“I don’t have a skills shortage”. Maybe not yet but you probably will soon enough.

Having recently attended the utility week live event over a couple of days, there was never going to be any other topic than the one that I was invited to sit on the panel for, and not for any obvious reasons.

You see, before getting involved with the Institute of Water around the topic of ‘Innovation in addressing the skills gap’, I didn’t know the extent of the gap. On finishing up at the event, this particular challenge looked more and more like an emergent crisis, to which I’m not convinced everyone is fully aware. I certainly wasn’t.

Here’s a pic from the panel discussion.

This is a huge problem…

The panel I was a part of were focussing mainly on the water sector, but other sessions around the arena honed in on energy, gas, alternatives, utilities as a whole. So there was a broad spectrum of information out there.

3 pieces of information I heard have stuck with me, (although one of them isn’t an accurate number as I couldn’t take a picture quick enough) from 3 separate sessions. They were:

60,000 estimated gap in people to be able to deliver AMP8 in the water sector

277,000 estimated number of energy and utility fieldworkers needed in the next decade

400,000+ estimated total number of roles needed across utilities as a whole in the next decade

I know not of the estimation methods, so let’s just assume they are near enough.

On one hand, this is great news for the jobs market, on the other it presents a potential crisis for the sector, especially those that are unable to attract and retain good people.

It did make me wonder about gaps in other sectors and just how big this challenge is for the UK as a whole. A UK wide crisis?

This will speed up the need for AI

Once I had chance to sit and ponder this a little, a couple of chats with people around the subject, it became impossible to keep AI out of the conversation. So it’s important to give it the air time it deserves.

Given the size of the challenge, it seems to me there will be huge competition for people to fill these roles, which will inevitably leave us short somewhere and so AI will be seen as a core strategy to be able to fill the gap. It will most probably speed up its emergence into some roles as leaders try to ensure they can still deliver with an under resourced operation.

There has to be a watch out here though, that we don’t see AI as the ultimate answer to the problem. It can help, but it’s not ‘the answer’. It surely has to be a part of a joined up, strategic solution which doesn’t leave it as the stand alone champion strategy that it has become in some organisations.

Companies with poor culture will pay the price

Thinking beyond AI, I fundamentally believe in that statement.

Imagine you are looking for a job. You get one at the energy company working in one of their field teams. Once you get into it, you’re not enjoying it that much. The team you work in isn’t that collaborative and you really value ‘team’. You see another role in a water company, working in the field. You decide to go have a go at that as they really need people right now.

In that scenario you would either leave or maybe even get given a pay rise to try keep you there. Either way, there is a cost.

It seems there will be so much choice for those seeking employment that having a great working environment will have a huge impact on someone’s decision around where to spend a large proportion of their time.

What people want and expect from an organisation these days has changed. If they don’t have positive held beliefs about it they are more inclined to avoid or change it than tolerate it. Beliefs are constructs that are created based on experience. Experience can be influenced in the here and now as well as working with past experience to change beliefs. In a nutshell, we can help people form positive or negative beliefs about the place they spend their working time at.

What beliefs do your people currently carry about the environment they operate in? Do you even know?

Given some of the stats I have put out in these articles over the past couple of years, it appears to me that there is work to do.

Here’s a stat I found that seems to frame it quite well:

I would argue that if we are willing to accept low engagement then we might want to increase the size of the gap!

 

Innovation around people

The panel that the Institute of water was running was on the innovation stage at the event. The topic therefore was around innovation, but when most people think innovation they go to tech or process. This was a people focussed discussion.

Typically, thinking around innovation does not go towards the idea of people. You only had to walk around the event. Innovation everywhere, but all in the tech space. There must have been 300 organisations there at least, and the only one focussed on people innovation was the institute of water (apologies if I got that wrong it was just my own experience).

Innovation of anything typically starts with ‘thinking’, and last time I checked that’s what people do and so we need to be switched on to the idea that we need the whole person (head, hands, heart) for this to be fully leveraged.

If we sign on to the idea that we are going to need to innovate to attract and retain people over the next decade, there will need to be a shift in how we prioritise this sort of innovation. In the past this type of challenge would be pointed straight at the HR director and they would come up with a plan. Unfortunately, this isn’t HR’s problem to solve alone and can’t be solved just in one supporting silo.

Often we put challenges into buckets, we silo them, like our operations, and that makes collaboration harder, but not impossible. Taking a challenge and bringing different perspectives is almost always going to be a better approach.

It feels like a good time to innovate beyond traditional approaches to creating company cultures.

You can’t turn this on overnight, you should really start now

Some challenges, you can form a plan, a strategy, get at it within the year. Not this one I’m afraid.

It takes time to get at this type of innovation. There will be locked in mental models across utilities, wider sectors, models that leaders have worked with and grown accustomed to. They may need to change for things to change.

In my experience a narrow focus on efficiency and cost has always been a high priority, even when it is said otherwise, the actions and focus of measurement don’t back it up. Priorities may need to be challenged by changing some of the current beliefs leaders hold around idea’s such as engagement.

Where to start?

This is a big challenge, and ultimately one that we have been unknowingly supporting with solutions for years now, albeit with some difficulty because of our own beliefs around the idea of a focus on engagement and differing priority order.

One thing that I believe all organisations in the sector could do as a starting point is ask themselves a couple of questions and be really honest around the answers…
 

  1. How much attention are you really paying to the creation of an environment that people would love to work in?
  1. How innovative are your current strategies to change company culture when they are held up against previous efforts?