruiting or an internal mobility or just a strategic planning initiative.
How do we all get comfortable with AI?
And then there’s this issue of Systemic HR and developing your team, your function, your operating model to be more adaptive and more dynamic.
So I look back on 2023 I feel it was one of the most fascinating and fun and enriching years that I’ve had. I am always amazed and impressed and energized by you, by you guys who were out there on the firing lines, dealing with these complex issues and companies with old technologies and all sorts of changes going on and how you’re adapting. I continue to be more impressed and more excited about the HR profession every year. I think a lot of people who aren’t in HR think we do a lot of compliance and administration stuff and we fire people. That is the tiniest part of what we do.
2024 is going to be an important year. You as an HR professional are going to have to learn a lot of things. You’re going to learn about Systemic HR issues, you’re going to learn about AI, and you’re going to learn to be a consultant.
There’s no question in my mind that over the next decade or two dynamic organization management is going to become a bigger and bigger issue – how we manage people and companies. And I don’t mean manage like supervise, I mean develop, move, retain, pay, et cetera, culture, all of those things.
I leave 2023 very energized about what’s to come with AI. And if you’re afraid of AI, just take a deep breath and relax. It’s not going to bite you. There’s nothing evil here. It’s a data driven system. If you don’t have your data act together, you’re not going to get a lot of good value out of AI.
I talked to Donna Morris at Walmart last week; I talked to Nickle LaMoreaux at IBM; and I talked with the senior HR leaders at Microsoft. They’re all seeing huge returns on investment from the early implementations, and seeing hundreds of use cases. We’re going to have a lot of new tools and lots of vendor shakeout. (Check out what SAP is up to and where Workday is going.)
Stay tuned for our big Predictions report coming out in mid January. That report is my chance to give you some deep perspectives on where I think things are going, recap things that have happened over the last couple of years, and give you some perspectives for the year ahead.
As always we would be more than happy to walk through these things with your team.
I hope you have a really nice holiday season and you take a deep breath.
The world is never perfect. It’s never been perfect. It wasn’t perfect in the past. It won’t be perfect in the future.
But the environment you live in and the environment that you create can be enriching, enjoyable, productive, and healthy, and fun if you decide. And I think we all have the opportunity to make those decisions.
It has been a pleasure and an honor for me to serve and work with you this last year, and I’m really looking forward to an amazing 2024 together.
–END OF PODCAST–
Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations
leadership
2023年12月30日
leadership
微软首席人力官Kathleen Hogan:员工如何充分利用人工智能
Kathleen Hogan Chief People Officer at Microsoft [Photo: courtesy of Microsoft]
微软首席人力官 Kathleen Hogan表示,人工智能对我们工作方式的影响将比个人电脑更大。
AI是我们时代的决定性技术,创造了一个巨大的范式转变,它将改变我们的工作方式,影响力甚至超过了个人电脑的引入。我们曾经有一个大胆的愿景,“每个办公桌上、每个家庭里都有一台电脑”,而今天,我们希望在“每个人的口袋里都放一个副驾驶”。
当然,AI的影响也伴随着挑战。我们必须解决关于工作流失、算法偏见以及组织快速培养技能的真实担忧。但最终,我相信AI的潜力太大,不能采取观望态度。
领导者需要创造正确的环境,让AI获得积极的势头。这将需要准备和有意识的方法,以便这些新的AI工具不仅帮助员工提高生产力,而且帮助他们茁壮成长。我建议关注这三个方面,以更快实现这些好处:培养基于敏捷的文化、重新想象我们的工作方式、投资于更深层次的人类技能。
培养基于敏捷的文化
为了充分利用AI的承诺,团队必须保持敏捷。
即使是那些多年来一直在内部使用AI进行数据分析、预测建模和任务自动化的公司,生成性AI也代表着一个重大转变。通过能够理解人类语言、导航大量文档知识并创造内容,更多职能的员工现在可以使用这些AI工具。
一个基于敏捷的文化还将加速组织建立推动AI价值的更广泛基础和最佳实践的能力。我相信,在AI时代培养这样的文化意味着拥抱适应性领导力,领导者必须愿意深入未知。
重新想象工作方式
20世纪80年代和90年代的机器人自动化进步使制造业生产力翻了一番。这不是仅仅通过给工人提供更高效的工具实现的——公司通过重新思考生产技术和重新设计工作流程,优化人与机器之间的流程,实现了机器人自动化的全部价值。
同样,要充分利用AI采用的价值,领导者需要重新想象工作是如何完成的。这始于将工作分解为更小的任务,以确定AI能做什么,以及或者比人类做得更好。除了自动化一些重复或乏味的工作任务,我们还需要确定AI可以如何协助员工处理更复杂和微妙的任务,如研究、写作和分析。
这个想法是让领导者利用这段时间,不仅是自动化流程,而且是与AI一起重新想象流程,寻找新的工作方式。这将最终帮助人们更聪明地工作,而不是更努力地工作,给他们带来更多的精力,并发现更有意义和更令人满意的工作。
关注人类技能
生成性AI已经被训练了大多数人类语言,所以任何人都可以使用它。但就像任何新技术一样,仅仅给人们新工具而不提供使用它们的技能是不够的。
而且,尽管这似乎与直觉相反,人类技能与技术技能一样重要,以有效使用AI。这包括分析判断力、灵活性、情商、创意评估、智力好奇心、偏见检测和处理能力,以及委派任务的能力。
事实上,我们现在发现,基本的管理技能是发掘AI副驾驶的全部潜力的关键。就像委派给人类员工一样,与副驾驶合作需要能够清晰地沟通,设置背景和参数,定义期望,分析结果,并提供反馈。
一个好的起点是根据学科开发AI技能培训和实践。随着我们从自动驾驶AI转向副驾驶AI,对人们来说,仍然扮演飞行员的角色,用批判性的视角评估他们从AI工具中获得的输出是必要的。这包括验证准确性和评估偏见。最终,飞机的船长有责任成功着陆。
我相信,解锁AI的全部潜力是领导者的责任。AI的创新正在以惊人的速度发生。当我们导航AI对工作场所的影响时,组织领导者必须立即开始培育正确的环境,以确保没有人被遗留在后面。仅仅将AI工具放在员工手中是不够的。当我们培养基于敏捷的文化、重新想象我们的工作方式,以及建立获得AI最佳效果所需的人类技能时,我们可以帮助我们的组织和员工在这个新时代中茁壮成长。
对我来说,能够成为这个令人难以置信的时刻的一部分,既令人兴奋又令人振奋。
英文原文来自:https://www.fastcompany.com/90982077/microsofts-chief-people-officer-heres-how-workers-can-get-the-most-out-of-ai