Human Resources when there are less humans around

The below chart (or a version of it) has been making the rounds plenty in the last year or so as the American economy rebounds and seemingly continues to strengthen coming out of the financial crisis and ensuing recession of the late aughts.

It shows how despite corporate profits, expressed as a percentage of GDP, continuing to set records, that those record profits have not (taken in aggregate), translated into lots of new jobs, as the labor participation rate shows.

Source - FRED 

As the chart pretty clearly shows, aggregate corporate profits (the red line), after plunging to a low at about the middle of the recession, late 2008, have rebounded considerably, and now are at all-time record levels as a percentage of GDP.

The employment rate however, after taking an equally dramatic fall throughout the entire recession, finally stabilized at a far lower level than pre-recession, and despite, (or some might argue what has been the primary driver of), rising corporate profits is showing no signs of regaining its former levels of around 62%.

Profits are up, way up even, yet corporations are achieving these profits with far fewer workers than before, (and paying them less, generally. We could also factor in wage growth or lack thereof to make that point at well).

There are lots of reasons for this - technological progress, increased automation, continuing reliance on relatively cheaper foreign labor, diminishing influence of labor unions, the aging of the workforce, etc. but the bottom line seems to be an ever-growing bottom line with less and less actual people needed to make that happen.

No doubt if you are one of the workers in the 'right' kind of job, you are probably doing pretty well or are on the way to doing pretty well. But if you are one of the people that might be in a field that has simply figured out to continue to drive profits without as many people, then things could be looking kind of grim.

Where does all this leave you as an HR/Talent pro?

A lot depend on the company/industry you are in. But in aggregate, certainly, when there are less and less 'humans' in the workforce, then corporations will figure out they need less and less Human Resources people to help look after them all. I have talked with a few HR leaders lately that are seeing both the size of their labor forces hold steady and their HR/EE ratios holding an extremely high levels.

Advice?

Make sure you are spending a decent chunk of your time and energy on things that are truly additive - technology that will help employees generate new ideas and innovations, marketing and recruiting strategies that will let you land more than your share of the best talent at the expense of your competitors, and even in an 'addition-by-subtraction' way, elimination of silly rules, policies, or processes that in any way get in the way of employee performance.

And you could spend some time figuring out what kinds of planning, services, training, development, and team building activities that 'resources' like our pal Baxter needs and you might ride this out a little longer.

Have a great weekend!

VIDEO: The robots are a lot like us

What a week. I am beat.

Let's take it into the weekend with a laugh - check out the video below, titled Shelved, from the Media Design School of Auckland, New Zealand. (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

Shelved gives us a look at what the future might hold for the incoming robot workforce - oddly enough it seems to resemble quite a bit the human workplace of today.

Shelved from Media Design School on Vimeo.

Awesome, right? "Replaced by a human!' And did you catch the key role of the HR lady?

Have a great weekend everyone!

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #1

Launching a new series on the blog this week - well not exactly new, since I have been writing about robots, the impact of increased robot automation on workplaces and jobs, and how if we don't watch out, pretty soon all our base will belong to them for quite some time now. But then I figured that the combination of the robot uprising, and my need for a steady source of reasonably interesting content for the blog warranted a more structured approach to collecting, classifying, and most importantly - providing an easy way for our future robot overlords to see that I am, actually, on their side, the future 'robot' content on the site. So then, this is the first 'official' piece in the new series, 'Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising'.

From the 'Jobs that the robots are not really doing, but could easily take over if given the chance' category, I submit for your consideration the 'job' of Entertainment Rreporter.  Take a look at the video below, (yes, it is from The Onion, but don't let that unduly influence your opinion), and then ask yourself honestly if robots could indeed replace all manner of entertainment industry 'journalists': (RSS and email subscribers will need to click through)

iInterviewer: Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola Talk Their New Movie, Inevitable Deaths 

Not that bad, right? And if you leave out the Onion's need to make the interview more of a gag than a true reflection of the typically horrible and banal celebrity interview  - 'How did it feel to work with such a great cast?', then I think you can pretty easily see that a robot, (and not even that powerful a robot), could step in for what passes for the in-depth and biting reporting that most entertainment shows pay high-priced human talent to produce.

I know what you're thinking - this is a goof, it's the Onion after all, and I'll never get back the approximate three minutes I've spent reading this post.

All of those reactions are fair and valid. At least the 'lost three minutes of your life part.'

But if you're still hanging in there with me on this, here's the payoff.

It does not matter what industry, job title, function, or process you are involved in. If what you do is easily repeatable, if the people that do the job are pretty much indistinguishable, and if it doesn't really matter who does the job, only that it gets done - then you or your job is a candidate for the impending robot uprising.

We laugh at the robot interviewing the actors. Until we realize a human reporter would have asked the very same questions.

And not been as funny.

It's Friday - you can't possibly STILL be working, can you?

Here is a really quick take for a blustery Friday as I stare out the window awaiting the arrival of Winter Storm Nemo, (Yes, we are naming winter storms now. Silly. Next thing you know people will be naming their hangovers. 'Sorry I can't make it to the office today. I got hit by Hangover Bacardi this morning.')

I thought about the storm's impending arrival across the Northeast, and the havoc that these types of weather events play on work, school, travel, etc., and then it hit me - it's Friday, most of us shouldn't even be working at all.  In the future, and if one Danish academic has anything to say about it, once you've put in about 25 solid hours for the week, you should be able to pack it in, put your feet up, and drink cocoa and watch the snow.

How so?

Take a look at the reasoning behind Professor James Vaupel's assertion from a piece on the Science Nordic blog, (you have that one in your Google Reader, right?), titled - 'We should only work 25 hours a week, argues Professor'

When you’re 20, you would rather spend more time with your friends. When you’re 35, you want time with your kids. But then when you reach 70, you have far too much time on your hands.

This scenario probably sounds familiar to many people today. But there are good arguments for changing this. We should aim for more leisure time in our youth and instead work a bit more when we get older.

“We’re getting older and older here in Denmark. Kids who are ten years old today should be able to work until the age of 80. In return, they won’t need to work more than 25 hours per week when they become adults,” says Professor James W. Vaupel.

In socio-economic terms it makes a lot of sense. The important thing is that we all put in a certain amount of work – not at what point in our lives we do it. In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth. I believe that in this century, the great redistribution will be in terms of working hours." 

Interesting take for sure. Kind of makes sense in a way, I think. If indeed via a combination of longer life expectancies, advances in medical care and technology that will make us capable of being productive workers into our 70s and 80s, and even economic necessity - it seems almost certain most of us, and definitely our kids, will have longer working lives than our parents and grandparents did.

Professor Vaupel thinks there should be a kind of societal trade-off - in exchange for signing up for working until you are 82 (or you keel over), you get to put in 25 hours or so a week when you are in your 20s and 30s, in theory so you can enjoy your life more, spend time with friends, go surfing, raise your kids, etc.

Sort of a crazy, only a European would think that way kind of an idea, but one that does at least force us to think about what the impact of an aging workforce might be in the future.

What's your take - do we all, especially us Americans, work too much? 

Are we going to continue to work too much way into our Golden Years?

Are you going to send your Gen Y staff home for the day after you read this, making them PROMISE to take care of you in about 30 years?

Have a Great Weekend!

From the Friendly Skies: A Lesson in Workforce Planning

Here is what can happen in an industry when labor market conditions, regulatory changes, shifting compliance requirements, are mixed with a generous dose of a 'Just like the Republicans we should have seen this coming' demographic shift.

Check this out from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend - 'Airlines Face Acute Shortage of Pilots':

U.S. airlines are facing what threatens to be their most serious pilot shortage since the 1960s, with higher experience requirements for new hires about to take hold just as the industry braces for a wave of retirements.

Federal mandates taking effect next summer will require all newly hired pilots to have at least 1,500 hours of prior flight experience—six times the current minimum—raising the cost and time to train new fliers in an era when pay cuts and more-demanding schedules already have made the profession less attractive. Meanwhile, thousands of senior pilots at major airlines soon will start hitting the mandatory retirement age of 65.

Another federal safety rule, to take effect in early 2014, also will squeeze the supply, by giving pilots more daily rest time. This change is expected to force passenger airlines to increase their pilot ranks by at least 5%. Adding to the problem is a small but steady stream of U.S. pilots moving to overseas carriers, many of which already face an acute shortage of aviators and pay handsomely to land well-trained U.S. captains.

It's a proverbial 'perfect storm' for the airlines, and not the familiar kind that simply traps passengers for hours on the tarmac waiting for a gate, but rather the kind from which there are no obvious or simple answers and remedies.  The workforce is aging, the requirements for new entrants are getting even more rigorous, the training or feeder systems for new replacements are drying up, (the piece cites some disturbing statistics about a dramatic drop-off in flight school training program participation), and global competition for scarce talent is driving up the salaries for many current pilots, making them much more likely to at least consider opportunities outside the USA.

This story is about airline pilots, truly probably always a pretty tough role to source for and fill, but increasingly we will see versions of this story playing out in other industries as well.  It isn't just experienced airline pilots that are getting ready to retire - it is engineers, skilled tradespeople, teachers, HR bloggers - no class of workers is immune.  And I certainly don't need to remind anyone of the ongoing drama and saga about the 'skills gap' - a topic for another day but relevant to this discussion as a reminder that an aging workforce is just one of many challenges facing the talent professional in the coming years.

Last week I had a post on some trends shaping global people management, and in that post we talked about how it was surprising and disappointing that adoption of 'Web 2.0' modern and social technologies was rated incredibly low in importance and relevance by global HR and business leaders.

One of the commenters (rightly) pointed out that the better story was another of the 'trends' that was also ranked extremely low in importance - 'Managing an Aging Workforce.' I think the airline pilots piece in the WSJ helps to reinforce that point and to remind us all, (as if we really needed a reminder), that while business, strategies, customers, technologies, and markets are constantly changing and are usually unpredictable - that one factor in this volatile planning mix is pretty constant and reliable. 

Everyone in your organization is getting a little bit older each day. And some days it feels worse than others.

Hopefully the airlines will make the needed changes and adopt new strategies to meet their resource needs - and hopefully it will give the rest of us a bit of a warning that we may not be as secure in our talent plans and sourcing strategies as we think for the time when our folks start to retire.