According to UA today, the annual gathering of this year’s World Economic Forum, which is in Davos, Switzerland, will be chaired completely by women team. This is happening for the first time in the history of WEF of last 47 years. The seven leading ladies who will chair the conference are:
- International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde
- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
- Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg
- The general-secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation Sharan Burrow
- The director-general of European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Fabiola Gianotti
- CEO of ENGIE Isabelle Kocher
- The founder of the Mann Deshi Bank, the organization which is responsible for providing microfinance to women in India: Chetna Sinha
The gathering is supposed to begin on Jan 23rd, 2018. This meeting has been happening since the year 1971. More than 3000 leaders participate in this gathering who come from the business, government and the media background. The agenda of the gathering is to converse and suggest solutions for world’s most obstinate problems, while the theme for this year’s conference is “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.”
Why is the diversity of the workforce important?
The diversity in the workplace has been on an increasing trend which is benefitting the organizations. Since the diversity offers greater access to the talent and more inclusive corporate culture, the companies are intentionally recruiting people keeping diversity in mind. Even the corporate policies are devised in a way to better the result of the recruits. But, an exemption to the diversity is stirring in C-level positions, as Meghan M. Biro mentions in her blog Talentculture. She also suggests a four-step way to make a corporate culture more favorable to workplace diversity. The four-steps include:
- Instrument workplace diversity initiatives like mentoring, career development, and supplier diversity
- Encircle other points of view like actively seeking advice, opinions, and ideas from all
- Creating the policies that are diversity-friendly such as flexi work time, telecommuting, acknowledgment of cultural traditions and holidays
- And lastly, focus to change diversity in the C-suite like recruiting with the advancement potential in mind.
Way forward
The factor on which the future of work in 2018 depends is, how we can get the participation from the variety of employees that are scattered over virtual and video connections environment while leveraging their combined intellect and the ability of attentiveness to facilitate the business and thereby leading to profit generation.
The organizations are eyeing on the growing need for the decentralized and supple workforces. As per the data shared by Paul Dodd in Wilson HCG opinion piece, the remote workers in US consist of 18% of the U.S. workforce which is expected to rise to 30% by the year 2025.
He also talks about embracing the Agile methodologies by 2020. Agile methodology asks the companies to move fast in small and self-organizing teams, have a clear decision-making process, recruit good people, and ask people to push their ability.
Dream Team
A cross-functional team means more success as per Alex Moore for ATD. He talks about the relevance of the diverse skills and well-defined roles and KRA’s.
