Predictably, business leaders feel anxious as they struggle to marshal and mobilize the workforce of tomorrow. In a climate of perpetual disruption, how can they find and hire employees who have the skills their companies need? And what should they do with people whose skills have become obsolete? The CEO of one multinational company told us he was so tormented by that last question that he had to seek counsel from his priest.

The workers, however, didn't share that sense of anxiety. Instead, they focused more on the opportunities and benefits that the future holds for them, and they revealed themselves to be much more eager to embrace change and acquire new skills than their employers proffered them credit for.

There seemed to be differences that were noted. The first is that workers seem to recognize more clearly than leaders do that their organizations are contending with multiple forces of disruption, each of which will affect how corporates work differently.

The second difference that appeared from our survey was this: Workers seem to be extra adaptive and optimistic about the future than their managers recognize.

The traditional wisdom, of course, is that workers fear that technology will make their jobs obsolete. But our survey revealed that to be a misconception. A majority of the workers felt that advances such as automation and artificial intelligence would have a resolute impact on their future. In fact, they felt that way about two-thirds of the forces. What concerned them most were the forces that might allow other workers—temporary, freelance, outsourced—to take their jobs.

When asked why they had a positive outlook, workers most commonly cited two reasons: the prospect of better wages and the prospect of more interesting and meaningful jobs. Both automation and technology, they felt, proclaimed opportunity on those fronts—by contributing to the emergence of more-flexible and self-directed forms of work, by creating alternative ways to earn income, and by making it possible to avoid tasks that were "dirty, dangerous, and dull."

In every country workers described themselves as more willing to prepare for the workplace of the future than managers believed them to be (in Japan, though, the percentages were nearly equal). Yet when asked what was holding workers back, managers chose answers that blamed employees, rather than themselves. Their usual common response was that workers dreaded significant change. The idea that workers might lack the support they needed from employers was only their fifth-most-popular response.

That brings us to our third finding: Workers are seeking more support and guidance to equip themselves for prospective employment than management is providing.

In every country except France and Japan, significant majorities of workers reported that they—and not their government or their employer—were responsible for equipping themselves to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving workplace. That held true across age groups and for both men and women. But workers also felt that they had serious obstacles to overcome: a lack of knowledge about their options; a lack of time to prepare for the future; high training costs; the impact that taking time off for training would have on wages; and, in particular, inadequate support from their employers. All are barriers that management can and should help workers get past.

What Employers Can Do to Help

1. Don't just set up training programs—create a learning culture. Do not create merely tailor made training programs create a learning culture were workers can be trained continuously. Most workers felt that technology would have a positive impact on their future.

2. Engage employees in the transition instead of herding them through it. As companies transform themselves, they often find it difficult to attract and retain the type of talent they need. To succeed, they have to offer employees pathways to professional and personal improvement—and must engage them in the process of change, rather than merely inform them that change is coming

3. Look ahead of the "spot market" for talent. Most successful companies have adopted increasingly aggressive strategies for finding critical high-skilled talent. Now they must expand that approach to include a wider range of employees. A well known corporate company recognized that need in 2013 while developing its Workforce 2020 strategy, which concentrated on how the company would make the shift from a hardware-centric to a software-centric network. The company now hires far fewer contractors to meet its needs for technical skills, for example. "We're shifting to employees," one of the company's top executives told CNBC this past March, "because we're starting to see the talent inside."

4. Collaborate to deepen the talent pool. In a fast-evolving environment, competing for talent doesn't work. It simply leads to a tragedy of the commons. Individual companies try to grab the biggest share of the skilled labor available, and these self-interested attempts just end up creating a shortage for all. To avoid that problem, companies will have to radically change their outlook and work together to ensure that the talent pool is constantly refreshed and updated. That will mean teaming up with other companies in the same industry or region to identify relevant skills, invest in developing curricula, and provide on-the-job training. It will also demand forging new connections for developing talent by, for instance, engaging with entrepreneurs and technology developers, partnering with educational institutions, and collaborating with policy makers.

5. Find ways to manage chronic uncertainty. In today's world, managers know that if they don't swiftly identify and respond to shifts, their companies will be left behind. So how can firms best prepare? An office-furniture manufacturer has come up with some intriguing ideas. One is its Strategic Workforce Architecture and Transformation (SWAT) team, which tracks emerging trends and conducts real-time experiments in how to respond to them. The team has launched an internal platform called Loop, for example, where employees can volunteer to work on projects outside their own functions. This benefits both the company and its employees: As new needs arise, the company can quickly locate workers within its ranks who have the motivation and skills to meet them, and workers can gain experience and develop new capabilities in ways that their current jobs simply don't allow.