Employers warned about the risks of not upskilling staff

New laws make employers liable for psychosocial safety at work,

Employers need the right skills to do their jobs safely. Picture: iStock

Reskilling workers to manage changes in their jobs is no longer an optional extra for companies.

Instead it could be seen as essential under new laws that make employers responsible for the psychosocial safety of staff.

Head of risk advisory and a partner at law firm, Ashurst Australia, Philip Hardy, says workplace health and safety requirements introduced recently, and which mandate a proactive approach from employers, mean that reskilling is important.

“If you actually look at the psychosocial risk hazards in the safety requirements, ensuring that people have the appropriate tools and skills is one of the hazards that needs to be managed by an organisation,” he says. “So the failure to do so presents a risk.”

He argues reskilling is one of the mega trends business faces, not just because people are changing jobs but because they face so much change in their existing jobs because of technology, including AI.

“We’re now seeing a kind of change that we haven’t seen before,” he says. “We are living and leading in the attention economy, the impact of which in the workplace hasn’t been fully understood or experienced.

“The other issue is that because the pace of change is so significant, both in terms of its speed of impact and the degree of penetration across an organisation, leaders don’t necessarily have the technical skills to drive the change. They’re going to require the input of their workforce to be able to effect that change.”

That’s where the resilience, adaptability and self-direction of employees is needed, according to the Ashurst Future Forces 2023 survey of trends which covered 300 global executives.

Hardy says: “The simple reality is that people are going to have to reinvent themselves multiple times through their career in order to remain relevant to the workforce. We are now saying that the degree of reskilling within roles is going to be quite significant so you really want personal adaptability rather than expecting a top-down approach to retooling. It will be much more bottom up.”

Workers need to approach their jobs in a different way – to be able to understand changes, process them and implement them, all at a quick pace.

Artificial intelligence, for example, shows businesses can recruit a million users in a matter of days, whereas previous technologies took weeks, months, or years.

“We used to have an implementation window for change that was much wider,” Hardy says. “There was time to plan it, think it through, map all the job impacts and teach everyone what the specific implications were going to be for their role. Roll it out slowly, do some user acceptance testing. You actually had a window to do that (but now) there’s no window to do that.

“Most leaders don’t even know what the impact on those roles is going to be; they need the workforce to experiment in order to understand those changes and imagine those changes.”

Another challenge is ambiguity in some roles. The lack of clarity often makes people less comfortable in their jobs. Hardy says “the greater the ambiguity, the higher the need for resilience. If we don’t equip the workforce with resilience and adaptability, we actually present a psychosocial risk.”

He says employers have not always been fully aware of the new legislative obligations around psychosocial safety.

“The way we frame it to leaders is to think about psychosocial risk as the safety issue of the 21st century in a modern workforce,” he says.

“Historically, talking about safety was a very physical thing – trip hazards, making sure people did not have physical damage to their body. The reality is a lot of work has shifted to white-collar work, and even jobs that historically were performed by blue-collar workers – think of the automation of mining trucks – is now done remotely in control centres. The nature of the safety risk has changed, but it doesn’t mean we’ve removed the danger, it has just changed.”

In recent years, psychological safety related to issues such as bullying and harassment but now it’s about whether people are able to sustainably perform their role with the right tools and the right management.

Hardy says the push from younger generations to direct their own work is an opportunity rather than a problem for leaders who should be spending their time thinking about the perimeter within which they want that level of self-direction to occur.

“Obviously, when there’s no perimeter, it’s anarchy,” he says. “But equally, we’ve heard of organisations that just say, ‘we’re not going to touch AI’, they’re provided no freedom and there’s no ability (for workers) to self-direct and explore whatever the benefits might be. The right way to do it is to give the freedom within a frame.”

The Ashurst Future Forces 2023 found an ageing workforce and the prospect of long-term talent shortages would complicate companies’ efforts to secure skilled people. It found 42 per cent of those in banking and private capital said securing needed skills was among the toughest challenges their businesses would face in the next decade, compared with 31 per cent of the overall sample.

Skills in AI and machine learning were in high demand. Hardy says: “Static skills aren’t going to survive in a world where artificial intelligence can take knowledge and distribute it efficiently. What will be important instead is being able to understand concepts and place them into context, whether of the organisation, the market or the customer.”