Creating the Workforce of the Future

The workforce of the future is going to look different and the changes that will get us there are already happening. Job seekers have clear expectations of their potential employers when it comes to organizational culture and flexible work environments. They increasingly have options, and if employers want to remain competitive—and continue to attract top talent—they need to keep up with those expectations. 

The fact is, job seekers—especially millennials and those in Gen Z—take into consideration a prospective employer’s reputation, its workplace culture and its equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies. A September 2020 diversity and inclusion survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the employment website Glassdoor found that more than three-quarters of U.S. employees and job seekers reported that a diverse workforce was important in a potential employer. And when diversity isn’t found in a company’s ranks, they risk losing out on talent— 32 per cent of job seekers said they wouldn’t apply to a company that didn’t already have a diverse workforce. 

Addressing diversity and inclusion, and cultivating those values as integral to an organization’s culture need to be fostered across all levels of an organization, from the front lines to the C-suite. 

Mohamad Fakih, founder of the Middle Eastern restaurant chain Paramount Fine Foods, has built his company by centering the people he employs and the communities he serves. As CEO of a company that has developed a reputation for its generosity and community spirit, it’s those values that drive how he does business—and how to be successful doing it. And leading by example is why Fakih is often himself at the forefront of community initiatives to give back.

“It doesn't matter what kind of company it is, in today’s market a company’s culture is critically important. I believe it must be centred on putting people first,” says Fakih. “When your corporate purpose is centred on giving back, and making your community stronger, then in turn you will be supported—both internally, by your own people, your employees, who want to be part of something they can be proud of in front of their family and friends, and externally, by people who will be happy to be your clients or customers.”

Creating those values requires understanding not only the needs of the community you serve, but also taking the pulse of your own employees, to better understand who they are what their needs may be, says James LaFleur, External Partnership Coordinator with Interior Health, a health authority in B.C. serving the southern interior region. 

Interior Health regularly measures employee engagement and last year conducted its first ever Employee Census and Inclusion survey, with 10,000 employees—half its workforce—providing information about how they identify on a variety of characteristics. The data helped paint a clearer picture of Interior Health’s staff, which then informed the development of resources and programs to better meet their needs. It also directly influenced components of its Diversity and Inclusion plan, LaFleur says. 

“The more equitable, diverse and inclusive we are as an organization, the better and safer the care will be that our clients and patients experience,” he says. 

That’s why workplace culture is important, says Chami Akmeemana, CEO of Convergence.Tech, a consulting & tech company that fuses business, social and environmental impact, and technology. A company is only as strong as its people, notes Akmeemana, so “it’s in their best interest to help people be their most engaged, to have them contribute more value and adapt to a changing world, and help their organization to do so as well.”

When the global pandemic was declared in March 2020, it forced organizations to quickly adapt and find ways to continue their business. While remote work wasn’t new, the scale at which workers began working from home was. According to Statistics Canada, the number of Canadians working from home in January 2021 was 5.4 million. Today, many workers expect the option for remote work to remain, with or without the pandemic. 

And it’s increasingly looking like that expectation will become the reality. A 2020 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 680 CEOs found that a large majority—78 per cent—believe that the shift to remote collaboration is here to stay. While the shift to remote work had been happening in the business sphere for some time, the pandemic sped up that progress and brought it to the forefront of workers’ minds everywhere, notes Akmeemana. Tech giants like Microsoft and Apple have been adopting hybrid work, which has the potential to pull the rest of us closer to that reality, too, he says. 

“I believe business holds the largest influence in the continued shift to remote work,” says Akmeemana. “Companies are more flexible than public institutions in their ability to shift and adapt as they are driven by the marketplace, which is strongly influenced by societal shifts.”

Embracing this fast-changing labour landscape and collaborating with employees to create mutually-beneficial arrangements is what will set the best apart from the rest, says Ryan Vestby, CEO of CompuVision, an IT management and consulting company based in Edmonton. 

“If you’re an IT professional in our industry and living in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, do you really need to move to Alberta to be able to make a great living and put food on the table and create a great lifestyle for you and your family? The answer is no,” says Vestby. “We’re not constrained to a geographic location anymore.”

For employees, this means having the freedom to live and put down roots anywhere you want, and the power to choose to work for organizations across borders or oceans. For employers, it means having access to a diverse talent pool that isn’t limited simply to the city or country in which you’re headquartered. 

Both ways, it means working with the best versus working with the options you’ve got. 

For organizations to be seen as an employer of choice and successfully attract the top talent in the industry, they need to be transparent, flexible and truly “walk the walk,” adds Vestby. “You attract diverse candidates when you have a large candidate pool. When you focus on culture and engagement, and align your behaviours with your values, you gain and maintain a reputation of being an excellent place to grow your career.”

It’s an amazing moment, Vestby says, but employers need to be willing to adapt to the new context because “the old rules of the game just don’t work anymore.”

Thoughtful and inclusive policies need to be a feature not only in workplaces, but also in work-integrated learning opportunities and programs linking learning to careers, to create a full circle of authentic engagement, says Fiona Blondin, Director of Indigenous Strategy for Cormorant Utility Services, one of Ontario’s largest contractors in the power distribution and transmission industry.

“It’s about the approach to recruitment and retention. One, recruitment, is external and the other, retention, is internal,” says Blondin, who is originally from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, NWT. 

Blondin, who, as a single indigenous mother, had to overcome significant barriers—financial and otherwise—to access education before starting her career, says that experience has shaped her own approach to her work. 

“All of these barriers were real and they were tangible…and they would be the very things that vetted you out of all kinds of opportunities,” she says. 

“For me, it’s really about all of these issues—it’s about older parents, it’s about people returning to education when they’ve already had kids, it’s about mothers, it’s about people of colour, it’s about indigenous people, it’s about two-spirited people, and all the real life barriers that we’re already facing, without even getting up in the morning,” Blondin says. “Those are the pieces that we’re really starting to unpack now. And I think about this often because I do believe we’ve come to a point in Canada where it’s not about changing who I am, it’s about thinking about the uniqueness in who I am.” 

The one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work anymore, adds Blondin. In fact, she says, it misses whole populations. That’s why, through her outreach work with Cormorant, she emphasizes the importance of meeting people where they are and approaching indigenous populations as a listener. 

“You don’t sit in your office and wonder why you can’t find Indigenous people and why you can’t hire them. You have to go to where they are, you go to their community, you reach out to them,” she says. “You don’t just think to yourself, ‘This is the box, this is how we traditionally engage with people, this is how we bring people in,’ and then wonder why it doesn’t work.” 

Employers across sectors need to be mindful that their recruitment strategies are inclusive and are relevant to all candidates, adds LaFleur. For example, he says, reaching out to university or college career offices and student services catering to Indigenous student populations is crucial to understanding how best to reach to those students.

“Instead of employers creating recruitment events in a vacuum, it is critical to gain insights from educational institutions on what their students want and need and creating recruitment events centered on these needs and wants,” says LaFleur. 

LaFleur notes that Interior Health serves 54 First Nations and 15 chartered Metis communities, which makes Indigenous recruitment and  representation even more important. Interior Health’s Employee Aboriginal Self-Identification Project found that as of May 2021 6.2 per cent of its workforce identified as Indigenous. The health authority has identified a goal of increasing that number to 10 per cent by 2025.

In the healthcare context, without a diverse workforce and the policies necessary to get there, “you risk having gaps in care when it comes to cultural safety, anti-racism and anti-discrimination,” says LaFleur. “You risk failing to address the harmful effects of colonialism in healthcare. You risk under-serving and ultimately having poor outcomes for patients, clients and their families.”

And while employees and those in the job market are demanding diversity and representation, research shows that companies that genuinely adopt EDI policies and attract diverse employees outperform their competition. Research gathered in 2017 by McKinsey & Company showed that organizations that were more ethnically and culturally diverse outperformed their counterparts by 33 per cent. The data also found that gender diversity among executive teams is strongly correlated with profitability and value creation.

Diversity helps to drive innovation and excellence in a sector, says Cate Murray, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Stem Cell Network, a non-profit that supports stem cell and regenerative medicine research in Canada.

Building that diversity in the talent pool can be a challenge for an emerging sector like biomanufacturing, she notes. That’s why collaboration with educational institutions is key. Working with institutions offering life sciences degrees or technical training programs helps raise the visibility of an emergent sector as a potential career path to more students, she notes. 

“We have an obligation to put this in the front window to say, ‘Look, here's one of the careers of the future.’ This is critical for ensuring we can produce innovative made-in-Canada solutions.”

But if anything, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need to build these sectors here at home. If we don’t, we risk losing talent to other countries—a challenge the sector is already experiencing.

“I believe that diverse work environments create and help support excellence. So diversity can never hurt—it just can’t,” she says. “An inclusive approach will lead to a better process, to a more robust sector, to more people being brought into the sector.”