Ravin, I wanted to speak to you about the opportunities that we have with human-centric productivity. Why do we, at Mercer, believe that is such a critical topic to be exploring this year within our organizations?
Yeah, you know, Kate it's a really good question. If you think of how work-- what has characterized work for the last 120 years? It's this notion of people being connected to processes, being, essentially, cogs in a wheel. And we have consistently looked for gains in productivity by making that process faster, more efficient, trying to get people to work harder.
Over the course of the last 20 years if you look at how much of those gains have been shared with the workforce, they're actually a fraction of what was being shared pre 1970. And one of the things I've always wondered is there is an inherent circularity, right. If we're investing less and less in the workforce, we're sharing less and less of the gains and we've hit basically a ceiling on these processes, what's the incentive for people to work different?
Yeah. Absolutely. And I love the fact that you ended on the topic of work different. But I agree with you, and we haven't seen some of those promised productivity gains from technology flow through to GDP growth. So I think there is an opportunity to relook at how we think about productivity at an individual at a team at a country level.
When we think about it in terms of organizations, what are some of the challenges in terms of unlocking productivity in our workforces? What gets in the way?
Yeah. So I think so much of it is we think of mindsets, tool sets, and skill sets. And I think from a tool set perspective, it's this pivot from talent being tied to a process to increasingly this more human-centric work, view of work, where work is organized around talent. And particularly Kate, as you know, in this era of GenAI, where we anticipate every individual, every worker, every employee having a copilot in doing work, what you start to see now is that more human-centric view of work where it's really revolving around the individual rather than people revolving around a faceless nameless process.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's wonderful how AI's forced us to really think about our own humanity--
Indeed.
--and how it's ushering in an era of I think more personalized work experiences, which is fascinating. I'm curious, where do you think-- what do you think that means for how we measure productivity in organizations? How do we need to maybe shift our mindset on that to succeed?
Yeah. That's a really good question. You know if you look at some of the early studies of generative AI, projections of between 10% to 30% gains in productivity. And you and I have talked about is this the moment to reset? For the last 30 40 years in this pursuit of efficiency, we've taken the productivity gains, questionable as to how much they are, but we've taken them all to the bottom line, we've not shared it with the workforce, to my opening point about the inherent circularity of this argument.
Do we now, with this these 30% gains, do we reset and say in order to build a more resilient enterprise, we've actually got to be much more thoughtful in how we share these gains with our talent and with our communities? Do we design in space for learning and well-being into the flow of work and creating the space so that some of those productivity gains are used to fund a four-day work week, more learning in the flow of work, more space for well-being, better assets and resources to support worker well-being.
And I think that's going to be really essential, Kate, because the model we've been on for 40 or 50 years where we've consistently tried to drive profitability at the expense of all other stakeholders, I think we've hit the ceiling on that.
Absolutely. Well you always excite me about this positive vision of the future. And I hope it does usher in an era where that productivity wealth that we now anticipate will be shared more broadly. Thank you Ravin.
Yes.
It's been wonderful to chat today.
Likewise Kate.