Deconstructing the future of work

Management

Sponsored by Everest Group

Four-day weeks, on-demand pay, ‘rural’ talent, digital workers… in recent times, we’ve heard these ideas accompanied by seemingly teleological questions about work as a construct.

The timing is understandable given the confluence of factors at play – the rise of digital, labour pyramid issues and the after-effects of a global pandemic, including a desire for more meaning in work and convenience through remote work. After years of navel-gazing, society is finally waking up to the fact that our jobs, the way we do them, the time we spend and the very fundamentals of the nature of work itself are perhaps incongruent with the world we now live in. This realisation opens up the very promising possibility of re-examining and perhaps reconstructing work for the new era. But, beyond the clarion call, what exactly does it entail, how do we understand the future of work and how do we design for it? Fundamentally, we can break it down into three distinct components: the how, the where and the who.

Nature of work – how will work be done?

Digital technologies have truly come of age. From cloud to AI, we’ve been able to accelerate technology adoption to significantly enhance ways of working. Today, we have multiple ‘digital born’ businesses that are disrupting markets using technologies that only a decade or two ago were considered futuristic.

As we look at adoption of these technologies in the workplace, it becomes clear that the nature of work will change considerably. Robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-based automation can significantly reduce the number of transactional tasks to be delivered manually, in addition to a few judgement-oriented tasks. The universe of tasks that can be automated or streamlined will expand as these technologies mature. With cloud, AI and analytics, systems of record become more scalable, data pipelines can be streamlined and meaningful data itself becomes more accessible. This further enhances our ability to use data to derive insights and make informed decisions.

Everest Group’s future of work research shows that the adoption of these technologies has accelerated during the pandemic. More than 70 per cent of organisations have invested in digital in the past 12 months and about 50 per cent of those expect to invest more in the next six to 12 months. Naturally, all of this has implications for the kind of work that then falls to the human workforce. With transactional tasks largely automated, judgement-, expertise-, and empathy-oriented tasks and related skill sets (including ‘soft skills’) become more important. But this is not a gloom and doom job-loss scenario; digital hardly ever is. Digital will also create jobs for talent who can acquire skills related to automation, AI, analytics and the cloud.

In essence, the nature of work is changing. Enterprises will need to prepare for these eventualities by ensuring they have adequate skilling programmes in place, starting by building skill taxonomies for the future, assessing current skill sets and building out continuous learning, upskilling and reskilling programmes to enable a future-ready workforce.

Work location – where will work be done?

Our research indicates that over half of today’s enterprises expect more than 40 per cent of their employees to continue to work from home over the next two years or so. The pandemic has dispelled certain notions about remote work while highlighting its challenges. No longer do we question if remote work is efficient or even a possibility. Video calling and conferencing tools, collaboration technologies and the potential of the metaverse have meaningfully reduced the friction that deterred work from home. Employees have gained from shorter commute times, greater flexibility and proximity to family.

On the other hand, 55 per cent of enterprises see employee engagement as a key challenge in a remote-only environment, and 50 per cent see organisational culture as difficult to maintain with full-time work from home. The middle ground – hybrid work – seems destined to be a key component of the future, and enterprises need to design their environments for this reality, redesigning physical and virtual workspaces, embedding information security as needed and changing management styles to accommodate the hybrid working model.

As remote working has gained more acceptance and mature economies have aged, the time has also come to de-link talent from geographic location. Beyond the US and India, emerging technologies such as AI and automation have sizeable talent pools in multiple countries across the world. The enterprise of the future should seek to leverage this talent, applying similar guiding principles as those for hybrid work with additional focus on local compliance, managing cross-cultural teams and customising policies.

Talent model – who will do the work?

As work and workplaces evolve, so will the talent we need. We already spoke to the need for geographically distributed and suitably skilled talent. The future workforce will also be diverse, equitable and inclusive. Diversity will, in some ways, be necessitated by the need for a variety of in-demand skills sets and changing labour pyramids, but beyond that it is a fairly well-established fact that diverse workforces simply do better and bring a variety of perspectives to the table, enabling enterprises to serve their clients better too. From this perspective, in the age of digital, organisations will need to bolster their diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, define concrete goals and metrics, and mobilise internal and external resources to help meet these goals.

As we look to fulfil specific skillsets for future work, organisations will also do well to consider contingent or temporary workers in addition to traditional permanent ones. Contingent workers are in greater supply now and will offer a good pool of talent to tap into, particularly for in-demand and next-generation skills. This will require careful consideration on the part of enterprises, as not all roles will be suitable for fulfilment. Even among the contingent workers, there will be those whose skillsets are in higher demand.

Attracting them will also pose a challenge for enterprises. Today, a large portion of contingent programmes are run through procurement. A holistic programme run by HR (including contingent and permanent workers) that can communicate the employer value proposition well, help with engagement and leverage data to improve programme management might just be needed as we transition to this new construct.

The future of work is neither esoteric nor mundane – it is somewhere in between, and it is here already. It will require us to question well-established paradigms. It will need us to rethink the framing of work in our lives. It will push us to redesign and reconstruct. Enterprises that move the needle now stand to gain a lasting competitive advantage.

For more information about Everest Group, visit everestgrp.com