Tech changes 9-to-5 lives

FINANCIAL SERVICES HAVE TO BE MORE FLEXIBLE

Technology has changed the global environment, how we work and what we expect from employment. Expectations are dramatically different today versus what they were 15 or 20 years ago.

“The nine-to-five work week is a relic of the 20th century,” says Dion Chang from Flux Trends. “We are all remote workers.”

The generations entering the workforce today have a quite-different idea about how their careers will look. Having grown up with the internet, social media and intelligent personal assistants as part of their daily lives, their perspective wouldn’t have been shared by their parents and grandparents.

The old template of work, which Chang calls the “linear way of living”, is foreign to them. They won’t follow a path of completing school, going to university, getting a job, working until they retire and then putting their feet up. “They expect to zigzag through their working life,” Chang says. “Skills become redundant quickly, and they will have to upskill; do something different.”

Many will anticipate educating themselves again mid-career. They may take mini-retirements to take time off and return to work. They know they’ll probably work well past the current retirement age, and may not contemplate a final retirement at all.

Their lives will be defined by this flexibility. And it’s something for which the financial services industry is largely unprepared.

The products offered to employees today are essentially the same that have been available for decades: pension funds, death and disability benefits and education savings plans based on the experience of providing these products to people living a “linear” life.

How relevant are these solutions to those joining the workforce today? Financial services providers must become more creative in thinking about solutions meaningful to people living their lives in a substantially different way.

“Should we even still call it retirement?” says Nomha Kumalo at Momentum Corporate. “How are we reconsidering the vehicles through which we provide financial solutions? The language we use might even be driving disengagement.”

You can’t convince someone that saving for their retirement is necessary when they have no intention of retiring traditionally. To make saving meaningful, it must be relevant.

As Regard Budler at Momentum Corporate notes: “We have to ask people what really matters to them and solve through that approach.”

The changes to products might be subtle, but how they’re packaged and presented will be key.

“The challenge is finding a balance between the stability of products and remaining relevant to the needs of the workforce,” says Budler.

“Fundamentally, people might need the same thing, but the way we execute and deliver it has to be more flexible.”