Future of talent

One of the things that has been bothering me for quite some time has been talent sourcing and retaining. I have built and dismantled several teams over the course of my entrepreneurial journey, it is one of the most difficult things one does especially in an organisation where things don't run as assembly lines. This week I encountered a couple of situations that led me to dedicate this week's newsletter on the future of talent.

I will start with the two situations,

1. Severe shortages in the airport staff and pilots in Europe leading to severe flight delays or cancellations
2. News that a very valued talent of mine might leave us, and as a mentor I feel that the talent should explore other avenues

Flexible work & Pandemic

Over the past several years, multiple things started happening in the aviation industry, especially around the talent. In order to save costs, the flexible workforce started to increase a lot. Especially due to the pandemic and lockdowns everywhere, many of these flexible talent were let go of, and they found alternate professions. Now that the pandemic has subsided and vacation seasons starting again, the airlines and airports are not able to ramp up their staffing to the same extent as before. This has resulted in several cancellations, delays and misery to the vacation goers eventually.

If we get a bit deeper into the root-causes of that - one has to accept that most of the talent in especially airport staff are temporary workers who are not doing this full-time, or as a gap year to support travels etc. One cannot expect to hold on to such talent and the job of the human resources relies a lot on hope that people will always turn up for the flexible work. Secondly, the job as such is not that engaging and exciting even for those who don't have university degrees. One would be better of running their own Doner or Pizzeria outlet, rather than waking up at 2 am to go to the airport to move baggages from the belt to the plane. Same applies for many other allied professions in the sector.

Retaining smart folks

On the other extreme end is the issue that we faced recently; and many companies face on a daily basis. Retaining smart folks is always a challenge. If I remember my days back at Shell for instance, it was necessary to have sufficient challenging projects or front-end development that would keep smart people ticking and excited. Once the projects become too operational heavy which entails running checklists and procedures, then it is not exciting anymore for smart folks. Obviously, there are exceptions, like the one I had at the Pernis refinery, where the operations were so dynamic in nature, one had to always be on a thinking (rather than just doing) mode to problem solve.

When I was building Umagine in the Netherlands, the first 6 months were the most challenging from an intellectual stand point - where the level of uncertainity is quite high. One has to build everything from scratch, which includes from strategy to market roll-out; and sales to operations. During this time, many of the smart folks enjoy the challenge and stick on with you. The moment things get to a steady state, which by the way is the ultimate goal of building any business; things turn out to be quite procedural in nature. Everyone in the team have to work on an "assembly-line" mode with minimum deviations and pushing for maximum errorless output. The smart folks tend not to like this again, as it is now quite operational and far less intellectual.

Over the past few months, I have faced that cycle again of re-building the business and associated challenges with them. Now that the "operational" steady state phase begins to kick in, retaining smart talent is a challenge. One can argue whether one really needs smart talent at this stage; and should the operations be handled by folks who love to do operations and don't look out for the big-picture challenges.

Intermediate Conclusion

In a way, with both the examples above - retaining talent for regular run-off-the-mill tasks (like baggage handlers, security etc.) as well as smart folks for intellectually ambigous activities is a challenge in itself. Depending upon the geography, there is a severe dearth of both types of talent. For example, western Europe lacks the regular talent and India lacks the really smart folks (at least for a reasonable salary for a start-up).

There is a societal aspect that plays a central role in keeping this balance. In that sense, I wouldn't judge whether one is smart or not, it is just that their environments and exposures have been the reason of their intellectual talent. Between the age of 22-30, most of the folks are not committed into a long term relationship (with kids, houses etc.), and are also quite impatient when it comes to what they get offered as challenge at the workplace. After that (exact age of course depends on where one is), the challenges at home are also equally exciting or tiring in a way that the professional doesn't need to search for extra challenge at work. Secondly, there is an aspect of "settling-down" and increased risk-averseness once long-term committments come into play.

Way forward - Talent for Run off the mill jobs

I wouldn't discount the fact that the run-off-the-mill jobs would decrease with time with advent of technology at different workspaces. It is a matter of time that full body x-ray scans and high definition camera's will full replace the security checkers at the airports; and the self-driving and loading baggage handlers will arrive to replace the human ones.

Still, there will be a huge chunk of run-off-the-mill jobs that will continue. This has to be a priority for policy makers and futurists to address the challenge. Some of my thoughts on this are as follows,

• Community service - as it partly happens now, get those who are in criminal institutions as jails to pick up such jobs as part of their sentence and re-introduction into the civil society
• Refugees - future will see many climate, social and economic refugee flows everywhere in the world - either between or within countries. Employ them for such jobs until they learn the local language and integrate into the society to be able to pick up other jobs
• National service - for critical infrastructure run-off-the-mill jobs, reintroduce 1-2 years of national service, where young graduated folks can be inducted into such jobs
• Cross-industry collaboration - create a common-pool of talent for such jobs, and given seasonality plays an important role in supply and demand, rationalize that by having a market-place that works
• Acceptance - reduce the services being offered to an acceptable and sustainable level, rather than taking drastic measures like increasing prices 10x and getting workers from countries 2000 kms away

Way forward - Smart folks talent drain

This is a tough one, despite the fact that even in the future technology will overtake the work of very smart folks who always want an intellectual challenge. The advent of AI is definitely a factor that will affect the smartest people on the planet. There might not be any intellectual work left.

On the contrary, it will take quite some time to reach the above situation; and in order to keep the inflated ego of homo sapiens live; we will never give in 100% to technology. Some of the solutions I foresee on this side of the spectrum are as follows,

• Market-place of intellectual problems - render the smart folks as freelancers who will be roaming around solving the difficult challenges for industry and society. In this way they don't get bored
• Front-end loading of challenges - ensure that within a company there is a sufficient pipeline of problems that needs to be solved with priorities for the same. If there are no problems then there is a good chance that the company is not innovating and will perish eventually
• Minimum sustenance income according to talent - this is a tricky one, but if there is a basic income as a factor of talent given to folks, then the social pressure isn't there any more of risk-averseness; and eventually getting disillusioned at work. The smart folks will continue to challenge the system and thrive along with the organisaiton
• Acceptance - just accept that we as humans don't have to create problems to be solved. Reduce work-weeks to 2-3 days a week, chill and pursue other hobbies during the rest of the time.

Final conclusions

The above mentioned thoughts are for a futuristic society, although some of those are applied now in parts and parcels. A long term plan for talent management which is dependent on real bottom-up metrics is what will be sustainable. The carrot-stick methodology of mythical ESOPs and bonuses, and company benefits are not something that will help retain talent.

Talent retaining methodology needs to evolve, and now is the right time to start....