February 2021
In our second podcast of our new series, we speak to Peter Cheese, Chief Executive of the CIPD who shares his thoughts on what 2020 has changed for businesses, the end of the 9 to 5 working pattern, the future role of the office and importance of employee voice.
In Conversation with…Peter Cheese
Series 1: Podcast 2
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s, in conversation podcast. I am Lucy Lewis a partner in Lewis Silkin's Employment Team and in this podcast series I will be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective of what the future of work holds. The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to rethink who, how, what and where we work and I am really looking forward to exploring what that means for the world of work with our guest speaker for this podcast, Peter Cheese, Chief Executive of the CIPD.
Welcome to the podcast Peter.
Peter Cheese: Thank you Lucy.
Lucy Lewis: So, Peter you have been the Chief Executive of the CIPD since 2012 and it's really hard to emphasise just how much has changed in those years in terms of what businesses need to be thinking about when it comes to the future of work. I know that the CIPD has played a significant role in championing better work and better working lives and obviously those things have become really important in responding to the challenges presented by the pandemic but, but also responding to the Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movements, so although our main focus today is definitely going to be the impact of the pandemic on the future of work and what that means for HR, I am hoping that we can also look a little bit beyond the current crisis and touch on one or two of those longer term trends, those things that have been driving significant change in the world of work.
World of work
So, to do that I was going to start off by asking you what you think 2020 has moved to the top of the agenda for businesses?
Peter Cheese: It’s a really good place to start Lucy and the reality I think is that the pandemic has reminded us of some really, really important things and the first is it’s reminded us of the absolute critical importance of our people in every organisation because at the end of the day the pandemic is a human crisis, and of course, you know with all the constraints and remote working, it’s emphasised many ways in which we need to connect with our people but I think it has certainly put front and centre the idea that people are in our businesses everywhere and it is definitely building on many trends that have happened, and I’m sure we’ll explore that through this conversation, that have been with us for a while, so I tend to think, as I said of the pandemic as acting as a real accelerator for many things that we’ve needed to do in the world of work, putting people much more front and centre.
Lucy Lewis: Fantastic. And you’re right about the acceleration. If we take one of those trends and we look at remote working, it’s something that we’ve been looking at and following quite a lot on the Future of Work Hub. We’ve kind of known that we’re graduating towards this more hybrid way of working, but futurists put that maybe 10 or 15 years away and then you get the pandemic, and as you say it dramatically accelerates that. It’s sort of become the issue of the here and now.
Remote working
What do you think we can expect going forwards in how we work and when we work?
Peter Cheese: Well I think it will absolutely act as this trigger point to really re-think work in these ways. I mean if one thinks about the traditional paradigms of work that we’ve had for a very, very long time, the five day working week is all commuting into offices and all these other things, they’ve been with us literally for well over 100 years. And we’ve talked about more flexible working, we’ve you know, the CIPD and others have researched the benefit of it. You know because more flexible working provides opportunities for inclusion, you know many people have otherwise constraints in their ability to work with so called standard hours, five day working weeks.
But it’s also good for our mental health and our wellbeing and ultimately therefore our productivity if we can provide more flexible working in all it’s different forms. So, it has been, as so many people have called it, the biggest experiment in home working we’ve ever had. But, let’s not forget that less than half of the total working population actually were able to work from home and those people that were not working from home, often they were in jobs which were, you know, what we’ve started to call ‘essential’ but they weren’t always the highest skilled jobs and the higher paid jobs.
So, we have to be really, really careful as we take forwards the learning from the pandemic that we create flexible working opportunities for all. Because flexible work is not just about working from home, or different workplaces, it’s also about different work schedules and giving people more choice in when and how they work and empowering them all. And these are such fundamental principals of how people trust and how we trust them to work and what is good, as I said, for their wellbeing and these ideas of inclusion, but the pandemic can and must act as a real wake-up call for us all that these ideas of these standard ways of working, the challenges we’ve had with presenteeism and so forth, really can be overcome and we can trust our people to work in these different ways and we need to build those things into our organisational thinking and working practices in the future. And I think that’s very exciting.
But, as I said, we’ve got to make sure that this works for all and we don’t just focus entirely on the idea, that while everybody who works from home thinks it great so that’s what we’ll continue to allow them to do.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Flexible working
And I think it picks up that difficult question that lots of HR people are dealing with at the moment and that’s is there still going to be a role for the office in the future? What do you think?
Peter Cheese: I think there will. And I think, when you use the word hybrid working, I think what we’ve learnt and we’ve seen many surveys of organisations as they talk to their own staff during this pandemic of what works for them and of course it varies.
I mean, it’s one thing if I’ve got a nice quiet office space to work while from home and I can look out at the countryside. But it’s a very, very different thing if I’m working in perhaps off the end of my bed quite literally or in a house with a lot of noise going on around. So, you’ve got those issues.
You’ve also got of course the issues that many people have reflected in terms of social connection of work and indeed, you know, charities like mine and others, have shown how mental health has definitely become an issue because of increased social isolation and we need to be very, very mindful of that. So I think, you know, building on those thoughts that absolutely I think we can find very different ways of working, but the ways in which we use our offices I think can change as well. So that we give people choice. We’re able to say to them ‘look, maybe you want to come in two or three days a week or one day a week?’ and when you come into the office to emphasise those things where having people together in one place is actually really beneficial. So that’s social interaction for example. Certainly, more workshops and team working.
And then of course, understanding that hybrid work and therefore, is for an individual, that ability to perhaps work in the office or work from other places, but it’s got to work within teams as well because we’ve got to create work places where not everybody will be present. And if we’re honest, although we’ve had technology for quite a while to do these things, we haven’t been very good in using it. And we’re all quite familiar with the sitting in meeting rooms and there’s some person on a screen trying to chip in because we’re not really connecting with them. And that’s another form of hybrid working that we can work with these ways of both virtual and physical at the same time.
So, there is some very, very important learnings that we’ve got to take forwards and I think we will continue to have our offices, but they will be different. And many, many organisations, talking about these ideas, going back to why we need an office. Talking about things like perhaps what we will have is more distributive offices so whether it be we just pile into one great big central office, we could have more distributive offices which of course would also allow perhaps our access to people in different parts of the country and different locations much more easily, and then connect them, as I said, in these hybrid ways of working between those different locations. So, there’s lots of ideas like that which I think are emerging. And it’s fascinating to me. I mean, I’ve seen things like telepresence and other of these kinds of forms of technology which have been around for the last 15/20 years, but we haven’t really embraced them because we haven’t actually understood these sorts of principles of different ways in remote working and now is our chance to do it.
Lucy Lewis: And you mentioned technology a couple of times there which is interesting. It sort of leads me to a question about the really challenging job for people professionals. Because they’ve sort of found themselves in a position where they need to, not only identify but also anticipate these sort of external drivers of change and so if we are looking at this practically and you’re the HR Director tasked with this enormous job of planning for the future of work.
business priorities
What do you think your key priorities and practicalities should be?
Peter Cheese: Yes, really important. I think first and foremost is to have this open dialogue with the organisation and with all the employers and workers. You know, what have we learnt? What works for them? What kind of choice do they want? What are the constraints? So, we are building it from a very much sort of people centric view, rather than us as leaders or whatever imposing ideas. I mean, if you look at an awful lot of so-called flexible working practice in the past, a lot of it was driven by things like cost imperatives, you know, lets reduce our office footprint because that will save us costs and then we’ll tell people when they should work from home.
So, this is, as I said right at the very beginning, this is about putting people much more front and centre of our thinking. So the first is to engage with them and talk to them and work through what choice they want and what constraints and support that they would need. I think then, we have to think about how we configure our offices and how we configure things like technology so that it works in all the ways that I’ve just touched on.
But another very important element is how we train our Managers at all levels to work in these very different ways. I mean, one of the challenges we’ve had, which has been very, very enduring, is this notion of presenteeism. And it’s fundamentally built from the fact of people not really trusting others when they can’t see them. I mean, it’s a very sort of human bias if you will, that we tend to overrate those people that we see in front of us, you know, particularly when often those people in front of us are trying to demonstrate how hard they’re working by maybe coming in before we do or leaving after we do, whatever. We have a very, very strong culture of presenteeism bias and it’s got, almost, endemic in organisations and now we’ve got an opportunity to break that.
What we have learnt in the pandemic is we can trust people to work from home and work when we can’t see them all the time. We’re also learning much more about how to judge people on outcome and not just input of hours and that’s very, very characteristic of the presenteeism bias that we over bias towards the idea that, well I can see somebody who is putting loads of hours in, so that’s what I’m going to judge them on and we really have to judge people much more on their output and outcomes.
So those are all very, very fundamental shifts which I’ve highlighted from the point of view of long held paradigms of work and cultures of work that we’ve got to train our Managers to embed this thinking deeply and to understand how to manage teams that are working in these very different ways.
And of course, and we’ll come on to it, this is also other aspects of diversity. Diversity is of course in the nature of the individuals and people that they have been appointing. And then there’s also diverse in terms of how and where they work and we need to, as I said, really make sure that we are training our Managers so that whatever policies and practices we put in place really do work, that they are fair and that they help to get the best out of people everywhere.
Lucy Lewis: And then the diversity points is an interesting one because one of the things that we’ve learnt a lot from out of the Black Lives Matters and the Me Too movements is giving employees space to share their experiences to raise concerns, creating if you like, an employee voice.
Employee engagement
Do you think the role of the employee voice will become more important in business in the future?
Peter Cheese: I think it must Lucy. And this is another interesting sort of paradigm of work if you will. We’ve known through motivational studies, science and goodness knows what else, that the idea of people having voice is fundamental to their engagement in the business and indeed their trust in an organisation. It’s also linked to other ideas, so the idea of autonomy which is, you know, give me space, give me some control, some agency over what I’m doing and of course, if we go back again to so many working practices, all the way back to the very beginning if you like, of certainly the aspects of management thinking around scientific management. It was those ideas were not prevalent. It was the idea of treating people as an asset that what we had to do was give rules to control their behaviour and Managers were there to control and make sure they did the task they were supposed to be doing. Those are not human centric ways of managing people. I’ve often described it as moving the thinking from homo-economers, in other words you know the idea of a person as a resource or an economic asset to homosapiens, and understanding that to get the best out of our people we’ve got to treat them as people and individuals.
So, the idea of giving people a voice is very, very fundamental to that idea. It’s the idea that I have a voice, that I can speak up, I can challenge and equally I can contribute to how work can be improved or how we sell tasks and it’s incredible again when you think about, as a said, these longstanding paradigms of work when, you know, even the most complex business problems, you know you get all the high paid and clever and erudite people at tops of organisations all trying to work on a problem and then eventually come to some conclusion to try and implement it and if it doesn’t work, because nobody ever asked the frontline workers. So it’s about giving voice to people so that you get the best out of them, the people on the front line are usually the people that best understand what’s working, what’s not, so give them voice in terms of innovation and change. But also give them voices as I said, in terms of where they are seeing constraints and challenges or where they need to speak up because they think in the worst case of things like bullying or harassment cultures.
So it’s a very, very fundamental idea, the idea of voice. But it’s extraordinary when one thinks about it. There’s no rocket science. There’s no magic. We have known this for a very long time but the prevalent cultures, the commander in control, and the idea that people are there to do a job and bound by rules and policies and all of those other things, fundamentally has to change and again, you know, I think that the pandemic is acting as an accelerant for those ideas as well.
Lucy Lewis: And one of the aspects of this kind of fundamental change is obviously future proofing your workforce and part of that involves upskilling. And I know there’s been a huge amount of research and a lot of recent calls for more importance to be placed on upskilling, just because of the job losses following the pandemic. And the CIPD’s had a really big part on that. It’s recently called on employers to partner more with further education colleges to promote upskilling but also really focus on future proofing their workforce planning.
upskilling
Can you tell us a little bit about why that’s important to the CIPD and why its something employers should be doing?
Peter Cheese: Yeah, absolutely. It starts, from many ways, a debate that has been growing and growing over the last sort of 10/15/20 years, largely because of the implementation and introduction of technology, so called digital disruption, the fourth industrial revolution and all of those things. And certainly my experience having been in the world of work for a long time and thought and consulted about many of these issues over many years, you know, really has the sort of last 10/15 years we’ve talked a lot more about the so-called future of work and indeed, you know, this is what this podcast is and what you’re doing as well. And as I said, in my mind a lot of that was accelerated by technology. By seeing that the future of work, the jobs and skills that we do could be profoundly impacted by the advances and things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and automation, robotics and so on. And of course, that continues to be true and we are seeing the steady advances, we were still really only in the foothills of what all of these technology changes would really mean to us. But that, as I said has been a big trigger for a lot of this debate and therefore a lot of this debate about what skills are they going to need?
We’ve had people like the Bank of England and memorable quotes along the lines of you know, 60% of the jobs the young people will do whilst they’re still in education has not yet been invented. So, it’s brought a new emphasis on this idea that we have to be able to upskill and reskill our people much, much faster and as I’ve said, there’s been loads and loads of research and surveys on this including our own and the fact is that we’ve always needed to do these things. We’ve always needed to upskill people but, you know, sadly particularly in the UK it’s interesting to know that we have underinvested in our workforces in the past, we’ve underinvested in skills and training, our educational systems are not best adapted to the changing world of work.
And so, to your point about FE, I mean further education and technical education has fallen way behind in the UK in the last 20 years and that has to be corrected, because we need a more balanced educational system. Yeah, of course we need universities, but the education is not just about university education and so much of the really vocational and work-related skills actually can come through FE colleges and technical colleges. So it’s good to see now that there is more emphasis on that, I was very involved in the Commission on the College of the Future looking at FE, there’s been recent announcements from the Government on putting more investment into colleges and vocational education but also this idea of lifelong learning. We never stop learning. And yet somehow, going back to sort of paradigms of thinking, we’ve had perhaps more in this country than many others, this idea that when I’ve finished education that’s that. I’ve got my certificate; I’ve got my degree or whatever and I’m done. We’re never done with learning.
So, we need to create cultures of learning in our organisations as well. We have got to invest more in skills within our workforces. We’ve got to be far more agile in how we deliver learning. So whilst I’ve pointed, you know, at some of the things that I believe we have to change in the world of education, and learning, and bringing education and colleges and so forth much closer to business, we’ve also got to re-think learning in organisations. And again, coming back to technology, there are so many ways in which we can deliver learning in very, very different ways, not just aiming fire hoses at people and expecting to absorb all this stuff and endlessly talking at them, but embedding learning in the flow of work. Using all these different techniques that we now can where we can truly deliver bitesize learning. We can present learning at the point of need and we can encourage people to learn through experience as well as what we might teach them formally and we can build on all these ideas of so much of our learning any way is experimental.
So, these are again not new ideas, but they’re getting accelerated not only because of the growth of technology in our workplace is more or less debated about the future of work. But again, I think also through the pandemic. The pandemic has made many organisations understand that we have fallen behind in technology investment, we need to do more of that. We’ve got to do more to train our people and build these fundamental skills of people management and so forth, but we’ve also got to find ways of upskilling and reskilling then with technical and job skills. That is a big agenda for us and it is fundamental to the idea of organisations that will be agile, adaptable and sustainable for the long term and I for one believe that this will be one of the big shifts that we have to make in organisations and our educational systems to be truly future fit for the kind of future of work that we’re all talking about.
Lucy Lewis: I mean that’s very, very powerful and actually it takes me back to a discussion that we had in our last podcast as we start to look at the next generation, the skills that the next generation of workers need and I was talking to Professor Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at Oxford University and he talked about the economic and personal sacrifices made by young people through the pandemic in favour of older generations. The impact on the pandemic on their future and our collective responsibility to think about creating better prospects for them in the workplace context.
Workforce planning
And it got me wondering, do you think we’ll see a shift towards disadvantaged younger workers and is that going to impact inter-generational workforce planning?
Peter Cheese: Yeah, it’s really interesting and I saw some of the commentary from Professor Goldin. The idea of intergenerational unfairness has actually been growing for quite some time. I remember talking on platforms on this subject 15 years ago, and it was some of this idea that again, because of some of these changes in technology and so forth, that would there be the same opportunities for young people in the past that had been there for previous generations. Were they going to see a hollowing out of work and a deskilling of work at one end, but on the other end, a demand for very high skills which we won’t always have across our working populations.
Also, these ideas, you know, have my generation milked the proverbial cow and you know with regard to house prices and many, many other aspects of our economies. And then as Professor Goldin touched on, has the pandemic itself created sort of more inherent unfairness in younger people and certainly if we’re going to see, as I think is very likely, a significant economic downturn, well obviously we’ve already seen that, but that it could be more prolonged and every economic downturn that we’ve had, we’ve always seen unemployment rates amongst young people growing.
So the idea of this intergenerational fairness is not new but again as we have explored the factors now driving it which make us all think more deeply about it and I do think that again this links into of course, the whole ideas of inclusion in work and work opportunity and the whole, you know, what’s called the economics of inequality and when you look at some of the work of Professor Goldin, and I’m a bit of a fan of people like Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis, some of these economists have been talking about the ideas of inequality for a long time. And this is a very, very fundamental societal question, but it is also something that I strongly believe that responsible businesses can act on.
So how organisations help to create opportunities, for example, for young people. How they help to work with the educational systems to help young people understand the world of work and give them work experience opportunities. How they encourage those young people to develop and progress those careers.
And also, as we know, and then going back to things like Black Lives Matter, inclusion and unfairness hits many, many dimensions of our societies and populations today. The ethnic inclusion, the massive differences in ethnic pay gap and opportunities. Gender differences and gender pay gap and opportunities as well as we touched on in age diversity and younger generational opportunities. So, these for me, to summarise it call out an absolutely fundamental responsible for businesses to act in these ways. To create more fair and inclusive workplaces. To give people voices, we’ve already touched on, and to truly understand what inclusion means.
By doing that, you know, this is not just about being woke. By turning that you generally create more sustainable businesses. We know we need diversity, generational and otherwise, because it drives innovation. It breaks the cycle of group thing. It brings all these different experiences that we need to bear into our workplaces. It creates workplaces and organisations that are representative of society and the customers which we all serve. So, it’s a fundamental business agenda for good business reasons. And if we do those things then we help to make sure the businesses are acting responsibly and address some of the questions that have been raised on these very, very challenging questions of intergenerational fairness. But as I said, inclusion across many, many different segments and ways that we have to think about our future workforces.
Lucy Lewis: It’s fascinating. We could go on and on. But a final question, it’s one that I’m asking all our guests on this podcast series.
Future of work
What do you personally think will be the biggest and most radical change to the future of work that we’ll take forward with us from the pandemic?
Peter Cheese: Well, I think you can look at it at sort of two levels. I mean one is much longer term and one is more immediate in the next two or three years. I’ve always been very fond of a quote by Bill Gates where he said, ‘we tend to over-estimate what will happen in two years, and we greatly underestimate what will happen in 10’. I think if looking two years out, you know, we’ve explored many ideas in terms of breaking somebody’s long-held beliefs and paradigms and cultures of work, giving people more flexibility in how and where they work and restructuring therefore our places of work and everything else that goes with that.
We’ve talked about the importance of diversity and inclusion and giving people voice and then encouraging and developing our Managers to manage our people better and putting people front and centre of our agendas. We talked about skilling and upskilling and reskilling. Those all should be things that we see coming forward from the pandemic and in the circle of build back better that we can absolutely do. We’ve been doing more of it through the pandemic. So, we can absolutely keep these sorts of changes in our workflows and workplace cultures moving forwards as the pandemic hopefully begins to unwind.
I think that when you then look 10 years ahead, it’s fascinating isn’t it? I think you know it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that we will see work changing in some more radical ways. Maybe we will end up in a world of three or four working weeks which are shorter but you know an acceleration of those debates during the pandemic.
I often go back to John Maynard-Keynes’ essay that he wrote back in the 1930’s where he said by now he thought we’d all be working 15 hour weeks because of advances and technology when many of us still seem to be working 15 hour days!
So, I think when you look long term, I think you could see work being very, very different. Certainly, flexibility fully embedded. Perhaps shorter working weeks is the norm.
But also, fundamentally an idea of wealth distribution in dealing with inequalities in a very, very structural way. So, these ideas of if we are going to be more productive, we’re investing technologies that will make organisations more efficient, then who benefits from that? And that’s back to these much bigger discussions of, you know, multi-stakeholder capitalism and the true responsibility of businesses, to all of their stakeholders. And that’s what I think we need to be embedding over the next five to 10 years. So that through that we can create these channels and mechanisms to understand inequalities, to distribute wealth more fairly and create stronger and better societies.
And if we can do those things, then we really have made a difference and that I think is within our power. I think it’s within our gift and I think we all have a voice and agency in doing those things. But those should be our longer-term goals so that work is good for all and fundamentally, you know, just flows of that thought, what we are driving for therefore in many ways is the idea of a goal of wellbeing. Going back to Aristotle and his ideas of eudaimonia or what many other philosophers have taken forwards from that idea, what’s the purpose of what we all do? What’s the purpose of humanity and life? It should be to drive for some of those sorts of ideas of wellbeing and fairness and all these notions that we’ve talked about on this podcast and I think that should be the longer-term goals that we’re aiming for.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you so much Peter. It’s been really interesting. And there’s such a lot to think about. There’s almost too much to think about.
If any of our listeners wish to find out more about our discussion today, the CIPD’s 2030 people profession report is available to read at www.cipd.co.uk and Peter, hopefully you won’t mind if I say people can follow you on Twitter. Always, very interesting. @cheese_peter. Thank you.
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