Dewan Foysal Haque

Id No: 41428001
Date of submission: 05.02.2020

Assignment on article 2: “Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than

You Think.” By Joseph B. Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman
and Alice de Chalendar.

Summary: This article is a bit eye-opening, simultaneously interesting to me, which

focuses on the willingness of the employees to accept and adopt change. And it also
articulated the assumption of the managers about the ability of their subordinates towards
changes in the workplace. The authors of this article collected data and get feedback from
11,000 workers and 6,500 business leaders from different organizations and found
employees and business leaders have significantly different views on the future.

The article has two remarkable dimensions: One: that commonly, the business leaders
assume the workers are resistant to change and when they considered the forces of how
things change, they often think about disruptive technology. Also, to sustain in the
changing environment as well as in the competitive market, they become anxious about
how can they find and hire employees? Who have the skills needed by their companies?
And what should they do with those whose skills are obsolete? Two: the study revealed a
significant result which profoundly differs from the manager's assumptions of their
employees. They found employees are more focused on the opportunities and benefits
their future would bring and are much more willing to accept change and learn new skills
than their employers ascribed.

However, the authors identified 17 different interfering forces and divided them into six
categories. The polls they conducted among people to examine the attitudes of leaders
and workers towards each of them. There were three significant differences in how each
group thinks about the future of work.
First, employees seem better than leaders to realize that their organizations are struggling
with many forces of disruption, each of which will affect how companies operate
differently. Leaders seemed unable or reluctant to think in various ways about the
potential disruption of forces. This is a worrying level that most leaders have not yet
figured out which forces of change should prioritize. Thus, the complexity of the changes
facing companies today and the pace with which they must make decisions, this
perception gap has serious consequences for both managers and employees.

The second difference is that when asked managers about what holds back employees,
their most common and conventional reply was employees' fear that technology would
make their work obsolete and also unwilling to accept changes, which proved wrong
according to this survey report. They noted rather employees are seemed more adaptive
and optimistic about the future than their leaders realize and are more likely to change
than managers believed them to be. The survey also showed a tendency of leaders to
blame employees, not themselves.

The third finding is: employees are looking for more support and guidance to prepare
them for future employment than management is providing. Most of the workers believed
that not their employer, they are responsible for developing themselves to meet the needs
of a rapidly changing workplace. Employees also felt that they had following obstacles to
overcome: lack of knowledge about their abilities; shortage of time to prepare for the
future; high training costs; and in particular insufficient support from employers.

From this article, we understand that employers can play a significant role in helping
employees to overcome these barriers. They can create a learning culture; engage
employees in the transition process; developing an internal talent set for the entire
workforce; and team up with external partners to develop appropriate skills in the pools
of employees from which it employs. However, we can conclude the article as the
employers must understand if they allow people to learn something new, or to show their
skills, they will give their best work. It is all about is in providing the opportunity.