Future of Work : Hybrid workplace in 2022

What Work will look like in 2022

?Have you ever wondered what Work will look like in the future? And has that picture in your head changed from what you visualized before the pandemic versus now? What does the future of workplace look like? What does work mean in the future? And how fast do you think that reality is upon us?

But don’t worry this article isn’t meant to be a rehash of the famous documentary “Human’s needn’t apply ” . However I do know that we can no longer be complacent about doing a good enough job, and having a “job security” anymore. But this article isn’t about how Robots will takeover our lives. I’ll leave that to the Terminators. But really I am here to explore what the future workplace will look like, and how the definition of work will evolve, and what do we mean by gig work?

Starting in 2022!

Great Resignation

But first let us take a look around us, today. What do we see ? In the US, the one country with a great deal of data collected on unemployment, the year 2021 saw the lowest number of people collecting unemployment benefits. And yet, record number of companies posted openings which remained unanswered. 4.4 Million people quit in September 2021 , and as of October’21 there were 10.9 million open positions.

It does look like August has historical been a time of the year when most people quit. Is it to do with the appraisal and hike cycles being in around June-July, which demoralises people forcing them to look outside ?

Not only are people quitting or planning to quit in the near future, most of them are quite sure of their prospects of finding a better opportunity once they do quit . Here is a quick run down of some of the top reasons behind the great resignation

1.?????Many people felt a change was long overdue. Due to the uncertainity brought about by the pandemic last year, several people hose to stick it out with their employers even with reduced benefits and wages, at least till the storm passed

2.?????Increasing quantum of work. ??We have all seen several young bankers take to twitter/ linkedin to protest over the crazy long work hours they had to pull during the pandemic. Now this has always been a sector where people knew workload was high. But with number of deals going up every quarter, adding to the toxic work culture was enough for several of them to call quits

3.?????Flexible work options. After haing realized that working from anywhere is an option, and that it doesn significantly hamper productivity, several employees are willing to quit, take a pay cut, if it means being able to continue this lifestyle

4.?????Increased funding and expansion of startups, Unicorns and soonicorns. 2020 saw record number of private equity and venture capital funds flowing into new age startups. This continued unabated in 2021. Now with so many companies raising money, there had to be expansionary plans in the horizon. And the best way to attract talent? Through better wages and terms. So it only made sense that employees to would follow the money trail

That brings us to 2022. I feel that this trend will continue on till the first half of the year. After which there will be a plateauing of the number of new offers rolled out. And well, eventually towards the end of the year unemployment rates will regress back to the historic mean.

Gig Economy and Loyalty at workplace

If you read any literature on the Future of Work, there will be a lot of debate and arguments on whether machines will displace humans, or if human ingenuity will triumph. But one thing that most researchers agree on is that the definition of “Job” is fast becoming obsolete. In fact, this may be one of the relics of the industrial era.

The knowledge economy saw an increased focus on “Jobs-to-be-done” as propounded by Clayton Christensen. But now we see a new trend emerging today. The outcome driven jobs. But this too has a gorge dividing the classes of “Gig” workers. On one side you have less specialized physically demanding work, like the delivery workers at Zepto, Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit and Bigbasket. On the other side the specialized freelance “Professionals”. While the former typically get paid base wages by the hour, the latter often ends up being paid a premium over that of full time employees, while enjoying several tax benefits too.

But Gig workers have literally zero switching cost. So how can one navigate and retain them, because lets face it acquiring new talent is also an expensive and time consuming process for companies too (Also something which Mukul Rustagi spoke about navigating this in my Kam Questions LinkedIn Live ). But if the recent court verdicts against Amazon and Uber is anything, retaining low skilled gig workers will require giving them similar benefits as your full time employee. The same is the case in India too . So, for the low skilled gig workers the next year is going ot look better, in terms of benefits, and stature. Infact Flipkart wasted no time in launching their marketplace for gig workers , in an aim to provide employment opportunities to them as well as streamline and navigate their supply chain issues. And that means, loyalty amongst gig worker is going to become a thing in the coming year. For a better understanding of the nature of these gig I’d highly recommend this paper by a group of researchers at Berkley or the working paper by Harvard Business Review titled “Being the Boss: Gig Workers’ Value of Flexible Work”

Now let’s look at the second group of gig workers. Now to understand the scope I thought of taking alook at gig platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. In 2019, Fiverr grew at 8%, and that more than doubled in 2020 to 17%. And their first quarter results in 2021 showed a 100%! Now since fiverr and upwork’s revenues are literally a percentage of that of the gig workers on their platforms, its safe to say that the quantum of projects also doubled. However, after seeing such results if you are tempted to quit your job, then id say hold on.

The biggest contributor to the projects on these platofrms were for Coders, UX/UI designers and legal contractors. All this ties back to the stupendous funding startups have been raising. And the need to rapidly scale for them to show to their investors that the money was well spent.

While there will still be a growth in this gig space, it will not continue at the same pace. I rather believe that the growth will go back to 2020 levels instead. And we will also see top gig workers banding together, and building upon their personal brand rather than depend on these platforms. And the projects that they get will be independent of the platform.

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Hybrid Workplace and Productivity

A lot of offices have started offering flexible work options. And employees to after having enjoyed working from home for a year and half are quite reluctant to go back to offices full time.

So this could be good news for co-working spaces. Why? Because a lot of employees have gone back to their small cities and towns, where setting up a new office space for the occasional office visits of their employees will turn out to be extremely expensive. Instead, if employees are able to plan out their time ahead, they could just book the closest office (a co working space) and “turn up” to work if they’re bored working from home.

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But again, following the trail of money makes me believe that the coming year the focus will be more on productivity and not as much on work places or collaborations. (read the full list of companies that turned unicorn in the productivity space )

Automation in Work: RoboWorkers

Andrew Mcafee and Erik Brynjolfsson once mentioned that four types of work are in danger of being overtaken by robots: Dull, Dirty, Dangerous and Dear .

Over the last few years we have seen at least the first three categories succumb to automation. Data entry is now a matter of a click thanks to OCR software. We have robocleaners now taking care of the basic hygiene and housekeeping for us. We have drones and rovers taking us through crash sites or mining excavations. That brings us to “Dear”

What do we mean by dear tasks ??

Jobs that are expensive for the company but can be done at minimal costs and intervention by machines . I can think of one category of jobs that are widely prevalent in India that fall into that category. The IT services. With low code / no-code automation the need to outsource to companies in the east will soon start diminishing.

Any job that requires complex calculations will get outsourced to machines. Why ? Simply because they are much faster than machines. And in the capitalist world, time is money!

Decisions that are based off data can be taken by machines. Apart from being faster, they also remove the human biases and noise from the system . In fact in their book “Noise”, the authors provide compelling arguments of where even a very rudimentary (by today’s stadnards) computation machine was able to provide better verdict that seasoned judges!

Future work

One popular argument is that AI and machiens tend to amplify the biases of the people who built the machine in the first place. True, but with self learning and feedback loops, the system has ways to de-biasing over time. So, to improve efficiency all that is required is to run it through several simulatons in a faradays cage, and then once its close to perfect release out on the job. (Sounds a lot like Harold Finch and the machine from Person of Interest, doesn’t it?)

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Another argument is that machines lack creativity. So our jobs which require human ingenuity can never be effectively taken over by machines. Well, remember AlphaGo, and how it defeat Lee Sedol the reigning world champion? Well, I know that is old news, and ?“the God’s move” stumped the machine in the end didn’t it ? That requires human ingenuity!

Welcome to the world of GPT3 and deepfakes! My favourite deepfake has to be the one of Ryan Reynolds as Wolverine (P.S.: No disrepect to Hugh Jackman or any of his fans, I loved him as WOlverine, but gotta admit watching Ryan Reynolds was fun too)

So, essentially the cost of making star studded movies could also potentially go down. I don’t really need Ryan Reynolds there. I just need a body double would charge a tenth of what I would’ve otherwise paid RR, and a small pay out to RR so that he doesn’t sue our ass later, and Voila! You can pander to your fans every demand of cast lineup!

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But, lets admit it, every time there has been an industrial revolution, some job were replaced by machines while several new ones which we couldn’t even anticipate cropped up! And those kept growing for centuries after too.

That only means that upskilling every few years is what is going to keep us in the workforce. On that note, these graphs are quite telling. And may even help you with your future hiring decisions

For the full report : https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/impact-of-new-technologies-on-jobs

SO the 3% that refuses to upskill will be the first ones to see their jobs being cut out. 29% reluctant retrainers at work, will be left behind the career curve with the 67% rapidly upskilling folks.

What I found more interesting was how people with higher degrees felt a lesser need to upskill at work. That in my opinion is a deadly mistake one can make. I think most of them will soon come to the realization that while their higher degrees helped them with a launchpad to their careers, to stay on that trajectory they will need to learn-unlearn-relearn at a lot faster pace!

This age wise trend too was worrying. But there could be 2 reasons why younger folks feel a lesser need to retrain themselves at work. First is that the percentage of younger than 20 years old in the work force is very very small. So the base effect is what is causing the effect.

And I hope that is the case because the other hypothesis is that teens think they know more than their jobs can offer to teach them. And this is quite possible with the proliferaton of information on the internet. Which could make some of them feel like they know more than their bosses or tutors could possibly teach them!

Anyway it was heartening to see more than half of the boomers looking to retrain themselves. Like they say, there is no age to stop learning.

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