People or Technology

🥇 Values are a strange thing. Once upon a time, they were considered symbolic - of how an organization and a government chose to run its operations (a gentleman's handshake). Today, they have become a social media slogan - to be forgotten and dismissed when inconvenient.

I was thinking of this case study making the rounds about the AI customer chatbot Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, deployed. The company took the 8500 displaced workers and redeployed them to remote interior design consultants between 2021-23 and it resulted in additional revenue streams.

⌛ This requires a commitment of 18 months to 36 months for reskilling and reabsorption. What is your HR policy? Have you planned that far ahead? Most employers come up with a vague set of skills/tasks that mean nothing, as they have not used foresight to anticipate the evolution of the industry or the global economic landscape.

In 2026, for Ikea and Ingka, jobs were lost (citing declining sales, US tariffs, and weakened consumer demand) - but those were from headquarters and Group Functions (not customer-facing jobs). Your customer-facing jobs are the ones that create value (unfortunately, that is where we deploy chatbots that most people hate, but we assume are useful (like banks).

Is your chatbot before the person or behind the customer-facing employee? It makes a difference. Emirates Airlines in the Dubai location does it well.

💡 Is your organization looking for new roles inside new technology rather than savings underneath it? I do not think the mindset of "lets fire people and save with technology" is a long-term mindset. What do you think?

❓ Who do companies prioritize when times are tough? Shareholders (like institutional investors that also manage pension funds) or their employees who spend much of their waking hours in service to the company? Has it got more complicated due to institutional investors? Should it be this complicated?

🏬 Small businesses often prioritize people and their community. How do we ensure we also foster a small-business mindset? Much of my early research was in this area, and I saw small businesses doing things that corporations would not and vice-versa.

Weekend thoughts.......case study here: https://employerbranding.news/resources/what-ikeas-ai-reskilling-story-looks-like-now-it-has-made-layoffs-too/