Is your workforce reinvention ready?

This is the complicated—and unenviable—reality for many senior executives, as PwC’s latest Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey finds sizeable pockets of the global workforce eager to learn new skills, embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and tackle new challenges—even as many companies fail to tolerate debate and dissenting ideas, or even small-scale failures. Meanwhile, many workers are restless: fully 26% say they plan to quit their job in the next 12 months, up from 19% last year.

The survey, fourth in a series that dates to 2019, drew responses from nearly 54,000 workers in 46 countries and territories, and underscores the central challenge facing CEOs and other C-suite leaders: you have to reinvent your organisation, but without the support and energy of all your people, these efforts will fail. And in the current environment—where skills gaps appear to be widening and more employees than ever struggle financially just to get by—you can’t take anything about your workforce, or culture, for granted.

With that challenge in mind, we’ve organised this year’s survey summary into four actions that CEOs and other senior executives can prioritise to better understand what their employees want, learn what’s holding them back and—together with their people—make their organisations more reinvention ready.
 

Most business leaders take the dynamism and disruption of work and skills as a given. Indeed, according to the World Economic Forum, employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years.

Yet employees in our survey appear to see things differently. Just 36% of respondents as a whole strongly or moderately agree that the skills needed to succeed in their job will change significantly over the next five years, and only 43% say they have a clear sense of how the skills required for their job will change at all over that span.

It’s worrying that the majority of workers do not appear to have clarity on how their job requirements may change. If employees don’t anticipate or understand this, they may not be adequately prepared to acquire the new skills necessary to remain relevant and effective in their roles. But a closer look at the data reveals an even deeper concern: workers whose jobs don’t require specialised training appear the least likely to see change coming. Only 15% of these respondents say the skills required to do their jobs will change in the next five years, compared with 51% of their counterparts whose jobs are more specialised. This could leave workers who lack specialised training particularly vulnerable to job losses as skills continue to evolve, and as companies augment (or replace) jobs with automation, AI, or both.

By contrast, those with specialist training—a global cohort that grew by four percentage points since last year’s survey (53% of all workers versus 49% last year)—appear better prepared. Fully 60% of workers with specialist training say they have a clear sense of how the skills required to do their job will change in the next five years, compared with only 20% of those whose jobs don’t require specialised training (see chart below).

Finally, the survey identifies a “specialisation gap” when it comes to workers’ actions and attitudes with respect to advancing their skills and careers. In terms of actions, respondents with specialist training are about 1.5 times more likely than non-specialist peers to say they plan to ask for a raise or a promotion.

When it comes to employee attitudes, the survey found people without specialist training are far less likely to say that crucial soft (or human) skills—including adaptability and flexibility, critical thinking, and collaboration—will be important to their career in the coming five years (see chart below). These views differ sharply from those of employers in the World Economic Forum research, which noted the increased importance of complex problem-solving skills in the workplace, as well as the rising importance of resilience, flexibility and agility.

Most leaders recognise that their people are the company’s best source of energy, ideas and innovation. Yet our findings suggest that many companies discourage people from experimenting, debating ideas or disagreeing with the status quo—critical actions for innovation and employee engagement, not to mention corporate reinvention. And the problem is far worse than CEOs think.

For example, only 35% of respondents in our survey say that their manager tolerates small-scale failures, and just 33% say their manager encourages dissent and debate (see chart below)—much smaller proportions than what CEOs themselves reported in PwC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey.¹

These aren’t the only obstacles. Only about half of respondents strongly or moderately agree that they bring new, innovative ideas to their team (52%), actively seek feedback (50%) or provide it to co-workers (49%), or step up to take on extra responsibilities (50%).

Moreover, only about half of all employees find their jobs fulfilling or say they can truly be themselves at work, findings that are comparable to those of last year’s survey. Notably, those who say they’re likely to change jobs in the next 12 months are also less likely to say they find their work fulfilling or that they can be themselves at work—suggesting that those factors play a key role in driving people to switch companies.

Meanwhile, more than one-fifth of workers report their workload was frequently unmanageable in the past 12 months, with half of those individuals citing a lack of resources as the primary driver. That supports other findings showing that burnout remains a problem.

Questions leaders must answer:

Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and high inflation, employees around the globe are feeling the squeeze. The proportion of workers who say they have money left over at the end of the month declined to 38% this year, from 47% in 2022. And the share of respondents who struggle to pay their bills each month or can’t pay them most of the time increased to 17% from 12% last year (see chart below).

Our survey found struggling workers evenly spread across most demographic categories, though the economic burden falls somewhat more heavily on ethnic minorities than on others. Likewise, employees without specialised training were more likely to be struggling to pay their bills (17%), compared with 11% of respondents who had specialised skills.

Financial stress is debilitating for workers, and ultimately companies, too. Recent PwC research into the financial wellness of employees showed that economic stress—in addition to harming people’s emotional and physical well-being—hurts their productivity and engagement. The research also found that financially stressed employees were nearly five times as likely to say that personal finance issues have been a distraction at work.

These detrimental effects may worsen as employees take on second jobs. Twenty-one percent of workers in our survey report working multiple jobs (see chart below)—a proportion that’s higher still for people who struggle each month to pay the bills (24%) or cannot pay them most of the time (27%).

Financial pressure and the need to seek higher wages are surely factors in respondents’ increased willingness to look for a new job. Despite today’s economic uncertainty, a higher percentage of employees say they plan to change jobs in the next 12 months than said so last year (26% versus 19%). And although many people with second jobs cite the opportunity to learn new skills as one reason (36%), they are nearly twice as likely to cite the need to earn more money (69%).

Our survey also found an intriguing relationship between financial stress and employee focus on upskilling. Although 62% of those who can comfortably pay the bills say they actively seek out new opportunities to learn new skills, the proportion falls to 50% for those who struggle to pay the bills, or cannot make ends meet most of the time. It’s impossible to know, of course, which way the causation runs, but that’s beside the point. Leaders need to be aware of the stress their employees are under—including financial stress—and recognise that some of their people may be struggling just to get by. Helping employees address their financial stress will benefit workers, while also giving organisations the human energy and attention they need to thrive.

Questions leaders must answer:

The best leaders operate on multiple timelines, managing short-term disruptions, while looking to the future. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than when it comes to understanding how your people fit into your reinvention plans. You can’t transform for the future without a clear sense of where your employees are today—and where they could be tomorrow. Committing to helping them get there is the first step in building a reinvention-ready workforce.

^{1. Respondents who work in government and public-sector roles were excluded from all comparisons to PwC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey in order to make these direct comparisons.}