Future-proofing your workplace

I don’t know about you but so much of what I read right now is flooded with tales of the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence. AI is coming! AI is here!! AI is taking over your workplace!!! Rather than heading to your purpose-built bunker and pulling out the tinned food, there are some much more practical ways you can prepare your office and your employees for the inevitable rise of technology.

In amongst my reading, I’ve noticed a common theme of business owners feeling it’s not their responsibility to develop the future skills of their employees. According to many, it should be up to the government, the education system or the individual themselves to ensure their sufficiently upskilled for the future of business. If that’s the case, imagine how much more appealing YOUR workplace would be if you were assisting the growth and development of your people. When it all comes down to it, you’ve got good people; why not keep them around for as long as you can? With that in mind, here are some ways you can have your people ready to accept technology with open arms.

Create Talent Champions – there’s often those people in each office who just get technology. They’re not necessarily in IT but they love a gadget and you’d consider them an early adopter of all things tech. Why not utilise their techy know-how and set them up to share their knowledge? Encourage them to be socially conscious and industry aware and allow time in their schedule to research ways your office can be upskilled and updated. They can then feed this information back to you or to the wider office.

Foster leadership skills – whether directly in people management or just being capable of confidently leading people forward, you’ll need strong leaders as technology continues to advance. To ensure your leaders are best prepared, encourage opportunities for your people to hone their leadership before their role demands it. Provide chances for people to step up by offering the option to head-up a project or train a new staff member. No matter what you choose, they’ll relish the opportunity and you’ll appreciate the extra help.

Allow opportunities to update skills – encourage an environment of curiosity and continued learning. You could offer a certain amount of hours in your employee’s schedules for learning or, money in your budget to provide the training. By fostering this growth and development you’re creating a workplace which is open to change and ready to tackle new technology as it continues to be released.

They may seem like fairly simple changes but hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the size of their impact. When it all comes down to it, an open-mindedness to change needs to start at the top and the best bit is, it’s contagious! By developing your people you’ll retain all that valuable business knowledge while also ensuring your office is ready to tackle whatever it might be that AI throws at you.

Shannon Wood, Managing Director S8 Expert Recruitment Solutions. I have over 14 years recruitment experience specialising in the animal health industry across the ANZ region. Areas of expertise include sales and marketing, technical roles (Quality Assurance, Quality Control & Regulatory Affairs) and operational & financial positions. I work extensively in the veterinary, ruminant, monogastric, aquaculture and the pet specialty industries and I look forward to the next 14 years.