Tomorrow’s Work, Workforce and Workplace

Backdrop

Future has always been uncertain and unseen. Our ability to visualize future helps us to understand tomorrow and prepare ourselves in advance for the possible obstacles and opportunities. As the organisations are leveraging technologies particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict the future, it is still difficult to predict human behaviours and evolving challenges in our society and environment. Hence, despite our inability to define future, it is agility, adaptability, innovation, speed, and action which differentiate our ability to deal with uncertainty to remain effective and successful.

With the technology advancement across the industries, practically every company is becoming a tech company by adopting IoT, Cloud, Mobility, RPA and AI/ML. This, tech advancement, was already creating the need of redefining the nature of work, skills and workplace for companies; however, 2020 added new challenges. These changes (due to pandemic) were unexpected and organisations were initially not prepared. However, with the agility and adaptability organisations were able to navigate this difficult phase. The pandemic is not over yet and we are seeing the second wave in India. Last one year, we saw increased technology adoption by companies across the Industries. This means the future of the work, workplace and workforce would be different than what it is today.

Let’s understand this change for each of them as below: 

Future Workplace: Contours

When we imagine the future workplace, things look different. We wouldn’t have 100% people operating out of the office. The future working model for the organisations would be hybrid. In post-pandemic era, companies which never experienced work from home would offer remote working for certain roles to be a differentiated benefit to attract the right talent from outside. In a recent report published by JLL, employees in India have indicated that they prefer to work in a hybrid model. Similarly, all global studies and surveys have been clearly indicating the future working models to be hybrid. This means, workplaces will have certain set of employees working from office and remaining operating out of remote locations. The benefits of this model would be as follows:

1.     In the hunt of hiring talent, companies can go beyond a specific location and hire people from different locations

2.     Overall cost burden on managing facilities would be reduced

3.     Workplace will mostly have floating workstations as free space; and employees required to operate out of office can sit at any workstation

4.     Diversity hiring will become possible. Most notably, this arrangement will give flexibility to working women to balance their work and personal life better. 

5.     Organisations will see increased adoption of technology enabled communication and collaboration tools.

6.     Virtual townhalls will help in maximum participation and same unified communication will reach out to every single employee across the globe in one go. 

7.     Learning norms will undergo change. Increased byte-sized learning interventions and self-paced learning interventions will replace conventional classroom-based trainings.

8.     Hybrid working models will help in retention as employees who want to continue to operate from their hometowns would prefer such organisations. 

9.     Hybrid working model will also enable companies to open satellite offices in tier-2 and tier 3 cities through co-working space to facilitate reach out to nearest office for remote working population in those cities and areas. 

 Hybrid Workplace: Challenges

Hybrid working model may not be the perfect model for all. There would be challenges too. One of the biggest challenges would be the efforts in ensuring sense of belongingness with the organisation. With increased remote working arrangement, employees will lose sense of association with the organisation as they would have no or lesser opportunities to ‘experience’ office or other colleagues in person. This would require companies to adopt newer ways of engagement with the employees. The other issue would be redesigning the overall employee life cycle for catering to both segments of employees (i.e. employees operating from office and employees operating from home). It would not be easy for functions and management team to set up any ad hoc discussion or calling everybody for an event or activity with an ease. While setting up something in person would help for employees working from office, it would still need to be thought through how that would be replicated simultaneously for employees operating remotely and their involvement and participation is also ensued. 

Organisations will also need to equip itself to deal with socio-cultural, diversity and compliance specific aspects while building future ready & hybrid organisations. It is clear that it wouldn’t be the attractive to build infrastructure to create the brand of the organisation. Overall experience to employees (irrespective where they operate from) would become a dominant variable.

Future Work DNA

The nature of work is continuously evolving. With the increased adoption of technology, a lot of manual work, repetitive tasks have been automated resulting into cost and time savings. It is expected that many process and manual jobs will become redundant in the future. Companies have started adopting RPA which is helping them automate all kinds of complex and manual time-consuming processes.  Similarly, big data is playing a significant role across the Industry including business intelligence and insights to be able to take the right business decisions. Due to pandemic, cloud adoption has moved everything virtual and provides flexibility to users w.r.t. anywhere and anytime access. 

Future work will require awareness of the technology tools for all employees even if they are not in ‘technical roles’. Employers will prefer hiring people with engineering or technical competencies. New workforce would be expected to be reasonably tech-savvy.

To provide experience to customer, prototype and simulation of the product or services would be shared with them before product or service is delivered to them. Imagine a real state firm providing its buyer a 3-D view of personalised home being bought by the buyer. Similarly, a home interior designer firm providing multiple 3-D design view to customer to chose from. An electronic appliance company providing the overall control and operations of the equipment over the mobile app through IoT irrespective of the location of the person operating it. In some pockets, all these changes have already gained ground; but this would become part of commodity-based services in future. All these changes will redefine the future work. As mentioned earlier, every company will become a software company. 

These changes may result into talent scarcity for future ready organisations. IT Industry has already started experiencing the talent crunch during this pandemic. This crunch may assume serious proportions if not handled well right now. Besides, rapid changes in technologies will further complicate this situation. Academia will have to step up on time to match these expectations; and companies will have to start putting a new workplace model based training interventions to deliver the right skilled talent.

Future Workforce

With the change at workplace and evolved expectations on nature of work, future workforce would be different from today. The other dimension which would affect the future workforce would be the intake of generation z who would join the workforce in large number. 

·      Highly technology savvy. Due to pandemic, all the students in schools and colleges have already adapted to collaboration tools including various apps which help them achieve efficiency and effectiveness. They will carry this experience when they enter the workplace. Organisations which would not be ready to provide technology enabled experience to such workforce would face issues of creating a better experience.

·      Learning flexibility: Mode of learning will further evolve to self-paced, social & peer learning, gamification-based and byte sized learning. 

·      Diminishing sense of association: One major reason of this would be the nature of working model (i.e. either working from home or in a hybrid model). People who would be operating remotely, for them nothing will change except the laptop, company provided infrastructure and virtual environment. They would continue to operate from where they were working earlier. If organisations fail to engage them well including giving them flexibility to working models, some other organisation providing them flexibility would hijack them for job switching.

·      Learnability Quotient: Future workforce will be agile in picking newer skills and newer ways of functioning. They would not like to stick to mundane job for longer time.

·      Engagement & Growth: Organisations need to ensure they continue to engage and reward the differential performance to be able to engage these folks well. Leaving the career in the hands of Manager being the God would not work.

·      Openness & Transparency: This would mean organisations will need to create open culture to appreciate the diversity and divergent views as long as they are not in conflict with the values and ethics of the organisations.

 Final Words

The future is going to be different from today. What made us successful all this while may not necessarily make us successful to deal with this change. Organisations will need to evolve and shun the older ways of functioning including picking newer ways of managing work, workforce and workplace. In summary, three major changes will drive all of them:

1.     Employee Experience is most important aspect of driving all three dimensions (work, workforce and workplace). We live in an experience economy and if our policies and services are not aligned to this underlying fact, we will struggle in becoming future ready. Experience is defined by our ability to become a humane organisation demonstrating compassion and empathy in our dealings with stakeholders, especially employees.

2.     Technology: Adoption of technology tools irrespective of industry, providing ease and flexibility to employees for collaboration and communication will make a big difference. Helping employees pick newer competencies by providing them learning opportunities through byte sized and self-paced through learning technology platform will help them to be future relevant and engaged.

3.     Hybrid Working Models will help in attracting and retaining talent. Employees will look for flexibility to operate from any location be it home, hill station and/or office. Organisations which will adopt to this change and align its overall eco-system around this will be successful in attracting and retaining talent in future.

PS: This article of mine was originally published by @NationalHRD as per given link - https://nc2021.nationalhrd.org/NCRChronicle/issue2/