The Rising Power of Employees

The digital tsunami has handed over brand ownership to the employees. They are more powerful than you think. The rising employees are driving large changes.

When the bosses at Air France decided in October 2015 to cut costs by $2 billion over two years, they did not anticipate the backlash. Hundreds of workers protested against the plans to cut almost 3000 jobs and increase pilots’ working hours while reducing the size of the fleet. At some stage during the protest, the workers almost lynched two executives, including the HR manager. Historically, in such scenarios, the empire strikes back. That is just what they did. Five of the offending protestors were identified by video footage of the protests and arrested.

Paid time off to protest

Cut to 2018. More and more companies are now giving their employees paid time off to protest. Facebook is not only allowed its employees to join “pro-immigration” protests, they “encouraged” their contractors to allow its security staff, janitors, shuttle-bus drivers to be free to join the protest without fear of retaliation. Facebook also said it will investigate if any of its vendors illegally crack down on their employees’ protest rights.In a hyperconnected world, opinions can go viral in a matter of moments. When employees feel enraged they no longer go to their manager and discuss their grievance. A single tweet can drop the market value of the company. Negative sentiments can go out of hand. This is a trend that will go mainstream everywhere. Leaders just have to learn to lead in this new setting.

Project Maven

Project Maven, also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team, was launched in April 2017. The federal government wanted to use Artificial Intelligence to analyze predator drone videos. Video from unmanned aircrafts is used to analyze military targets and battlefield data. It was a partnership between the government and the tech wizards of Silicon Valley. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all were part of the project. The 18-month contract for Google was to end in March 2019 and was worth a measly $9 million.Google has always encouraged and empowered its employees to express their views. It was viewed as an essential part of building a culture of innovation where dissent leads to the churn behind several creative outcomes. Engineers routinely will challenge and debate product decisions. But this was not another project that Google was running. Some employees described it as the “militarisation of AI”.

The Ultimate Bargaining Power

In April 2018, some employees petitioned Sundar Pichai urging him to drop out of the Pentagon project. This was not just another geeky problem where Google’s top-notch team of engineers would churn Big Data from hours and hours of video footage to glean actionable insights. What started as a murmur at the fringes soon seemed to take a life of its own.In April 2018, the New York Times published the letter that Google’s employees had written to the CEO. They rejected the argument that the likes of Microsoft and Amazon were also partners in the project. Google’s unique history and influence set it apart from everyone else. More than 4000 employees signed the contract.The government’s plea that the project would use AI to defuse bombs or to safeguard the public from cyberattacks. The government pointed out that they were competing with countries where most organizations routinely collaborate with the government in such projects.It was the employee resignations that finally made Google’s leadership decide to drop the project whose value was expected to go up to $250 million. High end-specialized tech talent is scarce. Losing these valuable resources was not an option. The leadership of Google met and took a call at the end of May 2018. When the current contract expires in 2019, there will not be a follow-up contract. Additionally, Google will release a new document articulating the principles on the ethical uses of AI.

Et Tu Microsoft

In June 2018, it was Microsoft’s turn to deal with the ire of employees. The root of the controversy was blog post written in January 2018, in which Microsoft said it was offering cloud services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and was “proud” of the work. Microsoft said that the services could “help employees (of ICE) make more informed decisions faster,” such as “enabling them to process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.”ICE agents were separating children from families at the border with Mexico. That caused a furor. The letter written by Microsoft employees was published in New York Times. It urged Microsoft to cancel the $19m Azure contract with ICE because, “These are powerful capabilities, in the hands of an agency that has shown repeated willingness to enact inhumane and cruel policies."

Making the CEO take sides

In the analog world, workers would make headlines when they wanted something for themselves. That could have been a pay rise or protesting poor working conditions. In the digital world the influence of the expert talent goes beyond employee pay and benefits. It will be on ideological alignment. They will choose not to work on projects where they experience a values conflict. When organizations claim to be purpose driven, this is the definition they have to keep in mind.Ideological protests were few and far between.

Tim Cooke of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Sundar Pichai of Google, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber and Chuck Robbins of Cisco also voiced their opposition to the immigration policy. And rightly so. Silicon Valley has always depended on skilled immigrants.Last year, the National Foundation for American Policy released a study of the startups that were worth over a billion dollars. More than half had at least one founder who was an immigrant. When the authors expanded the search to senior, non-founding roles, that number rose to 71 percent.  Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars or more and are key members of management or product development teams in over 70 percent (62 of 87) of these companies. The collective value of the 44 immigrant-founded companies is $168 billion, which is close to half the value of the stock markets of Russia or Mexico.

Brand owners

Korn Ferry recently released a study aptly called The Salary Surge. Organisations around the world could add more than $2.515 trillion to their annual cost of labor by 2030, the result of a global shortage of highly skilled workers that could dramatically drive up salaries for the most in-demand labor. World economies could also fail to generate $8.452 trillion in annual revenue by 2030 due to talent shortages. The combined effect of these twin pressures could jeopardise profitability and threaten business models. This is the time when organisations must look at the power of talent to shape the business agenda and competitiveness.Employers no longer own the brand. Leaders were just about starting to take the voice of the customer seriously. Now they have to also deal with the collective power of a hyperconnected world of workers. Employees are keen to force the employers to make ethical choices. Leaders have no choice but to follow the employees. This time they are leading.

First published byHindu Business Line dt July 19, 2018

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