Muse

This is a special branded episode from our sponsor, Citi.

Recording a podcast these days is a little different than it used to be. I just want to make sure that everyone is also muted, like Sarah. Does that sound familiar? Ten months into the shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, office workers around the world are now used to working remotely. Correct. Yep. It's recording. Everyone should see a red dot in the corner of their Zoom. Balancing work and home life, errant pets, and Zoom-schooled kids have become our new normal. But what does the next normal look like? How did the pandemic accelerate workplace trends that were already shaping the future of work? And how are we preparing the workforce of now for the economy of the future? Welcome to a special branded episode of Global Translations presented by Citi. I'm your host, Heather Clancy. On this episode, we're getting to work. We'll discuss how COVID-19 has advanced new workplace norms. We'll look at the tools, skills, and technologies that will be critical to the next generation of talent. And we'll imagine what the future of work looks like in the U.S. and across the globe. The concept of going to work has completely changed since March of 2020. On the one hand, for essential workers, like those in healthcare or service industries, going to work now means risking their health. And on the other hand, for many office workers, going to work now means a trip to the living room. 26% of Fortune 500 CEOs say they will never get back to having over 90% of the workforce in the office. And more than 50% of those CEOs say they don't expect to travel as much as they did before the pandemic. But this shift goes beyond remote work. Since March, employers have embraced video conferencing, accepted and often even encouraged a more flexible work culture, increased their reliance on emerging technologies, and even demonstrated a rise in empathy. And while the shift is certainly unprecedented, none of this is entirely new. It's hard for all of us, I think, to go back to the fall of 2019 mentally. Vanessa Colella is Citi's chief innovation officer, head of Citi Ventures, and head of Citi Productivity.

But if you go back, many of these trends were already happening, whether you think about remote work, flexible work, or you think about just automation in the workforce and how that was going to play out. I think what we really saw in 2020 is simply sort of a mass acceleration of what was already underlying trends in this space.

Those underlying trends are observed closely by Bill Kerr and his team.

One driver is technology, automation. And that has been accelerated for many companies in terms of their journey towards digital platforms, digital business models, touchless surface content.

Bill is Darbaloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and he's co-director of Harvard's Managing the Future of Work initiative. The project works to inform business and policy leaders' actions by researching trends that are redefining the nature of work.

Another thing that many companies were working with across sectors were the right workplace models to be inclusive towards people that were single parents, maybe working from home on a regular basis and so forth. And as we record this podcast, you know, I have an elementary school going on in the next two bedrooms. So I think that has also been brought closer to all of us through the COVID transition.

And so like Bill, I have an elementary school-aged child. And so we've had all manner of learning pods in the apartments, Zoom school. Today is the first day of no school. So I've said no interruptions for the next hour.

Over the course of the pandemic, Vanessa has championed an unexpected leadership tactic among her C-suite peers, the need for human connection in the workplace. She says that in the face of technological innovations and artificial intelligence, the work that cannot be replaced is the work that is based on human-to-human contact, shared emotions, and expressions of solidarity.

I think what's important to remember during the pandemic is, well, well, we've all been going through the same thing. We've all been going through it very differently.

And you're a big advocate for empathy and understanding. And COVID-19 has certainly surfaced unique concerns around mental health and the potential implications of isolation associated with remote work. Tell me, how are corporate leaders ensuring that employees stay happy, engaged, and productive during these trying times? And why is this so critical?

to the future of work? Why do we really need to be thinking about this now?

Many of these trends already existed before COVID, before 2020. But what this year has done is just sort of laid bare everything for us. And I think that notion of mental health and balance and ensuring that you care for employees, that was always true, right? It was always an imperative. But it was sort of, you know, if you could maybe get away with cutting corners a little bit or get away with, you know, just focusing on getting the job done, whereas this year, it's become so apparent that you have to lead with humanity, you have to lead with empathy, you have to have a much deeper understanding of what your individual colleagues are going through in order to maintain morale, maintain happiness, maintain productivity, and just ensure that everyone's okay. And from my perspective, the notion that we all now understand that mental health and mental well-being is of primary importance, and it is the circumstances are not distributed equally. So learning how to lead through that, I think, has hopefully taught all of us to be better leaders.

Bill, I am sure you have thoughts on this.

I think we have had many of the same experiences at Harvard Business School, as we've tried to manage among our staff and faculty, much more need for managers and unit leaders and so forth to reach out to their employees. In the entrepreneurship group, which I'm the unit head of, we have focused extensively on development of weekly newsletters to be sharing personal tidbits that are going on in people's lives and finding informal ways to build in time before and at the end of meetings. And you've got to work on messaging. You know, what we may have said already 10 times, you need to now say 20 or 30 times to being shared. So there's a lot that we've learned to build there. And that's a place where, as I've talked to leaders that have been experimenting with more virtual or hybrid forms of their workplace, a lot of times they are saying, you know, we used to do it this way, even after COVID, we want to make sure that we don't lose this part of it, because it helped us, you know, reach out to many communities and have people involved that we typically wouldn't have had.

Vanessa, I would love to hear any particular anecdotes that you have or tips, if you will, to that things that you've done differently. I asked you about the general topic, but what have you done differently with your own team? And what has Citi done?

Yeah, so let me start with Citi, and then I'll come to our team. I think Citi has consistently prioritized employees throughout the face of the pandemic. And obviously, being such a global company, you know, we had an understanding from China early on, our operations in China, what we were likely to be faced with. And so Citi moved extremely rapidly, really almost over a weekend to put any of our employees that we could in sort of secure, remote places. And then obviously, we've got a lot of folks in the workforce, like our tellers and our solution center employees, where people had to physically go to work. So moved incredibly quickly to just make sure that from a physical health perspective, people were in the best possible conditions that we could create. My team came up with an idea to do a video series that was all videotaped on people's smartphones, called the Humans of Citi Ventures and Citi Productivity. And so we share on a regular basis, sort of edited bits of people's personal lives and what they're doing at work. And I think as Bill mentioned earlier, you know, if there are things that we can take away from this, it's that we've actually gotten to know one another much more. The serendipity is hard to recreate. But, you know, when you go through, really, the three crises we've been living through this year, right, a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a racial equity crisis, and realize how each one of those three is differentially impacting every person. I'm very grateful for not only all the work that people have done, but how they've done it. And, and I hope that that how will stick with us.

Newsletters, videos, virtual breakout room chats, the digital tools Bill and Vanessa have used to foster workplace culture during the pandemic come from a long line of workplace tech innovations. And the pandemic certainly hasn't slowed that innovation down. In fact, the shutdowns, quarantines, and abrupt work from home transition accelerated these innovations and helped the corporate world embrace.

Emerging Technologies to Support the Next Generation Workforce. So let's talk more specifically about the role that technology will be playing in this shift to the future of work. What are some of the specific tools and emerging technologies that you see shaping now and that will continue to shape this future? Things that you're really, really relying on heavily.

Sure. So I think there's so many. And I think there's two categories of tools. One are tools that existed that are being used for new things. And then there's sort of a category of brand new tools. So in the existing category, video conferencing has existed for a very long period of time. But it's being utilized by schools, by medical centers, places that never thought they were going to run their operations in a remote fashion. And so I think that will continue. And then, of course, you're seeing tons and tons of new tools. So we exist and have existed in a very highly networked heterogeneity environment where many different kinds of devices are being attached. And that requires sort of a constant vigilance around security and authentication. So whether you think of portfolio companies of ours like Secure who are really thinking about how do you maintain digital identity? How do you make sure that we know who's who? How are we thinking about authenticating people in a proper way? All the way to things like, you know, we've had electronic signatures for a long time. But how do you think about new technologies like what Anvil is doing around digital processing as opposed to paper-based processing? And I think we've all developed an appreciation for the tactile and in-person things that we miss. But the places where we've been able to get to good enough solutions that work seamlessly, we won't ever go back. Right. So when something has started working better virtually or better digitally, we won't go back. I think we'll hopefully go back selectively to those tactile and in-person things that we miss and that we haven't been able to replicate over this time period.

Yeah, I want to go back to the company that you just mentioned, Anvil. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? And then I also would love you to touch on this another company that I know is part of the City Ventures portfolio, which is Scan. Right. So I love I think that the audience would really love to hear a little bit more about that one.

Yeah, absolutely. Lots of things have already moved to digital, but a lot of things haven't. There's still an awful lot of paper that gets processed. And you remember a couple of years ago, people talked about the paperless office. Well, I'll tell you what caused the paperless office when our kids were all being Zoom schooled and I ran out of paper to print the latest assignment. Like that's what got to the paperless office. Right. When, you know, certainly working for City, right, we are we cannot print anything at home because that's an insecure environment. So we moved overnight to a paperless office and a company like Anvil that can really automate that paper processing in a digital manner. I think it's really important to make sure that this this stuff doesn't all become just our life hacks over the course of 2020, but become something that's fully integrated into the way we do business. And speaking of that, we're constantly trying to think about how do we do a better job of improving processes, right, making things more effective and seamless for our colleagues, for our clients. So, you know, you asked about scan scan is a company that uses machine learning and AI to really understand what are the processes that people go through. And how do you not only discover those processes, but then by bringing them to light, allow you to improve upon them, make them better and where possible from an end to end perspective, make them digital.

Yeah. So automation definitely is a key topic when we discuss the future of work. And it even became an important talking point during last year's presidential primary debates. Bill, how will automation, artificial intelligence and robotics impact everyday Americans and how they go about their jobs or careers? And are there any unintended consequences of automation that we need to be considering as these innovations increasingly come online, as they become part of our world?

I will start with the descriptions Vanessa just gave of the ventures that City is supporting. What's significant about those is that they are a lot of people that are engaged in very cognitive based work, non-routine tasks, stuff that historically automation hasn't had a big impact upon. And if you want to have a contrast, go to an automotive manufacturer and talk about automation. They're like, man, I did that in the 19th. 50s. They've got a much longer history. And so for more than 100 years, we have been automating tasks with technology. We began with doing routine physical tasks, and then we moved into routine cognitive tasks with the computer, which was a big transformation over the last 50 years. And what's significant about the technology landscape now as we combine this with a more advanced form of robotics and artificial intelligence is that it's going to be touching every job, every role in a corporation. And that's going to include, again, the frontline workers. It's going to include people that are on the shop floor, the factory floor, but it's also going to include the fraud department at Citi or other kinds of marketing functions. Many different pieces that were historically not impacted now will be. As you take a step back, though, one of the things that we always try to emphasize is that you don't automate jobs. You tend to automate tasks. It's very rare that you completely wholesale automate away all the work that somebody's doing. Instead, you're taking on one role or one set of tasks. And when you get down to the broader macro implications that this has, they're significant. We, over the last 40 years, saw much less growth of what would have historically been what we call middle skills or middle wage work relative to work at the lower wage end of the spectrum or work at the higher wage. And that's because the computer and the computing revolution was able to take on a lot of those kinds of roles or tasks. So we're going to have to look to make sure that we can provide significant work to everyone in the economy. And second, help people transition out of roles and occupations where automation is coming in into places where we can continue to put their talents to use.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So and you're talking a lot about new skills, right? And for these digital platforms requires new digital skills. It also requires new ways of thinking about management, new soft skills. In order to be successful, future employees need this, you know, that could be the next generation, current employees might need to also develop these skills to maintain relevance in the new economy. Bill, you interact with the next generation workforce quite a bit at Harvard. Can you talk about the rising importance of skills building for the next generation of employees and how people can invest in themselves? So what do individuals need to do to in order to prepare themselves for that for that scenario that you were just talking about?

It's significant. And as we look to the skill base, you already named some of the most significant skills people need for the future. One is there's going to need to have a baseline of just digital fluency, the capacity to work in digital platforms, software as a service type platforms. What's significant about that particular skill base is that it turns over quite substantially. So people that have looked at kind of online job postings for the same firm decade after decade have found that there's about a 25 percent baseline turnover in terms of the skills people are looking for in their job ads. But in the digital technology space, that turnover is about 50 percent over the course of a decade. So it's a fast moving treadmill. And that means we're gonna have to have people continually re-upping those skill bases. And then moving or augmenting beyond just the description of soft skills, which can include creativity and several important roles like that. A lot of work emphasizes the social nature of skills. And in particular, the ability to work in teams, the ability to be a customer-facing employee, those kind of interactive forces are actually quite challenging for the technology to take on those particular tasks. And so they're pretty good foundations to build around. But what we also find a lot with the Managing Future of Work project is that a lot of this falls on employers. And there's a number of companies that see where they want to go in terms of technology and their digital future. But to get there, they have to overcome their legacy IT systems. And they also have to make sure that their employee base is ready for that future. And so it can almost be a competitive advantage, the capacity they have to help their employees prepare for that future and be able to provide them credentials, micro-credentials, degree-type stamp that they can then take to other employers as well.

Vanessa, how is Citi investing in skills building and the next generation of talent?

So Heather, it's such an important topic, and I'm so passionate about this. So we're not going to automate jobs. We're not going to automate parts, right? But the thing is that people think about jobs. They don't think about skills. So a big part of this is helping people think about, like, not my job as chief innovation officer, but my skills are I'm really good at pivot tables in Excel.

and I'm a decent public speaker, breaking down what skills you have. So we at Citi actually launched a platform called Worthy, and it's about helping people think about their own worth, right? What skills do you have and what skills could you or would you need to acquire if you wanted to take another position or a different position or move to a different location? And I just will say one last thing, which is if you just look at the U.S. alone, there's no shortage of people trying to upskill. In fact, we've got over $1.6 trillion of unpaid student debt, which is like the most tangible example we need that people understand that they need new skills, and as Bill said, these skills are going to decay and they're going to need more new skills. The challenge is there's never been a straightforward way for people to connect. What skills do I already have? What skills do I need to acquire? And how will that help me to earn income to support my family? And so what Worthy does as a platform is it connects those dots from what you already know, lets you explore what else you could do, and then lets you see, gee, what skills could I acquire based upon where I am that would help me earn more income? And I think there's tremendous work going on. Bill's leading a lot of it at HBS. Around the country, there's a lot of work going on around skills. And we feel like our small part at Citi is to help connect that skills-based work to people's ability to generate income. Because if we can help to close that loop, then we will get out of the sort of hole that we're in around student debt and people trying but not being able to move as the workplace moves. And instead, giving people sort of the visibility and the transparency and the tools to acquire the skills that they need to thrive.

I was just going to double down on that. I think the places we've been most excited about in workplace reskilling programs have been when there's this kind of transparency that's given to the employee about where the company is going to go, what kind of occupations and opportunities they're going to have out in the future. And here's where you are. And here's a set of skills that we need to have you help work on developing. And we're going to be very excited for you to be along with us on that journey.

Yes. I would just add one thing to what Bill said, which is with platforms like Worthy, we've released these tools to the public. So I agree with you. There are certain employers who are doing some amazing things internal to that company. But of course, for a lot of people, as jobs shift, it may not be within a single organization. And so we feel it's really important for anyone to have access to the tools to get exactly the kind of transparency, Bill, that you were just describing in terms of where am I today? Where is the world going? And how can I sort of build my career journey in a path that's going to be fruitful as things move forward?

We're talking about returning to some kind of normal after the pandemic. It's pretty clear that it will still be many months before most people return to their offices. One concept that I know you talk about quite a bit, Vanessa, is the concept of an equitable return, right? What do you mean by that?

Yeah, thanks for raising that, Heather. I think we touched on it a bit earlier in the conversation when we were talking about, you know, it's not flexibility if you don't have a choice. Many businesses now, as we get to, you know, well, not right in this exact moment when we have a surge in this country. But as we get to a place where people are starting to come back to physical locations, again, this is obviously limited to the office workers who have been working from home. Lots of people have been forced to be in their physical location this whole time. But if you think about office workers, there will be a period of time when not everyone will be back, but some people will be back. And so what we're really focused on at Citi is making sure that return is equitable, right? Because some people will have the ability to go back more quickly or more easily, right? If you're not caring for young children or older adults, if you don't have a partner who is an essential worker or a healthcare worker, right? There'll be certain circumstances, again, unique to each individual employee that make it easier for some people to return and more difficult for other people to return. And what we want to ensure is that because the ease of return is, as we know from the pandemic, tilted against women and against minorities just because of the nature of either caring for older relatives or young children and the fact that minority communities... have been so much harder hit by COVID for many, many reasons. You know, it's likely that the disproportionate number of people or percentage of people who are challenged in physically going back to work will be women or underrepresented minorities. And so we're very much focused on the fact that we don't inadvertently create something where it was focused on the people who were able to get back to the office. But we make sure that as we slowly and carefully and in a data-driven way return to the office, we keep that individual humanity and empathy and understanding of circumstance so that that return is equitable and we don't inadvertently leave certain populations further behind.

Yeah, Bill, I love your thoughts on this as well. What will the new normal look like or what should it look like?

Well, let me first stick with Vanessa's thoughts because I think that's very, very important. One of the pieces that we were tracking at the Managing Future of Work initiative over the last three or four years has been the growth towards needing to have individuals be the unit of analysis so that it was not just a block of workers. You had to be able to think about what Heather needed, what Vanessa needed, and the particular circumstances there. And to be on the question of the new normal, I think this enormous boulder just got dropped into a lake and there's going to be ripple effects for a long time to come. And as we look towards the future, we're going to have to think about how we also bring in people that have been really disadvantaged over the last few years. This includes kids in school that may have more or less had a sideways year in terms of their education that were possibly in high school. And then what will be the future workplace models to make sure that we can include them in the workforce? If there are trading gaps, how can we overcome those and help to rebuild that part of our workforce for the future?

Yeah. So I'm going to stick with you, Bill, for our final question. I'll start with you. And it's looking a little farther than just this next year. It's imagining this future, right? 10 years from now, 20 years from now, for both office workers and factory workers and beyond, field workers, everyone. What do you imagine that work will look like as we take this moment and look ahead and learn and hope and act?

I think we've seen some of the basic building blocks. One is talent is going to be super important for the future. And in part, that's going to be because there's a lot of stuff that are going to be placed around people that are doing some really significant parts of the work process. And so the capacity of people to complement and build on that, whether they're on the shop floor of the factory or in the office of the future, is going to be critical. Second, while technology has some uncertainty towards the future, demographics don't. And most every advanced economy is going to go through a significant aging of its workforce. And you're going to have many people that are not going to only have the kids like Vanessa and I have in the room next door. They're also going to have elderly parents who are going to need some form of help or assistance, or there might be a micro need for them to be able to do something on Thursday afternoons to help out. You're going to see a lot more workplace models needing to accommodate and think about how to activate that.

Great. Vanessa, you have the final word.

So I think, you know, when we think about future, first of all, I would say none of us are good at predicting it. But I guess I would just leave us maybe with a hope or an aspiration for the future. We've learned a lot. And one of the things that we've learned is that whether you are a truck driver or you work in a retail location or you're an office worker or a factory worker, you know, humanity and empathy and really understanding people's circumstances. Bill said it before, right? They no longer look at research by like groups of workers, starting to look at individual people and what work and what work and life mean, right? So I think if we can hold some of those learnings around focusing on individuals and really thinking about humanity and empathy and how we can carry those forward, I think irrespective of whether the future workplace has ping pong tables or cubicles or individual offices or only conference rooms, we will still be in a better place as leaders and as organizations.

Well, from my always remote existence in New Jersey, I've been working remotely for the last 10 years. I really want to thank the two of you for this enlightening and... And really thoughtful conversation. Thank you very much, Vanessa and Bill. Thank you, Heather. Thanks, Heather. For years, we've debated what the future of work will look like. But through COVID-19, it's safe to say the future of work is here and now. Our new reality has pushed us to embrace the tools, skills, and technologies that have now become standard. But the nature of our work is only going to keep changing. So as we look to the future, it's important to identify and hone the skills that will translate through the ages. And it's important for employers to prioritize and build up the next generation of talent. From abrupt transitions to remote work to adopting radical empathy in management strategies, corporate leaders like Citi have prioritized the well-being of their employees from the onset of this crisis. And while these new workplace trends certainly started pre-pandemic, COVID-19 accelerated them and will continue to define the future of work for years to come. Thank you for joining us on this final special branded episode of Global Translations presented by Citi. I'm Heather Clancy. Thanks for listening.