Simplifying the esoteric 'Future of Work'

Before the pandemic unleashed its cataclysm, and left us scurrying for our lives the fault lines had started appearing on the monolithic structure of our work. This structure, in existence, for almost half a century represented the stodginess of where we worked, how we worked and who all, amongst us, worked. While working from home we started realising the imminent challenges that lied in front of us- redefining work, moving beyond the physical workspace, inducting and assimilating millennials, easing collaboration among employees scattered across the world and digitising work that actually actuated all this.

The ‘future of work’ is as complex as an algorithm written for AI( Artificial Intelligence), which is meant to carry out simulations in one of the most advanced transplants carried out in ophthalmology. The complexity arises from the fact that sweeping changes have been bought simultaneously in the way work is redefined and who does the work. Allow me to elaborate on both these variables one-by-one.

How work is being redefined?

Digital transformation had started almost two decades ago and it accelerated during the pandemic two years ago. It forced industries to converge, companies to alter their business models and reinvent themselves. Digitalization, which includes mobile, cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, hopefully, has changed the way value is created in the marketplace. It has catalysed companies to move beyond manufacturing and selling to be always connected with customers, partners and other stakeholders in their ecosystem increasing the need for data and analytics. Every company is being disrupted by other companies in the adjacent industry and digital business models are blurring the boundaries of the company.

Telecommunication companies are, for example, through 5G, ?evolving into distributed networking, media, entertainment and social networking. Healthcare companies are now morphing into discovery and development of drugs, into wearable devices, elderly care, telemedicine, informatics, health software and expanded nursing. If retailers such as Walmart are setting up in-store pharmacies, healthcare services and testing labs then what will be left for healthcare providers?

In the preceding two paragraphs I have tried to present a stark reality that brings to the fore few alarming truths:

·??????Organizations are facing and will continue to face skills crisis. A considerable number of existing roles will become obsolete and new roles will be created. Consider the case of a traditional retail bank venturing into fintech model; the skill requirements of both are radically different. A bank needs customer-service, sales, administration, IT operations and back-office [ credit underwriting etc], whereas fintech is populated by engineers with expertise in user-interface design, product and marketing teams. Even if the bank creates something like ‘digital academy’ it will not be able to outperform the fintech because of the agility of product management and design team at the fintech, end of the competition!! In all possibilities the bank will buy-out the fintech company resulting in roles such as that of personal banker, teller, compliance consultant and administrative assistant becoming obsolete.

·??????Companies are staring at a drought of critical skills. In telecommunications, for example, the advent of 5G, which is much more than a stack of technologies, has bought in a preponderance of service-delivery models and industry and business applications for the industry. This has necessitated the creation of skills that are different and evolved from that needed in 4G and LTE.

·??????Technology enabled us in creating a digital workplace, working digitally and establishing the virtual office. The digital workplace includes smart building technology, digital user interfaces [ applications, portals], data collection and predictive technology. Working digitally means adopting a digital way of working; it means how the work is being done rather than from where it is being done. Virtual office signifies the atmosphere in which people work individually or as a team anywhere, any time and anyhow.

·???????Activity-based working aims to break jobs/work into fragments, which are then allocated to inter-disciplinary teams. The development of a new mortgage product, in a bank, for example, will require a team comprising of credit-underwriter, risk consultant, business analyst, marketer, an AI specialist, and IT manager who will create the IT infrastructure for the product to subsist in the bank’s online product portfolio.

·??????Talent will no longer be confined to single team and in pre-defined operational roles, rather it will need mobility across products and projects as it is evident from the above illustration. ?Firms will eschew static hierarchies in favour of dynamic networks of skills. The same team will be needed, apart from launching a new product, for example, to optimize a process, analyse market trends and develop new strategies for retaining customers or on-boarding new customers.

Who does the work ?

The great resignation followed the pandemic and it forced companies to shed their myopic view, which was obsessed with the traditional in-house talent pool. They responded to the great resignation by challenging their own assumptions regarding the mode of employment. The talent-pool of tomorrow will comprise of in-house employees, gig workers, crowd, service-providers and freelancers. This has been made possible because the work itself is unbundled now into fragments requiring specific skills. The role of the physical workplace will be to bundle together these fragments as commodities/services to be offered to the customer.

This open talent continuum, to a great extent, comprises of millennium and generation Z , who collectively have rewritten the archaic employment contract. While the pandemic nudged us to think about the role of ‘work’ in our lives, the assimilation of these two categories of population in the labour market has necessitated the need for rethinking on tenets of Talent Management.

The future of work depends upon a flatter, more networked talent model supporting a more flexible and a globally dispersed workforce. Generating a fair deal in terms of rewards, partnership with the organization and development based growth is crucial to mobilise this talent pool. Companies will have to transform into organizations with which the globally-dispersed workforce can relate to and this is possible only when companies change their mindset from leading employees to partnering with employees. Fairness, diversity, equity and inclusion will be critical components of Talent Management frameworks and not just fancy words meant to showcase organisations as ‘employer of choice’. As a matter of fact, fairness is at the top of mind for leaders, who are concerned about inequity in paying differently to people doing the same job from different locations.

Two trends seem to be promising enough to dictate the future of Talent Management practices:

·???????The workforce of today and tomorrow is asking for a technology enabled and consumer-grade experience at work.

·??????The workforce wants freedom of choice in the way it works and it expects the employer to respect that freedom.

In practicality the above two require the organization to relate with its employee, whichever category she belongs to and thus the organizations of tomorrow will be astute enough to blend their return-to-work communication into sustainable future-of-work models that preserve the culture of the company while offering flexibility to blend work into desired lifestyle. These organizations will be prudent enough to treat everyone in their talent pool as a potential partner rather than people who are paid in return for their services. This new approach calls for renewed vigour on goal-setting, calibrating expectations and establishing regular touchpoints.

The path towards inculcating a ‘partnering mindset’ is fraught with challenges:

ü?Line managers often falter while managing geographically dispersed teams in terms of negative biases, cultural differences and emotional intelligence.

ü?Flexible working options for all is easier said than done especially when the team is dispersed, diverse and has divergent philosophy towards life and work.

ü?Equity is often at stake while partnering with multilingual, multicultural and multilocational teams.

?The challenges in the future:

??Knowledge sharing- With an understanding and acceptance that remote work is futuristic; it is critical that companies conceive ways and means to facilitate sharing of knowledge across its widespread workforce. I have observed that knowledge sharing and collaboration are very difficult even when the teams are nestled in a single, monolithic structure and so I can imagine the challenges in creating an environment where knowledge is shared seamlessly.

??Diversity, Equity and Inclusion- While remote work could be beneficial for diversity as there will be an increased reach to a very wider pool of candidates, equity and inclusion can and will prove to be daunting. A plausible way seemingly is to enable an infrastructure that can provide everyone with an access to collective intelligence.

??Culture- Organizations with a universally dispersed workforce will have to question their core values, assumptions and artefacts and be ready to change these if these are frustrating to meet strategic objectives.

??Learning and Development- This has to enable career pathways that are a series of developmental steps that help employees progress from one career to another. It is radically different from a traditional career path in which, for example, a sales executive becomes a Senior Executive and then an Assistant Manager and so on and so forth. In order to partner with and provide support to career pathways a judicious blend of upskilling and reskilling will be required.

?Conclusion:

Concludingly in the immediate future organizations will have to be resilient, purposeful, agile, partnering with stakeholders especially its workforce, technologically enabled rather than led by technology, flexible, adaptable and, most important, empathetic because one pandemic, in two years, has shown us and reminded us of our fragility and our vulnerability. It would be naivete not to discuss ‘Leadership’ required for the future.?A candid admittance- I am at crossroads between participative leadership and servant leadership; I am juggling between the two. Few facets of the future need servant leadership whereas others require a participative one. I leave this choice on the wisdom of readers of this article. ?