Podcast Transcript

Jordan Rich (JR): Welcome to today’s FFI on Friday. We are pleased to feature Grace Lordan, Associate Professor of behavioral science and Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics. She is delivering the closing keynote at the FFI Global Conference in October. Her presentation will focus on women and the future of work, both within and outside the multi-generational family. This is Jordan Rich. Grace, let’s have you tell us more about what your talk at the FFI conference will be all about.

Grace Lordan (GL): The keynote that I’m delivering at FFI is really going to focus on women, the future of work, and also particularly family business and what this actually means for family businesses. My work looks at predicting what jobs are going to become obsolete in the future. So, thinking about when we look forward ten years, twenty years, given the type of patterns that people are investing in now, what are the things that might become automatable. If you look at those jobs, if you take the long-run perspective, it looks like the type of work that women do much more now in comparison to men. We’re going to have more jobs in that. You might imagine that this will have some big positive impacts for the gender equality gap when it comes to pay, promotions, and people being on executive boards. However, if we look at what’s happening now in the economy, when the recession has started to bite, both within family businesses and within companies that are listed, the people who had the most redundancies do look disproportionately to be women as compared to men, from the early data that’s coming out. That’s because women still tend to stay in roles that are more background roles, as compared to income-generating roles.

The question that I will be exploring is, “How do we bring these two things together?” Should we be safeguarding women’s futures and thinking strategically about who we’re making redundant now and who we’re investing in now? And more than that, how should family business evolve to get some of the gains that are coming from artificial intelligence now and in the future.

JR: Can you specify a bit as to what kinds of jobs we’re talking about that may be on the more redundant scale?

GL: There are a few types of jobs. The traditional types of jobs that people focus on are the ones with routine tasks. Anything you can imagine that’s routinized is likely to be made redundant and obsolete. The new technologies, artificial intelligence, are causing what I call a polarized automation of jobs, which means that if you’re a lawyer, a marketer, if you’re someone in creation, there’s a big complement to your jobs now from having artificial intelligence embedded both in your business and as your friend if you’re an employee. But that will mean less of those jobs will be available in the future unless we have growth. And the last of the types of jobs where the technology has become available, like driverless cars, bricklaying, but the policies in some countries don’t allow yet there to be a driverless car. Thinking about what the policies mean as well is fundamentally quite interesting. Those are the three types: the ones everyone agrees are automatable; the ones that some people are a bit sketchy about but we know the technology is there to automate a lot of the boring tasks, so we think the people doing the foundational jobs will disappear or become less; and then the last are these jobs which are the moon-shot for technology, but they’re doing some of the tasks that human beings do with respect to movement, to fingers and movements of hands, and the technology is starting to look good but the policies aren’t there yet within cities or countries.

JR: People are probably the most important resource, at least right now. Is part of your messaging about how family business can keep and attract successful and innovative female workers for this part of our discussion?

GL: We’ll be talking about keeping, attracting, but also leveraging the talent. You’re spot-on that the talent we have in the organizations is what determines the future. But really, when we look within firms and look within the productivity coming out per person within a firm, there is some friction at the moment. I think some discussion around what those frictions are, and how they can be taken away, some discussion around how artificial intelligence and other technologies can help, and the types that people should be looking at will be exciting, and also looking at diverse talent, which obviously includes women.

JR: You mentioned AI, and we can’t escape talking about that. It’s everyone’s conversation point over coffee, or in your case, tea, depending on where you are. How rapidly is this changing the landscape, in your estimation?

GL: I think we had a big bump when ChatGPT came out and people realized the functionality of generative AI. There are some good applications in health and in retail. I think now things have kind of slowed down, because people are realizing the limitations of the technologies, having explored it so much. But I think what’s really interesting is what’s on the horizon. What seems to be on the horizon with artificial intelligence is that we will be in a place where the artificial intelligence in front of us is five, ten times more intelligent than we are and can simulate what it would mean to have five people with you, being creative. I’m thinking about what that means for the people who are employed. It’s important that you don’t have employees who are afraid of this technology and moving away from it. At the same time, it’s important that we don’t just start letting the machines make the decisions. For me, artificial intelligence becomes a data point, a resource, another piece of information, but it fundamentally doesn’t replace human beings.

JR: Ultimately, it could be a cozier fit for people who don’t want to work in an office five days a week, who want to be remote and want to do things on their own schedule. These technologies, and AI is one of them, can make that easier. Adapting all of this together and using it to our advantage might also be something that people can consider.

GL: It can, and we see that now. We see some companies move towards having entirely remote campuses, meaning that people can essentially be nomads, they can travel around your beautiful country and see many places that they never would have gotten to see had they had a full-time job. And then on the other side, we see people who are leading organizations who say, “You must be in five days a week.” I think we don’t know who is right in this argument, and it’s likely to vary from company to company. But I would love to get family businesses really thinking about what is the mode of working that makes them the most productive, and does that change within functions of the organizations, so they can think about the type of work that they offer to people. If you offer people hybrid working it’s cheaper, for example. You also get different talent than if you expect people to be in the office. Really, that conversation around planning the type of offering that they’re going to give to humans going forward, particularly if they’re going to be working with these technologies.

JR: Grace, why is pay equity so important to any consideration in a family, as well as anybody else? We hear about it, and people still raise the issue. What role does the family business have in assuring better equity in terms of pay?

GL: I think the family business has a huge role in this, because it’s a huge part of the economy. I think any conversation around pay equity has to include family businesses. In fact, if family businesses took the lead in this, the way that they could close the pay gap would be quite fundamental. I think why we care about it is that there are segments of society that are getting paid differential wages for the same type of work. Fundamentally, that’s what it comes down to. There’s good evidence that because we pay women less than men for the same type of work, then women make choices to be less attached to the labor market, to take more time off to raise their family, and the men end up being the breadwinner. There’s a lot of productivity models that suggest that we’re losing a lot of talented people to this. Potentially, the most talented person in the family isn’t necessarily working.

It’s about rethinking, 1) do you want to offer more flexible work, speaking to how society is now, where men and women are doing less than equal amounts of [housework], and 2) do you want to offer men more opportunities to be with their family? We rarely talk about men. The idea that men don’t want to be with their families, that they want to work sixty hours a week, that they really want to work at this level of intensity, this has also been detrimental to men. They suffer higher levels of stress at work, they have lower levels of job satisfaction, and men do die younger than women. So, when we think about equity, and the whole puzzle, it isn’t just about making sure that women get paid equal to men. It’s also making sure that men get equal work/life balances compared to women.

JR: There’s also a question of training, preparation, and education. In the United States now, more women are attending college than men. I don’t know what the stats are in England. Certainly, it sounds like it should bode well for women in terms of better jobs, better pay, maybe even outranking men for the first time. What are your thoughts on that?

GL: Since 1992, both in the US and the UK, women have surpassed in the number of degrees. We’ve had this for a long time, but women still do different types of education as compared to men. I think some of the choices that women make—they shy away from engineering, finance, economics—leads to when they exit [university] the types of jobs that are available to them are just different from men. The question then for family business is, “Do you want to stop being unforgiving of undergraduate choice when you have to do most of the training for individuals anyway?” and rethink how you hire talent in those early days [in the workforce]. I know a lot of bigger companies that have had success doing that. They’ve said, “Look, maybe we don’t care what the person studied in college. They’re going to learn in an organization anyway, so instead of relying on universities to give grades to decide who gets to join our company, we will assess them by tasks ourselves.” That’s been quite successful.

JR: When one family business fills its staff with more than just men in suits, what are the advantages to that? Assuming that you’re attracting talented women [to the workforce].

GL: When we talk about putting diversity around board tables, we’re not talking about just having people who look different. We’re talking about having people who think differently. What you really want is cognitive diversity. So, if you have people who are going forward in an uncertain world, most sectors are experiencing lots of uncertainty, given that the executive suites are the ones who make the big decisions, they should have lots of different perspectives of cost/benefits and risks to allow them to [make decisions]. Unfortunately, we can’t see inside people’s brains and measure their cognitive diversity so well. One way to think about it is, if you have people who are born with different genders, with different geographies, within different belief systems, they are likely to be exposed to things that would allow them to assess different pictures differently. That’s why we come to women and other demographics. But fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is get people around board tables who think differently, so the company is insulated against uncertainty.

JR: You wrote a book with a terrific title: Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want. Let’s apply that title to the final question: as you address the FFI conference, what are a few small steps family business leaders can even think about right now? Not giant leaps, but small steps that can start to make a difference and improve their situation?

GL: I think the first thing is to get clear on the mode of working that makes their firm more productive, and don’t worry what’s happening in the outside world. That will vary within company to company, and there are very easy models that allow you to do that. I think the second is to think about your people and the type of skills that you would like them to have. I would encourage family business to think about AI skills that people are talking a lot about, but they’re easy to diffuse. Also [think about] the types of skills that would allow their employees to navigate uncertainty—being more adaptable, more open, leaving ego at the door. The types of soft skills that we know work well in this economy. Then, I think the third thing is to look at pulse points of how content people are feeling on the job. [Look at] how the folks in their organizations are feeling on the job and looking to see when there are high points and low points, then trying to make those high points slightly higher and trying to buffer those low points. I suggest this because it’s good for employee well-being, which is good for productivity, but it’s also good for retention. Then I think the last, in the spirit of the book, is I think that they should think big, without constraints, about what the future might bring for their family business and put in place more steps that move them towards that goal, knowing that even if they don’t reach that blue-sky thinking that they’ve imagined, that just by having those small steps, they’ll get further than they would have had they not set that goal.

JR: Grace, we thank you for your time, your attention, your expertise, and your passion for this subject. Thank you so much.

GL: Thank you Jordan, and I’m really looking forward to being in New York, so if anyone is listening and has spare time and wants to meet me before or after my session, please do reach me by my website, which is www.gracelordan.com. I would love to see you.

JR: Our thanks to Grace Lordan, closing keynote speaker at the October FFI Global Conference in New York City for this discussion about women’s progress in the workplace and the future of work. The FFI Global Conference brings together thought leaders from around the world to share their latest work and research in the family enterprise field. To learn more, visit www.ffi.org. Thank you for listening!