The Future of Work in Africa
Recently, I read an article about the Tardigrades, also known as “water bears”. Scientists say that it is the most resilient animal in the world. Tardigrades is a micro-animal that can observed only under a microscope. It is resilient because of its ability to adapt to any environment to survive. The Tardigrades can enter an almost unbeatable state to cope with extreme environment. It can expel all its water in the body and reversibly suspend its metabolism, making it super difficult to be killed in this condition.
Organizations should be adaptable like the Tardigrades. Organizations and their leaders should be able to react effectively when business and environmental factors change unexpectedly. This kind of adaptability is required when thinking about the future of work.
The future of work: What does it mean?
The future of work is a result of the forces of change shaping and redefining work, the workforce, and the workplace. The future of work is asking us to consider the biggest questions of our age. What influence will technology, demographic shifts, market globalization, and new work models have on what we do, where we do it, and how we do it? The responsibility for business leaders and their organizations, therefore, becomes deciding what new world of work their organization will deliver.
Work is more than just activities you engage in for pay. Work is an experience that is beneficial to everyone who is taking part in it.
Again, the world of work on the continent is changing fast. While geographical and industry-specific peculiarities exist, the change is broad and applies to every industry. Understanding how this is changing is essential to all decision-makers who create and assign work, train, and prepare people for the workplace and shape the organizational and institutional contexts in which these people work.
From where I stand, the most relevant and impactful forces shaping and redefining the nature work are:
- Demographic Shifts
- Work Models
- Technology
- Globalization of markets
Demographic Shifts
The influence of diversity and generational differences, their beliefs and values that distinguish workers’ perspectives.
Demographic shifts shape who is available to work in the workforce and when. The workforce expectedly will influence how work is organized and performed. Therefore, it is impossible to examine the changes to work in isolation from changes in who does the work.
According to the United Nations, between 2020 and 2100, they project the world to add 3.1 billion people to the total population and 1.4 billion people to the working age population. Nearly all the additional working-age people will be added in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a dramatic change from previous decades when the growth of the working-age population was clustered in Asia. Within the same period too, Sub-Saharan Africa will account for 87% of global population growth, and by 2050 it will be the only major region in the world with a growing working-age population.
An overview of Africa’s workforce shows that it is more multigenerational than ever, increasingly well-educated, skewed younger, and has a growing number of women engaging within the paid economy.
A multigenerational workforce
Today’s workforce is unquestionably more multigenerational than ever. Look around your workplace and you are likely to see people from across the age span, particularly as more Africans are working past official retirement ages. There are five generations of talent on the job today, from the Silent Generation to a sprinkle of the newly minted Gen Z.
When we talk about diversity in the workplace, the conversation focuses on race, gender, and sexual preference. Ageism or generational gaps aren’t usually the first identity factor that comes to mind. Yet, our stereotypical ideas skew the banking and finance industry older and the tech industry as a bunch of 20-something in hoodies and flip-flops.
Age is an important dimension of diversity, and people of different ages often bring vastly different and valuable perspectives and insights to their work. Different generations have distinctive ways of viewing job responsibilities. Their life experiences influence how they engage with others to address challenges. As a result, multi-generational teams can offer a variety of ways to address problems. This, however, creates an additional responsibility for leaders, who must design the workplace to accommodate and fuse the various perspectives of the generations working in it to drive creative solutions to problems.
Market Women
Women are productive agents who possess equal productivity as men. They have the potential to contribute as much as men do to any economy. Yet in Africa and even globally, women’s contribution to measured economic activity, economic growth and well-being is way below its potential, despite making up a little more than half of the population.
For any person to take part in the labor market, they must have the time and opportunity to do so. Therefore, to analyze labor force participation, it is necessary to understand how people allocate their time to activities such as paid work, unpaid work — including household chores and childcare, leisure, and self-care activities.
Unfortunately, sociocultural factors such as gender roles perpetuate a status quo that limits the choices available to women. Hence, created an unequal distribution of paid and unpaid work time, with women bearing an extremely higher responsibility for unpaid work, which falls outside of the traditional economic production boundary and spending proportionately less time in paid work than men.
However, in recent years, the gap in economic contributions is reducing and there is a growing presence of women, especially young mothers, taking part in the labor market. The share of women in the paid labor force is higher today than two decades ago.
We can connect this increase in women’s participation to factors that lower the time-cost of unpaid care work, make it possible to share unpaid care work with men, or designing employment to be more compatible with it.
Work Models
The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up and amplified future of work trends and propelling organizations into new ways of working by creating the environment to reflect, re-design, and re-build work models.
Here’s how it all began. A little over a year ago, COVID-19 forced many companies worldwide to send their employees home — often with a laptop, an internet modem, and a hope. This resulted in the largest work experiment in modern history. Many organizations rapidly shifted to temporary remote working arrangements to deliver business continuity. This thrusted employees into cross-functional, distributed task teams where they had to make rapid decisions to solve challenging problems and react with authority to changes in the market to keep their organizations afloat.
The work experiment, driven by necessity rather than choice, proved successful. Right in the middle of a devastating health crisis, many companies across several sectors continued their business, with some showing record breaking profits and valuations.
An unplanned outcome of this experiment, however, was that many workers and some companies realized they could make work different. They experienced the sixty-second commute. They realized that not all meetings need to be as long or as large as they used to be. They discovered place and time does not always define work, and that the number of hours worked per day is not a measure of productivity.
In Re-architecting Work Models, Deloitte proposes the Four Future Worlds of Work, where consideration is given to two critical degrees of choice around ‘when and where’, and ‘how and what’ work is completed.
Scenario 1: Co-location Collaboration
High flexibility and choice around how and what and limited on when and where work is completed.
Work is executed through fluid networks of teams that are focused on achieving customer missions. These teams thrive when they are co-located, working together physically, using digital tools and platforms to connect with remote peers when needed. Employees do their best work when they’re on site, have tools at their fingertips, and work across the same time zones together.
Scenario 2: Stable, Secure, and Social
Limited flexibility and choice around how and what, and when and where work is completed.
Employees are most comfortable when working together, thriving with social and physical connections. These organizations will choose to maintain stability in when, how, and where work is completed — a lot like the ‘old normal’. The workforce is focused on task execution relevant to their functional units, reflecting a traditional hierarchical model. There is a preference for working on-site with access to shared equipment, tools, and face-to-face connection.
Scenario 3: A Time and Place for Choice
Limited flexibility and choice around how and what, and high flexibility and on when and where work is completed.
Work is executed through traditional, functionally aligned structures, with high choice around the location and time when work is complete. These organizations will focus on employee outputs and outcomes over time on the clock. These workforces are comfortable with hybrid ways of working (both physical and virtual). These organizations will provide complete choice, autonomy, and flexibility to their employees across all dimensions, creating highly empowered teams. Employees work across fluid networks of teams to achieve customer missions in virtual-hybrid environments. Teams are in tune with each other and have clear norms around ways of working.
Scenario 4: Autonomy and Personalization
High flexibility and choice around how and what, and when and where work is completed.
These organizations will provide complete choice, autonomy, and flexibility to their employees across all dimensions, creating highly empowered teams. Employees work across fluid networks of teams to achieve customer missions in virtual-hybrid environments. Teams are in tune with each other and have clear norms around ways of working.
In the next article, I’ll discuss the remaining two forces shaping and redefining the nature work on the continent: modern technology and market globalization. The latter will be driven by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
