Four years out of the pandemic and the conversation around the future of work is entering new terrain.
Many employers have settled on a return-to-office mandate, but as the lackluster post-Labor Day return to office showed us this year: “Hybrid work is here to stay,” senior editor Jena McGregor told the attendees of Forbes’ Future of Work Summit.
Now in its third iteration, the summit brought together CEOs, human resource executives and chief people officers to discuss what the next frontier of the future of work looks like, and how to rewire work to meet the technologies of today.
Taking the front seat in the conversation today were two main themes: The rise of artificial intelligence in all aspects of work and the shift toward skills-based hiring as the cost of secondary education soars. How can companies use these two approaches to meaningfully change the way we work?
As McGregor asked attendees, “How do we turn promises into practice?”
Follow along for live coverage of the summit where you’ll find more about those insights and ideas from chief human resource officers, CEOs and more.
“Digital Workers” And A Mid-Year Check-in With Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin
Nine months into the job, Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin is focusing on how to best implement AI into the job performance platform.
While some may be dreaming about the day AI writes performance reviews for us, Franklin cautioned the audience about implementing AI technology without the proper guardrails. “It’s important so we don’t just have AI do things for us completely,” said Franklin, who took over the company founded by Jack Altman in January.
But all the AI talk hasn’t been smooth sailing. In a controversial July LinkedIn post, Franklin announced that Lattice would be giving AI employees performance reviews. “There was a misunderstanding that we were saying that AI was human,” Franklin said. “That was wrong.”
While the move has since been rolled back, Franklin maintained that with the rise of AI agents—AI assistants that do more complex tasks for humans—it was important to establish guardrails in place to ensure that humans are successful in their jobs working together with AI.
“The question is: How do you hold the agents accountable? If that agent is going to be paid for through dollars that were originally budgeted for human capital, how do we know that those trade-offs are good?” Franklin asked, noting the huge amount of fear and lack of education about what AI actually is.
AI’s Frontier Founders Answer: Will AI Replace Workers?
Everyone wants to know: Will AI replace my job? It’s a little more complicated than that.
While AI may take over low-level, often tedious, work, there’s also the possibility it will allow junior employees to start developing those “mastery” skills faster. “[When you] give that to an AI earlier on in your career, you can start developing those kind of mastery skills, whether it’s negotiating a merger, whether it’s dealing with compliance or litigation,” said Winston Weinberg, cofounder and CEO of Harvey AI, in conversation with Forbes senior writer Richard Nieva.
The panel, which brought together three AI founders honored in this year’s Forbes AI 50 list, dove into the details of how AI would and could be implemented into workplaces. From an individual worker perspective, how is AI impacting employees’ day-to-day jobs?
It’s letting employees process more information quicker, according to Keith Peiris, cofounder and CEO of Tome, an AI platform for sales teams. “Most leaders are asked to do more with less, so [AI] is meeting this technological capability with a sort of cultural necessity,” he added. Efficiency is the name of the game.
But from a company perspective, the conversation is about more than just what AI policies are in place. Work structures, said May Habib, cofounder and CEO of Writer AI, will fundamentally change.
“I think a lot about how you get senior people if you don’t have junior people” whose jobs can be the most vulnerable to being replaced by AI, she said.
How To Turn Skills-Based Hiring Into a Reality
While a majority of leaders believe that skills-first hiring is the best way to hire talent, only 30% of employers actually implement it. Why is there such a gap?
“It’s relatively easy to recruit, but it’s less easy to [not] have a ‘leaky bucket,’” Courtney della Cava, senior managing director at Blackstone, told Forbes’ assistant managing editor Ali Jackson-Jolley. It’s not just about establishing skills-based pipelines, but about following through with your hires, whether through traditional internships or apprenticeship programs.
At Accenture, that means consistent training. For employees hired through their apprenticeship program, which makes up 20% of their entry-level roles, Accenture provides training where they learn both hard and soft skills specific to their role. “That foundation of a continuous learning mindset and an open perspective is what allows us to do what we do,” said Angela Beatty, chief leadership and human resources officer.
Key to it is also defining the skills you need for specific roles. Are soft skills, for example, part of that requirement? What are the hard skills you need?
“Skills-first is how you’re actually going to think about the roles that are required,” added Debbie Dyson, CEO of OneTen.
Transforming The Energy Sector’s Workforce With BP
A shifting energy sector requires a shifting workforce. So how do you retain your employees? To BP, it’s all about training.
“A lot of the work we’ve been doing is about training new skills and ensuring the existing skills can be transferred to some of the lower carbon areas of our organization,” said Kerry Dryburgh, executive vice president of people, talent and communications at the energy giant. Zooming in from a rainy London, she told Forbes’ Ali Jackson-Jolley about BP’s efforts to mirror the energy transition into their workers. “It’s also about transitioning jobs,” adding that nearly 40% of the jobs in their renewable energy efforts came from workers with transferable skills.
With a variety of roles under her umbrella, from in-person rigs to corporate employees, BP is also focusing on different talent pipelines, like apprenticeships. Dryburgh, who started her career with an apprenticeship in the UK herself, has set a goal of establishing 200 apprenticeship positions at BP.
“We want to get people from different backgrounds or lower economic backgrounds because we know that where you start from actually does influence where you can get to,” she added.
Lab Rats in the Hybrid World
Not only is hybrid work here to stay, it’s also largely becoming the go-to in-office policy. Still, “we’re in an experiment,” Tim Oldman, a workplace experience consultant, told attendees. “We’re lab rats.”
But while we’re still experimenting, panelists discussed how exactly hybrid workplaces are implemented. From flexible schedules to policies, experimenting also means thinking about how a hybrid workforce impacts how folks work. Managers, for example, are at the forefront of both learning and implementing policy. “Most of the managers in our organizations are player coaches,” says Doniel Sutton, chief people officer at Pinterest. “That means they have to be that themselves and they also have the added responsibility of overseeing their teams.”
Offering flexibility allows employees to feel like they are exercising some agency in how they spend their time, and it opens up a whole new set of opportunities for current and future employees.
It can, and should, mean different things to different functions. “For in-person employees, it’s about shift swapping,” said Eric Severson, chief people officer at Neiman Marcus. “It’s about meeting our customers and employees where they are in order to make business work.”
Sutton thinks about where, and how, their employees are working. For those who may not have space for a physical office (hello fellow New Yorkers) at their homes, or for those earlier on in their career, offering a physical office, and even mandating in-person days may be the best solution.
Another point emphasized in the panel moderated by Forbes deputy editor Isabel Togoh: A hybrid workforce does not need to come at the cost of your profitability. “The relationship between people and place has a direct impact on talent acquisition, which has an impact on bottom line numbers,” Oldman said.
In 2022, Neiman Marcus had its most productive financial year in the last 15 years, when its workforce was still remote-first. As retention and engagement went up, corporate expenses fell by 30%, according to Severson.
“What’s clear to us is it just has no negative impact on our ability to deliver financial and operational results,” he added.
Meshing the Handmade, the Human and AI
Etsy may be your go-to destination for handmade gifts. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t embracing novel technologies—AI in particular—at its very core.
AI can “reduce the toil and the stuff we don’t really like to do,” Etsy CEO Josh Silverman, CEO, told Forbes assistant managing editor Steve Bertoni.
While using AI that can write code may be all the rage, Silverman said it’s really most helpful for looking at the impact of a change down the road. With six million lines of code at Etsy, most of the work the engineers do, he said, is seeing how a change will impact the functions down the line. AI can help with that.
But where AI may be most helpful for the marketplace is using it to do things that couldn’t be done. With 120 million items listed, Etsy has a huge amount of data about the products listed on the site. But it’s relatively inaccurate data about the makeup and composition of items listed.
Tagging all the 120 million items would be very hard, if not impossible. “There’s not an army big enough we could hire and go [and label] one by one. A [machine learning algorithm] can do it at scale in a way that lifts up our sellers,” he said.
Calendly Takes On AI
Implementing AI into your product is not just about saying you use AI, it’s about making sure you’re building the right AI solution, Tope Awotona, CEO of Calendly, told attendees.
It’s been quite the ride for the scheduling software, which was last valued at $3 billion in 2021. Now, Awotona says the company is focusing on serving the needs of its key clientele: External-facing teams or organizations.
Take AI-generated meeting summaries: A meeting host, such as a sales person, will likely want different things highlighted in a meeting summary than the attendees, such as a client. “We’re not just looking at these as meetings; we’re thinking about what needs to happen before that meeting, what is the ultimate goal that you’re trying to achieve and how can we achieve success” all within Calendly, he told Forbes senior writer Jabari Young.
Will We Ever Curb Burnout Rates?
The people are burned out. It’s a problem both employees and their employers are facing as we go deeper into “the great detachment.” So how do we move on?
Burnout, according to director of the Better Life Lab at the New America Foundation Brigid Schulte, “really boils down to a difference between the effort that you put out and the reward that you get.” One that has only been exacerbated by AI.
“We’ve got these ideal worker norms that value and reward overwork, so if you introduce another technology tool in that [environment], you’re also going to expand this idea of the performance of work,” she told Forbes deputy editor Isabe Togoh.
One of the problems in addressing and solving the burnout problem is how leaders think of it structurally.
“We don’t recognize burnout often as what it is, which is a productivity problem, not just an individual well-being problem,” said Joe O’Connor, CEO of Work Time Reduction, which advocates for a shorter, 4-day workweek. The solution can look like a formal reduction of the official workweek to promote shorter, more productive working hours, or asking employees what are the health and wellness benefits that work for them.
Or it can look like implementing distributed work, both across work apps and across physical spaces. “Any serious enterprise knows that an office is a critical employee offering, but it’s not how we should organize how we get work done,” said Annie Dean, global head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian.
WeWork Doubles Down On Flexible Work
Three months into his new tenure as WeWork CEO, John Santora joined Forbes chief revenue officer Sherry Phillips to discuss how the company is providing workspace for flexible teams.
After morning discussions about the benefits of hybrid work, Santora was frank with the audience: “As long as you use [an office], I don’t care how or where,” he said, receiving a good chuckle from the audience.
Indeed, a new study by the office provider found that 59% of surveyed companies who plan to increase their workspace in the next two years are choosing flexible over traditional offices. By the end of the year, the company will have about 1,000 locations available for quick rent on its app, giving users the ability to book an office, a conference room or a seat at a WeWork space.
Santora also revealed to attendees the company is now “debt-free.”
The ROI of Childcare
The best way to respond to pushback against providing some sort of childcare benefit to your employees is to show its return on investment, and how it improves absenteeism rates, particularly.
In conversation with Forbes’ Ali Jackson-Jolley, Darell Ford, CHRO and chief DEI officer at UPS and Shari Eaton, chief people officer at Chobani spoke about how they implemented their childcare offerings directly to their employee needs.
UPS, which provides on-location childcare to employees in five states, has focused on providing urgent daycare to employees when previous plans fall through. It solved two problems: employee retention and absenteeism, which for a transportation company impacted productivity quite a lot.
“Time is money,” Ford said. “Absenteeism and making sure we have the right productivity is a real concern for us. But at the same time from a human perspective, that system breakdown [impacts] parents and in particular mothers [the most].”
Chobani, on the other hand, discovered that an approach to childcare for metro-based employees differed vastly from that of its plant workers. The solution involved multiple approaches, including access to a network of caregivers in close proximity and a childcare stipend, which has turned out to be widely popular with Chobani’s diverse refugee workers.
“We’re really trying to make sure that all of our employees understand what is available to them, which I think is one of the biggest hurdles of any point solution,” she added.
Childcare IS A Workplace Issue
Last week, Mom’s First founder Reshma Saujani asked former President Donald Trump if he would commit to legislation making childcare affordable should he be re-elected in November in what amounted to a now-viral non-response.
Today, she joined Forbes executive vice president Moira Forbes to discuss exactly how childcare cost is not just a women’s issue, but both an economic and workplace concern.
“The reality is that workplaces have never worked for women,” Saujani said, pointing to the disparity between school and work hours. But remote work offered a new solution: “It works for families, especially when kids are really young or you have very elderly parents, because oftentimes people just want grace.”
The solution looks different for everyone. Employers can take the UPS approach of providing on-site childcare; follow in the steps of Walmart, which created an app that allows workers to change shifts with one another, sensing that their employees preferred predictability above all else; or offer childcare subsidies like some larger technology companies.
“The point is that we have to be really open and innovative towards all the different kinds of models that are out there to think about what to do about our childcare,” she said.
What Are “AI Skills”?
Employers want to upskill, employees are seeing new AI tools join their work apps and job seekers are increasingly finding the phrase “AI skills” in job postings. But when someone says they want you to have “AI skills,” what do they actually mean?
It’s the question Forbes’ Jena McGregor posed to panelists in the day’s last conversation. From hard coding skills to knowing how to efficiently ask an AI chatbot a question, it seems like “AI skills” could mean anything.
“If you think of AI as a platform, you have to get very specific about the job and what the skills mean in that,” said Nickle LaMoreaux, chief human resources officer at IBM.
Or you can just get rid of the “AI” part overall: “In your head, try to stop saying AI, it’s just skills,” said Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn. “It’s about [knowing] what AI is and [knowing] how to think about it for your job.”
It’s also focusing on just learning the skills needed for your job, and how AI tools can help you be better at it—which may be your best bet in protecting your job. “The real replacement that’s going to happen is that humans who use AI have a higher probability to replace those that don’t,” said Anthony Stephan, chief learning officer at Deloitte.
Especially in a time where employee training, learning and development opportunities are at a high, how employees define “AI skills,” and provide opportunities for their employees to gain those skills, is key.
“It’s easy to say continuous learning is the new unlock for your employees,” says LaMoreaux. “But are you giving them an opportunity to do it? Are you rewarding them when they do?”