White Paper

The workplace flexibility movement began years ago when many organizations launched talent initiatives to accommodate working mothers. Over time, flexibility options mushroomed: from compressed workweeks to job sharing, telecommuting to adjustable schedules, career lattices to career re-entry. From its birth as an employee entitlement, workplace flexibility has grown to become a requirement for organizations that want to make the most of its people’s productivity. Consider these statistics: • Women without children would rather have more free time than make more money (68 percent)—even more than those with children (62 percent).1 • About 40 percent of professional men work more than 50 hours per week. Of these, 80 percent would like to work fewer hours.2 • One of every five employees cares for elderly parents, a number that could increase to almost half of the workforce over the next several years..3 • By 2025, Gen Y employees, now in their 20s, will grow to represent 75 percent of the workforce. For this emerging generation, work-life fit is valued more than compensation growth or skill development.4 Workplace flexibility has become table stakes for attracting and retaining employees. Now companies must align their flexibility strategy with their core strategy to realize the benefits. Workplace flexibility is vital for many employees and a welcome option for others. It can be just as beneficial to organizations—but only if they execute it well. That means seeing it from a business strategy perspective. Technology made today’s brand of flexibility possible, but companies can’t view workplace flexibility as a technology issue; it’s a management challenge. Of course, implementing an effective flexibility strategy is not easy. Demanding clients and customers want to be served at their convenience. Peak loads—and undesirable shifts—must be covered. Managers accustomed to face to-face supervision worry that homebound employees will fritter away work time. Remote team members fear they will miss a midnight email. And sometimes, employees who remain in the office believe they’re taking on heavier workloads while others take “flex time” — and they'll resent it, whether or not it’s true. Management should be prepared to nurture and grow an effective flexible work environment over time—it can’t be left to chance.

The theme of this year’s Tech Trends report is the kinetic enterprise, an idea that describes companies that are developing the dexterity and vision required not only to overcome operational inertia but to thrive in a business environment that is, and will remain, in flux. This is no small task. Though the technology advances we see today embody potential, only a select few may ultimately deliver real value. Indeed, some are more hype than substance. We need to do a better job of sifting through the noise to identify truly ground-breaking innovations that can deliver value. Then we need to act. Passively wondering and waiting are not options. As in Newtonian physics, the task before us is turning energy’s potential into reality. This is our eighth Tech Trends report. The beauty of following a broad swath of technology advances over time is that amid the incredible pace of change, we can recognize familiar themes. For example, the five macro forces—digital, analytics, cloud, the reimagining of core systems, and the changing role of IT within the enterprise—have remained constant, year after year driving disruption and transformation. Despite the omnipresence of these five forces, enterprise adoption of them continues to vary widely. Some companies are only beginning to explore trends we wrote about in 2010, while others have advanced rapidly along the maturity curve. To the former, arriving late to the party doesn’t necessarily diminish the opportunities you are pursuing. You have the advantage of being able to leverage compounded years of evolution within, say, mobile or analytics without having to work sequentially through the incremental advances represented in our annual Trends reports.

Nokia's leaders reflect on the Bridge program, lessons learned during its implementation, and the business benefits it brought to the company. Nokia's Bridge program resulted in 60% of employees knowing their next step the day they exited the firm. It also helped employees start 1,000 new companies and replaced jobs in communities where Nokia was a major employer. One-third of all mobile phone sales between 2011–2012 came from new products that were developed at R&D sites and manufactured at factories that were to be closed down or downsized as part of the restructuring.

What will workplaces of the future look like? It’s one of the top ten questions global businesses are asking themselves according to Deloitte’s 2013 Human Capital Global trends report, Resetting Horizons. And for good reason: dealing with the here and now is critical, but prediction and adaptation are key to sustained success. And there’s something more: predicting the future is a favourite pastime, and our history is littered with fabulous ideas. Some, like talking on handheld devices, have turned out to be inspired. Others, like us living a life of leisure while robots do all the work, have turned out to be disappointingly fanciful. The challenge has always been about separating the insightful from the noise.

The US manufacturing industry continues to gain momentum. Job openings have been growing at double-digit rates since mid-2017 and are nearing the historical peak recorded in 2001. In this dynamic manufacturing environment, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute launched their fourth skills gap study, to re-evaluate their prior projections and move the conversation forward on today’s hiring environment and the future of manufacturing work. The results appear to highlight a widening gap between the jobs that need to be filled and the skilled talent pool capable of filling them. The search for skilled talent—ranked as the No. 1 driver of manufacturing competitiveness by global manufacturing executives —appears to be at a critical level. In fact, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute research reveals an unprecedented majority (89 percent) of executives agree there is a talent shortage in the US manufacturing sector, 5 percent higher than 2015 results. The talent shortage seems to be exacerbated by two factors. First, the US economy is currently in the midst of the second-longest expansion in history, and the manufacturing industry is part of this expansion. To support continued growth, based on our analysis, Deloitte expects the number of new jobs in manufacturing to accelerate and grow by 1.96 million workers by 2028 (see figure 1). Second, the manufacturing industry could face a demographic challenge. Despite the trend of delaying retirement—according to the most recent Gallup poll, the average age of retirement is now 66 years—more than 2.6 million baby boomers are expected to retire from manufacturing jobs over the next decade. And, more than half of the open jobs in 2028 (2.4 million) could remain unfilled because of the following top reasons identified by executives: Shifting skill sets due to the introduction of advanced technologies; Misperceptions of manufacturing jobs; Retirement of baby boomers.

Career technical education (CTE) programs at community colleges are increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to four-year colleges, yet little systematic evidence exists on the returns to specific certificates and degrees. We estimate returns to CTE programs using administrative data from the California Community College system linked to earnings records. We employ estimation approaches including individual fixed effects and individual-specific trends and find average returns to CTE certificate and degrees that range from 14 to 45 percent. The largest returns are for programs in the healthcare sector; estimated returns in non-health related programs range from 15 to 23 percent.

Buoyed by high commodity prices, low unemployment and relative stability in a turbulent global economy, Canada is at an inflection point. Whether by design or accident of history, Canadians today are for the most part prosperous and confident in their futures. Ipsos’ latest Global Economic Pulse survey found that 68% of Canadians view their economic situation in a positive light, the highest among G8 countries.1 The challenge is how to take full advantage of our current economic and political capital. What should decision makers do today to best position Canadian workplaces for success in 2025? Deloitte and the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) have partnered to address this question by developing detailed scenarios depicting what Canadian society might look like in 2025. The goal of this exercise was not to lay out the definitive future of the Canadian workplace. Rather, it recognizes that despite our relatively enviable position, we must identify strategies that address the very real problems that continue to exist: the sustainability of our industries, the competitiveness of our firms, the quality of our employment, the inclusivity of our workplaces and our level of innovation.

If 2017 is anything like 2016, “disruption” is set to become the word of the year. In politics, business and society, recent events have highlighted the shortcomings of predictability and the urgency of expecting the unexpected. The same applies to the labour market. Warp speed developments in technology – automation, artificial intelligence and the arrival of the sharing economy – are transforming how we work. Beyond technology, traditional working patterns are also being disrupted by changes in society, organizations and workforce management, leading to the rise of a more independent and dispersed workforce. Flexibility is, indeed, the key to this new age, with around 30% of the US and European working population already free agents. The “job for life” no longer exists, while the “multi-career” is the norm.

Technological developments are changing the world and the way we work. Self-driving vehicles, 3D printers, and artificial intelligence are providing new business opportunities, raising concerns that jobs will be replaced with automated processes. However, mass-unemployment has not been realised in the medium to long-term. On the contrary, economic output and employment have risen substantially in developed countries, but is everything different this time? Will advances in technology create a jobless future? To estimate the effect of automation on jobs more accurately, economists from the University of Oxford calculated which and how many jobs in the US are at high risk of being replaced due to automation. Based on these calculations, Deloitte in Switzerland carried out a similar analysis for Switzerland. The results of this analysis is presented in more detail in this report.