RULE #4

4

CONSIDER TECHNOLOGY AN ENABLER AND DISRUPTOR

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

—Kurt Vonnegut¹

A New Age of Technological Disruption

The term consumerization of IT is now fully entrenched in the workplace. It was coined back in 2007 by Intel’s CEO to describe how IT technology adoption was being driven by consumers, not by enterprises. For many workers, especially those who work remotely, being able to work on your own device became a game-changing remote productivity tool. This has in turn spawned the “consumerization of the workplace experience” where employees are bringing into the workplace not merely one but a host of technologies such as smartphones, tablets, fitness trackers, smart glasses, smart watches, and, most recently, augmented reality applications.

As consumer technologies move inside the workplace, they significantly impact the employees’ overall workplace experience. Technology enables companies to deliver a transformational employee experience, one that enables employees’ communication and collaboration, enhances their productivity, advises their data-driven decision making, and even disrupts their individual job descriptions.

Staying ahead of the technology curve has never been more difficult for corporations. Figure 4.1 highlights the transformative impact of technology to enable, enhance, advise, and disrupt our workplace experience. We raise four questions to highlight the key technology drivers converging to create an unprecedented opportunity to transform the workplace experience for both employers and employees:

Figure 4.1 Technology is radically transforming our workplace experience

•  Enabler. How do we enable our work flow?

•  Enhancer. How do we enhance our capabilities?

•  Advisor. How do we make better decisions?

•  Disruptor. What roles will be disrupted and automated?

Enabler of Our Work Flow

Communication Is More Interactive and Visual

Communications at work have become “omnichannel.” New forms of communication are being deployed to better suit evolving work habits. Polycom, the videoconferencing company that for years created videoconferencing technology aimed at organizations with large formal conference rooms, now recognizes the need to adapt to very different work patterns. Michael Frendo, Polycom’s executive vice president of Worldwide Engineering, shares this about the evolution of his company’s products: “We have now assumed usage is in small huddle rooms so we are building new videoconferencing technology with background noise cancellation and increased mobility to ensure that they are useful for those working in huddles. In addition, we are seeing a huge trend toward video communications, especially among Millennials, as active users of FaceTime, Skype, and Google Hangouts, they are bypassing audio communications and going right to video for all types of needs from group collaboration to coaching and mentoring.”

Communication Is Morphing into Collaboration

One company that has explored how to best use technology for both communications and collaboration is Atos, a French IT services firm. In February 2011, CEO Thierry Breton announced a company vision of zero e-mail. Jean Corbel, the global chief change officer at Atos, and his team set out to make this a reality. Corbel says that Atos first looked at what its employees used e-mail for, and then the company identified how it could replace e-mail with other collaboration tools such as Skype for Business, knowledge management tools, or the firm’s internal collaboration portal to share content, ask questions, and search for answers to business issues.

“Collaboration is not an end. It’s a means for something,” says Corbel. “For us, it’s a means for more innovation, closer contact and bringing more value to the client. My value, and my pride in working for Atos, is to collaborate with our employees and our clients. If we work together as a team, we win in the marketplace. So when we launched a new collaboration platform as a substitute for email we invited employees to set up a collaboration space on this platform, populate it and start using it with their team members.”

The company’s experience has shown the benefits of shaking up a traditional technology. Atos has reduced e-mail usage by more than 80 percent. As Corbel says, “We found many benefits of decreasing email, especially in making institutional knowledge sharable so it no longer sits in private email inboxes.”

The number of collaboration and video tools available to workplaces today reinforces this need to rethink how we work differently today and to consider integrating consumer technologies into our new work flows. Gartner predicts that by 2018 over 50 percent of team communication will be done through the use of tools and apps.² The sidebar lists the top collaboration tools being used by businesses today that you should be familiar with and explore for your organization.

10 Top Collaborative Workplace Tools

1. Salesforce Chatter. Social collaboration and file-sharing service

2. Cisco Spark. Online rooms with group messaging, content sharing, video calling, and desktop sharing

3. Google Hangout. Communications platform including video chat, instant messaging, and VoIP

4. IBM Connections. Social software, real-time social communications, content management, and file sharing

5. Jive. Collaboration tool with a user-friendly interface

6. Microsoft Lync. Instant messaging and audio conferencing designed to integrate with Office 365

7. Slack. Real-time team messaging, archiving, and search

8. VMWare Socialcast. Collaboration platform with social networking and video and content management

9. Cisco WebEx. Online videoconferencing, meetings, presentations, and webinars

10. Microsoft Yammer. Private social network for employee collaboration

Digital Motivation Is Fostering Engagement

As communication in the workplace morphs into team collaboration, we are seeing a new way to motivate employees, called digital motivation. The term digital motivation (also called gamification) refers to using technology to digitally engage and motivate an audience. Digital motivation takes the essence of game attributes—such as fun, play, transparency, design, competition, and, yes, addiction—and applies these to a range of real-world processes inside a company from recruiting to learning to career development. As Brian Burke, vice president of Gartner, says, “Digital motivation today is being used by mass audiences but is gaining traction for internal usage in an organization.”³

Digital motivation inside companies can be a powerful way to motivate employees to learn new skills. Digital motivation can also help engage and source new employees. PwC wanted to see if it could use digital motivation to more fully engage job candidates at the firm’s Hungarian location. It turns out that job candidates were passing through the PwC website quickly, often spending only 10 minutes or less. PwC believed a more engaged candidate pool would yield better candidates, resulting in workers who would stay on with the company longer after they had been hired.

PwC turned to a serious game called Multipoly.⁴ The game allows job candidates to see just how ready they are to work at PwC by placing them on teams and presenting them with business problems similar to those they would encounter on the job. After a simulated job interview, candidates can try out roles such as consultant, senior consultant, and manager. Job candidates tap into their business acumen and digital skills to play the game. Noemi Biro, PwC Hungary’s regional recruitment manager, shared that candidates who played Multipoly were better prepared for live face-to-face interviews because the game “pre-educated them about PwC and its vision, services and the skills they will need to succeed on-the-job.” Biro reported that job candidates with Multipoly experience found onboarding at PwC easier, as they had already experienced PwC culture through the game. As a recruitment tool, Multipoly proved to be a huge improvement over the PwC career page. Rather than just skimming the PwC career site for 10 minutes or less, job candidates spent as much as 90 minutes playing Multipoly. Since introducing the game, PwC reports that the job candidate pool has grown 190 percent, with users reporting interest in learning more about working at PwC having increased by 78 percent. Finally, job candidates who were hired after playing Multipoly made the transition to a full-time employee more easily because they had a taste of PwC’s culture from playing the game.⁵

Digital motivation is also being used to train current employees. At Verizon Wireless, Lou Tedrick, vice president of Learning & Development, and Pete Beck, director of Learning Technology, identified a sizable business challenge where digital motivation can be applied: reduce the training time and gamify the learning experience for Verizon Wireless retail store representatives. Tedrick and Beck saw that retail store representatives faced an average of 12 new phone launches (e.g., new smartphones or tablets, pricing, promotions, systems enhancements) each month. The amount of knowledge they needed to retain was huge. This is compounded by the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, a neuroscience phenomenon where information is exponentially forgotten from the time it is consumed if there is no attempt to retain it.⁶

Armed with a business plan for addressing the high volume of phone launches, Tedrick and Beck’s team—working with an internal lean six sigma group and external consultants—created a gamified learning experiment called Burst and Boost. First they split one store’s retail representatives into three groups: a control group, a Burst group, and a Burst and Boost group. The control group was trained on a tablet launch using standard paper-based training and performance support tools for a total learning time of 20 minutes. The Burst group received similar training but in the form of video bursts on a smartphone for a total of 6 minutes. The Burst and Boost group also received training in 6-minute video bursts as well as boosts—a mix of learning reinforcements that included multiple-choice questions, open questions, and polls asking, “What is your favorite aspect of the phone?” “What is your favorite video?” and “What is your favorite feature on the new smartphone?”

When the researchers compared knowledge retention among all three groups, they found the Burst and Boost group retained 50 percent more information than the control group and Burst-only group, in considerably less time, resulting in more time selling and an estimated savings of $5 million across Verizon Wireless retail stores. Tedrick and Beck felt the key here was the gamified “boosts” over a period of two days, two weeks, and two months where retail store representatives were asked to continually think about the new phone and share personal stories about the phone. Tedrick recaps with this: “We found the key to knowledge retention is to have the retail store representatives make a personal connection with new knowledge over a 60-day period, thereby leading to increased knowledge retention, shorter time in training and overall savings.”

Finally, digital motivation can be used to drive innovation by embedding it into a company’s training program. Booz Allen Hamilton embedded digital motivation into its training program targeted to firm data scientists. Rebecca Allegar, digital strategist, shares the rationale for developing this: “What we know about online learning is that it is often a lonely experience and leads to low retention and engagement among learners. Also we observed that learning to be a data scientist often came from multiple learning vendors and this was often designed as a mix of online and in person experiences, done on an employee’s own time” in addition to juggling multiple client engagements.

The solution was Tech Tank Stadium, an online learning experience that included several components, such as change management (why the Tech Tank Stadium was important to an employee’s career development), incentives (tangible and intangible rewards for participation and accomplishment of goals), and design thinking (understanding the psyche and need to form a network among other learners). The Tech Tank Stadium has proven successful in two ways. First, data scientists enrolled in and completed the learning program. But more importantly, because the digital motivation promoted teaming, the participants developed relationships that continue to this day. The new data scientists continued to engage with each other following the completion of the program to share insights, questions, and challenges they are having at work each day. For those in learning and development, this is a pinnacle of achievement: creating the serial learner, who completes learning and continues learning and networking with like-minded employees to help increase their performance on the job each day!⁷

While the audiences vary, digital motivation is a proven engagement methodology that is reshaping many workplace experiences for the mutual benefit of both worker and employer.

The Appification of Work is Intensifying

We now live in an app economy. Apps have become the primary way we interact with each other, work, learn, and play. More companies are creating proprietary apps and opening up their own corporate app stores. Enhanced security, greater productivity, and ongoing access to learning and development are the primary motivators.

After realizing the influence that consumer apps were having on its largely millennial, mobile workforce, Cognizant Technologies decided to “appify” many of its work processes and create its own corporate app store. “There was this huge disconnect we were seeing in the workforce,” says Shanthy Ghosh Roy, head of Learning & Development for North America at Cognizant. “Our employees could easily access what they needed on social channels but at work people were spending needless hours updating timesheets, looking for learning & development programs, and updating their performance goals.”

After Cognizant understood how wide the gap was between the personal lives of Cognizant’s employees and their work lives, the executive team devised a plan to appify many of the Cognizant work processes. The key was to have each app do a few actions well, from simply booking a conference room to being part of a series of apps to complete complicated work flows such as coordinating an employee’s move to an overseas office.⁸

“We suddenly realized that even if we had all of the requirements to build an app store this would be a long term project. So we decided to solve this problem through crowdsourcing,” explains Ghosh Roy. She continues: “Essentially our HR department aligned with our marketing messaging which is focused on leveraging social, mobile, analytics, and cloud to solve business problems. We asked ourselves: If we are looking to provide instant, intuitive and easy access to our work processes, what will it take to do this in Human Resources?”

The solution was to create a corporate app store. Other tech companies such as Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and GE all have their own enterprise app stores. One of the biggest benefits to having an enterprise app store is the enhanced security it provides. By keeping all the apps used in the workplace in one manageable place, a company can secure not just its own files and data but also those of its employees.

Ghosh Roy further explains: “Next we asked ourselves, ‘Why does one single team have to be responsible for deciding which apps the company should create?’ So we decided to crowd source with our associates the development of new apps. We started with active involvement from our CIO who presented us with a challenge: Can we create 1,000 apps in a year? We had such an overwhelming response from all of our associates across all functions of the company that we exceeded this goal and crowd sourced 1,000 apps within 8 months. The apps range from expense account reporting, time sheet reporting, accessing our Learning Management System as well as coaching and mentoring, all available to be accessed by all Cognizant associates.”

Ghosh Roy concludes, “Thinking about the future of HR, I can see using apps for a range of associate engagement functions such as accessing training programs, coaching and mentoring.”

App usage will get a further boost in coming years. Newer platforms such as smart watches and other wearables, connected TVs, virtual and augmented reality, home Internet of things, automotive and global smartphone growth will more than double the installed base of app-capable devices by 2020.⁹ What will you appify?

Enhancer of Our Skills

Wearable technologies are transforming the workplace experience. Wearable technology is changing what we know about workers, how work gets done, and how skills are built. The spectrum of wearable technology at work has rapidly expanded to now include:

•  Quantification and measurement

•  Implantable and ingestible

•  Strength and endurance

•  Augmented reality

•  Virtual reality

Quantification and Measurement Is Leading to the Quantified Employee

Technology is becoming ever more personal, smaller, and more powerful. We’ve evolved from computers that filled entire rooms to desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and now wearable and ingestible devices to track health, wellness, and productivity. Just as mobile phones did over the past five years, wearable devices are now entering the workplace en masse and in multiple formats.

One early approach that has emerged at the forefront of adoption is integrating fitness trackers into the workplace, as employers and employees use them to motivate healthier habits at work. Amy McDonough, vice president and general manager of Fitbit, says, “The CEO of one of our clients, Houston Methodist, actually published his step count, and asked everyone who worked for the hospital to try to beat it.” The hospital also learned through employee surveys that Fitbit users who have at least one friend with a Fitbit get 27 percent more steps than those who don’t, so the hospital subsidized the cost for not only its employees but also their spouses or partners. “In the end, 90 percent of employees participated in the corporate wellness program and averaged 16,000 steps per day,” says McDonough.¹⁰

Fitbits go beyond encouraging healthy behaviors. They can improve office culture by getting teams to meet their fitness goals together. And as reported in Fast Company, Fitbits are also reducing healthcare costs.¹¹ Appirio used data on an opt-in basis from employees and was able to shave 6 percent off its annual healthcare bill. Beyond the wellness outcomes, employee engagement has also increased. Workforce health is not widely recognized to be among the top drivers of productivity or performance, but most leaders believe health is a significant contributory factor.¹²

Improving safety and data collection are further drivers for deploying wearables in the workplace. Healthcare, military, and industrial employers stand to benefit the earliest. Wearable devices now track the position of employees or soldiers, providing real-time data about their location to remote data centers. Wearable devices are also used to track biometrics such as heart rate, blood pressure, and hydration of workers. To improve safety, Rio Tinto truck drivers in coal mines in Australia have been wearing a SmartCap, a baseball cap with sensors to detect how alert the drivers are, and provides a warning when drivers become too tired to drive.

Future wearables will integrate so closely with fashion, you will not be able to tell the difference. Companies like Hexoskin, OMsignal, and AiQ Smart Clothing are creating biometric garments that measure our bodies’ vital signs. Adidas has embedded sensors into the jerseys of sports teams to provide coaches with data on location, heart rate, and movement of the individual players. In the not too distant future, technologists anticipate wearables hidden in contact lens, , maybe even inside the rings or pendants we wear around our neck, to measure our biometric data and our activity levels and proactively prompt us to seek a qualified medical diagnosis.¹³

Implantable and Ingestible for Convenience and Diagnosis

Finally, while it may seem futuristic and concerning to some, implantable chips and ingestible sensors are also being piloted today. Epicenter, a coworking space in Stockholm, has introduced implantables.¹⁴ Workers at the facility are able to get a communications chip implanted into their hands by a piercing specialist. The chip then allows them to swipe into offices, register loyalty points at retailers nearby, and access the work gym.¹⁵

Technology is now legally ingestible. Moving beyond wearables and implantables, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already approved the first use of an ingestible sensor as an aid to measure medication adherence.¹⁶ Researchers from MIT discovered a way to create an ingestible sensor that can monitor vital signs from inside the gastrointestinal tract.¹⁷ While ingestible sensors are being designed primarily for clinical monitoring and diagnosis, they also have the potential to first show up in the workplaces of military personnel or professional athletes.

Strength and Endurance are Enhanced by Mechanical Wearables

According to the 2016 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index,¹⁸ “Overexertion involving outside sources ranked first among the leading causes of disabling injury” in the workplace. This “event category” includes musculoskeletal injuries and disorders that result from carrying heavy loads and costs U.S. businesses $15 billion in direct outlays annually. Companies are now deploying robotic exoskeleton suits, boots,¹⁹ powered gloves, and other hardware formats, all designed to allow people to lift heavy loads safely and provide enhanced lower-exertion mobility.²⁰ Exoskeleton wearables change who can be hired for manual work (especially in industries expected to experience labor shortages such as construction and agriculture). These wearables reduce work injuries, and provide enhanced on-the-job aids to make repetitive assembly-line work easier.²¹

Augmented Reality Is a New Reality

Augmented reality (AR) augments workers’ senses. AR devices project a visual digital overlay onto a real physical scene through some form of display capability, usually hand held or head mounted.²² The most widely covered AR device was the commercial deployment of Google Glass, which, while released to developers and early adopters, was not given wide release. AR technology is still in its early stages, and the possibilities for the application of augmented reality in the workplace are vast. Significant early successes are taking place in warehouses where stock pickers use augmented reality technology to process shipments and products faster and with fewer errors. Many companies are developing AR devices for enterprise use, efforts hastened by the greater availability of higher wireless broadband speeds. Greater awareness of AR has been further fueled by mobile AR games that blend digital and real-world play. Recall how Pokémon Go, became a viral global phenomenon with 30 million downloads within two weeks of its July 2016 release date with high levels of average daily engagement time (over 48 minutes per day) by its players.²³ Now imagine if you could replicate this level of engagement and excitement over a new hire onboarding or a leadership development program? This will be the next frontier of AR in the workplace as organizations proactively integrate this new form of user interface into training and development and importantly, provide prospective new hires with a glimpse into the workplace experience their brand is known for in the market.

More elaborate augmented reality devices, such as the DAQRI smart helmet, use ultra-accurate sensors, photography, video capture, and augmented reality to precisely inform workers of their surroundings, providing a truly augmented contextual awareness experience.²⁴ A newer version of the DAQRI helmet includes an x-ray function that allows the wearer to look into the workings of objects using a real-time overlay of information. This enables maintenance workers to see exactly where an object is broken, and how they can fix it, without even opening it up. These types of AR-enabled devices will change the way jobs are carried out in many different industries and significantly lower the number of years of experience required by technicians to be fully productive in the field, opening up a wider pool of technical job candidates who can be trained in real time to perform their jobs.

Virtual Reality Enhances Job Skills

Prepare for workers wearing immersive headsets. Virtual reality (VR) is a fully immersive digital experience. The goal of VR is “to engage a user to interact with a simulated auditory, visual and kinesthetic environment as if it were real.”²⁵ Virtual reality enables users to navigate different digital environments. VR headsets are rapidly becoming less expensive, more practical, and better suited to an emerging role in the workplace. VR technology is ideally suited to encourage users to experiment within the digital environment. The year 2016 was the breakout year for virtual reality, with Oculus Rift VR, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and Google Daydream all enabling quality virtual reality devices and apps on the market. In the workplace, Volvo was an early adopter of Microsoft’s HoloLens to enhance collaboration work between its auto design team members. Tilt Brush from Google was one of the better early apps that drove consumer awareness for VR.²⁶ The top 10 VR platforms and headsets are listed in the sidebar.

Top VR Platform and Headsets

1. Google Cardboard. VR platform developed by Google ²⁷

2. Microsoft HoloLens. Developed by Microsoft Corporation

3. Samsung Gear VR. Developed by Samsung Electronics in collaboration with Oculus and manufactured by Samsung

4. Oculus Rift VR. Developed by Oculus VR, Oculus Touch

5. HTC Vive. Developed by HTC and Valve Corporation

6. PlayStation VR. Developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment and manufactured by Sony

7. Google Daydream. VR platform developed by Google²⁸

8. Sulon Q. Designed by Sulon Technologies Inc.

9. OnePlus Loop VR. Developed by OnePlus

10. OSVR. Open-source virtual reality developer ecosystem with open-source headsets by Razer and Sensics

Some jobs are now literally a game. Job Simulator is the flagship VR game developed by creative games studio Owlchemy Labs. The Job Simulator game envisions a world in 2050 where robots have replaced humans at all jobs. Players are encouraged to “step into the Simulator to learn what a job, such as an office cubicle worker, gourmet chef, automotive repairman, or convenience store clerk was like.”²⁹ In each game, a player operates from the enclosed space of the job (cubicle, kitchen, garage, or store counter) and interacts in a satirical and fun way with many of the objects commonly found in those workspace environments. The Job Simulator VR experience was made available for the HTC Vive, Oculus Touch, and PlayStation VR platforms and has received early accolades as a fun, immersive workplace experience environment.

Job Simulator illustrates the potential of VR to simulate serious work environments for immersive training purposes. Imagine a new-hire onboarding experience where the new hire accesses a VR experience before joining the company. She could experience the corporate campus by walking through the hallways and into various buildings, meet the avatars of her leadership team, listen to different team members interactively describe what they are working on, and learn about the company’s business and culture by engaging in meetings and online training scenarios all experienced within the VR environment.

The potential to rapidly train workers to perform more complex tasks is astonishing. VR training improves retention, removes the logistical issues of organizing in-person training sessions, and lowers maintenance on actual equipment traditionally used for training purposes. The role of a trainer will be redefined as immersive tutorials tap a multidisciplinary team of video and subject matter experts to create the AR experience. New augmented virtual reality applications raise the potential levels of all employees and should be experimented with for many workplace situations. Make an effort to experience AR and VR soon and imagine the possibilities for your immersive future workplace experience!

Advisor: Applying Technology to Make Better Decisions

Technology is driving better business and people decisions. Recruitment, goal alignment, and operations efficiencies are among areas where organizations are applying technology to inform decision making.

With hiring, many organizations have still to apply the proven capabilities of hiring analytics. A National Bureau of Economic Research study³⁰ found that using analytics leads to better hiring decisions. The research highlighted how the more hiring managers disregarded the advice of the algorithms, the shorter the period of time an employee stayed at the company.

Just as performance management has gone from a closed-door, once-a-year process to being more frequent and transparent, so have goal setting and performance feedback. Goal setting and performance feedback can be accessed online through the web, a mobile device, or even a smart watch, allowing all to see overall goals and how they fit into them. John Chu, vice president of Global People Operations at App Annie, a 450-person mobile app analytics firm, shares how his firm is starting to use OKRs (objectives and key results). According to Chu, “We realized we needed a transparent and consistent way to align the goals of our leaders to the overall company goals as we grew across 13 countries and multiple cultures. We started with sharing the overall company goals and then implemented a phased approach empowering our top 60 leaders to share their objectives and key results with the rest of the company. This not only led to greater transparency but also increased accountability as our leaders shared their goals with the department and the enterprise. While it’s too early to capture hard business results, we can see how increasing transparency and accountability leads to greater cross collaboration and improvements in employee engagement.” Chu is implementing OKRs in the HR department to establish a great place to work, an overall company objective. The sidebar shows how OKRs are applied to HR team members!

OKRs at a Glance

App Annie Company Objective:

•  Establish a great workplace for great people

HR Goal:

•  Improve employee engagement

HR Results:

•  Improve employee engagement score to 7.4 (75^th percentile among benchmarks)

•  Implement skip level meetings across all levels, all regions

•  Complete global manager training in Q1 with 100 percent participation

•  Implement flexible work arrangements in the Americas

Source: App Annie

Technology is also being used to implement operational efficiencies. Using badge swipes, a financial services firm established where and how often employees were moving around the office, and by using meeting invite records the company was able to tell exactly how many meetings employees had, how many participants on average were in each meeting, and whether attendees were internal or external. With this information the company was able to prevent a 20 percent overbuild of facilities such as meeting rooms and offices, a substantial saving on real estate costs. Collecting this type of data from devices employees are comfortable with, such as swipe cards and mobile devices, has become much easier, but, and this is key, there are limits to collecting such data for optimizing workplace efficiencies without employee knowledge. We have seen data collection on employee activity done best when organizations transparently communicate a policy of what data will be collected, how, from what employee activities, and for which decisions.

Disruption and Automation—Exponential Growth Ahead

Every job will be impacted by technology. The increased usage of technology has the power to create new jobs, reshape existing jobs, and in some cases eliminate jobs entirely. Research from the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report predicts that over 5 million jobs will be lost by 2020 as a result of developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technological changes. A study completed by the Martin School at Oxford suggests that 47 percent of jobs are at high risk of being replaced by technology in the next one to two decades. The study “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” evaluated 700 jobs based on the skills and education required for each and then weighted them according to the likelihood that they could be automated. The result: all 700 jobs were ranked from low-risk occupations (recreational therapists, emergency management directors, and healthcare social workers) to high-risk ones whose more repetitive tasks (library technicians, data entry operators, and telemarketers) make them more likely candidates for partial or complete automation.³¹

But while much media commentary has been on job elimination due to technology, not enough focus has been on how technology will disrupt and at the same time augment jobs. Chatbots are one example of how bots are “botifying” the workplace. A chatbot is an artificial intelligence computer program designed to simulate a conversation through written or spoken text. At Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Hipchat, workers are interfacing with chatbots to help get tasks done. Facebook’s AI virtual assistant called M can make restaurant reservations and complete other tasks that combine AI with a team of “trainers” and customer service experts to ensure M is performing each task requested of it.³² Microsoft has a chatbot for employees called ADbot that mines the corporate directory for information for answers to any number of queries. The goals for these bots are to “make internal employee communications faster, easier, more fun and in turn save money.”³³

A new breed of mobile intelligent assistants such as Google Assistant,³⁴ Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana, Apple’s intelligent assistant Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa have also entered the workplace. As more developers build bot interfaces that respond interactively to human dialogue, the botification of the workplace will exponentially expand and allow knowledge workers to work smarter. These bots powered by machine learning have the potential to enhance our current jobs and augment how we learn, communicate, and mentor colleagues.

Now, take the example of journalism, where reporters have forever felt safe that their daily tasks couldn’t be automated, given the amount of creative thinking that goes into their work. Today, journalists can tap into algorithms behind Narrative Science and Automated Insights, two firms that leverage machine learning to write an article in a matter of seconds. The first reaction from a journalist could well be one of panic—will this automated writing software take over all journalism jobs? The answer is clearly no. Journalists are still needed for tasks involving more complex stories, and robots are unable to seek out and interview people, write captivating articles, or turn a phrase in an entertaining way.

What the technology does do for journalists, however, is free them up to write more exciting and challenging pieces of journalism. If a computer program is writing the initial report on a company’s end-of-year financial results, it frees the journalist covering that company to focus on analysis and follow-up articles.

The Machine Knows Best

At the top of the artificial intelligence hierarchy is IBM’s Watson. Watson is an extremely advanced piece of intelligent assistant technology distinguished for being able to answer questions posed in natural language. Watson entered the public imagination in 2011, when on the quiz show Jeopardy, it beat two former winners to claim the first place prize of $1 million. The system’s ability to take a very human question and return highly accurate and detailed answers suggests it is capable of supporting many client-facing roles. Watson is now commercially available to support AI-enabled decision making across multiple industries, with particularly noteworthy performances in medical diagnosis. When asked if Watson would soon eliminate the need for frontline call center workers, Dr. Bernard Meyerson, IBM Fellow and chief innovation officer at IBM, responds, “Think of Watson as the backup to the client facing humans. We’ve not yet seen as much work elimination as we are seeing client satisfaction rise.” Meyerson’s view is simply stated: “Human + Machine is working best at this time.” However, he continues, “In the long term there is no doubt that the simplest queries will be handled by machines.”³⁵

Avoiding the Technology Skills Gap

For younger workers starting out in their career, how can they ensure against technologically induced unemployment? The advice from the Martin School at Oxford University is this: develop skills in creativity, social intelligence, and perception and manipulation as these will be the ones least likely to be disrupted by technology. These jobs require skills in consulting, negotiating, critical problem solving, and influencing of others. AI is not yet a match for the empathy that is so relied upon to engage and connect with our fellow workers.

Contrary to media headlines focusing on jobs that technology will eliminate, jobs are constantly being created by new technologies. Thomas Davenport, a professor at Babson College and a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and D. J. Patil, a data scientist at Greylock Partners, declared data scientists to be one of the sexiest new job roles of the twenty-first century.³⁶ Separately, a World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs also identified “data analyst” as one of the two roles that stand out most, based on the frequency and consistency with which they were mentioned across industries and geographies. “The second is the specialized sales representative, as practically every industry will need to become skilled in commercializing and explaining their offerings, whether due to the innovative technical nature of the products themselves, or to their being targeted at new client types with which the company is not yet familiar, or both,” the report stated.

In discussions with clients and academics, Future Workplace captured 20 job titles that now exist across multiple industries that did not exist 10 years ago (see the sidebar).

20 Jobs That Did Not Exist 10 Years Ago

Jobs Leveraging Soft Skills

1. Chief employee experience officer

2. Chief gig economy officer

3. Community manager

4. Director of corporate storytelling

5. Director of employee wellness

6. Learning experience manager

7. Manager, contingent workforce

8. Millennial generational expert

9. Social learning manager

10. Workplace strategist

Jobs Leveraging Hard Skills

1. Chief digital officer

2. Cloud computing services analyst

3. Cloud services specialist

4. Data scientist

5. IOS android developer

6. Market research data miner

7. Recruiting scrum master

8. Ruby on Rails web developer

9. Social media expert

10. User experience designer

Source: Future Workplace LLC and Digital Marketing Institute

But what does all this mean for the future workplace experience? Regardless of industry, technology is enabling, enhancing, advising, and disrupting jobs. The most important lesson for HR professionals is to stay on top of these technology shifts in order to avoid the dreaded skills gaps that leave people and technology underutilized. If employees are undertrained and unable to take full advantage of the current technologies within a company, the benefits of that technology decrease significantly, and the employee is no longer capable of achieving maximum potential at the company. If technology is underutilized, then so are employees, and this can lead to an erosion of resources, morale, jobs, and ultimately efficiency. For these reasons, it’s important we keep our companies and employees on the right side of the continuous technological evolution by ensuring they are at least fully trained to work on the technologies already within our organization.

The best way to predict the future is to create one for yourself!³⁷ We need to push ourselves to master the technologies available to us in our workplace and encourage experimentation with new technologies. To understand the impact of technology on the workplace experience for ourselves, our teams, and our organization, we must be committed to continually experiment with new technologies and ask ourselves, how can these be used to deliver a transformational workplace experience?

MY ACTION PLAN

Myself

•  How could I avoid being disrupted in my job?

•  Who could introduce me to new apps or technology that could I use to improve my productivity?

•  What do I need to learn to be prepared for intelligent technologies in the workplace?

My Team

•  What technologies and wearables should we be experimenting with next year?

•  What new technologies did we pilot in our workplace in the past year and with what results?

•  What intelligent technologies (apps, wearables, AI, Internet of things, machine learning) can we envision being used inside our organization and for what purpose?

•  How could we push further on reshaping our work behaviors using technology?

My Organization

•  How could we use technology to make better business decisions?

•  What roles are prone to technological unemployment in our organization over the next two to three years?

•  What roles will be enhanced or created because of the new technologies we are bringing into the organization? What new job roles will technology create in our industry?