If workers are in short supply, why do employers continue to use digital gatekeepers that screen out millions of capable individuals? Joe Fuller joins his Managing the Future of Work co-chair and podcast co-host, Bill Kerr, to share insights from the project’s research collaboration with Accenture on the “hidden worker” problem.

HBS Managing the Future of Work

Bringing hidden workers into focus

Slack is a mainstay of remote work. But when Covid-19 hit the company behind the software had to pivot from an in-person orientation to digital-first. VP Brian Elliott, leader of the firm’s Future Forum consortium, explains how remapping work means reimagining the organization.

Slack’s Brian Elliott: Digital-first elevates output and diversity

Managing the Future of Work project co-chair and podcast co-host, Joe Fuller joins Eric Olsen on Helix Education's Enrollment Growth University. How can colleges address the middle skills gap while readying students for the job market? Work-based learning and better career services are key.

Guest appearance: Joe Fuller on Enrollment Growth University

“Tiger” Tyagarajan, CEO of professional services firm Genpact, on post-Covid workforce challenges, how to foster a culture of adaptability, and the imperative and benefits of diversity.

Cultivating an organizational growth mindset

Coursera Chief Enterprise Officer, Leah Belsky, on how online education is facilitating workforce development, mitigating Covid job losses, promoting diversity, transforming teaching, and enabling lifelong learning. She also discusses the company’s decisive shift to remote work.

Coursera: From virtual lecture hall to platform for lifelong learning

Harvard sociologist David Pedulla unpacks the hiring process. How do race, gender, and work history influence the gatekeepers? What assumptions guide their decision-making and how can social science help level the playing field? 

How to make hiring more equitable

Life sciences cloud software company Veeva's origins as a highly decentralized organization and its early adoption of video conferencing paid off when Covid-19 forced the switch to remote work. The business was able to help speed up the vaccine pipeline. Co-founder and director, HBS alumnus Matt Wallach, talks about the firm’s post-Covid work-from-anywhere strategy, its embrace of the multi-stakeholder public benefit corporation model, and why it foregoes non-compete clauses as it aims to foster employees’ careers.   

Veeva’s distributed approach to building institutional knowledge and shared culture

Can social science and big data help organizations have constructive conversations with their employees? People analytics is being put to the test as businesses grapple with the pandemic, remote work, return-to-the-office decisions, diversity and inclusion, and a raft of social and political pressures. Didier Elzinga, founder and CEO of HR analytics platform vendor Culture Amp, discusses employee engagement and wellbeing and the need for data-literate managers.

People analytics: Getting from data to meaningful impact

Former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erica Groshen on how better data gathering can improve careers and the economy and why it’s important to keep politics out of federal statistical research. Also: skills, worker voice, gig, inequality, the social safety net, and assessing the impact of Covid-19.

Infrastructure: Upgrading the US labor statistics system

Eastern Bank is betting that bigger is better when it comes to serving small businesses and supporting local communities and philanthropic causes. Until recently the oldest and largest mutual bank in the US, Eastern has gone public and is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy. CEO and Chair, Bob Rivers, on maintaining the bank’s commitment to diversity—in business, communities, and internally—and how Covid has reconfigured work and magnified the challenges faced by small and minority-owned businesses.

Taking stock of Eastern Bank’s expansive community banking model

Translators aren’t headed for obsolescence just yet. Computer-assisted language translation has come a long way, but for many jobs, you’ll still need a human in the loop to avoid inaccuracies, tone-deafness, and cultural insensitivity. Computer scientist Spence Green is president of enterprise language translation company, Lilt. He unpacks state-of-the-art neural network machine translation and explains the critical function of localizing content for international markets.

AI-assisted language translation: Context is king

Managing the Future of Work project co-chair and podcast co-host, Joe Fuller joins Aassia Haq on MBO Partners’ State of Independence. What does the post-Covid workforce look like, and what are the biggest challenges facing CEOs and CHROs as they compete to marshal talent and transform their workforces?  

Guest appearance: Joe Fuller on State of Independence

As the US vies with global AI rivals for technological and strategic advantage, where will it find the human brainpower and skilled labor to compete? Is the government prepared for the challenge? Artificial intelligence is crossing boundaries, transforming markets, and raising ethical concerns. José-Marie Griffiths, member of the National Security Committee on Artificial Intelligence, discusses the commission’s recommendations.

US plans for AI primacy

Many architects are looking for work these days but the profession as a whole is influencing the future of work writ large. Architecture is shaped by the tension between the creative process and the more rigid, risk-averse business of building—a business that’s been hit hard by the pandemic. At the same time, architects are playing a key role in redefining work- and living spaces for the new normal. Stefan Behnisch, whose firm Behnisch Architekten designed Harvard’s vast new science and engineering complex, deconstructs the design and construction workforce, the future of the office, and the post-Covid city.

Architect Stefan Behnisch on designing for a changing workforce

Social Finance has deftly aligned incentives around skills training. By pooling public and private resources and making job placement a shared goal, the nonprofit is providing proof of concept that could scale to address workforce development needs nationwide. Co-founder and CEO Tracy Palandjian explains career impact bonds and social impact bonds.

Social Finance: trainers make the grade when students get good jobs

Artificial intelligence. Robotics. The Gig Economy. Globalization. The world is changing at a dizzying pace in ways that will have a profound effect on the economy, jobs and the flow of talent. How will firms cope with the changes ahead and what steps do they need to take today? Each episode features faculty from the world’s leading business school interviewing CEOs, technologists and experts on the bleeding edge discussing how to survive and thrive by managing the future of work.

hubhopper

HBS Managing the Future of Work

hubhopper