Insights

Population aging is one of society’s most profound demographic changes. It also has a major impact on the workplace: the percentage of older workers is increasing and the mix of young and old is broader than ever. How can we make the most of this shift in age demographics in the workplace? And how do we keep workers employable throughout their long career? This is the challenge we have been addressing for the past ten years, together with SD Worx.

Did you know that companies who invested in innovation during the last financial crisis came out stronger? In this third white paper created within the research project 'The Art of Corporate Venturing', we present various best practices for different forms of startup-corporate-collaborations.

Hybrid work is becoming the new normal. Technology has a role to play, but how well can it keep us connected in a world of physical distance?

The team we work with is a decisive factor in how we experience our jobs. Therefore, your team is an essential key to a sustainable career. Yet, until now, this has remained underexposed as a context for career development, both in the academic literature and in the career policies of organizations. With this ESF "Innovation through Exploration" project we wanted to explore this further. We developed the LiZeT toolkit with the aim of actively engaging team members in their career development. More specifically, LiZeT helps teams to learn to organize themselves (in Dutch).

More and more companies are shutting down offices and allowing their employees to work from home. Hybrid work, or the combination of working from home, at the office or at a third location, is definitely on the rise. Ten years ago, hybrid work would have been unthinkable. In 2010, 15% of Belgian employees worked from home. Today, this is no less than 35%.

At the same time, more and more organizations are looking for new ways to respond more flexibly to customer and environmental needs. The classic, rather closed and bureaucratic hierarchy is giving way to a more open and dynamic organizational design. Innovative labor organization, self-management, network organization are all different names for the same movement.

Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine a business without technology. Most industries are becoming "smarter" and more tech-driven. We live in the era of the "platform society." For example, Coursera has become the world's most prominent online educator, collaborating with over 200 leading universities and companies. Platforms are becoming increasingly powerful and concentrate on collecting more and more data to cross- or upsell services. Ranging from small individual tech initiatives to complete business models with intertwined supply chains and "Platform" based business models. New ways of working, such as Agile and DevOps, are introduced, leading to opportunities and unknown risks.

In 2019 over 750 global experts and decision-makers were asked to rank their biggest concerns in terms of likelihood and impact. For the first time in the annual Global Risks Report, published in January 2020, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all environmental. All the more reason for going circular.

The World Economic Forum predicts that 85 million jobs will disappear worldwide by 2025 because of automation. On the other hand, 97 million new jobs will be created, often requiring different skills. Belgium and Luxembourg are even in the world’s Top 10 automated countries. As an organization, how can you prepare for this shift? And how can you find out what impact digitization and automation will have on your employees?

With careers lasting longer and technological evolutions going faster than ever, the key question for all HR policy makers is how to combine employability and workability.