Speakers from the PageGroup, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Delta Air Lines, UNICEF, Walmart and other high-profile employers outlined how they are addressing these future trends right now.

At Pfizer, Sherry Cassano (pictured), chief talent officer, emphasised how the need to move quickly to “save a life” fuels all of the company’s work. “Minutes matter,” Cassano said. “Time is life. Don’t stop – don’t take your foot off the gas.”

For instance, she said, developing and releasing its Covid-19 vaccine took nine months, in contrast to the usual 10 years it takes. “We had to completely shatter the bureaucracy at Pfizer, with more collaboration and co-operation.”

Cross-functional teams across the entire business have become a key way of working at Pfizer, with the team lead called the “pilot-in-command”. The pilot-in-command may not be the senior person within the team, but in addition to delivering performance reviews for the functional team they lead, they are also called on to review the cross-functional team performance of all of that team’s members. 

“It’s not about hierarchy,” Cassano said. There will be over 50 such cross-functional teams within Pfizer by January, she explained. 

In a similar vein, the company encourages what they called “zigzag growth”, which is a non-linear career and development path. This can mean that an employee will move ‘diagonally’ outside their area of speciality into a new role instead of moving ‘up’. More than 1,000 people at Pfizer have made diagonal moves, Cassano said.

Neither the diagonal moves nor operating cross-functional teams “are easy unless you have the right culture”, Cassano acknowledged. 

Pfizer’s culture also supports failure because experimentation must take place in order to develop pharmaceuticals that ultimately come to fruition. “In Pfizer, 90% of what we do fails,” she said. “Employees must trust we will catch them when they fail.”

“Progress over perfection” is what the company values, she said. 

Another focus of attention now is that one-third of Pfizer’s employees say they have skills that are not based on their qualifications or work history and are not evident to the company. Many thought they had missed opportunities because they didn’t know the right people.

All of the issues described by Cassano are part of developing a leadership profile for Pfizer in terms of characteristics sought in all of their employees, she said: “Pfizer is on a path to more leaders and fewer bosses – and external recruitment is a key component.”

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