The latest issue of Think Global People magazine is out now!

---

‘Collaboration for the Intelligent Age’ is the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos from 20–24 January. This year’s event will discuss how to stimulate global growth and improve living standards for all across its 300 sessions. Boosting economic growth to raise living standards is a significant issue, not least for mitigating the risk of social polarisation. The WEF’s ‘Global Risks Report 2024’, which surveyed 11,000 business leaders in 113 economies with Zurich Insurance Group and Marsh McLennan, identified ‘social polarisation’ as the third most significant global risk after ‘misinformation and disinformation’ (first) and ‘extreme weather events’ (second). The key question is how to boost growth inclusively alongside technology adoption, which will significantly change the type of work available.

Re-attaching to work

The new year always comes with reports of employees self-reporting as a ‘flight risk’ and actively or passively seeking new work. Given the important links between engagement, performance, productivity and wellbeing, these insights into employee intentions are as important as any other.A US survey by global advisory and analytics firm, Gallup, found that at the end of 2024, employees were feeling increasingly disengaged from their jobs. Dubbed ‘the Great Detachment’, this trend is the result of interrelated and overlapping factors, including:

• organisational change leading to burnout
• the challenges of embedding hybrid working
• responding to new customer, employee and employer expectations
• broken performance management practices.

On the employer side of the employment relationship, fewer jobs and higher living costs mean employers largely hold the balance of power in today’s labour market – as well as the solutions to reconnecting with employees.While over half of employees are looking for new work this year, over 90% of them won’t be successful, according to the survey. This picture runs alongside rising reports of employers ‘quiet cutting’ (reducing responsibilities in the hope an employee will resign) and ‘quiet hiring’ (acquiring new skills through freelancers, associates and gig work without hiring full-time employees), and employees ‘quiet quitting’, practising ‘fauxductivity’ and presenteeism. Neither represents a high road to productivity, nor increases societal wellbeing.The approach with the likely greatest integrity and sustainability – vital for social cohesion – is getting people motivated and engaged enough to raise productivity and social, economic and emotional wealth. Leaders, managers and employees can all add value to the employment experience and the organisation. By creating workplaces and jobs people find fulfilling and worthwhile and committing to lifelong learning, we can create and populate the tech-enabled roles needed to deliver on the productivity and quality of life promise of technology. Joseph Briggs, co-leader of Goldman Sachs Research’s global economics team, explains: “Until we’ve seen more significant uptake in the actual application of AI, in the regular work production process, I don’t think that we’re going to see as big of an impact on productivity.”Insights into how to evolve technology into existing and new roles come from chipmaker Intel. As well as working with schools, colleges and universities, it is adopting in-company skills economies. Intel encourages employees to tap into organisational resources and take the initiative to upskill, reskill, innovate or enhance their leadership skills in line with their personal aspirations and career goals. This agile approach means Intel, which employs 120,000 people worldwide in 50 countries, can move at pace in this fast-evolving sector to retain, recruit and reskill people and ultimately remain competitive.Speaking to the WEF’s editor Linda Lacina in the World Economic Forum’s ‘Meet the Leader’ podcast, Intel’s chief people officer Christy Pambianchi talked about reskilling and building teams for the future at the company. She explained how the approach has become less prescriptive and is now balanced more towards creating systems and cultures for people to direct their own learning and development. This is especially important because of the company’s distributed teams and the need identified in employee surveys post-pandemic for more connection with colleagues.“I think it's a super exciting time,” said Christy Pambianchi. “The rate of innovation continues to accelerate. So I think trends that are going to continue to emerge are really a lot of focus on skills and building employees' confidence and identifying what are the skills they have, what are the skills they want to acquire and companies making a lot of skill-based training available to people. We're trying to create more of a skill economy inside of the company. We most recently updated all of our jobs so that they're refreshed for the new work environment. We're helping employees capture what skills they have. Then we link that to all of our learning libraries so people can build out a learning curriculum for themselves.“[We have figured] out for every job we have, what are the core skills required? What are some optional skills? So now that's transparently available to all employees in the company. So, as they think about, aspirationally, what job may [they] want to aspire to, now they can see what are those skills. Maybe they can identify other exemplars and start to take ownership of what are the skills they're acquiring so that they really have intention about how they hope to evolve their professional career.British broadcaster and telecommunications company, Sky, is also firmly linking people development to its business strategy and supporting people to add value to their skills. Mindful of how technology is changing the skills it needs in the short- to medium-term, the broadcaster is taking a purposeful approach to future skills development. It is looking through several lenses, including core and technical skills.Basing its future skills requirements on those identified by McKinsey, Sky has made those including digital awareness, curiosity, agile thinking and resilience central. It is now raising their visibility internally. Each skill has an executive sponsor. The company organises learning pathways and panel events with leaders from across the business to debate the skill to try and get more visibility around it. “It’s important people understand the importance of futureproofing themselves for the years ahead,” said Sophie Holmes, Sky’s group head of future skills development and a panellist at the CIPD’s 2024 annual conference session on ‘Sustaining momentum in career development to enhance workforce productivity’.“On the more technical end, that’s really been thinking about partnership with our strategic workforce planning team to understand the long-range plan for Sky, and what that means for skills and roles. It’s a lot harder. We’ve had detailed workshops with the leadership team to understand what the strategy is, unpicked what the skills would look like and wrapped a programme of learning around that. For example, being more data literate – how might we build those? We’ve looked at core skills and technical skills to start building this narrative around preparing for the future.”

---

Related reading

• Rediscovering the meaning of work
• CIPD 2024: unlocking growth and productivity
• Pivoting to a career in tech

---

Futureproofing and engagement building

Approaches like these are not without their challenges. The first is how to encourage an increasingly detached workforce to take ownership of their own learning and development. The second is often a cultural shift to encourage line managers to release established and high-performing team members for personal development opportunities and lateral moves to other parts of the business. Third, is the generational and inclusion elements.“Progression at work is essential for both the workforce and the growth of an organisation,” said Barbara Matthews, employer of record Remote’s chief people officer, commenting on findings in its ‘2024 Global Workforce Report’. “The disengagement micro-trends we see today are a concern as many businesses are not acting fast enough to address the wider issue of today’s great detachment in the workplace.“Seeing data that suggests Gen Z doesn’t want to become middle managers is one of the first instances where disengagement trends in the workplace are having a quantifiable impact on the world of work itself,” she said. Highlighting this problem for talent pipelines and accenting the importance of healthy workplaces, she continued: “Our survey data indicates creating an environment that protects work-life balance creates sustained productivity and engagement, suggesting the onus is on businesses to once again make progression and ambition at work more appealing and valued.” Linking in with the trends for Gen Z and also older workers to not want managerial responsibility, but to grow their career and skills is accenting the value of sideways moves. “Seeing lateral [moves] as progression; what are you valuing and storytelling around it and the impact of those moves?” said Sky’s Sophie Holmes. “What tools are in your toolbox? It’s powerful to be able to see the value of that. People are going to need to be more adaptable so [skills] breadth is somewhere we can start to make that progress.”Fellow CIPD panellist JC Townend, CEO of career transition provider LHH and country president of its parent company, Adecco, has seen the benefits of looking at careers and skills this way. “As I talk to our clients in HR across a variety of industries, I think companies are finding they are really good at putting together these skills ontologies. The very best ones are on the front foot of figuring out what are the skills of the future, the skills gaps people are going to have from where they are now and where they need to get to. However, the uptake of these systems is very low among their employees. They are saying it’s as low as 3%.”Detachment and employees withdrawing their discretionary effort suggest more communication needs to happen about the growth opportunities. Creating safe places to develop and build future skills, adding value to individuals’ careers, and cultural alignment and transparency in hiring practices and career development – including fairness and equity – are likely to be key.“Our research has shown that at least 50% of people right now are looking for their next career move,” said JC Townend. “The problem is that less than 10% are looking internally. So we asked why is this happening? Companies are really good at showing career paths and helping employees understand how they need to close those skills gaps and it’s just not happening. The thing we realised is that we need to draw employees in to take charge of their own careers; not just in getting the skills they need in the next job, but actually thinking about the next job they want to do and then all the ways you go about landing that job.“The things we’ve learnt in career transitions is that it’s not just about having the right skills. You’ve got to be well-networked; you have to have a personal brand that shows the skills you have. You’ve got to have experience that demonstrates the areas you are interested in. So what we are trying to do is teach employees how to do these other things, how they interview for the job – even internally. We think that makes a big difference. Managers are the gatekeepers to the employee’s brand and reputation in the company and training opportunities. Allowing and even pushing them into gig assignments. We need to not only motivate managers to do this, but also give them the skills.”

Inclusion and career activism

Encouraging line managers to regard talent as an organisational rather than a team resource, especially when backed by transparent internal talent frameworks and platforms to support internal talent mobility, is one solution. “This takes the emotion out for managers because they can see how to backfill the role from within the organisation,” said Sophie Holmes.Such openness and collaboration also link well with DEI approaches, as consultant Woosh Raza, former executive director of people at NCVO, highlighted in the CIPD panel. “When people look to the future, it moves DEI from being a standalone to what it actually means in terms of skills and skills development. There’s so much opportunity here to think about how you bring your whole workforce along.“When I talk to my clients about reskilling, they are very quick to go to their younger workers and try and engage people. They have this bias that when you are at a certain stage of your career, you are not necessarily as willing or able to pivot. That comes out quite prominently in digital skills. We [also] don’t talk about social mobility enough when we talk about work and skills. Gender too. We know women are less likely to put themselves forward. That plays out in terms of career development. This is why taking an intersectional approach is really important.”“One of the things we talk about is career activism and putting the power in the hands of employees themselves,” said JC Townend. She talked through LHH’s Career Navigator programme. This was set up 18 months ago to accommodate 20 high-potential candidates and the retention challenge of there not being enough roles for them to go on to. “These are the amazing performers that are asking me every six months, ‘what’s my next job?’ Two years is too long. So we developed this careers navigator programme that’s teaching them how to take charge of their careers, giving them a career coach for six months, giving them access to career transitions if they are made redundant. What’s been amazing is three of those people are already in new roles. The other 17 are still with the company. We’ve given them patience because they can now see their career trajectory.”

---

---

Find out more about the Think Global People and Think Women community and events.

---

Subscribe to Relocate Extra, our monthly newsletter, to get all the latest international assignments and global mobility news.Relocate’s new Global Mobility Toolkit provides free information, practical advice and support for HR, global mobility managers and global teams operating overseas.

©2025 Re:locate magazine, published by Profile Locations, Spray Hill, Hastings Road, Lamberhurst, Kent TN3 8JB. All rights reserved. This publication (or any part thereof) may not be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of Profile Locations. Profile Locations accepts no liability for the accuracy of the contents or any opinions expressed herein.