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Workforce futures: exploring change and discovering paths forward

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Our great privilege in helping organizations explore their futures is to sit with them when they make discoveries about the world of change surrounding them. Uncertainty turns to clarity and hopefulness at those moments. What may have felt like feeling their way around in fog becomes a brighter, clearer view of the future. With that clearer view, colleagues can find new common ground and begin to chart a course toward the future they prefer.

There is nothing quite like the cascade of “ahas” you can read on the faces of organizational leaders who get a chance to deepen their sense of the future, explore scenarios—what ifs about critical changes—and assemble their ideas about how the future might play out. As people explore their future with colleagues, they get a chance to try out ideas, compare assumptions, and engage with ideas about change for their organization.

With my colleagues, Jennifer Jarratt and Katherine Green, PhD, and at the direction of Joyce Oreskovich, Director, and Sam McKeeman, Programs Manager, of the Maine Bureau of Human Resources, we spent several months in 2014 exploring the future shaping the Maine State Government’s workforce. We led three workshops where the state’s human resources leaders and department leaders engaged with ideas about the state and the state workforce's futures. Our Maine 2025 project illustrates the power of foresight to chart a clearer course for workforce strategy.

The Maine State Government workforce

The Maine State Government workforce was built over time based on local needs and conditions, and it evolves and changes slowly. It must draw on the local and regional supply of talent, and that supply is not always adequate or available.

The state's workforce is aging, a detail that some stakeholders lamented in our interviews around the state. Maine, in fact, has the oldest population of any US state.

Core questions for the future of Maine’s government include how to recruit talent to the state, and how to keep Mainers with talent there, as well as interest them in working for the State Government. Talent and skill can be developed within an existing workforce as well, and Maine's state government has done so and continues to do so, but it still faces limits on resources, time, and "raw material" for reaching its workforce goals.

Perhaps most importantly, in the face of all this, Maine faces change, and its workforce needs to adapt and change to meet new demands on state government. How profound and comprehensive will change in the marketplace, change in technology, change in the citizenry be, and how might it evolve and shape the demands on Maine's workforce? Who should the state government recruit? Who should it develop? Where can it find the talent it needs? Maine faces those questions, and turned to an exploration of the future to begin to answer them.

How to use foresight for workforce development

Workforce development can be a slow, sometimes expensive process. It pays to get it right. Taking a long view into the future, five, seven, ten years, or more, may be critical in achieving HR’s goals. Maine's HR leaders realized this, and built a body of critical questions to examine, recognizing that a focused exploration would bring the clarity the organization needed to build its strategies now for future success.

Workforce Futures processAt the right is a schematic (click to enlarge) of the foresight process we used to help align Maine's state government for its strategic workforce development:

This is a process of open-minded exploration and discovery (Steps 1 and 2), ideally including key stakeholders who bring their insights, and but also who will understand emerging strategies and plans more readily if they are engaged in the discovery process. Then it involves constructing clear views of possible future outcomes, views of sufficient detail to bring insights on change to the leadership of the organization (Steps 3 and 4). 

From those alternate views of what is possible will begin to emerge specific ideas for strategy that are strong responses to one or more future view (Steps 5 and 6). The whole process: opens up thinking to possibilities not considered before, clarifies and expands assumptions about the future, engages more stakeholders and identifies the most robust strategic actions for long-term success.

Among the core conclusions for Maine from our program:

  • Build for digital government, continuing to harness technology and adjust the workforce, but focus on "finishing the change cycle"—getting beyond just adding tech and trimming staff to reconfigure government processes and structure, and the workforce that serves them.
  • Launch an age transition plan – lay plans to transition the state government workforce as staff are eligible to retire, retaining some talent and filling a pipeline of talent into the future as more people reach retirement age.
  • Make Maine State Government jobs best in class – making the state government a haven for talent, where a Maine State Government job is better than a private sector job, or a state job somewhere else. This involves a myriad of job, workplace, leadership, and development enhancements.
  • Nurture the skills pipeline – Engage with educators and industry around the state to raise skill levels for workers.
  • Market Maine – Get the story out on the qualities of Maine as a place to move to or return to, to live, to work, and to develop professionally.

How things will turn out for the Maine State Government's workforce is still to be determined, but with a clearer view of the state and state workforce’s future, Maine's leaders are better armed with the clarity they need to move intentionally forward, unstick what's stuck, build new ways of finding and engaging workers, and reach new excellence in public service.

50+@Work, part 2

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Three scenarios for 2020

A core part of our focus on “50+@Work,” is a set of 2020 scenarios that explore a range of possible ways employers may be handling older workers in the near-term future. Each is highly plausible, and our 2020 situation may, in fact, be a blend of the three, depending on the employer, the sector, and other factors. We use these scenarios to help groups explore their choices, and the potential human capital marketplace they will face in a decade or so.

The 2020 scenarios in brief:

Business as usual – Employers continue to push out older workers, on purpose, or inadvertently. They lose assets and often face higher costs in replacing older workers with younger ones.

War for talent – Employers battle for a high-skilled subset of older workers, bidding up their incomes, though other older workers struggle to stay employed in meaningful work.

Sagacious human capital – Many if not most employers recognize the value of older talent, the skills, experience, and wisdom of workers in their 50s, 60s, and beyond.

A key point of these scenarios is to focus employer thinking on the impacts and costs of inaction. There are opportunities to improve approaches to human capital in general, and older workers in particular. What we have now in a lot of organizations is inefficient and unnecessarily costly. 

We work with organizations to explore the impacts of the scenarios and employer strategic options as they look for greater success with an aging workforce. At the simplest level, anyone can pull a small team together, and spend time discussing these three ideas about the future, and what they mean. Doing that will get a vital conversation going, exploring questions including:

  • Do we fit any of these three now?
  • Which is more likely in our sector?
  • Which do we prefer?
  • What advantages and strengths do we bring to this question?
  • Are we doing what we should for the best business outcomes?
  • What are our strategic options?

In part 1, we explained our focus on 50+@Work and the joint initiatives of Leading Futurists LLC and Green Consulting Group LLC.

In part 3, we suggest more things employers can do, with our without our help, to confront the topic, and find ways to greater success with the aging workforce.

50+@Work, part 1

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Changing how we think about older workers

People have trouble imagining the lives of people 65+ including ongoing, meaningful work. That is despite plenty of examples of happy, vital, productive older people. And it’s probably true even for a lot of people in range of that age—they accept the conventions in society that say when you are about 65, you should retire.

But older people often want to work and many have to work past “retirement age”. Some want the challenge and stimulation of work, some need the income, and some want both. As good health lasts deeper into people’s seventh and eighth decades, they don’t feel like they need to go home and rest. The Baby Boomers will be especially intent on changing what it means to be 65+. So we’re in for a big rethink of what it means to be older.

Meanwhile, employers continue to struggle to find the skills and experience they need. Older worker talent is a critical resource for their success.

My company, Leading Futurists LLC with Dr. Katherine Green of Green Consulting Group LLC, has built an ongoing initiative on this topic. Our efforts include a Facebook community page, 50+@Work. And a Twitter feed of insights and important links on the topic, @50PlusatWork. Please come join us at either or both.

Through these efforts, we are helping employers explore how to be successful with 50+ workers—not as a way to do a social good, but because it’s good business. We offer an interactive guide for exploring, envisioning, and planning how to find that success. We also offer workshops to help organizations rethink their efforts, and develop strategies that get beyond the low-hanging fruit.

We will continue this discussion:

In part 2, we take a brief look at three 2020 scenarios about employers and the aging workforce

In part 3, we suggest some things employers can do, with our without our help, to confront the topic, and find ways to greater success with the aging workforce

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