The Future of Work

Changing times. And new technologies

If we think back, or hear stories of our parents and ancestors working tough jobs for long hours and with relatives from pit communities, in sometimes challenging conditions! we immediately thank our lucky stars those days are over. But should we…. I’m not suggesting we reopen the pits or workhouses, but let’s look at the changing culture of work we are currently living through..

Depending on your age, you may recall a time when your sat nav system was a box of paper maps in the boot of your car, or a print off page from AA Autoroute, or the early luxury of a Tom Tom sat nav app for an early mobile PDA. Like your Sat Nav, how we access our email has progressed from a fixed office PCs to a heavy but portable laptop with two factor authentication password devices allowing you to work almost anywhere. And we can’t reference any work technology history discussion without mentioning the ‘game changing’ RIM BlackBerry, the device that changed the way we viewed email and our working hours forever ...and here starts my devils advocates challenge on our current work life and work life balance. This device in many respects brought massive value to UK business.

I was one of the first people in the UK to have a blackberry device and wore it ‘in its hip case holster’ with incredible pride.

And here is how it changed the game and set out what is now our normal working world.

We became always on, previously leaving the office was just that, leaving the office. The blackberry allowed you to take it everywhere with you and with that work anywhere and more importantly, any time.

The hook of this always on was a 'drug' to us and we became addicted very quickly. The growth and demand in the early days was outstripping supply. They couldn't manufacture them enough in the early days to meet demand.

Over time the novelty wore off a little and new devices were introduced and emailing out of hours became the norm for us all. We move from emailing on the sofa to stealing an hour on the sun lounger while on holiday to ‘ check in’ ! Our lives where massively transformed as a result of this little device.

But now lets balance this view. The above feels a little negative, like the little devices invaded our lives for the negative and in a way I guess it did to some degree, but with any major change, in any revolution, there will always be both pros and cons. Sure life changed and while it happened subtly, its resulted in a big change to our working lives.

Now let’s consider the benefits and the first one is for me the biggest and most positive change to date.. Flexible working.

To many the very mention of the words, Working From Home, fills people with dread. Visions of a late start in their PJ’s followed by a long lunch, a few beers in the afternoon and a few pals popping round to catch up…

I’m sure this has and does still happen to some degree but for many of us flexible working has meant something very different. Its allowed us to use the travel time to catch up on our unmanageable inboxes, its allowed us a chance to share the responsibilities of a family with school run duties and taxi services to sports clubs and associations etc. Also its provided us with clear thinking time and space to be creative in our roles. My planning time at home is often what keeps me focused on the business goals and our plans on track.

As time has progressed Flexible working is now a critical part of many peoples lives and i personally couldn't take a role that didn't offer this as part of its standard offering. Also, thanks to technology we can work more flexibly now than ever before, we have solutions that allow us to call, video chat, collaborate in real time and even immerse ourselves in the same Virtual world thanks to VR solutions.

The office really is now everywhere and thanks to technology the world is now a much smaller place.

Sure we’ll still travel and we’ll still meet up, its nice to do both! but in balance and the time saving and work life balance benefits our little connected devices now brings us should never be overlooked.

I now want to highlight two future trends we are likely to see on the back of flexible working technologies

Ai Project Software & Gig Economy

Firstly, Project allocation and roles and responsibilities will change. Ai will begin to enter the workplace and provide some amazing solutions we didn't know we needed. The main one will be around project allocation Ai software. This will work by placing a project in a portal (like MS Teams) and then allocating roles and responsibilities to a team. The software will then set the owners task automatically and provide reminders and prompts to individuals and notify when others have completed tasks they are dependant on. The owner of the project can see a flowchart view of whats on track and what's not and again will be notified of progress or issues proactively. A key feature of this is that we can then allocate certain tasks to the crowd of Gig Economy workers or other people in our own organisations.

Secondly, The Gig Economy is a separate chapter in this blog (coming soon) so i wont go into too much detail here, but to say there is an army of workers out there that are incredibly well skilled in all manor of areas of expertise and happy to bring their support to you via Gig Economy arrangements. They may be on bringing up a family, caring for someone, suffering from ill health, between jobs etc etc, but whatever the reason, they are happy to support your project at a time that suits then and in return save you critical time in the process. Services like Mechanical Turk have built a massive community supporting every possible type of organisation you can imagine from, designing a logo’s to number crunching in Excel or proofreading text. If we consider this growing industry and our earlier point of flexible working, again technology is to thank for bringing these industry revolution services to the fore.

I’ll speak for us all ‘ we work very hard ‘ but thanks to technology we already work smarter and in the future we’ll work even smarter still.

Upcoming Blogs on ‘The Gig Economy’ , ‘My Ai Co Worker’ & ‘The Future of Education’