Vantage Point Podcast 1

The podcast discusses two main themes: demographic change and social change in the workplace. The aging population and decrease in birth rates will impact recruitment and retention of workers. Employers now face higher expectations in terms of promoting fairness, social justice, and well-being among employees. The conversation also touches on the need for a more honest discussion about immigration and its role in addressing workforce challenges. The podcast highlights the importance of confronting these global megatrends and finding strategies that work for each society. Welcome to Vantage Points, a new podcast series hosted by Starfish Search, bringing together different perspectives on change in a year of fluctuation. The first in this series looks at how we might need to adapt to issues coming down the track related to workforce, skills, diversity, opportunity and inclusion. And we are delighted to be joined by James Kirkup, partner at Appella Advisors and former columnist and think tank head, Jason Arthur, chief executive of Sir Lewis Hamilton's charity, Mission 44, and Anthony Painter, director of policy and communications at the Chartered Management Institute and published author. And it's great to be here on Vantage Points today. So I'm going to start by trying to set the scene a little bit for the macro context for the conversation we're having today by, I guess, proposing a couple of themes that I think frame the conversation we're going to have. And what is one of the biggest things the world faces that doesn't get talked about quite as much as some of the others? Demographic change. The world is aging and we are having collectively fewer babies. And that means that there are more old people and fewer young ones. Now, from an employer perspective, that's a big deal. It's going to become a bigger deal in the long term. Recruiters are going to have to try harder to attract and recruit and retain workers. And that, I think, is going to change the way companies and organizations recruit. So that's my first theme for us to discuss. The second one is about social change and expectations of the role of employers and employment. Now, I'm quite old. I'm nearly 50. I started my career at a time when, essentially, you got a job, and you went to work, and you did your job, and you went home. And whether or not you were happy or unhappy, or your place in society was, frankly, none of your employer's business or concern. And it feels like that idea has long gone, that employers now face a much bigger, wider set of expectations rightly on their role in society, about using their role in recruiting and employing people to promote a much wider, much more comprehensive sense of fairness of social justice and making the world a better place, as well as discharging their primary responsibility of doing whatever business they're in. So those are the two themes that I would love to try and frame our conversation. Anthony, you're the expert in day-to-day management and what companies and organizations are actually doing, or how they manage people, but how this works in the real world. Do those things ring true? Yeah. I mean, the latter conversation is a very lively one. And it's not uncontested space around the need to be a more inclusive employer to enable your staff to have a greater sense of well-being. And there's a lot of pushback. Obviously, the woke, anti-woke thing is real. There's a lot of challenge around things like diversity initiatives. Do they work? And so on. And some of it's fair challenge. You've got to do things that work. But I think this wider social responsibility is a really important point. And I think it's something that we'd like to grow over the coming years. And it's related to demographic change, as well, because we'll have different expectations of our lives. And we'll have different burdens in our lives. A lot of people in their late 40s, and I'm in a similar position to you, will have to think about the older generation and the younger generation simultaneously. That changes your relationship to work, actually. So I think all of it comes together. And there is a sense of shift. But there feels like there's an absence of politics and strategy around all of these deeply big issues currently. We're not having those conversations. And instead, we're engaging in a politics of distraction and pretend to ourselves that everything's just going to revert to a normal pathway. And things are going to be all right. Or there are some people who are trying to free ride on you. You're going to fight back against them. Whatever the particular policy of distraction, we're not being serious about confronting one of those big global mega-trends that you're describing. Thinking about how this works in day-to-day terms, you captured it very well, the way those two things come together. Essentially, because younger people are scarcer, they are more valuable to recruiters. This is something I hear from people my age who recruit and manage. It's a standard middle-aged, grumpy old man conversation about, God, they're really demanding, aren't they? They want this. They want that. Whereas in our day—I'm sorry, I'm sounding really old here—big recruiters could just essentially say, right, that's the graduate scheme. That's the recruitment. That's the job. Apply, don't apply. We'll take the 10 people we like. The rest of you, go hang. Those days are long gone, aren't they? I think those days are long gone and good riddance to them. I think we should be more demanding about our working lives. I think the put-up-and-shut-up era creates enormous burden, particularly those who have less power in the workplace. Those who are in more insecure work, women in particular. I think those ways of working just didn't work for the totality of the workforce. If we're talking about how we can have, in the context of demographic change, economic stress, environmental challenge, we've got to engage the multiplicity of talents that we may have available to us in order to meet some of those challenges. Otherwise, we're just going to remain stuck in a rut. That's where we are. You look at the productivity growth figures to get sort of economically technical about it, but the last four or five years, it's completely flatlined. That's not really— It's longer than that, isn't it? Yeah, the trend has been appalling for a long period of time, but it's actually just completely flat. You're thinking, right, okay, this is not society that's gearing up to face these mega-challenges. This is a society that's sort of slowly giving up, and that's not a place that we can afford to be. Of the two themes that you have rightly raised, James, I think immigration is an interesting connector between the two, because the one thing that I would challenge of your initial framing is it's the West that's getting older. If you look at Africa, 60% of people in Africa are under the age of 25, and where it feels as though our discussion around immigration has become dishonest, and there are many ways in which it's dishonest, but ultimately, in order to address some of our demographic challenges when it comes to the workforce, we are going to need to rely, I think, on immigrants, certainly in the short and medium term, to fill a number of important roles, but then in having that conversation and potentially having to have more immigrants in particular sectors and for particular roles, you inevitably then will force even greater discussions around identity and community cohesion and how employers are able to weave in those new workers with people who are born here. I'm involved in the education sector, and at the moment, you've got a teacher diversity challenge, but you also have a teacher recruitment challenge, so lots of people here don't want to become teachers. It doesn't have the level of flexibility and work-life balance that lots of younger workers want. I 100% agree with you on that immigration point, and I think we'll definitely see, in due course, employers having to challenge that political consensus around immigration. If you want to look at the future, how about Japan? Japan is probably about 20 years ahead of us on that demographic curve. They've gone through the stage of trying to get robots to do all the jobs that they can't get human beings to do, and now they're effectively licensing a large amount of unofficial immigration, which they're not there in the critical birth. I think we may well end up back there, but I'll try and avoid taking you off down too far down the immigration avenue. Just on that point, just to say something on the Japan point, there is a ramen shop in Tokyo that I used to frequent in the late 1990s, right? And the last time I went there was about four or five years ago to the district of Tokyo called Sugamo. They sell a bowl of ramen and half a plate of fried rice, and then there's some dumplings alongside. When I was there in the late 1990s, it cost 1,000 yen for this set menu. You get a free beer with it as well, by the way. It's still the same now. That sounds like great news, but it's symbolic. I always think this is symbolic of a society that actually is quite frozen, and it is quite frozen, because the other thing they've done, of course, is shifted a lot of their production overseas to Southeast Asian countries and so on, because they didn't want to grasp that nestle of immigration particularly firmly. I think Jason's point is absolutely right. We're going to have to have a more honest conversation around this, because we're not an industrial powerhouse in the same way that Japan was. They found a strategy that kind of worked for it. I don't think it can work for us as a sort of high-level services economy in the same way. So we need to think about what model can work for us. Brief Japanese segue, I don't know if you saw. There was a story, I think it was in the FT the other day, but it's amazing. A pocket industry set up in Japan called Resignation Agencies. For Japanese people who want to quit their job that they've got, but you find that it's very difficult to resign, because there's a huge pressure on young Japanese people to get a corporate job and keep a corporate job. But actually, like young people around the world, they've decided there's more to life than work and they want to quit. But instead of quitting themselves, they literally hire an agency to do the quitting for them, which is that year. But again, that year was proof, I think, of the same megatrend there, that actually people have a different expectation of the workplace and the unemployment, because only Japanese corporations literally just say, right, September the 1st, recruitment day, we're going to hire a thousand people, that's it, you'll work for your entire life, end of story. And you will never quit. And you will, yeah, you will work, when we want you to work, you wear the black suit and the white shirt that everybody wears all the time, that's your life. And that is gone. And that's the social shift that we are, that we're starting to experience in the UK as well. Jason, your work, from what you can see of big employers and big recruiters, how are they, I mean, terrible question, how do you think they're doing? How do you think big British recruiters, public sector and private sector, are doing in catching up with that social expectation of more inclusive, more just recruitment techniques? So, for Mission 44, the sector that we engage with the most is broadly stemmed specifically motorsport, and motorsport is a very weird and unique sector, but it's a sector which is grappling with all of the issues that we've been speaking about to the extent that, you know, it's incredibly competitive, so there's a desire to get talent, there's still an expectation for people coming into motorsport employers and Formula 1 employers that, you know, they're going to get the right level of support, development, work-life balance, whilst at the same time their teams are travelling all around the world, competing in these races. So, even though it's quite a niche sector in many ways, the overarching themes still apply. And my sense of it is that I do think employers are, certainly in motorsport and in STEM more broadly, have a sense of what they should be doing, but not necessarily an understanding of how to do it well. If I get this, somebody's going to hit me over the head, but I don't really know what to do. Yeah, exactly right, both on recruitment and retention, and also just saying the wrong thing, the nervousness about it, and then for the bigger employers as well, even though there is a benefit to their future workforce in terms of brand in what some might describe as wokery, they know that they will also get attacked from others. So, it's a very complicated niche. The other thing which I find fascinating, and me, even as an employer, I find it difficult, is this tension between, I think, the expectations of Gen Z, that, you know, certain things will be provided for them, that their mental health will be supported. And I think, Anthony, you're absolutely right, that they should be demanding about, you know, how they're paid, the support they get, the work-life balance. I think, broadly, that's correct. Whilst, at the same time, actually, many of the challenges that perhaps older generations went through, build a level of resilience and skills, which I think is still helpful in the workplace, and getting that sweet spot between providing the right support and actually saying, that's not the job for an employer. Actually, some of these things need to be provided outside of the workplace, and our job is also, actually, to try and make it a bit tricky for you, because you will develop and grow as a result. I think that's a tension that a lot of employers, including within the Stamford Motorsports space, might have. I'm nodding vigorously here, because I began my career on Fixed-Tree Newspapers, which certainly gives the character for me, formation, and making me increasingly a person of resilience, put it that way, in terms of their HR and care. Can I ask you, in terms of the motorsports industry, another, I guess, central plane of division here, if you like, how far is that? Are you aware of divides between the graduate and the non-graduate intake? I mean, are the people you're seeing recruited, do they all have to have higher degrees in engineering and the like, or is it all for apprentices and the non-graduate half of the population there? There is, and motorsport, the roles within it, more broadly, aren't just the STEM technical roles. There's also marketing, and brand, and hospitality, and there's a huge number of roles. Actually, now that motorsports are trying to become more sustainable, there are some interesting roles linked to that. But certainly, within the more technical roles, you've got roles like mechanics, and that is ripe for people with practical skills and apprenticeships, all the way to your engineers. My dad was a mechanic. He left school when he was not quite 14, I think. Right. That was what he did. But yes, he left the industry when cars all got computers in them, and you had to have higher technical skills to get the car up. Yeah, but I guess the difficulty is, because all of those roles are still incredibly competitive, it's very easy for a big F1 team to default to the networks of people who are currently within roles, which means that, certainly for the more advanced roles, which require a master's or PhD level, or whatever it might be, you will default then to looking for your Cambridge student, your Oxford student, maybe Loughborough, Cranfield. And so the understanding of how we find diverse talent, who can support us with that, how do we acknowledge that they may not be polished, but actually, given their backgrounds, their potential is much greater, and so we need to create the environment to support that progression. I think, but this isn't just applied to motorsport, there's just a lack of understanding about networks and then how to implement it. Anthony, looking more widely at management and recruitment, do you think that we are seeing a shift away from graduate-first recruitment? I know some big employers are talking about skills-first recruitment, where we don't look at your CV, we don't look at the institution you attended, we just look at the skills you can demonstrate. I know, yeah, some of the big peaks of what we used to do, the milk-running recruiters, the accountants, the big four firms are moving away from, you know, most of the time they basically just said, you've got to have a 2.1 from one of 5,000 universities for us to look at you now. Those requirements are very, very much old hat now, aren't they? Well, yeah, I mean, there's a shift, but, you know, you look at the employment rate and, you know, the salary four or five years after graduation, it's still going to be very high at the sort of Russell Group University, there's still a skew. I think the apprenticeship system is something which has become incredibly valuable, it's sort of, you know, it's tagged as a policy failure, but I think that's a bit short-sighted, there's things that have to change within it. I think we spend a lot of the time when we're talking about skills in the workplace, in the English debate, in the UK debate, trying to decide whether we should do more of this versus less of that, should we do less AG, more apprenticeships, should we do more level 2 or level 6, this sector or that sector, these types of qualifications. And I think we waste an enormous amount of energy on that conversation, when actually the biggest problem is we're just simply not doing enough across the board. Employers are not investing enough, we don't invest enough ourselves. If we're serious about getting into a more productive space, we're going to need a skilled strategy to go alongside that. And that's actually the discussion that we should be having, and we don't have. Apprenticeships are great, there's not enough of them. There are lots of other different types of, you know, work-based learning and technical qualifications that can come into the mix as well. How do we do that? The conversation we're having in Singapore is actually around, you know, we've got this system now, this is a suite of qualifications, we'll give you some funding, we're going to have a campaign about it, we're going to make sure that we invest in the over 40s as much in, you know, the 18 to 24s. And as a consequence, their adult engagement with skills and training has increased by sort of 12% over the course of… You'll see from my favourite internship here, Anthony, when I'm running a think tank, if I ever wanted to get the attention of politicians or any… Singapore. I would say, did you do it in Singapore, you know? And everyone goes, oh yeah, that sounds good. So yes, all hail Singapore. Is there a Singapore GP? There was a grand prix in Singapore. There is a girl. There we are. One thing I'll say about Singapore as well, I mean, they've done it for the last 20 years. It's not just like a two or three year thing. They've just been… Islanders are also doing it quite well, you know. And so there are… Sorry, Jason. It's not just we don't invest enough. We don't invest early enough as well. When I think about education in the context of this discussion, I think we've entered into a relatively unhelpful binary debate between knowledge and skills, where the discussion within education has leant very much towards knowledge. But in reality, we need to be investing in both of them. And, you know, I quite like the work of organisations like Skills Builder and the eight areas, the eight skills that they think young people need. That all seems very sensible to me. So we have to be investing in teachers and educators to be able to develop those skills early enough and working with employers so that by the time they get to 16 and 18 and 21, they can transition into the workplace with what employers need. But because we're not investing and we're not investing earlier, I think there's a kind of ticking time bomb here of, you know, insufficient skills combined with technological shifts. And we haven't talked about the dreaded two letters yet, AI and what that means. I think there are real, real storm clouds coming. The conversation is getting very political. We might as well face it head on. Eventually, we're going to find that we're finally going to get a general election. I mean, all of, you know, pretty much everybody is betting on a change of government. I mean, what, I mean, what's that? Will that matter to the conversation, do we think? Is that going to, you know, will a different government change things or will those big trends and, you know, habits and chronic problems remain regardless of who's in government? I think to answer his point around investment, the difficulty is whoever wins, there's not going to be very much money. So I think there is a, what does feel like potentially a shift or might change is that labour have spent quite a lot of time worrying business and their attentions as a result that comes elsewhere. And we've seen the unions kick up about some of what they perceive as the watering down of their protections for workers. But because there isn't enough money, I think that need for collective efforts and cross-sector collaboration is going to be even greater. But, you know, my analysis of what labour have said today is that it's all very safe. It doesn't feel as though there's nothing that doesn't seem sensible about a lot of the policies that they're putting forward, but whether that's going to bring a kind of radical shift in skills and productivity, I'm not sure we've had. I think whoever, you know, I think the two policy documents that we'll see from the two main parties, I think they will bear very little resemblance to where policy would be at. No, I'm not saying that they've got a secret plan. I think because of these challenges, maybe we should be hopeful that they do have a secret plan, but given these challenges, I think things will have to shift quite quickly in the second half of this decade. I think that does include thinking about the way in which public investment works and the degree of latitude that there is there, given the scale of these challenges, because if it's just a sort of incremental change over a period of time, I think we'll, I mean, the risk for Labour if they win is that people won't feel a big shift and change by the end of this Parliament. I can't, on that point, you're pointing to the, I guess, the weight of expectation that would be on an incoming Labour government, that the public would expect things to change. I wonder if that same, there will also be a similar weight of expectation on companies and other organisations, around some of the talks we're talking about today, recruitment and retention, about that relationship between employers and their workers. I should say, you're talking about the relationship between Labour Party and business. My main job these days is advising companies on how they deal with government and political parties like the Labour Party, so I'm a participant in this stuff as well. I do think that, you know, big recruiters, big employers are going to face an increased expectation that they will do the right thing, that they will show more care and more support for their employers, for the diversity of their workforce, for the well-being of their workforce, whether or not Labour legislates for it, whether or not there's regulation requiring it. I think there will be social and political pressure on employers to do the right thing and look after their people more. I mean, am I being, you know, am I being, you know, naive, floppy, but I'm committed about that? I don't think you're being naive. I think that pressure will grow because the expectations of millennials, to a certain extent, but certainly Gen Z, is that employers need to be doing those things. So I think the pressure will grow. I think the difficulty for employers, though, is that in order to provide inclusive workplaces, they will have to be catering for new workers who have a range of different identities that they prioritise, different ways of communicating about that. And in the context of the cost of living crisis, growing inequalities, still evident discrimination, whether it's on race or sexual orientation, I think the vulnerabilities of people entering into the workplace will be significant. Mental health clearly is the biggest challenge. So their inability to cater for that level of diversity, I think, will still be quite significant, even though they need to do it, and there'll be greater pressure on them. Sorry, I think the best employers are already moving into the space. There's some easy wins here, really. I mean, the thing we pick up on a further, we do lots of public surveys, is that people are far more likely to say they want things like flexibility, they want a supportive manager, they want to feel that they're in an inclusive workplace. And these are, you know, right at the top, I think like paying benefits are further down. But actually, there are things that can be done to actually support people that are not going to cost the earth, but just require changing your practice, your mindset, your way of communicating. I don't disagree with that at all. The one thing I would say, though, is that that employee's ability to access mental health services within their community, or to feel as though, you know, they can do training outside of work, or, you know, feeling safe, all of those things will make it much easier then for what that employer does provide to meet the needs of that employee. And I think we need to be challenging employers to be doing more. But if we look at employers in isolation, and don't recognize that their effectiveness is within systems that are crumbling, then I always feel as though we're setting up employers to fail. So it's not to disagree with you. It's just that I think for too long, there's been too fragmented an approach to addressing these challenges rather than... Our managers are spotting the NHS having an impact on the workplace, on their teams, and impact on stress, anxiety, and productivity. So that goes the way of saying exactly. Violent agreement here, I suppose I should say, because I've written this in various public forums, but I'm not giving away any secrets of things I advise clients. But I think there is a strong business interest in big companies supporting the NHS and better public health services. I think being actively supporting a healthier population and the services that provide for a healthy population is a good business decision, as well as being the right thing to do reputationally and ethically. So hopefully, we will see some slight more yet more employer engagement on supporting those services as well. Can I just, wrapping up, one thought which to me is coming, Anthony, when you talk about that scheme of priorities that we see from... There are lots of surveys showing that very point you make, that actually young people, particularly younger workers' expectations of work has shifted to the point where flexibility, well-being, support services actually regularly outrank pay and conditions. I mean, I've always found that slightly mind-blowing, because I started my career at a time where unemployment was the most terrifying thing that could happen to you, where all the power lay in the hands of the employer, and therefore you took the salary, you go, and that was that. And the idea of walking away from a job to make you unhappy was just unthinkable. And we've still got a long way to go, haven't we, in terms of employers adjusting to a population, a labour force that is smaller, scarcer, and is prioritising well-being and flexibility over wages. Is that the big challenge for recruitment and retention in the next 10, 20 years, do you think? I think it's probably the big challenge for business growth, actually, or organisational performance. I think that's how a lot of the more enlightened employers are saying, and you speak to people in Labour Party around the New Deal for Working People, what they comment on is that they feel that some of the stuff they're doing is playing catch-up with quite a lot of the sort of league and pack of employers are already doing. So I think they're quite surprised at how, notwithstanding the changes and so on, I think they're quite surprised at how non-controversial a lot of what they're proposing is. Because I think actually what's happened is, through COVID, COVID is and isn't a point of disjuncture, but on this working relationship thing and sense of worth and value through work, I think there is a point of disjuncture, and I think a lot of the leading employers have done that, trying to work out how that can work. The one modifier, I would say, James, to what you said is, although I do think young people are prepared to put well-being and flexibility above pay, if you look at those who are in the most insecure jobs, it's more likely to be young people, it's more likely to be particularly, I think, minority groups, Indian, Pakistani and Black Caribbean groups in particular. And for them, I don't think that that applies, they are very much looking for security. I think that's a very well-made point, that it's very hard to make comments about the whole labour market and the whole labour force, because the real diversity of experience within that group of about 30 million people in employment, it's very hard to describe a trend that covers all of them. And there are, as you say, groups for whom the reality of the workplace has not caught up with that sort of more comfortable position that others are in. So yes, that is a point very well made. I think we should probably start, on Mark's concerns, we've done Japanese rum and Singaporean training techniques and advanced motorsport, we could go on an awful lot. We should probably wrap things up with any closing thoughts and observations we've got. I think that, from my point of view, the thing that essentially reinforces to me is how old-nighter touch I feel. The fact that all these things that I solidly feel are sort of novel and slightly different trends, clearly aren't short-term fads. They're not going away. This is the reality, and I guess I have to learn to adjust to that. So that's my takeaway. Andy, what have you made of it? I'll say something that sounds rather odd. I think Theresa May was onto something, and I think she kind of realised that there was a potential for an emerging politics of work that mattered across the political spectrum, and she tried to grab hold of that with the Taylor Review and other things and so on, and obviously wasn't able, for a variety of reasons, to follow through. But I think there is an opportunity for the next government, whatever flavour it is, to really turn their hand to something that could be a really interesting and dynamic political agenda around the future of work. Mine is relatively banal, but I do think it's really important, which is thinking about the future of work and skills. When you look at it at a governmental level, it is split across DfE, DWP, Bays, a bit of DCMS getting involved, and then we've talked in this conversation about immigrations, and then you're bringing in the Home Office, we're talking about health. So the lack of a comprehensive strategy and interconnections between those departments, so that you don't have ministers who want their own headline, rushing off doing X or Y, rather than ensuring that everything is cohesive, I think is a real blocker to a thoughtful approach across the economy and across society to actually deal with these issues. We haven't even touched then on regional inequalities and how they play into this as well. So something as banal as a strategy that tries to connect dots and structures at a national and local level that force people to work together, I think is essential if we're going to address some of these challenges. We'll do that in the next episode of The Rest of Lake Pockets. But with that, we will wrap up. So this has been valuable. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you to Starfish for bringing us together for a lovely, engaging, interesting conversation.