Hopes and Fears 2023—Canadian insights

As the world undergoes high levels of change, uncertainty and disruption, Canadian workers are feeling the pressure on many fronts. They’re struggling financially, are having troubling managing heavy workloads and are unsure about the skills they need for a changing world. Many of these issues have been ongoing for some time, but an additional force of disruption emerged this year with the very rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence.

These are among the many issues we probed in our annual Hopes and Fears survey, which took the pulse of 2,000 workers in Canada as well as almost 54,000 employees globally on the evolving future of work. The findings highlight important issues for Canadian organizations’ workforce strategies. With organizations themselves facing similar uncertainty, challenges around labour and talent and pressures to enhance productivity and outcomes in the face of a new wave of digital disruption, they need the full support and energy of a workforce that’s ready for change and is equipped with the skills of the future.

There’s significant urgency for leaders to act given the questions many executives have around the future. According to our 26th Global CEO Survey, almost 40% of top executives believe their organizations may not exist in 10 years. Reinventing the business will be critical to remaining viable in the long term, but you can’t transform for the future without figuring out how your people fit into your reinvention plans. Read on to learn more about how your people are feeling today and what you can do to help them prepare for what’s coming tomorrow.

Building a reinvention-ready workforce

Of significant concern in this year’s findings are some of the gaps in perceptions we’ve seen between employers and employees that suggest many workers aren’t yet ready for the widespread changes their leaders believe are coming. While our survey found only about a quarter of Canadian employees believe skill requirements for their jobs will change significantly in the coming years, other studies have shown that employers are keenly aware of the disruption of work and skills. According to a report from the World Economic Forum, for example, employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years.^[1]

These incongruencies are important because, if organizations are going to be making major changes to their business models to remain relevant well beyond 10 years, key elements of their workforce strategies—including the mix of skills they require—will need to evolve as well. So where should employers start? While there are many aspects of building a reinvention-ready workforce, our survey highlights three key areas of focus for Canadian organizations:

While many Canadian organizations are still assessing the opportunities technologies like generative AI will create and what they’ll mean for their businesses, it’s clear there will be significant impacts on their people and the future of work. Generative AI will benefit many employees, for example, by freeing up their time and capacity to focus on higher-value tasks, while others will see their jobs displaced by the acceleration of digital disruption.

But as our survey showed, many Canadian respondents appear unaware of the scale of the change that’s coming. Less than half, for example, have a good sense of how the skills their jobs require will change in the next few years. And as the chart below shows, many employees are still coming to terms with how AI will impact their jobs.

Question: What impact, if any, do you expect AI to have on your career in the next five years?

The responses suggest Canadian employees aren’t overly pessimistic about AI’s impacts, but they also may be underestimating the implications for themselves and their role in the future of work. This presents challenges for both employees and the organizations they work for. On the one hand, employees have a responsibility to be curious about AI, understand both the positive and negative impacts on their roles, jobs and careers, embrace opportunities to use it and make sure they have the skills necessary to grow and contribute to the workforce.

At the same time, as human skills become increasingly important in successfully adopting AI, employers also play a significant role in supporting employees through this period of accelerated technological change. To help employees understand and prepare for what’s coming, employers first need to invest the time and resources in assessing which AI use cases deliver the most attractive opportunities and how adoption will affect the mix of roles and skills they need. Once they’ve completed that assessment, leaders need to do their part by engaging with their people in conversations about AI, instilling a growth mindset around it and creating excitement about how employees can support their vision for the future of the organization.

Planning for the broader impacts on workforce strategies

Employers will also need to account for the broader and more profound impacts of AI on their workforce strategies. For example, in cases where generative AI takes on only certain tasks or aspects of an employee’s role, organizations need to plan for the other productive activities they’ll want their people to focus on during the time that technology has freed up.

Generative AI also has major implications for training, education, apprenticeship and development. As technology gradually takes over knowledge-based tasks traditionally handled by junior-level employees, organizations will need to think about how they train and develop the skills of new workers who typically learn many of the fundamentals of their roles on the job. 

While there will still be an important place for employees to review the outputs produced by generative AI tools, they need to understand those fundamentals to perform that quality assurance function effectively. Finding new ways to equip employees with those baseline skills and capabilities will be key.

Helping employees understand changing skills requirements and creating opportunities for them to develop those capabilities isn’t just in workers’ interest but also benefits employers. As our survey showed, talent pressures that became particularly apparent at the height of the Great Resignation continue to reverberate, with 23% of Canadian employees saying they plan to change employers this year. And business leaders remain concerned: according to our CEO Survey, 62% of Canadian respondents believe shortages of labour and skills will have a significant impact on profitability in the next 10 years.

While upskilling employees will be important to address these talent pressures, the good news is our Hopes and Fears Survey also revealed opportunities for some employers to discover and harness key skills they already have in their workforce. Among Canadian workers, 42% said their employers focus too much on their job histories and not enough on their skills. And as the chart below reveals, more than half of Canadian employees said they have skills that aren’t clear from their qualifications, work history or job.

Question: Based on your experience, to what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I have skills that are not clear from my qualifications, work history or job.

Findings like these highlight the importance of shifting away from a focus on roles and jobs to take a skills-based approach to career paths and workforce strategies. Moving beyond a traditional qualifications-led approach by, for example, relaxing degree requirements and recognizing micro-credentials and online learning has many benefits. Companies can make better use of their existing talent, while workers benefit from new opportunities to contribute their skills to support emerging priorities like generative AI.

In our research on workforce trends in recent years, the importance of workplace culture as a key enabler of change, innovation and achieving strategic business outcomes has become increasingly clear. A company’s employees are its best source of energy, insights and innovation, but for them to do their part in supporting change and transformation, they need to feel empowered to bring their ideas forward. And that requires a workplace culture that allows for dissent and debate and in which people feel comfortable and confident speaking up to their managers and taking small-scale risks.

What can Canadian organizations do to instill these cultural attributes? A good place to start is with their leaders, who play a critical role in setting the tone for ideas and innovation to flourish. As part of our survey, we asked Canadian workers for their thoughts on leaders, particularly when it comes to their impacts on key aspects of workplace culture:

The findings suggest a majority of workers don’t feel safe experimenting, debating ideas or disagreeing with the status quo. This is why organizations need to invest in developing leaders with the right leadership styles to guide their teams through change and transformation, connect more deeply with their people and provide them with meaning and purpose. And that investment in transformative leadership should encompass leaders throughout the organization, including middle management, given that many managers find themselves promoted based on their technical competency rather than their ability to inspire their people and foster innovation.

Many of the cultural attributes we explored in our survey also relate to employees’ trust in their organizations and their leaders. Bringing innovative ideas forward and trying them out requires employees to believe that they can do so without negative consequences. Trust also involves fundamental questions of fairness and transparency, and on these issues, our survey also found some issues for Canadian organizations and their leaders to address:

^{_{1. The Future of Jobs Report 2023, World Economic Forum, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf}}