Today’s returning guest, Karl Ahlrichs, is a human capitalist consultant and a far-thinking and future-planning individual. Back in episode five, we discussed some of the storms he sees coming on the horizon, particularly where HR and the next generations of employees meet. In this episode, we once again look to the future of human resources.

Although our current economy is far greater now than it's been in a while, Karl sees quite a few potential problems on the horizon that we need to be better prepared to tackle, in addition to some opportunities.

What’s are the big things on the horizon for employees and HR?

Workers in the U.S. are very productive, and that’s what keeps our stock market alive. The volume of people working isn’t changing very much, but the volume of what we’re producing continues to climb because we’re leveraging technology and new processes.

• The scary thing is that it’s not going to be applied to every industry (e.g. coal industry is in trouble, but natural gas is booming).
• We’re going to see middle management jobs get automated and disappear.
• If you’re working in a job that could be automated, you need to start looking for a way to get client- or customer-facing.

We are getting away from age segregation in the generations, which is great because there's been way too much millennial bashing.

We need to develop better emotional intelligence, which means developing critical thinking skills, maturity, wisdom, and the communication skills necessary to speak to different kinds of people.

We have to look at how young people want to learn and realize that everybody wants to learn that way. We have to gamify how we teach the core skills described above. If you make it a game, make it competitive, and get them engaged, you'll move the needle of learning. Below you can view a video of Karl explaining this process.

 

Big data is coming in a big way. With the power of algorithms coming and the power of all of this data that we've been gathering, we can now start drilling into it. We're able now to predict what happens next, instead of tracking what happened last week.

• For example, synd.io is an application that, in three dimensions, maps the actual network, of your organization. You get to look at your organization - live data, real data, real time - and you can look at it like a nest of people from three dimensions. You can turn it and twist it to figure out who's important and who isn't. You can figure out who your key employees are.

The one thing that people need to do this year to overcome all of the storm clouds on the horizon is listen to your high performing employees. You have to keep your top talent, and the easiest way to do that is to at least appear to listen to them (which goes back to developing emotional intelligence).

Karl also recently put out a very interesting art project: a limited run of handmade and letterpressed books containing his own poetry and photography. It’s called Spaces Between Places, and it’s central theme is the loneliness of business travel. Check spacesbetweenplaces.net for news about future distribution.

Resources:

• Learn more about Karl: ExpertSpeaks.com | KarlAhlrichs.com | Twitter | LinkedIn

 

Production & Development for Improv Is No Joke by Podcast Masters

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