It won’t be business as usual in the post-COVID world

A conversation with Joe Fuller, professor, Harvard Business School and co-director, Managing the Future of Work initiative

By Ramona Schindelheim

June 9, 2020

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We learned Monday that we are now in the early months of a recession that started in February. As the economy seeks a balance between reopening and public health safety, employers are making plans for what their workforces will look like in the coming months. There are many unknowns ahead, but we’re already hearing that it won’t be “business as usual.”

Joe Fuller is the co-director for Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project, which analyzes research and recommends plans of action for business and policy leaders trying to navigate the evolution of the workforce.

Fuller has spent the last few weeks speaking to employers about what they’ve been thinking about when it comes to bringing employees back to work and hiring new workers. He is the guest on this episode of Work in Progress.

“What I think we are going to see with employers is that they’re going to proceed cautiously on the whole with rehiring. You can already see more progressive employers investing in—or beginning to plan for—how they’re going to upskill their current employees for this new reality,” he says.

“How are they going to get them to be able to be productive with some of these new (tech) tools, with specific emphasis on making them more—the word that employers often use—agile. The word that I’m going to use is more fungible, and this goes down also to jobs that we don’t historically think of as being high-paying or even technologically oriented.”

So what does this mean for job seekers? What skills do they need moving forward and how do they get them? Fuller and I spend much of the episode on these questions.

You can listen to Work in Progress here, or find us wherever you find your podcasts.

Episode 137: Joe Fuller, Harvard Business School professor and Managing the Future of Work co-director
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.