Part 4: Executive interview with Deloitte’s Michael Stephan

In our final part of this exclusive four-part series with Deloitte’s Michael Stephan, we look at the workforce ecosystem and flexibility, two ideas inextricably linked in our new, boundaryless world.

When we talk of the ‘workforce ecosystem’, it’s the recognition that “oftentimes organizations are focused on the people on their balance sheet today. And one of the real opportunities is to think more broadly and recognize that the skills that you might need for your future may not always be skills inside your organization” says Stephan.

Acknowledging that your workforce is no longer contained within the four walls of your HQ – or on the balance sheet for that matter – is a revelation and somewhat freeing. Knowing that your talent pool is now truly global really does broaden the horizons.

Examples of how, as Stephan continues: “Whether it’s through partnerships with other organizations, whether it’s freelancers, or gig workers, there are opportunities to fill in skill gaps through that workforce ecosystem in new and different ways to ultimately serve your organization and your customers.”

Yes – skill gaps. We can never leave it too long before discussing one of the defining topics of modern workforce dynamics.

Expertise isn’t uniform

For Michael Stephan, though, it’s very much an opportunity, and not nearly as difficult to solve as you might think, for this simple reason: “not everyone needs to be an expert. When we talk about technologies like AI and and other leading emerging digital technologies, we recognize that those technologies will likely be one degree of separation from every person’s job in the future.

“But that doesn’t mean that every person needs that expert level knowledge in order to do their job. And so the other opportunity when you think about skills is to put it on a fluency spectrum and recognize that some workers will need that knowledge in the context of the work that they’re doing, some will actually need that knowledge to become a software engineer or a coder for a product they’re developing, and some may need that knowledge just to make strategic choices or direction or investments.”

Unfortunately not all orgs understand the importance of a fluency spectrum and the opportunities it creates, such as “a flexibility around what you’re ultimately going to build inside of your workforce and the concept of sustainable impact and longevity, and agility to move with the market.”

AI and coding skills, for example, come with many different needs and outputs, and Stephan uses factory automation to illustrate this point: “There are some people that will need more specific knowledge to code or actually use a machine leveraging that technology. And then there’ll be other people that leverage the insights and information that come out of that technology to make decisions.

“So if you think about a manufacturing floor, there may be an individual using a robot or a machine to actually build a product that requires a higher degree of expertise to use that.

“There may be someone in the quality control group that is looking at that product and evaluating it that needs to understand how it was built, but not have the same level of depth of coding knowledge of the machine. And then there’s gonna be leaders that are leveraging the insights and information coming out of that manufacturing plant and looking at the outputs to understand the progress, the gaps, the opportunities, et cetera.”

So – the watchword of the new skills era: fluency spectrum. Experiment with your organization’s own, and remember that as important as reskilling and upskilling are in the modern world of work – not everyone needs to reach the same level of expertise.

You can watch the full video above.

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Deloitte are a headline sponsor of both UNLEASH America and UNLEASH World. You can find all their activity on the Deloitte hub page here.