workforce | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Harnessing refugee talent

Techfugees shows what can happen when migrants and refugees are given access to technology and capital.

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.

Old king coal loses his merry men

Desperate rural communities look to obliging politicians to get mining jobs back. Sadly they won’t be returning.

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.

Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

McDonald’s former CEO inadvertently highlights the future of work in his comments about robot fast food kitchens

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.

Confidence and open communications

Open communications is essential in a time of change, tech giant EMC finds

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.

Malls and the economic divide

The fate of two shopping malls illustrates the importance of skills and education for communities

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.

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.

What do we do with displaced workers?

As autonomous vehicles get closer to being commonplace, the question now is what do we do with the armies of displaced truck and taxi drivers.

When Uber founder Travis Kalanick was asked about this earlier this week he suggested that the company may be involved in vocational training for out of work taxi drivers, Tech Crunch reports.

Kalanick’s suggestion raises a number of interesting possibilities – we may see a training levy placed on the new tech companies to fund vocational colleges or develop a new generation of apprenticeship schemes.

The question though is what skills would be best for today’s displaced workers to acquire? One idea is to give them training in statistics in an attempt to address the looming shortage of data scientists.

Another angle could be to train them in programming so they code their way back into the workforce.

Whatever course we take, nations are going to have to face the need to reskill their workforces. Kalanick’s suggestion should be the start of a larger conversation on how we fund that training.

Dealing with an app driven world

The challenge of dealing with a app driven, mobile workforce isn’t just one for technology companies.

“It isn’t easy to create apps for the real world,” is the opening line of this morning’s VM World conference in San Francisco.

That line encapsulates the challenge facing almost every company, not just tech companies like VMWare, in the face of shifting marketplaces and technologies.

One of the biggest business shifts is the move to mobile technologies. This isn’t just changing marketing and user experiences but also changing companies’ operations as staff increasingly use their own smartphones and tablets to work.

Managing a shifting market

That shift though is not simple, as ZD Net reports Facebook’s move to ‘mobile first’ was a tough path in the words of the company’s senior engineer Adam Wolff.

“I think everyone would say it was worth it, but it was extremely painful,” Wolff admitted, explaining each sub-team was building in their own ways because there was no one to crossover with necessary knowledge.

Facebook has probably been the most successful company is dealing with the mobile shift and their difficulties despite their massive resources show just how difficult it is for companies to change not just their technology, but their business processes and in many cases the entire mindset of the organisation.

Those pain points in transitioning between ways of doing business is where opportunities lie, for VMWare they are seeing IT departments struggling with the development and deployment of apps along with the security risks of staff bringing their own mobile devices.

Happy coincidences

For VMWare, this is a happy coincidence in that their main business of computer virtualisation is as much at risk from the shift to cloud computing and mobile applications as any other business. By offering the tools for companies to manage that shift, they can retain their place in the market.

The threat though is this space has many other contenders – not least Facebook itself with its open source React platform the company developed out of its experiences in developing its mobile product.

One of the strengths VMWare has is being an incumbent, which is why they are pushing their ‘hybrid cloud’ offerings where companies use both their own data centres along with the public cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Stuck with sunk costs

For large corporates with huge sunk costs in their own infrastructure and those with security or operational reasons for keeping some of their functions in house that hybrid strategy makes sense as it’s unlikely any board or CIO is going to happily burn their existing systems and process down and go to a ‘pure cloud’ or mobile strategy.

While catering to that market is lucrative for the moment, the longer term risk is that the next wave of large corporations – and today’s high growth businesses – are pure cloud companies.

For the companies catering to the old ways of doing business, for the short term there’s profits to be made in the pain points from an evolving marketplace but in the long term it’s how well businesses are placed for the world the end of that transition that will guarantee their survival.

The process facing software companies like VMWin dealing with as business shifts is a challenge faced by almost all industries, the question is how to adapt to a very changed way of working.

The three S’s of employee engagement

How do we engage with an always on, connected workforce?

We need to rethink how we measure performance in the workplace says Andrew Lafontaine, Senior Director Human Capital Managemet Strategy & Transformation at Oracle Australia.

As business adapts to a changing society and mobile technologies, one of the questions facing managers is the mismatch between the Millennial generation and those GenX and Boomers who make up most of the executive suite, Lafontaine sees this as been in how the younger cohort approaches authority.

“There certainly can be a disconnect between Millennials and boomers. Millennials don’t see hierarchy the way boomers see it as important,” says Lafontaine. “Boomers have ingrained view of the way they have come through the workforce.”

Breaking the old rules

Unfortunately for those older managers, their world was based on a formalised, ‘straight line’ hierarchy dating back to the days ships’ captains used flags and voice tubes to communicate.

That rigid military style worked well for nearly two hundred years of business with mail and then the telephone only reinforcing that management model. Now newer collaboration tools mean different ways of working becoming possible.

A problem with those different ways of working in teams is how performance is measured warns Lafontaine. “What they are not measuring at the moment are what I call ‘network performance’. How workers they helping their colleagues, collaborating and working together.”

Separating home and office

With mobile technologies becoming ubiquitous it becomes harder to separate work from home life, “we working now from home and on the tram. You don’t need a nine to five workforce nad companies have to deal with and embrace the technology,” says Lafontaine.

In the context of babyboomers and GenX workers, that technology meant longer hours in the office but Lafontaine suggests things are now changing. “There other areas to measure. How are they looking after themselves? The days of babyboomers working 12 or 14 hours a day and neglecting their health or outside life are over.”

For the future company, the key to success lies in engaging their employees Lafontaine says. “A more highly engaged workforce delivers better outcomes. Engagement is the three S’s: Stay, Say and Strive”

Those S’s come down to three questions for the worker; should I stay? What should I say? and How should I strive to do a better job?

For managers the challenge is engage all workers regardless of age, the task of finding what engages and motivates workers of the computer generation is only just beginning.

Literacy in old and new terms

Is data literacy as important today as being able to read and write was a century ago?

I’m in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, for the next few days for the Open Source, Open Society conference.

During one of the welcome events Lillian Grace of Wiki New Zealand mentioned how today we’re at the same stage with data literacy that we were two hundred years ago with written literacy.

If anything that’s optimistic. According to a wonderful post on Our World In Data, in 1815 the British literacy rate was 54%.

That low rate makes sense as most occupations didn’t need literate workers while a hundred years later industrial economies needed employees who could read and write.

Another notable point is the Netherlands has led the world in literacy rates for nearly four hundred years. This is consistent with the needs of a mercantile economy.

Which leads us to today’s economy. In four hundred years time will our descendants be commenting on the lack of data literacy at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century?

What will the workforce of the future look like?

How do we imagine the economy, workforce and government of 2055 will look?

Yesterday this site looked at the shortcomings of the Australian government’s Inter Generational Report and criticised it primarily for its failure to imagine how society and the economy would look by 2050.

While no-one has a crystal ball, making projections on how government spending will look in the future without having some basis for the assumptions on revenues and expenditures renders a document like the IGR somewhat useless.

So what might Australia’s economy in 2050 look like? Here’s a quick list of thoughts.

Rethinking retirement

The obvious is most western societies, including Australia’s, are going to be older. This has a number of consequences, particularly with the retirement age.

In 1909 the old age pension was introduced in Australia with eligibility starting at 65 for men and 60 for women. At the time, life expectancy was 55 years for men and 59 for females.

Today age pension age has barely moved with it becoming 67 for those born after 1952. Life expectancy today 91.5 years for men and 93.6 for women, this expected to increase by 2055 to 95.1 and 96.6 respectively.

More importantly, life expectancy at age 60 will move from 16.9/19.3 years today to 21.3/23.1 in 2055.

Quite clearly the superannuation assumptions of being able to get a tax free pot of gold at 60 are doomed, few people will get enough from their lump sum to see themselves through twenty years retirement.

That throws them back on to the state. Given these numbers it’s clear the eligibility age for the old pension is going to have to be increased.

Coupled with a declining birth and participation rates seeing fewer taxpayers contributing to government coffers, the need to reform the pension age is going to become more pressing.

A healthier population

One of the differences between 1909 and today is that we’re far healthier. A fifty something today is generally in better shape than a thirty year old of their grandparents’ time.

Coupling that with the changing nature of work where most workers of a century ago were employed in exacting physical labour, today’s employees are far more likely to be sitting on a computer. This means the working life can be extended.

While the population is going to be healthier, an older population is going to mean more people with chronic conditions and those with serious issues like dementia are going to be an increasing drain on medical services, not to mention increased incidence of cancers and possibly diseases related to sedentary lifestyles.

This means the nature of medical treatment is going to change, a lot more is going to be spent on early identification and intervention of chronic and debilitating conditions.

Changing the workforce

While the workforce is going to get older, it’s also going to become more precarious. This is already clear in the long term trends since the 1980s and with the rise of ‘collaborative economy’ businesses like O-Desk, Mechanical Turk and Airtasker we can see jobs becoming more casualised.

Today’s children will not have a steady career path and governments have to plan for extended periods of unemployment. This too affects the participation rate and the levels of household spending.

A precarious income also means workers are less likely to take on large debt commitments. This trend is already apparent and is the main reason why companies with a 1960s consumer spending model are struggling in the economy of 2015.

Property stagnation

The Australian middle class model that depends upons highly indebted householders paying down mortgages is likely to be unpopular by the middle of the century as people will be reluctant to take out a huge loan to buy a property when their medium term job prospects are uncertain.

This one aspect is where the Australia government projections go badly awry. It’s understandable not to consider this given the political poison of telling the population their assumed property gains aren’t going to happen but it damns the IGR to failure.

A society with lower levels of property ownership means a dramatic shift in the tax mix and government expenditures. Assuming that today’s normal will also be tomorrow’s is very risky.

Changing technologies

The technologies themselves are changing the revenue and expenditure streams for government, just rolling out diverless vehicles might eliminate the need for half the US’s police force while reduced registration fees, taxes and fines will hit state and local government budgets.

Similarly the global nature of digital businesses is going to challenge governments as the locations of where work is done, goods are delivered and profits made becomes less certain. Right now tax officials are struggling with the revenues of multinationals but increasingly smaller companies will present the same problems.

The other changing nature of work is going to be its composition, just as a hundred years ago nearly half the workers in western countries were in agriculture, a number that’s below one in twenty today, we can expect changes in employment sectors as robots and algorithms take over many of today’s jobs.

All of this means a very different society and workforce to today’s. While it’s difficult to envision what it looks like from here, just as the current economy was almost unimaginable in 1975, it’s necessary to give some thoughts on the shifts to make informed policy choices rather than the opportunistic populism displayed by most of today’s political leaders.

So how do you see the economy of 2015 looking? And where are governments going to raise their money from? I’d be interested to hear what you see in the crystal ball.

Saving retirement

The costs of the baby boomer population bubble are becoming apparent

Retirement age is vexed problem in the developed world; while life expectancy has increased over the last Century, the age where one becomes eligible for the pension has barely changed.

Harvard University professor Martin Feldstein illustrates this in a post on Project Syndicate, Saving Retirement, where he has a number of suggestions of moving the pension age to ease the pressures on public finances.

Obviously, retirees deserve advance notice before benefits are reduced. That is why it is important for the US – and for many countries around the world – to act now to make the changes needed to stabilize future pension finances.

Those pressures are going to become more real in the decade as the baby boomers join the ranks of the retired, the cry “I’ve paid my taxes, where’s my benefits?” is going to get louder.

Unfortunately for them, the kitty’s going to turn out to be bare – there simply aren’t enough Generation X and Y workers in the developed economies to pay for millions of boomers collecting pensions for the next thirty years.

Governments around the world have ignored this obvious, and predictable, problem for fifty years and now it’s time to address it. Unfortunately few leaders have the courage to tell their electorates the truth of the challenge ahead.

Have we come to the end of the middle class era?

Was the middle classes’ growth during the Twentieth Century an aberration?

Technology has transformed workplaces over the last century, drove huge income growth and moved many into the middle classes. Are we now seeing computers and robots displacing those middle class jobs?

At Tech Crunch Jon Evans warns Get Ready To Lose Your Job as “this time it’s different” – unlike earlier periods of industrialisation where jobs shifted to the new technologies such coach builders became car makers – robots and computers are making humans redundant.

So I see no mystical Singularity on the horizon. Instead I see decades of drastic nonlinear changes, upheaval, transformation, and mass unemployment. Which, remember, is ultimately a good thing. But not in the short term.

In The Observer John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, says Digital Capitalism Produces Few Winners.

Professor Naughton’s view is that high volume, low margin businesses like Amazon mean there’s fewer well paid jobs available and many of the lower positions will be soon replaced by robots.

At the other end of the digital marketplace, the high margin businesses like Apple, Google and Salesforce don’t need many staff to generate their profits, so wealth is concentrated among a small group of managers and owners.

While the low paid and manufacturing workers have been squeezed for decades in the West, it’s now the turn of the middle classes to feel the pain of automation, outsourcing and restructuring.

There’s two ways we can look at these changes, the optimistic is that our economy is going through a transition to a different structure; those out of work coachbuilders a hundred years ago didn’t immediately get jobs building cars and the same adjustments are happening again.

A more pessimistic view is that the Twentieth Century was an aberration.

It may be that Western world’s steady climb into middle class prosperity was itself a transition effect and we’re returning to the economic structures of the pre-industrialised age where the vast majority of people have a precarious income and only the fortunate few can afford middle class luxuries.

The next decade will give us some clues, but the portents aren’t good for the optimistic case, the Pew Research Centre shows America’s middle classes has been shrinking for forty years.

For those Americans still in the middle class, the Pew research shows their incomes have been falling for a decade.

Regardless of which scenario is true, the dislocation is with us. As individuals we have to be prepared for changes to our jobs, however safe they look today. As a society we have to accept we are going through a period of economic and social upheaval with uncertain long term consequences.

What’s particularly notable is how today’s political and business leaders seem oblivious to these changes and are locked in the ‘old normal’ of thirty or fifty years ago.

One wonders what it will take to wake them up to the changes happening around them and what will happen when reality does bite them.

Picture of a nice, middle class house by Strev via sxc.hu