Companies want growth, but workers are too busy to deliver it

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Companies have spent years pushing for greater efficiency but many workers are now so overloaded that they have little capacity left to deliver the growth and innovation their employers want, Korn Ferry’s latest global workforce research suggests.

The firm’s third annual global workforce survey polled more than 16,000 professionals, from entry-level workers to CEOs, across 11 major markets including the U.S., U.K., India, Germany, Japan and Australia.

One of the central findings is that being busy doesn’t necessarily mean creating value, with 45 per cent of workers reporting they are too busy to deliver meaningful results. Employees can spend their days moving between meetings and completing long to-do lists without having enough time for work that directly supports the company’s strategy.

“Activity is not the same as value,” says Roger Philby of Korn Ferry. “Organizations are great at measuring activities but find it much harder to connect the dots to value.”

Artificial intelligence hasn’t solved that problem. While executives may benefit from AI’s ability to quickly analyze and summarize information, Korn Ferry found workers responsible for using AI to produce deliverables can often see it as an additional burden, with 52 per cent saying AI tools have increased their workload.

The firm says businesses should rethink jobs around what humans do best and what AI can effectively handle, rather than simply adding AI-related tasks to existing workloads.

On the topic of workload, Korn Ferry says that while AI or restructuring may remove a role, many of the tasks associated with it can remain and are redistributed among existing employees. Sixty-one per cent of respondents say they are performing the responsibilities of more than one job.

The company recommends redesigning roles and fairly compensating employees when additional responsibilities become permanent.

At the same time, motivation is declining. Korn Ferry reports that globally motivation fell 9 percentage points in one year. Workers are increasingly staying with employers because of compensation, job security and fair treatment, rather than the work itself. The research suggests employers need to help people understand how their individual contributions connect to a larger purpose and business results.

Managers are stuck in the middle of this chaos, being asked to lead, coach, strategize and support employee well-being while simultaneously delivering results with limited resources. Forty-nine per cent of managers say they’re exhausted. Korn Ferry argues businesses need to reduce those workloads, properly train new managers and build stronger management pipelines.

The broader message from the research is that efficiency alone won’t generate growth. Cost-cutting can free up resources, but innovation requires employees to have enough time and capacity to experiment, learn and occasionally fail.

For employers, that means the next productivity opportunity may not come from asking people to do more. Instead, Korn Ferry’s research points toward redesigning work, removing low-value tasks and giving employees and managers enough capacity to focus on work that can actually move the business forward.

Fast fact

Millennial majority

60 per cent

That’s the portion of “head of AI” positions that are held by millennials, with median salaries around $236,000, according to new LinkedIn research. Women occupy just one in five of those lucrative hires.

Relevance revival

Have you ever had the feeling you’re losing relevance at work? Maybe you’re left out of key decisions or aren’t being pulled in to address important problems that you’d usually help the team tackle.

This Fast Company article provides tips for course correcting, including publicly taking ownership of an important, unclaimed business problem, stepping back and taking the time to ask more questions and challenge assumptions and repositioning yourself from an executor to a strategic thinker who influences decisions.

Digital doppelgangers

“I think of this as democratized ‘founder mode’,” said Bobby Morrison, former chief revenue officer of Shopify and advisor to several AI-native startups. “The real opportunity isn’t simply creating a digital twin of an executive; it’s encoding the leadership team’s context, company values, first principles and decision frameworks so people throughout the organization can make better decisions without waiting for the executive to be in the room. The best cognitive twin eventually makes the executive less of a bottleneck, not more omnipresent.”

This Globe column explores the rise of digital twins and how they could help organizations extend an executive’s knowledge and decision-making across the business. Making them useful will also require leaders to decide what parts of themselves should be replicated and what should remain distinctly human.

AI accountability

Fewer than one in 10 workplace codes of conduct explicitly address AI or technology ethics, according to a new report from advisory firm LRN. While nearly all employees surveyed are required to acknowledge a conduct code, many aren’t turning to it for guidance, raising questions about whether workplace rules are keeping pace with the risks and ethical questions emerging alongside AI.