Summary

Many organisations juggle workforce trends such as staff shortages, skills mismatches, advanced automation, flexible work, and sustainable development. The issue is pressing because they are facing an increasingly complex and disruptive environment, and it will become only more challenging for organisations to deal with these new trends.  

We observe different ways how organisations cope. Some organisations discover and seize opportunities, proactively shaping and reshaping their businesses. Other organisations overlook signs that foreshadow future trends and events and struggle, due to a lack of coherent information, uncertainty, and time pressure under which decisions have to be made, leading to even more severe problems.

In light of the above, this PhD research seeks to gain knowledge on how organisations, by means of their people managers can create a positive future of work.

First, this research aims to clarify the concept of ‘futures literacy’, the ability of organisations to prepare for the future, by developing a framework that bridges knowledge, practices and definitions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Second, the research aims to reveal how organisations can prepare for the future of work according to subject matter experts. The third aim of the research is to design a learning solution that empowers HRM practitioners and line managers to develop futures literacy capabilities of their organisations.