Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: workforce

  • Harnessing refugee talent

    Harnessing refugee talent

    Last week saw the inaugural Sydney Techfugees Meetup at the Australian offices of TripAdvisor, an initiative that not just assists new arrivals to the country but shows the importance of keeping a society diverse.

    Techfugees is a UK founded initiative harnessing the international tech community’s skills to assist with the global refugee crisis, the Australian offshoot was set up in 2015 with the aim of helping refugees settle into the Australian community.

    Moving countries is stressful for most people and migrants often face problems accessing services and capital. For refugees who’ve been traumatised by dislocation and war, the problems are even greater.

    Having had four hackathons, the Sydney meetup was an opportunity for the organisers to showcase their work and five new projects that addressed problems facing immigrant communities.

    A refugee’s story

    Kicking off the event was a brief presentation from Mahir Momand, former refugee from Afghanistan and now the Australian CEO of Thrive, a microfinance business for refugee businesses.

    Momand’s story tells us much about the refugee story, born in Afghanistan his family fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twice he returning to his home country before having to flee each time after his charitable work incurred the wrath of the Taliban.

    For migrants and refugee families, microfinancing an important idea, with few assets or business links in their new country is hard for them to access capital so this is an important way to stimulate employment among groups that tend to be entrepreneurial. This is one area where an concept designed for developing communities applies just as well to advanced economies.

    Presenting the apps

    The groups that presented at the meet up were diverse, One Step App offers walking tours which aims to build bridges between the immigrant and established communities while Cinema of the Oppressed looks at using video and other creative tools to help alleviate depression and isolation among new arrivals.

    On a more functional level, Water Democracy is developing a cheap and accessible device to purify water in disadvantaged communities while mAdapt uses mobile technology to increase refugee access to essential reproductive health services.

    Upload Once, the first project to present, is intended to keep a new arrival’s documentation in one place to make it easier for them to maintain and access important records which is essential for dealing with the bureaucracy when arriving in a new country.

    Bringing in diverse skills

    All of the Techfugees projects showed the diverse range of needs and talents of refugees and new immigrants.

    In these troubled, and scared, times it shouldn’t be forgotten how refugees and immigrants have been the strengths of most the successful Twentieth Century economies – most notably the United States and Australia, countries which are erecting greater barriers at the same time they are congratulating themselves for their successful immigrant societies.

    With technology changing the workforce, harnessing the talents and work ethic of displaced people could well be one of the strengths for this century as well. Techfugees is a small taste of what could be done.

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  • Old king coal loses his merry men

    Old king coal loses his merry men

    The industrial revolution’s most important energy resource was coal, even today it generates most of the world’s electric power.

    However, the last half century hasn’t been good for those communities and workers whose incomes are dependent upon coal as the industry has moved away from labour intensive ways of digging the stuff up, alternative sources of energy have developed and the consequences of dumping billions of tons of carbon into the planet’s atmosphere come to be understood.

    The US Energy Information Administration’s annual report on the nation’s coal industry makes grim reading, with both production and employment levels falling.

    Coal industry jobs were one of the touchstone issues in the recent US Presidential elections. As The Guardian reported, former staunch Democrats in the mining regions – some of America’s poorest counties – supported Donald Trump on the strength of the promise to reinvigorate the sector.

    Sadly, as the EAI reports, those coal jobs are never coming back even if the world starts using more. Since World War II, the productivity of US coal mines has increased from .72 tons per worker to 5.22 in 2011.

    Despite a recent slight drop in US productivity at the end of last decade – apparently due to spoil recovery during a period of booming prices – the trend is not good. As Australian academics warn, increased mine automation means jobs in that industry are going to become increasingly scarce.

    Like Donald Trump and the distressed US mining regions, Australian politicians believe that coal mining will provide the jobs of the future. They are wrong.

    Those communities and politicians hoping for jobs in the 21st Century may well be better off looking to the future rather than the past. Nineteenth Century thinking is not going to provide answers.

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  • Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    While robots threaten to take our jobs, they also promise to change the agricultural industry. That paradox describes how both the risks and opportunities in our increasingly automated word.

    Brian Halweil, an ag-tech writer, describes how small farmers are using specialist robots to automate their operations. He lays out how the miniaturization of farm machinery will help encourage small, diverse farms.

    The available of cheap, adaptable robots driven by almost ubiquitous and build in artificial intelligence is going to drive automation across most industries.

    Ubiquitous robotics though means we have to rethink employment and social security as the workforce adjusts to new methods of working. Inadvertently former McDonalds chief executive Ed Rensi touched upon this in his somewhat hysterical response to the campaign to increase the minimum wage across the United States.

    Rensi is right to point out that fast food restaurants will replace workers with robots where they can, indeed McDonalds led the way through the 1970s and 80s in introducing production line techniques to the food industry and the company will automate their kitchens and ordering systems regardless of minimum wage levels.

    That relentless automation of existing jobs is why there is now a world wide push to explore the concept of a guaranteed minimum wage. We seem to be at the same point we were almost a century ago where the ravages of the Great Depression meant societies had to create a social security safety net.

    As we saw with the Great Depression, the jobs eventually came back but in a very different form in a much changed economy. We’re almost certainly going to see the same process this century, hopefully without the massive dislocation and misery.

    For businesses and industry, Halwell’s point about much smaller and adaptable robots giving rise to more nimble businesses is almost certainly true. For investors, managers and business owners adapting to that world will be key to avoiding being on the minimum wage themselves.

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  • Confidence and open communications

    Confidence and open communications

    One of the big technology industry stories currently is the merger of Dell and data storage giant EMC, which at seventy billion dollars will be the biggest merger in the tech industry’s history.

    With fifty thousand employees managing such a change presents a challenge for EMC’s managers and something noticeable attending the company’s EMC World conference in Las Vegas this week is how upbeat almost all the staffers about the impending merger.

    In an interview with David Goulden, the CEO of EMC’s Infrastructure division, which is the company’s core business, I asked him how they were keeping staff morale up in the face of changes that will almost certainly cost jobs.

    “Change creates uncertainty,” says Goulden. “One thing I’ve learned from this is you cannot over-communicate and that’s true internally and it’s true with our customers. We’ve put an incredible amount of effort in communications so our teams are engaged to go and speak to their customers.”

    As change is now a constant in all industries Goulden’s lesson should be noted by all managers and business leaders – clear, honest and open communications with employees and customers is essential in keeping the trust of the markets and workforce.

    The old model of restricting information and hoping no-one finds out is increasingly harder to sustain and from a business point of view unprofitable in the medium term as well.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of EMC and Netsuite.

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  • Malls and the economic divide

    Malls and the economic divide

    Yesterday we posted on how a lack of education is contributing to the decline of America’s middle class. An article on Bloomberg’s Gadfly website illustrates the direct effects of this change in comparing the fortunes of two different shopping malls.

    It’s not news that America’s malls are dying in the face of changing demographics, consumer tastes and economics but some centres continue to thrive.

    Bloomberg’s Shelly Banjo and Rani Molla put the success of some malls down to the affluence of their customers. A centre that boasts Tesla, Apple and Louis Vuitton stores such as Atlanta’s Lenox Square thrives and charges high rents to its tenants.

    Just the presence of an Apple Store boosts a centre’s rents by 13% claim the authors.

    Eight miles away from Lenox Square is Northlake Mall which only attracts a quarter of the rents on a per square foot (psf) basis and doesn’t boast the high quality names but rather a range of fading chains and department stores.

    Northlake’s woes lie in demographics with its shoppers scoring poorly compared to Lenox Square’s on all measures.

    atlanta-mall-comparison

    The key points are per capita income and the education level with only just over half of Northlake’s customers having a college degree or better with the result earning only 2/3rds of that of Lenox Square’s shoppers.

    Northlake’s lagging educational and income levels isn’t unusual as this is exactly the problem facing most of the lower middle classes as their earnings fall as their skills are left behind by an increasingly technological society.

    The decline of Northlake, and most of America’s malls, illustrates the effects of an undereducated workforce on the local economy. Making sure the population has the skills to compete in the 21st Century is more than just a problem for the individuals affected.

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