colored butterfly flying free in the middle of nature
It has been roughly about five years since we started talking about the future of work, except the concept has now really taken off given the conditions generated by the global pandemic.
It has been largely predicted that by 2030, the majority of workplaces will be defined by experience –companies leading with purpose, organizations offering more personalized, digital solutions, cultures focusing around wellbeing and autonomy. Is this all a surprise? Maybe…
Work has been in a process of separation from time and space for over ten years. The impressions social media has been generating on trends have been blind-folding major corporate employees to recognize and embrace the choice to freedom and creativity they always held within. Now as organizations buckle down to knock out distances between physical and digital, human and robot, internal and external, stakeholder and shareholder, the workforce finds itself most disenfranchised, the work experience getting more demanding and disparate than ever.
How can we jump-start the conversation?
Though it is a fact that many organizations are in need of responding to sudden and a very unforeseen crises, the current evolution requires more of a visionary view into the future focusing on thriving vs. surviving through the turmoil. The trends around reskilling, technology improvements, turning learning catalogs to digital or extending benefits portfolios may be insufficient. What we need and desire is a whole new innovative approach to the way we think about leadership and organizational effectiveness.
Below are a few philosophical constructs that may help:
1) Human at the core: The first step in every architecture process requires imagination – visualization of what it could be. Organizations are still and fundamentally human systems. The current definitions we hold for the existence of business may be benefiting some shareholders while extensively hurting the ecosystem and broader shareholders. We encourage decision-makers to truly consider how they can put humans back at the center of their foundation and systems created. A few holding questions may be:
- What does a business as an enterprise in service of humanity look like?
- What do employees need at an individual, team and organizational level to achieve their ultimate state of wellbeing and productivity?
- What sort of tools do we need to better collaborate with one another and the revolutionary ways of working to broaden the impact we drive in the service of the customer?
Every behavior we demonstrate as 21st century HR leaders call for a new way of being that approaches every question with a visionary angle that embodies the intricacies of our humanities first.
2) Intention on design: One key skill that continues to be overlooked by especially HR leaders is design thinking. Some part of this we attribute to being bogged down by operations and other to not fully grasping the realities of tomorrow. If nothing else, the pandemic and its socio-economic and socio-cultural impacts have demonstrated our joined fragility in light of one another and our undeniable interconnectedness to the broader system. It is a beautiful cross over we find ourselves in because the kind of design questions we sit with and the kind of choices we make today will surely determine the course of entire generations’ lives, livelihood and culture. Despite the common narrative, we believe we do have the necessary tools and resources at our disposal to make the necessary constructional shift. We can turn our head away from the responsibility or own the decisions to create necessary conditions for others to live better, work better and socialize better.
3) Fully automated: During last year’s trends analysis, we mentioned accelerating technology and robotics. It is no longer about acceleration, as broadly discussed in the WEF 2020 Workforce report, automation, change management and on-going system optimization efforts and investments in tandem with the COVID-19 is creating a double disruption scenario for our workers. It is highly recommended, where it is possible, that organizations not buy off the shelf technology solutions but create customized ones in house through integrated user view to drive sustainable solutions that compliment team competencies and enable agile development of organizational capabilities forward.
4) Data as a friend: The adoption of cloud computing, big data and e-commerce insights remain high priorities for business leaders, following a trend established in previous years. According to Mercer Global Talent report, HR had quadrupled its use of predictive analytics from 10% use in 2016 to %39 use in 2020. In addition, there is an increasing interest in encryption, nonhumanoid robots and artificial intelligence to leverage better science. Though the data is largely better valued, the challenge continues to be how to harness the insights necessary to drive the desired differentiated experience and decision making. We find that the majority of organizations fail to consider to what end they are cultivating data for. Understanding key and ethical drivers to harness data will provide better insights to inform holistic decision making.
5) Energizing experience: Experience is about organic interactions that activate memory and lift up energy sources. Inside work cultures, where zoom fatigue is a diaspora and boomerang employees are inevitable, our workforce is aching for better trust, cohesion and values sharing. This is not about creative job titles such as Head of Hoopla, Data Sense-Maker, or Flash Team Designer, this is about how people approach life moments and how they show up differently through new mindsets. We encourage organizations to go beyond science and help people better integrate and embrace their full being through arts, poetry, slam and social conditions.
Inevitably, no one really knows how our work and work experience will continue to evolve. Right now, many of us feel like we are learning the art of sailing through unknown waters. Yet, let us remember the fact that something that is hard to pinpoint or quantify doesn’t make it less important. The lack of equanimity, the inequity, the disparity many experiences is real. The need to evolve the current capitalist economic model is real. The predicted world resource, climate change issues and the need for sustainable goals are real – just like predictions around the pandemic were…
As soft as it may feel for those of us focused on numbers to reimagine the future, it is one of the hardest acts today. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom” said once Ursula K. Le Guin and “some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality” wrote Patti Smith. This is the moment of choice and action; otherwise, it just becomes another of the past. Letting our intuition to guide the way, focusing our people and organizations around choices made, sensing decisions by science, enabling holistic well-being to energize the collective soul we share is the most crucial success in a post-pandemic world.
