Emergence Partners hosted an in-person executive roundtable in early February to hear, learn and explore the mindset around the role technology can play in delivering profound transformation.
Among the topics covered, some really interesting insights were discussed on the state of the labour market.
- Firstly, wage inflation and employee retention in India is being seen by executive teams as a major issue, with North America corporations consuming India based skills in the ‘nearly post’ pandemic era in huge volumes and contributing to 40% wage inflation in India payrolls. This is impacting both the cost of captive operations and the cost of India based outsourced services
- Secondly, for those corporations operating in the UK, the labour market has tightened dramatically. According to ONS data, there are 50% more unfilled vacancies in the UK now when compared to 2019 (ie pre pandemic and pre Brexit levels) and over the same timeframe the UK-based labour supply has reduced by over 1 million. These conditions of ‘demand up’ and ‘supply down’ are forecast to be a long term reality for business leaders to manage
- The desperate situation in the Ukraine has now worsened to such a point that the world will now be adjusting to something like 240,000 highly skilled technology resources being unavailable until the crisis is resolved.
Taking these three factors together there are some clear conclusions business leaders to consider:
- Cost of labour will accelerate at a rate businesses have not had to accommodate since the financial crash of 2008
- Attracting and retaining skilled labour will be harder than it has been since the financial crash of 2008 and for technology resources, probably harder than at any time since the heady days of the great .com boom
- We are now living in a time with a live fire war in continental Europe for the first time since the Yugoslavian wars through the ‘90s with deep consequences for human trauma, business resilience and financial markets
While these conditions are extremely challenging, there are some actionable, impactful decisions business leaders can take:
- Transformation programmes, deploying advanced technologies, are mission critical for both resilience and ongoing service delivery
- Business cases for Transformation programmes are compelling. The reality is with labour costs accelerating away at a time when market uncertainty will impede price increases to customers to the same level, transformation and automation programmes are critical to maintaining financial performance
- Act with urgency; your competitors are
- Incremental change is no longer a survival strategy. Profound Transformation is the only way to both survive and thrive
Read the full report 2022 Business Thrival Guide
