Henry Onukwuba, senior fellow of human resource management and organisational behaviour at Lagos Business School (LBS) has said that in the next six years, 47 percent of the traditional jobs, as we know them now, will cease because of today’s business environment.
Onukwuba disclosed this during the 2024 Young Talents Programme (YTP), held at the Lagos Business School (LBS) recently while speaking on the topic; ‘Building a Positive Work Ethic in Today’s Business Environment’.
“There are many peculiarities of today’s business environment such as digitalisation, globalisation, inflation, and artificial intelligence (AI), among others. This also implies diversity and different kinds of employees,” he said.
“Not less than 47 percent of traditional jobs will cease in the next six years.”
He said that because of the new developments in the workplace, people work from home instead of the normal eight hours in the office. However, he reiterated that these peculiarities leave employees with a lot of challenges.
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The fellow of Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (FCIPM) added that there are other peculiarities in the work environment such as gig economy, which operates on freelancing, or side-employment, moonlighting economy, and the surging ‘japa’ syndrome which he said is real in Nigeria.
“As a result of the surging inflation, many people are distracted at work with the struggle to survive the economic hardship; many others especially GenZs and Millennials are thinking of how to ‘japa’,” he said.
The result is that many employees are moderately or actively disengaged from work and therefore short-changing their employers,” he said.
The nature of the new employees he said, is that people can work from anywhere, use any device, focus on output, and create their own ladder instead of climbing the company’s corporate ladder.
Speaking on the economic realities, Onukwuba explained that it costs almost thrice what it used to cost employers to run their firms with dollar at N1,520 as against N460 it was four years ago.
He urged the would-be business leaders to be prepared to embrace building a positive work ethic for them to be able to thrive in the new workplace as it were.
Pointing to employee engagement as key to building a sustainable company, he highlighted the three types of employees such as the engaged, not engaged and the actively disengaged.
He described the actively disengaged kind of employees as the worst thing that can happen to a company because such individuals have the tendency to dissuade even the engaged ones to develop negative attitudes towards work.
Onukwuba explained employee engagement as the extent to which employees are motivated to contribute to organisational success and are willing to apply discretionary effort, extra time, and brainpower, among others, to accomplishing tasks that are important to the achievement of organisational goals.
Buttressing his points further, he counselled the young leader to imbibe Victor Machado’s ideology of what employee engagement is; “Getting up in the morning thinking, “Great, I’m going to work. I know what I’m going to do today.
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I’ve got some great ideas about how to do it really well. I’m looking forward to seeing the team and helping them work well today.”
Sandeep Sham, the head of learning and development at Tolaram Group Nigeria speaking on business concepts said successful business leaders must be able to dissect the difference between power and force; light and heat.
“Power attracts, and is geared to serve others, while force repels and is usually geared towards self-serving.
From the leadership point of view, use power for what is good; hence, great power comes with great responsibility,” he said.
However, Sham maintained that wise leaders should also know when to apply both to achieve the needed result; pointing out that heat could sometimes be used to bring someone out of his or her comfort zone.
Chris Ogbechie, the dean of Lagos Business School, speaking on the idea behind the Young Talents Programme said that one of the biggest challenges Africa is facing in terms of its development includes lack of executive capacity and brain drain.
“At Lagos Business School, we started a programme called the Young Talents Programme aimed at bringing smart, brilliant Nigerians, spending some time with them, and seeing how we can transform them into responsible leaders.
We provide the kind of skills they do not learn in university that will enable them to fit in properly into different parts of the economy, which include the private sector, public sector, and even academia,” he said.
