Paul from theGrogroup team recently took part in a webinar run by the global consulting firm Gartner, who set out their fairly detailed research in terms of the future of work trends for 2025, this post summarises the key points in a short blog and focusses especially on those that are likely to most impact professional services.
Their research set out challenges in 3 key categories:
The consensus view was that as Bob Dylan says “the times they are a changin’ ” and currently we are seeing a confluence of technology innovation, a change in the way junior professional staff gain experience (as the Bots can do some of the basic heavy lifting) and a most extraordinary statistic, that more people will reach retirement age in 2027 than ever before!
I’ll take each of the three headings and just focus on some of the most important issues for professional services from the nine challenges that they highlighted. You can see the full presentation here and it’s pretty easy to follow.
TOPIC 1: Trends in demand for a future ready workforce
Three key challenges arise here: the expertise gap intensifying as retirement surge and tech disrupt, as a result organisations are redesigning their structure for a new way of working and trying to build solutions for the widening communication gap.
By 2027, one in six workers will reach a retirement age in the US, which means we will have more people retiring than ever before and firms see themselves losing much of the knowledge base from the workforce. That may explain why 57% of employees want more learning opportunities and 60% say they’re not getting on the job coaching they need to support their core job skills.
Currently theGrogroup: are running a number of leadership programmess and one of the key challenges that everybody highlights is that they are time poor. Arriving on a programme they express their desire to do “more business development” and the challenges that the pressure of client work puts on their diary. When they reflect on their role as leaders it is clear how little time they have to focus on that part of their role at all, realising how little time they have to coach and develop the team and create the organisation needed to meet future client demands.
In the recent PwC report on law firms and the Gartner research, both highlighted the challenge for lawyers who 10 years ago would train up juniors by getting them to draft contracts, all the while learning the law, drafting skills, client relationship and client liaison skills. Whereas now the initial draft is driven by AI, and technology is reducing on the job learning opportunities.
The partnership model also does not lend itself to agile working and adapting to fast changing resources and by that, I would also include every single firm who is currently or has been a limited company in an attempt to streamline processes, only to find everyone still referring to each other as “partners” and finding it impossible to performance manage effectively.
It’s common for Gen X and Baby boomers to be frustrated by a lack of communication skills in those being recruited in to the workforce. One solution is “Nudge tech”, an interesting development that is almost like a personal coach for those with lower emotional intelligence on how to communicate with others. But in a digital age it perhaps does it give you that little “nudge” when you need it; telling you that “Jo prefers an email to a call” or vice versa and “not to bother Nic between nine and 12 in the morning”. Just to help you get it right first time.
TOPIC 2: Evolving role of leaders and managers
I think the role of leaders and managers in professional services is extremely difficult. It’s bad enough in a manufacturing or service industry where your full-time role is management and you do no client work, but of course in professional services that’s never the case. Most of your remuneration and certainly performance is based on chargeable hours and client facing deliverables, but if you’re good, you’re going to be promoted into a role that requires more of you both in terms of client expertise but also financial management, people skills and business development.
Little wonder that the research shows that a staggering 87% of employees felt that an algorithm will be more objective and fair than any boss. Because they are just too busy to care.
Some firms are looking at desirable metrics to building strong feedback loops on performance. I feel this is going to be particularly difficult in professional services while we remain so focused on the chargeable hour as a performance metric.
AI usage is going to become an interesting metric, as I was discussing with a number of partners recently, how they can encourage all of the firm to take up AI and they were looking at ways of measuring who was using AI in completing client matters. Those that did, would be rewarded because it would clearly take less time and free them up to do more high value work. Given that 90% of those surveyed felt AI usage should be commonplace, this is about how firms can catch up with the consensus of the teams to use AI more effectively.
DEI also came in to the study and the response was clear that inclusion was a highly valuable approach to be taken with any workforce resulting in much higher engagement (almost double) and many firms were re-prioritising key metrics to focus on inclusion and belonging as leading indicator as a progress on innovation and other business and talent outcomes
TOPIC 3: Emerging talent risks to organisational strategy
AI is changing every day and many would love it to be a silver bullet and although 47% of CIO’s believe their organisations generative AI initiatives have delivered on their expected benefit, there have been few in professional services that can unequivocally state what the benefits really are in terms of job completion or improvement in profit and efficiency metrics. Listening to a group of general council and lawyers recently it was clear that everybody is using it, everybody is in trials, but nobody would clearly commit to the key differences it could make in a compelling way. Clearly it may be a case of keeping some secrets very close to your chest. If we had fantastic AI solutions that meant we could deliver work in a fraction of the time, I’m also not sure I would share that with the competition!
It was interesting that 20% of those surveyed say technology adopted in the last two years has actually made their job harder, which probably explains the poor uptake of many tech initiatives.
Resilience is also a common theme for many of the people that we talk to in PSFs but in the survey this is being highlighted as a business risk because it is a personal risk to so many in the firm it could become a business issue. If the current rates of satisfaction with work interactions continue to fall, they will decline from 36% in 2021(of employee satisfied with coworker quality and camaraderie) through 29% (2024) to a projected 22% in 2027.
Clearly when employees are lonely, their performance suffers.
It means organisations need to incorporate support for socialisation and camaraderie building into the total rewards strategy. There is almost a need to encourage people to do what’s right for themselves even if they don’t feel like doing it.
If the audit team has got a spare minute, perhaps they could add a collaboration audit to the your planning processes!
So, What Do We Do?
Four actions seem sensible given the direction of travel of the industry, people and tech:
2025 will be a year when AI begins to evolve in our workplace and firms will need to have a long term plan to manage staff who are remote workers that are highly productive.
If you have questions or want a challenging conversation on any of these topics please do get in touch hello@thegrogroup.com