Future of Work January 2019

GETTING EMOTIONAL Why it’s okay to bring your feelings to work

SELF-CENTRED What big businesses can learn from the self-employed

BALANCING ACT Why it could take another 202 years to close the gender pay gap

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skills gap THE FUTURE OF WORK How adopting a better working environment can help companies attract and retain the best employees

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Solve the digital work crisis.

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Don’t worry – a robot takeover of the workforce won’t be happening any time soon OPENING SHOTS JOANNE FREARSON

T

ECHNOLOGY IS altering the way we work, and tasks once performed by human beings are now being done by robots. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation are making companies more efficient, productive and reducing costs – but what sort of jobs does it leave we humans to do?

Research by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has forecast that by 2025 machines will perform more current work tasks than humans – 71 per cent of tasks are performed by humans today.

Every industry and sector is likely to be impacted by this shift.

Already, in the retail sector we are seeing chatbots act as customer service agents or AI monitor stock in warehouses. The automotive industry is using artificial intelligence in the development of driverless cars, while in the legal profession machine learning is being used to analyse documents.

Some commentators

have even suggested a “robot apocalypse”, where workforce automation will make working humans quite literally redundant.

Is this a genuine concern? Not according to the WEF, whose research predicts that, while some 75 million human roles will be displaced by automation, 133 million new ones will emerge to take their place.

But what will these jobs look like? According to the WEF, positions that will be in demand include data analysts and scientists, software and applications developers, and e-commerce and social media specialists. Sales and marketing professions, innovation managers and customer service workers – roles that require human skills – will also be very much needed.

The skillsets most experts agree machines won’t be taking over any time soon are the ones that require emotional intelligence – or “soft” skills. People that have good communication, teamwork and

“The skills most experts agree machines won’t be taking over any time soon are the ones that require emotional intelligence” critical thinking abilities will be very much in demand.

The more monotonous, routinebased jobs such as data entry, accounting and payroll will continue to decline, with the WEF study projecting that 54 per cent of the workforce in large firms will require reskilling or upskilling.

As well as these new roles, the way our current jobs are structured will also change. The World Bank’s report The Changing

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Nature of Work suggests there will be an increase in non-traditional jobs and gig economy or contract positions.

Employees are more likely to have more flexible working hours and remote working will increase as technology increasingly enables us to do our jobs from anywhere with a broadband connection.

But for all this upheaval to be a success, the common thread in research is that companies will have to invest in their staff and retrain them in order to meet the new demands of these jobs of the future. Presently most companies are falling short on reskilling and need to put more investment in this area if we have any chance to succeed.

The robot revolution might not take the form we think it will. But it is coming, and to be more efficient and productive companies will need to think about ways to enable humans to get on with the more creative, soft-skilled side of working life.

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JOANNE FREARSON

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OMPANIES ARE turning towards artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their critical processes and make things simpler and more efficient.

But how is it really helping them?

“From wearable devices to chatbots, connected appliances to autonomous vehicles, we live in a world where machines are getting smarter every day,” says Steve Newton, executive vice president UK at Worldpay.

“Technology has become embedded into every aspect of our lives. Brands are only just beginning to scratch the surface with AI, but as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will become another way for businesses to gain advantage in multiple areas of operation.”

One of the reasons why brands have been embracing technology in the workplace, Newton explains, is to improve the customer journey and experience.

Research carried out by Gartner indicates that 81 per cent of businesses will compete mostly on customer experience over the next two years. “Brands that offer a hyperpersonalised experience through the use of machine learning and predictive analytics will be the ones that stand out from the crowd,” says Newton.

In the retail industry, which has been struggling of late from poor sales, AI, he points out, has been used to improve customer satisfaction and drive more detailed sales insights in e-commerce. “If businesses can make changes to better serve customers, this can help generate more loyalty and in turn revenue,” he says. “On the operational side, AI will help to streamline and speed

Why tech is the gamechanger for companies AI and machine learning are making firms more productive.

So what’s behind this change, and how is it helping companies connect better with customers? up day-to-day operations, predicting and preventing problems before they occur.

“Businesses implementing the technology successfully are likely to have the potential to reap the rewards of cost and efficiency savings, allowing the opportunity for growth and expansion. Anything that reduces day-to-day life admin and menial tasks for time-poor consumers has the potential to succeed.”

By using technology to improve the experience for customers, companies are changing the way people work and how things are traditionally done. A store of the future, Newton explains, could see the traditional checkout process removed entirely, while retail robots could be on hand to answer questions and take payments.

Or in a restaurant, food could be preordered via a chatbot and customers could pay through invisible payments technology without having to interrupt a staff member for the bill. “Reducing these delays would remove two of the major friction points in

the customer service journey, and allow waiting staff the time to deliver a worldclass service,” he says.

“It makes sense for businesses to automate mundane tasks to enable staff to focus on adding value through great customer service. That does not necessarily mean fewer staff, but freeing up time for workers to directly help customers.”

Companies are already beginning to do this. For example, Amazon and Walmart have both been rolling out robots across their fulfilment centres, while robotic catering has already become a reality at the Henn na restaurant in Japan’s Huis Ten Bosch theme park.

But Newton warns that brands need to strike the balance between technology and the human touch. “Ultimately, human skills remain essential for many tasks, making the marriage between humans and machines vital to success,” he says. “Robots will not replace workers, but jobs will evolve to focus on more skilled, creative and complex tasks.”

JANUARY 2019 Publisher Bradley Scheffer | Editor Joanne Frearson | Production editor Dan Geary | Head of production Maida Goodman Sales director Paul Aitken, | Campaign directors Adam Robins, Thomas English

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UK facing workforce shortage as foreign worker numbers fall T “It has been 70 years since the UK experienced such severe workforce shortages” – Gary Simmons, Mercer

HE UK could be facing a workforce shortage of 1.9 million by 2025 if labour demand continues to increase at the same rate as the last ten years, according to HR consulting firm Mercer.

The Mercer Workforce Monitor found the shortfall in workers was being exacerbated by a sharp decline in the number of foreign-born workers, as the impact of the Brexit vote begins to be realised.

There was a fall of 93,000 EU-born workers and 38,000 non-EU born workers in the UK between quarter three in 2017 to the same period in 2018. This was the fastest rate of decline since records began in 1997.

The rise in job vacancies was also the highest since 2001, at 845,000 for August to October 2018, up by 44,000 from a year earlier. There were also 43,000 fewer people looking for work as the unemployment rate remains near record lows.

But the Mercer report showed businesses could bridge this shortfall by implementing measures that tap

non-traditional labour sources as well as embracing diversity.

“It has been 70 years since the UK experienced such severe workforce shortages,” says Gary Simmons, partner at Mercer. “With Brexit and the ability of the UK government to restrict immigration from the EU, businesses must act now to address the impending labour shortage.

“Plugging the gap is not going to be easy, but it is achievable. Creating a workplace appealing to all, irrespective of age, gender, sexual orientation, disability and ethnic background are a business necessity.”

Based on research across underrepresented groups in the workforce, including people with disabilities, older and female workers, the Mercer study showed the UK workforce could rise by 1.8m in 2025, if these untapped talent pools were utilised.

The report found that by using older employees, the workforce could increase by 900,000 in 2025. The state pension age is gradually rising and the number of older workers is set to increase by 14

per cent by 2030, while under-30s will decline from 25 per cent to 23 per cent, making retaining and attracting older workers key.

Hiring workers with disabilities could add 475,000 to the workforce if measures were taken to increase participation.

Over the past five years, the number of people with disabilities in the workforce has increased from 51 per cent to 56 per cent, an increase of 817,000.

Although female participation in the workforce has increased from 60 per cent to 66 per cent over the last ten years, strategies to increase participation by a further 5 per cent by 2025 would add an additional 400,000 workers.

“Businesses have the power to create a positive vision for the UK workforce by truly embracing diversity and putting the necessary steps in place to foster a more inclusive workforce and culture,” says Simmons.

“Clearly government policy will play an important role, but it is incumbent on businesses to take the necessary steps themselves and reduce their over-reliance on traditional talent pools.”

Choosing your own hours? For many businesses, it’s the future of work F OR YEARS, only very brave or confident job candidates would dare ask an interviewer about flexible working.

Historically, the option to work from home or choose when you came into the office was restricted only to the most senior employees, as it meant compromises. Managers couldn’t keep an eye on their teams, collaboration and bonding became more difficult, and productivity likely to suffer.

Enquiring about flexible work might have led to an employee being perceived as demanding, or less of a team player.

Fast forward to 2019, and the main reason candidates don’t ask about flexible working is that they no longer need to. Suddenly, businesses aren’t just allowing their employees to choose how and where they work, they’re proactively advertising the options. In fact, this year’s LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report revealed that the number of global job posts shared on LinkedIn offering flexible working have increased by 78 per cent over the last three years. In all, 64 per cent of talent professionals in the UK say their company offers some flexibility to employees, 28 per cent only offer it in special circumstances, and 8 per cent don’t allow it at all.

“The main reason candidates no longer ask about flexible working is that they no longer need to”

So what’s changed? The same report offers some important clues. It shows how a gap in the supply of key digital skills is forcing businesses to overhaul their working culture and make full-time employment more accessible for additional types of talent.

As a result, choosing your own hours is no longer something associated only with the “gig economy” or freelance work. Taking up a more traditional role might well make it easier to find the right work-life balance.

The most obvious cause of businesses’ change of heart on flexible working is that

the people they need to hire are increasingly demanding it. LinkedIn’s data shows that between 2016 and 2017, flexible working jumped from being the 13th most important factor for LinkedIn members considering a new job to the top six. People with in-demand digital skills know they now have negotiating power and expect to be offered flexibility as an option. If a recruiter instead says they need to seek approval from an HR manager, that counts against the business. Those essential digital skills are likely to go somewhere else.

But the value of flexible working isn’t just in helping businesses compete for in-demand

candidates. It also increases the supply and diversity of people who might be right for a job. Mothers off work after having children, parents with partners in full-time employment, those with health problems or disabilities, or who live in remote, rural communities: all are valuable sources of in-demand skills, provided there’s flexibility about how and when they work. In a world of instant messaging, video conferencing and collaborative working tools, many of the downsides of flexibility can be overcome – only around 10 per cent of talent professionals now say flexibility hurts productivity.

A more diverse workforce doesn’t just give a business more hiring options. In fact, our 2018 Global Recruiting Trends survey shows that 62 per cent see it as a factor in boosting financial performance as well.

Businesses are making diversity a priority for their talent strategies. That has to involve diverse ways of working.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Jon Addison is head of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn UK Download the LinkedIn 2019 Global Talent Trends report at https://lnkd.in/gtt19

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The missing key: how agile culture unlocks successful transformation D

IGITAL TECHNOLOGY, including AI, automation, big data analytics and faster communication, is causing rapid change to the world we live in. Consumers want customised products, a seamless experience across all touchpoints, and instant access to information. As a result, organisations are finding that they need to reinvent themselves to keep up with these new demands made by both their customers and their employees.

As a result digital technology can also bring major disruption to established markets and organisations. New products and services, powered by new business models and agile development processes, emerge regularly and rapidly. And driven by technology, consumer expectations are constantly changing.

The competitive nature of commerce has intensified. To keep ahead of the game, businesses need to transform themselves.

However, transformation is never easy. And technology, while essential, is never a complete solution. As John Edmonds, PPM portfolio development manager at AXELOS Global Best Practice, says: “For successful transformation to occur, organisations need to address the human factors that run alongside technology, ensuring that organisational culture promotes change and that the end user’s experience of using technology enables them to work effectively and without frustrations.” All too often though, these human factors are ignored.

of communication and break down hierarchical “silos”.

96%

• Plan to be flexible. At the heart of agility is an adaptable mindset that recognises the need to change plans frequently according to changing context.

The percentage of global organisations that believe in some form of transformation… but only 47 per cent believe they can extract the value from a future transformation initiative

• Deliver iteratively and incrementally by breaking work down into short bursts with frequent monitoring and feedback. By aiming to deliver something of value as early and as frequently as possible, an organisation becomes far more resistant to being disrupted.

Source: KPMG Global Study 2016

• Measure the value being delivered. Transformation is not an end in itself: companies change in order to deliver better value to their stakeholders. That value needs to be quantifiable to demonstrate the success of the transformation.

Any guidance designed to help organisations embrace change successfully must have a number of attributes: • It must guide its users towards a longer term viewpoint of the market, from different perspectives including competitors, regulators and customers.

• It must enable employees to speak the same business language so they can approach problems in the same way. Achieving this will involve the sharing of best practice across departments and business units.

Communication An essential part of any organisation is the communication between people. Many organisations are hierarchical in how they communicate to staff. Information goes from the top down or from the bottom up.

But it rarely goes sideways, from department to department, or team to team.

This means valuable insights about what is working well within an organisation is lost. As a result, working practices stagnate. And when a sudden change to day-to-day routines is forced on employees, without justification, they are unreceptive. The ability of managers to locate and share knowledge to support change is crucial.

Agile working practices Companies that disrupt industries such as Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Innocent Drinks or Netflix, are highly agile. They have seen how an emerging technology has created an opportunity in a market sector and have used that technology to create a point of difference. Larger, older, slower companies find that point of difference hard to challenge, especially when it involves a totally new way of doing business.

Agility is a critical element of commercial success. Many companies have some experience of agile working, but this knowledge is often locked away in isolated teams or departments who have used a specific agile delivery approach. Taking the knowledge of good practice around agility and sharing it across an organisation is essential.

Transformation through people Communication, agility, and the recognition that transformation only happens through people: these are the building blocks of a successful organisation. That’s why companies that focus too heavily on technology are likely to fail to transform themselves.

“It’s people who have to work with technology and implement it,” John Edmonds of AXELOS points out. “It’s people who have to seek out information, such as the best way of bringing a product to market or the best way of automating a factory. It’s people who have to use the technology they are given at work.”

That’s where products such as AgileSHIFT from AXELOS show their strengths. AXELOS, a global joint venture company between the Cabinet Office and Capita, was created in

2013 to further develop and manage bodies of best-practice knowledge, the more wellknown ones being ITIL®, MSP® and PRINCE2®. Last year, AXELOS created AgileSHIFT to encourage all areas of an organisation to be more agile and to create a culture of enterprise agility.

AgileSHIFT is a guide to help organisations adapt and thrive in this rapidly changing world.

It is useful across all functions of an organisation, from finance and HR to operations, sales and marketing. The framework helps organisations transform by addressing human factors and helps ensure everyone in an organisation has a baseline knowledge and skill-set that helps them to work in an agile way.

There are a number of practices that AgileSHIFT suggests be encouraged to foster agile ways of working. These are: • Actively and continually engage with all stakeholders, so that everyone develops a sense of being part of a change, not a subject of it.

• It must be pragmatic – useful and easy to use, supporting innovation, giving people not just knowledge but the ability to share and discuss knowledge, and to develop new ideas based on that knowledge.

“Digital disruption is a threat to any organisation, large or small,” Edmonds explains.

“And the dangers of not defending against disruptors are major ones: loss of market share, the inability to maintain profit levels, a long-term slide in share price, and ultimately, commercial irrelevance.

“In contrast, organisations that embrace change by ensuring they support strong cultures of innovation, agile working practices and the ability to share and develop knowledge will not just survive: they will thrive in an age of rapid change.”

Technology may be an enabler of commercial success, but it’s people who will make visions of digital transformation come true.

INDUSTRY VIEW

• Build collaborative, cross-functional teams in order to create effective channels

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Reading the runes: why data science is key to the modern workplace As technology changes the way people work, finding employees who can make sense of the limitless data it generates is becoming increasingly important…

find out quickly if a potential new product is viable.

“In a space of a few hours [a developer can] actually come up with a minimum viable product to either prove the theory or kill the theory,” says Abel.

“What you can now do in a couple of days is something in the past would have taken months or years. The likelihood is that business demands will need to be done quicker. They are going to need to pivot more often or they are going to be disrupted themselves.

“What we are seeing is that the time-tovalue [ratio] is a lot shorter now, and the time to invest to get value is a lot lower.

[Businesses] don’t want to put money on the table so early. They want to do things faster than they ever did before.

“If it comes to the point where you have to build a business case and go to a board to get funding, you have probably missed the point of innovation.”

A

UTOMATION AND AI in the workplace are increasingly enabling machines to take over the repetitive tasks long performed by human workers. And as technology changes the way organisations work, the vast amounts of data this technology generates are a resource with huge potential.

“The biggest asset on your book going forward is data,” says John Abel, senior business director of Oracle Engineered Systems at Oracle EMEA. “If you look at the value of any company in the world now, it is [tied to] the way they use data. The highvalue companies are data companies.”

Abel sees data scientists as increasingly valuable assets to business. As companies harvest more and more data, people who can understand that data can help a company innovate quicker and provide “light-bulb moments” by being able to tap in and see what the data means. The greatest value lies in employees who are able to understand the fundamentals of what a business does today and what they can do tomorrow, then pivot the company in the right direction.

Working smarter

Can data be faked?

But there is still a lot to learn about the data these technologies produce, and there has been criticism it could be subject to human bias in the workplace, or even be tinkered with – after all, AI systems are ultimately trained by humans. “How do we know the data going into AI is good enough data that the outcome is a truthful?” Abel says.

He has spent a lot of time trying to address these worries through The World Bee Project. “We were looking at whether the honey from a hive is the honey that the bee keeper provided to the shop,” he says. “Is that the same honey that originally started in that hive, or has it been tampered with?

“You want to say data X goes through process Y and comes out as data X and we know it is the same stuff. That is the holy grail of data ingestion – as the volume of data increases the ability to spot anomalies gets much harder.

“People don’t realise this, but honey has a formulation which tells you the hive that it came from. We are starting to use IoT sensors [which can transfer data over a

network] in honey to determine the matrix of honey to make sure humans can’t tamper it, or use human bias to say it was from this ‘special hive.’”

Abel believes that if companies use IoT sensors alongside blockchain technologies – where everything is recorded on a network and nothing can be changed unless all computers agree – for security and AI when running their data systems, these problems can be overcome.

“Companies that have those DNAs in their profile – from source to usage – will become much more valuable going forward, because they have a chain where they can prove the data that entered is the data that came out,” he says.

The price of being left behind Although there is a still a lot to learn when it comes to introducing these technologies into the workplace, Abel points out that if companies do not bite the bullet, they will face being disrupted by their competitors.

“If it comes to the point where you have to build a business case and go to a board to get funding, you have probably missed the point of innovation” – John Abel, Oracle

“What we are now seeing is much more volatility in the world today,” Abel says – pointing out that, traditionally, going into a downturn would automatically spell a period of reduced innovation spend and a general focus on cost reduction.

“You can’t do that anymore,” he cautions.

“You have got to innovate and you have to be optimising. You have to do both. You can’t just stop. The minute you stop innovating is the minute you could be disrupted.”

But by using AI and automation technologies, companies can innovate quicker and

As more and more companies embrace AI and automation, people’s roles will also change. Abel views this as a natural evolution of the workplace – pointing out that many jobs we do today didn’t exist 20 years ago.

“The people before me never had machines,” he says. “They were doing everything in paper format. Every generation has had a chasm to cross, and once it is crossed things are disrupted. Some jobs are lost, but others are created.”

Employees need to be multi-skilled in different areas of the business instead of just be expert in one thing, he explains. But Abel dislikes the term “reskilling”, as he thinks the focus should be on continual learning in the workplace.

Although AI is more efficient at undertaking repetitive tasks or logic questions than a human, he is yet to be convinced that a time will come where the creative parts of a human brain can be replicated by a machine. “[What AI] has not yet done is what humans are very good at, which is creativity,” he says. “Where there are no set rules AI isn’t very good– it can’t just come up with a light-bulb moment.

“Everybody’s brain is different – the way they answer problems. If it is a creative problem the way you answer might be very different to me. If it were a logical mathematical problem, we both would probably come up with the same answer and take the same steps to get it.

“But if I gave you a picture I might say it is a dog and you might say it is a cat. The human side of our creative mind is very hard to replicate with machines.”

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One more time, with feeling: why it’s okay to get emotional at work We spend nearly half our lives working, yet feelings in the office are still seen by some as taboo. Business Reporter investigates why the future could be emotional…

“W

E OFTEN forget we are humans,” says Mollie West Duffy, over the phone to me from New York. “We have feelings all the time and yet between 9am and 5pm we don’t supposedly have them.”

Duffy, who’s promoting her new book about emotion in the workplace, No Hard Feelings, is referring to the tendency to act like our emotions don’t exist once we step inside our place of work. Although it’s popular to think a stiff upper lip may get you further ahead in the office, Duffy thinks it is more likely to lead to poor decision making, lower productivity and health problems.

Duffy, who co-wrote the book with illustrator and design consultant Liz Fosslien, knows this from personal experience. Both women were diagnosed with work stress-related health problems after they started their careers, by keeping their feelings locked in.

Emotional decision-making Research shows, Duffy explains, that decision making in the workplace is based on our emotions whether we are aware of them or not. “Decision making we think of as something completely rational, yet the science proves that it is not completely rational,” she says. “The best thing we can do is try to become a little more aware of how our emotions are affecting us.”

One emotion Duffy believes we should be paying more attention to at work is envy. People don’t often pay attention to this emotion, says Duffy, as there is a stigma around it, but its usefulness lies in the way it can tell you what you wish you had.

Duffy also recommends honing into anxiety and regret when making decisions. People should

“We have feelings all the time and yet between 9am and 5pm we supposedly don’t have them” – Mollie West Duffy

ask themselves how they would feel if they didn’t make a decision in a month, five months or a year from now. If they feel regret, it indicates that perhaps more importance should be placed on that decision.

Excitement is another emotion to keep an eye on – a wave we might want to try to ride out before making a decision. We might make decisions to hastily if we only use excitement as the gauge, Duffy explains.

Emotions are infectious But whether they’re positive or negative, we should pay attention to what our emotions are telling us at work. “By ignoring our feelings at work, we are overlooking important data and risking preventable mistakes,” says Duffy. “If you are ignoring how you feel and how others feel, you might send out emails that cause unnecessary anxiety. Your work is not going to be as meaningful if you are not opening up yourself to that side of yourself.”

Duffy, whose regular job is as an organisational designer, believes that as our jobs become more collaborative, complex and stressful, it will be our emotions t hat w ill help us nav igate the changes. Emotions are so powerful they are contagious, she tells me. “This has actually been proven: that emotions can go viral,” she says. “There is a study that shows that if I have a nasty co-worker and I get grumpy and I go home irritated because of this and snap at my husband, he can actually catch my bad mood.

“If he then goes to work the next day grumpy, he can then put his colleagues in a bad mood.

One bad attitude from a colleague can spread to other colleagues.”

If you’re feeling down, Duffy recommends taking a short

Below: Mollie West Duffy, co-author of No Hard Feelings

amount of time out to do the things you need to do to get yourself back on track.

When it comes to difficult conversations about problematic issues in the workplace, Duffy believes it is important not to rush into them. Rather, wait until people are calm before having a conversation about how the situation made you feel. She points out difficult conversations should not be avoided completely as this denies all parties the opportunity to improve the situation.

Not everyone feels the same way It’s also vital to be aware that everyone has a different communication style, Duffy says, and to take into perspective things such as cultural background, gender, age and levels of introversion or extroversion.

“All these can make a huge difference in how we communicate,” she says. “Gender stereotypes can hurt women. If women speak with confidence they are often told they are being aggressive and if they don’t then they are told to be more confident.

“Women [often] try to avoid being aggressive. So they use qualifiers. Women say things like ‘I am not certain’, or use hedging words like ‘might’, ‘but’ or ‘I think’, and frame requests as questions, whereas men tend to dominate the conversation by talking over each other.”

She advises women to lean into that confidence, and avoid questions, hedging words and other deflective strategies. Men, on the other hand, should refrain from talking over people, and give them credit for the things they say.

Emotions and the bottom line Studies have also found that organisations where compassion and gratitude are encouraged don’t tend to have a high staff turnover. From the point of view of savings and productivity, Duffy says there is a good argument for firms to focus on emotional wellbeing.

Research has shown the most ruthless hedge fund managers brought in less money than those that didn’t have this attitude.

People who have rude or aggressive bosses also have a harder time retaining important information. This is likely to lead to bad decisions.

“When we feel like we are supported by our colleagues we tend to stick around longer and we were better able to cope with job stress and were better employees,” she says.

But there is still a lot to be done for the workplace to really embrace emotions. Over the last couple of decades, Duffy points out, the focus has been on emotional intelligence. But most of the research on this until has been on emotional intelligence for leaders, ignoring the possibility it might be useful for every employee. This seems crazy, says Duffy, who believes this type of training should start the moment people begin a job.

There are a lot of benefits to be had by embracing emotions at work. They are something organisations need to recognise and understand, as if they don’t they risk not only damaging their staff’s wellbeing but also the bottom line.

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What big business can learn from the self-employed Is working for a gigantic conglomerate or scaling up a business the key to a fulfilling career, or could staying small be the answer?

T

HE FOCUS of most big businesses is normally growth, increasing profitability and improving productivity. But does this endless pursuit always square with the people who work for these companies, and who want to pursue the careers and lives they aspire to?

In the UK, the trend is growing towards selfemployment. Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed 15.1 per cent of the workforce (4.8 million) in 2017 were self-employed, compared with 12 per cent (3.3 million) in 2001.

Self-employed tech designer and internet consultant Paul Jarvis, who swapped a successful life in the big city to live on a remote island in Canada, does not think big business growth is all that it is cracked up to be.

Jarvis – who has worked with high-powered clients from basketball player Shaquille O’Neal to big corporates such as Microsoft, MercedesBenz, Yahoo and Warner Music – ditched the corporate world because he got tired of the pressures of growing his successful business bigger. “Being big is more fragile than people think,” says Jarvis, whose latest book Company Of One, questions the endless growth rates businesses aspire to. “It is because being big requires a very growth-focused business. It requires more resources, more moving parts, more everything in order to be sustainable.”

Does being bigger make you happy?

Speaking to Business Reporter over the phone from his Vancouver Island base, Jarvis says that although growth is important initially to get your company up and running,

Business Reporter UK

Below: consultant Paul Jarvis traded in a life in the city to live and work remotely in Canada.

His book, Company Of One (inset), is out now

constant growth isn’t necessarily a good thing. If his business became larger than it currently is, “I don’t think I would be happier,” he says. “I would probably be less happy because it would take more time. It would be more stressful, be more responsibility, as I’d have to hire more people.”

For Jarvis, a successful working life is making his business profitable enough so he can go about pursuing the meaningful pleasures in life, and have the life he wants.

He believes smaller businesses can be more resilient than bigger ones, because

Humanising technology is the future

A

S WE embark on a journey that will be dominated by artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration will put into focus what being human really means. This is a question that we address at LiveTiles every day, where our mission is to humanise technology. In doing so we want to seize the opportunity to help create an ethical framework for AI. Our position is a positive one: to embrace AI and shape it as a force for good, especially for the future of work, where it is likely to have the most immediate impact. AI has the power to relieve people from menial work, and to carry out tasks at greater speed, scale and accuracy than can currently be done by humans.

AI is outperforming medical consultants in diagnosing cancer, and in the field of autonomous driving it has the potential to save more than 1.3 million lives lost to road accidents every year.

This incredible, transformative opportunity needs to be embraced for the good of all people.

But what about the millions of people around the world who are earning their salaries from the jobs that AI will

replace? AI represents the fifth industrial revolution, following in the footsteps of steam, mass production, personal computing, and the current era of digital transformation – all of these “revolutions” have been disruptive, and all have led to both the disappearance of some jobs and the creation of new ones.

The work of a data scientist, for instance, didn’t exist ten years ago, yet this job is now indispensable across a range of industries, because digital transformation brings with it the ability to generate and convert data into fresh insights and new opportunities.

We need to discover the sweet spot between human and machine collaboration. At LiveTiles we find that one of the sweetest spots is empowerment: putting the tools and capabilities into the hands of employees so they can be more engaged, collaborative and productive.

One of our developments, for instance, is a customisable virtual assistant, or chatbot. People with no engineering skills can now create their own bots. This can be a real gamechanger, not just in terms of productivity but also in terms of stimulating and democratising innovation.

Digital transformation, after all, is essentially about people. Business leaders must engage employees in AI and identify how it can bring value to the workplace.

Starting with easy wins, such as a simple chatbot solution to get people comfortable with human-machine collaboration, is a smart move. This will set the scene for the successful transition to AI where it is perceived as beneficial by staff members and customers alike.

Looking into the future, AI is going to drive granularity when it comes to business goals and delivering personalised experiences. It will escalate the importance of return on experience (for users and customers) as the true indicator of business success.

The opportunity exists today to help build an ethical framework for AI. You don’t need a degree in computer science to draw up an AI strategy. Watching from the sidelines as others shape the future of AI and is not an option. Now is the moment to build the future.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Karl Redenbach (inset, left) is CEO of LiveTiles +353 851 866 914 www.livetiles.ai

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they require fewer resources and have much more autonomy in decision-making processes.

“I can just make decisions and run with them,” he says. “I can run a business with very simple rules, processes and solutions. It is easy to make sure things are running right. I don’t need to have an idea, then pitch it in a meeting and then have another meeting about the first meeting and run it by a board of directors.

“If I make my business as simple as possible, and because it is small I will do that, it is easy to keep track of [and] make sure things are running

right. I don’t need to run a whole bunch of reports to see if things are profitable, I just need to check a few places. If we work for ourselves and not for somebody else, we are able to make the rules as they relate to the direction of our business.”

Technology and the self-employed The growing trend towards self-employment, Jarvis believes, has been fuelled by advances in technology. The internet has made it relatively cheap to start a business, and people no longer need to be in an office to work, or invest in

expensive systems to set up a business. “In the same amount of time it takes to write an email to you, I can write an email to 30,000 people on my mailing list,” he says. “I can reach people who live all over the world. I can get replies from all of them and have conversations with them, or I can put something on social media that reaches more people than just setting up a shop in my local town.”

Jarvis reckons big business can learn a thing or two from the self-employed. He’s not suggesting everyone becomes an entrepreneur, but thinks big corporations can become more agile and lean if they try to apply a more “self-employed” mindset.

“To run a small business out of a house, it requires almost nothing to be profitable – and profitable businesses are sustainable,” he says.

Even by giving employees more flexibility in their hours or place of work, says Jarvis, could prove very beneficial to any business. “The more a boss gives their employees autonomy and the ability to make their own decisions, the more employees will feel ownership of their project,” he points out. “They are going to do a better job.

[Businesses] will get higher-quality work.”

But Jarvis admits that, for a corporate giant, change can be scary, and not all big companies want to give their employees such freedom. Many have hierarchical corporate structures where decisions are long, drawn-out processes. For these companies, he suggests, small steps are necessary to illustrate the benefits.

“Maybe an employee can have one day a week of flexitime where they could work from home, where it does not matter what time they start as long as they do the work,” he says. “Maybe an

employee works better in the morning, then takes their kids to the pool in the afternoon and continues working in the evening. They still get the work done, but they have more autonomy over their day.

“If a manager sees that, hey, this is actually working, my employees aren’t just lollygagging [being idle] around town or posting on social media all day, bosses would be more inclined to give autonomy to their staff.”

Will small be the next big thing?

As technology continues to evolve and people can work from anywhere, Jarvis thinks more and more big companies will be hiring staff with similar traits to those that are self-employed.

“If a corporate wants to retain the workforce – especially a younger workforce – then it will have to look at the traits of being a company of one,” he says. “Bosses will be more inclined to want to give autonomy to their staff. That is going to retain them more. Nowadays people want to feel fulfilled in their work, and if a corporate job isn’t giving that to them they may start to look elsewhere.”

Another skillset big corporations are looking for that’s second nature to the self-employed is problem solving. “The reason I make money in my business isn’t that I can do tasks,” he says. “It is because I can solve problems for businesses and solve problems in a way that is valuable enough for them to want them to pay me money.”

The way we work is inexorably shifting towards a more dynamic, flexible model, but it’s one that larger companies might do well to pay heed to if they want to attract and retain the best people.

How to ensure remote, flexible working benefits the bottom line

W

HETHER IT’S on trains, in airport lounges, at home or in a café, for a growing number of people “the office” is wherever they happen to be.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 54 per cent of office workers are now allowed to work remotely, with 30 per cent feeling that this ability increases their productivity.

It might be convenient, but does remote working really let people work as effectively as in a traditional office? Some degree of background noise can be good for creativity, research shows. But beyond a certain volume it becomes disruptive. Other distractions and a basic lack of essential facilities and support can also hinder effective working.

This has an effect on productivity and, ultimately, on profitability.

But beyond offering the basics, it’s also important to choose somewhere for your remote workers which reflects the values and corporate image of your business – and it was this that gave Adam Blaskey the idea to launch The Clubhouse. Based on the simple premise of making its members and their businesses more successful, The Clubhouse is now London’s leading business members’ club and meeting space,

“The Clubhouse is now London’s leading business members’ club and meeting space, providing a flexible and cost-effective alternative to a London office”

providing a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to a London office, with bases in Mayfair, St James’s, The City and Holborn Circus. “We provide innovative, design-led, flexible meeting and workspaces in central London created around the needs of both fast-growing SMEs and large corporates who are looking for a smarter, more flexible alternative to a London office or a better way to do business,” says Blaskey.

Business leaders across a multitude of sectors are now realising this approach to remoting working locations offers many benefits, and not just for managing physical

office space. “A growing number of the C-suite are beginning to understand that providing their staff with a dedicated, well-equipped, professional working environment – a proper London base – where they can concentrate on their tasks when working remotely is having an effect on the bottom line,” he explains.

Concerns about issues such as confidentiality when staff are working remotely, and discussing sensitive issues such as HR matters, new product development or growth plans are also growing among business leaders and boards. As such, a

professional environment is important to both improve productivity and make teams feel comfortable that they have the tools and flexible spaces they require on demand to make important, often sensitive decisions. But there is more.

“Company leaders are talking to me about the increasing fight for talent,” says Blaskey. “Many are realising that to attract, recruit and retain the best people they need to offer the growing number of their staff who work remotely a better environment than a noisy, crowded coffee shop.”

Remote working spaces and shared offices have long been associated with start-ups and freelancers. But today, clients of The Clubhouse are more likely to be faster-growing SMEs and global companies such as Tesla, BP, Morgan Stanley and BUPA. “As a business we have one aim and that’s to make our members and their businesses more successful. We provide everything a business needs without the overheads of a central London office,” says Blaskey.

INDUSTRY VIEW

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Flexible working isn’t working – yet…

Flexible working has many potential benefits for firms, such as improved productivity and employee engagement.

So why aren’t more businesses taking it up?

T

HE NUMBER of employees undertaking flexible working arrangement such as part-time working, term-time working, compressed hours and job sharing has flatlined since 2010, according to the Megatrends: Flexible Working report by the CIPD. This is despite the UK government extending the right to request flexible working to all employees in 2014. However, the report did find there was an increase in more informal flexible working arrangements, such as more people working from home on an ad hoc basis.

According to the CIPD, the potential benefits of flexible working are being missed because of unsupportive manager attitudes, limited available options and the negative assumptions of some employees about flexible working – for example, that their job may be at risk if they seek to change their working patterns.

“Providing more flexible opportunities for how, when and where people work should be

part of every organisation’s strategy to attract and retain the talent and skills they need,” says Peter Cheese, CIPD chief executive and co-chair of the Flexible Working Task Force.

“Employers need to consider, and address, the barriers holding them back from adopting flexible working practices more widely – be it entrenched organisational cultures or making sure line managers are trained to support and manage flexible workers.

“By encouraging many more jobs to be advertised as flexible as the default option, the task force is challenging outdated attitudes to flexible working that still prevail in some organisations and laying down a marker for other employers to follow.”

Since March 2018, the CIPD has been working with the government as well as business groups, trade unions and charities as part of a Flexible Working Task Force to increase the uptake of flexible working across the country.

“Working flexibly helps people to balance their work and home lives and is vital in creating an inclusive economy and diverse workforce,” says Kelly Tolhurst, minister for small business, consumers and corporate responsibility.

“It also gives employers access to a wider pool of talent and enables better matching of applicants and jobs.”

Members of the task force were also encouraging employers to advertise jobs as flexible by

using the phrase “happy to talk flexible working” in their job advertisements, regardless of level or pay grade.

According to the taskforce, businesses are losing out on many potential benefits if they offered more flexible working. These include addressing the skill and labour shortages by making work more accessible to older people and those with caring responsibilities. It could

also help women progress into senior roles more easily, potentially reducing the gender pay gap.

Other benefits of flexible working the taskforce outlined were higher job satisfaction, greater employee engagement and wellbeing, as well as improved productivity through increased employee motivation. Organisations were also more likely to retain staff and have less sickness absence.

Digital campaigns from Future of supply chains

Disruptive technologies

UK 2030

Future of banking & fintech

Employee wellbeing

Supporting SMEs

To see these reports and others, and for more information, go to business-reporter.co.uk/category/special-reports/digital-magazines

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What artificial intelligence means for the future of work “Instead of being viewed as alternative to human intelligence, AI should be thought of as a tool that augments human intelligence” – Murat Bicak, PMI

T

HERE IS no organisation, industry, or company that is immune to the effects of technology disruption, from connected devices to automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Whether it’s vehicles that gauge and react to their environment, online chatbots simulating conversation, or sophisticated algorithms that sort through massive amounts of data with unimaginable speed, the future of work is being shaped by new technologies and their promise.

AI is the technology that may well have the most impact. While AI means “artificial intelligence,” what it represents is far different. Instead of being viewed as an alternative to human intelligence, AI should be thought of as a tool that augments human intelligence. In this context, AI’s potential to change the future of work – specifically, how people view work, deploy talent, and create value – needs to be rethought and reimagined.

There is a lot of fear surrounding AI because of its presumed potential to eliminate jobs. In fact, according to a report by the World Economic Forum, 65 per cent of children now entering primary school will hold jobs that currently don’t exist. Certainly there is no question that when it comes to such tasks as processing algorithms, recognising patterns, and deep learning, computers can operate with a speed, breadth, and accuracy not matched by humans. But the idea that AI is a job destroyer is largely incorrect. To assess whether AI could replace humans at work, a McKinsey Global Institute team examined more than 2,000 different tasks that constitute jobs – an alternate view to looking at jobs themselves. Each was scored against 18 different capabilities that could potentially be automated.

The research found that approximately half of all activities people are paid to do could be automated through adaptation of currently demonstrated technologies. The research also indicated that this is unlikely to occur at this scale before 2055, pointing out various technological, societal and cultural obstacles.

But whether this happens in five years or 35 years, the real issue is what the elimination of tasks – not jobs – will mean. And it should be viewed as a positive. When machines are allowed to do these tasks, humans will have time freed up to focus on those things machines can’t do: ask probing questions, perform critical analysis, use subjectivity, think creatively, and apply emotional intelligence. By relying on machines for the appropriate tasks, humans

will have more time to focus on overcoming business challenges to drive growth.

Research from Accenture speaks to AI’s potential to boost growth. According to Accenture’s Reworking the Revolution (released in 2018), if businesses invest in AI and human-machine collaboration at the same rate as top-performing companies, by 2022 they could increase revenues by 38 per cent and employment levels by 10 per cent. Of the 1,200 senior executives surveyed for the report, almost two-thirds (61 per cent) said they expect the share of roles requiring collaboration with AI to increase in the next three years. More than half (54 per cent) said that human-machine collaboration is important to achieving strategic priorities. In parallel, 69 per cent of the 14,000 workers surveyed said it will be important to develop new skills to work with intelligent machines.

Despite leaders’ conviction about AI’s importance and employees’ belief in the need for skill development, only 3 per cent of executives said they plan to increase investment in training and reskilling programmes over the next three years. This disconnect could thwart AI’s potential as a driver of revenue and employment. Investing in skills and talent is an investment in the future. When a significant number of tasks that have traditionally been part of a person’s job can be performed by a machine,

the more accretive capabilities that an individual is hired for – critical thinking and decision making, creativity, and innovativeness – can rise to the surface.

Regarding the future of work, the focus needs to be on roles – where people are brought into a project because of a match between skills and needs – rather than jobs, where people are limited by narrow descriptions of duties. Organisations will structure themselves much more in this way, delivering value through projects that come together and disband rapidly and frequently.

People will contribute their specific capabilities to projects. Talent will be more fluid, mobile, and on-demand within organisations, with teams shape-shifting as needed to deliver specific business outcomes.

Large consulting companies, such as McKinsey and Deloitte, already work exactly in this project-oriented manner. They are proof that multi-billion-dollar organisations can be as nimble and agile as start-ups in delivering value by viewing strategy through the prism of projects.

The nature of projects and programmes themselves is changing and will continue to do so. Project managers and business alike can prepare for this change. There will be more exploratory projects requiring different methodologies and frameworks.

The project manager is going to have to rely on a very different toolbox that allows him

or her to adopt the methodology, management style and thinking most appropriate for the project at hand. Value will be created by innovation-oriented projects and transformative programmes to support not only new products but new business models.

Businesses should be thinking about how to retrain and reskill individuals for a business landscape that will continue to be transformed by AI and other technologies.

They also need to empower and encourage people to take risks, with the full understanding that when they actually go forward and test, they may fail. But through fast failure they can learn and continue testing until they find the right way to add value.

Incremental change will not be sufficient for organisations to succeed in the future, and resistance to change or an unwillingness to invest in change could prove fatal. Indeed, organisations governed by the top-down, hierarchical business models that dominated in the last decades of the 20th century lack the innate resiliency that allows them to survive something as disruptive as AI. Such organisations are unlikely to have the vision to see its potential and reap the rewards.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Murat Bicak (inset, left) is senior vice president, strategy of the Project Management Institute. For more information, please visit www.pmi.org/uk

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Bridging the talent gap in a post-Brexit world UK companies are finding it difficult to attract skilled workers, as concerns over Brexit bite. Business Reporter speaks to the CEO of Silicon Valley tech firm Pivotal about how to create a good working environment and recruit – and retain – the cream of the crop

THE BIG INTERVIEW JOANNE FREARSON

“The rest of the worlds can learn these methods. There is nothing magical or unique about Silicon Valley” – Rob Mee, Pivotal

W

ITH THEIR reputations for disrupting industries and get ting t hings done quickly, Silicon Valley companies have developed their own distinct work culture. Hi-tech start-ups from around the world have flocked to the region to gain access to talent, and learn the workplace ethos that makes these high-growth companies tick.

But do firms really need to be located in upstate California to be the next Apple or Airbnb? And can companies in the UK have the same appeal, as fears loom that Brexit turmoil will cause Britain to become a less attractive place to work?

British companies have already been struggling to fill positions. With UK job vacancies at near-record highs, the UK tech sector has been suffering from a skills shortage, and positions that once attracted a large number of foreign workers now draw in few.

The latest UK Labour Market Outlook by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and The Adecco Group found a significant drop in the number of both EU and non-EU migrants employed in the UK. So what does the future hold for attracting talent in the country?

Rob Mee, CEO and co-founder of Silicon Valley headquartered software firm Pivotal, sees huge challenges ahead. “Certainly Brexit is going to have an impact,” he says. “People can

already see that companies want to potentially diversify their concentration of people across Europe.

“That is something that concerns me. We have had access to a really diverse talent pool here. It is one of the great things about operating in Europe. For example, we do a lot of product development in Dublin and people apply from all over Europe.

That is fantastic.

“I would hate to see us to lose that here. I don’t know what exactly will eventually happen [but I] think it would be a big disadvantage to British industry to lose access to all of the talent.”

Not all doom and gloom Mee thinks Brexit will lead to companies diversifying their executive functions to other cities in Europe to a certain degree. But he does not believe they will pack up and leave the UK outright, but rather spread the risk around so everything is not concentrated in Britain.

Speaking from his firm’s London office, Mee says the UK still has a lot to offer despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit. “London has been for hundreds of years an industrial and banking centre,” he says. “It is a place where people want to live and do business. This is where technologists and creative people are working together to build next-generation software.”

And Pivotal, he assures Business Reporter, is not leaving any time soon.

“We will have a lot of customers concentrated in London for a very long time, so we are here and we will keep growing here,” he says.

“We also do have a presence in Paris and Berlin and other cities that we will likely expand to in Europe over the future. We will stay close to our customers where ever they are.”

Although mainland Europe is central to Pivotal’s plans, Mee believes London will continue to have enough gravity and activity to retain

Companies don’t have to be based there like Google (below left) to start thinking like a Silicon Valley company, says Pivotal’s Rob Mee (inset below)

companies for the foreseeable future – but he can’t say Brexit will not have an impact.

The Silicon Valley way A potential solution to the increasing talent gap in the UK, thinks Mee, could be found in creating the right workplace culture.

He believes a Silicon Valley mindset can be transplanted anywhere.

“The notion of a Silicon Valley culture is actually not restricted to a particular geography,” he says. “It can be anywhere. Silicon Valley is just a matter of state of mind. You can have that state of mind no matter where you are. It is really a way of doing things, and that can be done almost anywhere.

“The rest of the world can learn these methods. There is nothing magical or unique about Silicon Valley. It is a collaborative and creative and innovative culture and it can be established pretty much anywhere.”

Indeed, having its own roots in Silicon Valley gives Pivotal something of a headstart when it comes to embedding this mindset in its other workplaces around the world, by seeding each new location with existing staff.

Mee explains that new offices are seeded with a team of four to six, who then begin to hire from the local talent pool. Eventually the founding employees return to where they were originally based, leaving the new office composed of people who have been hired locally.

“Recently I visited Sydney, where we have an office,” Mee explains.

“They told me when I was there

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CIPD and The Adecco Group Labour Market Outlook report: key figures

70%

34%

70 per cent of employers report that at least some of their vacancies are proving hard-to-fill

34 per cent of employers have found it difficult to retaining staff over the past 12 months

48 per cent report an increase in their EU workforce expressing insecurity about their jobs as a result of Brexit

90%

26% 26 per cent of UK citizens also felt insecurity about their jobs as a result of Brexit

48%

48%

90 per cent of employers say current migration proposals will not, or only to some degree, meet their needs for low- or medium-skilled labour

48 per cent have raised starting salaries in response to recruitment challenges

SOURCE: CIPD/ADECCO GROUP

that they had just celebrated losing their first original Pivot from a different office. They were all hired in Australia.

That typically happens in most of the offices where we go.”

Pivotal’s culture, says Mee, is one of collaboration, agile working and continual learning. The company has a pairing programme where two employees from a team work together on a project. Developers, designers and product managers sit together throughout the day to learn from each other. The idea is to facilitate a faster transfer of knowledge between teams. It also enables employees to respond to changes in the marketplace quicker, and be more innovative and agile in their general approach.

“That is a very appealing workplace no matter where you are,” reckons Mee.

Learning from the past Pivotal’s open-plan London office in Shoreditch certainly gives off the impression of a place where staff members can work together side by side. There are community breakout areas, a kitchen stocked full of free food and drink and a relaxation room for staff to chill out in if they need to take a break.

When people think of Silicon Valley, Mee agrees, they tend to think of fast-moving software firms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – companies that were built on the same agile working culture Pivotal uses.

“These are methods that are optimised for a continuously changing world and continuously changing requirements,” he says.

“From the early 2000s, companies in Silicon Valley started adopting a more agile way of working, and a more experimental model of software development”

But working in Silicon Valley wasn’t always about agility and collaboration.

Originally, Mee says, software companies built everything up front. They would see if a project worked for customers after 18 months of development, to often find out it was not quite right.

As a result of these rigid systems, there was a high failure rate of projects.

From the early 2000s, companies in Silicon Valley started adopting a more agile way of working and a more experimental model of software development: the fail-fast, learn-fast mentality. “We have a hypothesis,” says Mee. “We are going to validate it to see if it true or is it false. If it’s false can we do something else? If it is true, let’s invest more. That approach has enabled software developers in Silicon Valley to start disrupting industries all around the world.

Mee points to this as the point of divergence, and that the reason the big Silicon Valley companies that emerged from it have been so successful. “They have adopted a much more scientific, a much more evolutionary model of software development,” he explains. “It is very disruptive, and allows them to move much more quickly and challenge established industries.”

And the rest of the business world has finally started to catch onto this way of working, says Mee – not just start-ups or the technology companies.

Pivotal is seeing its larger customers also adopt these modern software development techniques.

“The fact that the world is recognising that this is actually the way that software development needs to be done is fantastic,” says Mee. “There is definitely a movement that is ticking over to the mainstream.”

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Keeping humans in the loops “The work we do will be different in the future, but a world where all the work is done by machines is a recurring, wrongheaded fantasy which resurfaces at moments of great technological change”

T

HE FUTURE of work is at the heart of every major socio-economicpolitical debate raging around the world today. Whether it’s about Brexit, border walls, migrants landing on the beaches of Southern Europe, or the concentration of wealth among the 1 per cent, all of them are really about the nature and distribution of work. From work, and what is derived from it – money – comes power.

From its absence stems powerlessness.

This long-evident truth is more relevant in 2019, precisely because people understand that work is changing more quickly than ever before. Given that the stakes are so high, the arguments are fiercer.

And the main reason why work is changing so quickly? Science-fiction technologies that are becoming more and more real: artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, augmented reality, gene editing.

Many people are excited by what they see emerging, but many others aren’t. Many are scared that what little grip they’ve had on the economic ladder is slipping...

The prevailing feeling of many is that human work is going away, that we’re all doomed. Study after study – most famously Oxford University’s 2013 report that suggested almost half of US employment is at risk of machine-based replacement – has laid out a bleak view of a post-work world.

gulf apparent to all but the most ideological of eyes. Those who have kept up with the rise of automation and arbitrage have done well. Conversely, those who haven’t have seen their share of the spoils become thinner and thinner.

Placing the means of production in the hands of more and more people therefore is the surest route to the economic efficiency that remains key, but also the social harmony that is important, to ordinary people and elites alike.

And of course, the means of production are now literally in everyone’s hands. With a smartphone, a teenager in Preston can trade Yeezys, a semi-retired teacher in Cornwall can tutor a student in Bristol, a stay-at-home mum in Coventry can sell the jewellery she makes while her baby is taking its afternoon nap. Spreading more of these type of opportunities (and the ability to create them as much as use them) into more people’s hands addresses the needs of wealth creation and wealth distribution.

The fact that these opportunities are spreading is core to our view that there is a future for human work. Of course, the work we do will be different in the future, but a world where all the work is done by machines is a recurring, wrong-headed fantasy which resurfaces at moments of great technological change.

A focus on wealth creation and distribution

The jobs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technology has clearly played a role in the widening gulf between winners and runnersup (it would be impolite to say losers), a

But how different will this work be? In our recent reports 21 Jobs of the Future and 21 More Jobs of the Future, we have laid out

some of the types of work we see emerging over the next 10 years. They range from the low-tech and semi-obvious to the hightech and hard-to-fathom. All, though, are emerging at a time when the commercial value of human skills is being radically reassessed. In considering the work of the future we have set out the Four E’s of Skills…

Eternal: some human skills emerged at the dawn of man – the skill of burping a baby, of opposing a thumb, of leveraging sticks and stones and fire, of co-operating within the group. Of adapting. No matter how brilliant our technologies become, they – and many others – will continue to be of value.

Enduring: though the bushman of the Kalahari didn’t have much call to sell things, the skill of selling has been important to man for as long as recorded time. Other such enduring skills – the skill of being empathetic, of trusting, of helping, of imagining, of creating, of striving – will continue to endure. Enduring skills are central to jobs of the future.

Emerging: new skills in the future relate to the complexity, density, and speed of work. Are you able to work with a 315MB Excel spreadsheet? Can you handle the sensory overload of a drone’s virtual cockpit?

Can you assess which Common Vulnerability Score System action you should take first – in the next 15 seconds – before the cyberperimeter is breached? Fast twitch/no blink/e-game honed/multitasking candidates apply here…

Eroding: invariably, this year’s leading-edge skill becomes next year’s commonplace prerequisite. Twenty years ago consulting firms hired large teams of slide deck designers. Nowadays, a graduate new-hire that couldn’t put together a presentation (using Prezi not PowerPoint) on day one would be viewed in shock and amazement. The list of eroding skills is getting longer by the day, and many of them relate to technology.

There’s not much call for loading film or setting up UUCP networks nowadays. If too many of your skills are on the eroding list, it should be time for a reboot.

The future of work is being reworked The fear at the moment is a product of a world changing at an unprecedented speed and of a swathe of people (not necessarily always older people) aging out of it.

2019 marks an important point where how people and organisations engage with the future of their work will determine how bright their future is. Keeping humans in the loops – not simply of a machine algorithm, as AI developers talk about – but the loops of economic and societal systems which underpin functioning societies is the great task ahead. The leaders who emerge at this moment of profound change will be those who seize the incredible opportunities new technologies are generating and who spread them as widely – to humans – as possible.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Ben Pring is director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work www.cognizant.com/futureofwork

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Inspector The Inspector is not only Business Reporter’s roving reporter, but he is the office’s only dog. His colleagues love feeding him biscuits and rubbing his belly – and so, for that matter, does he.

Taking a pet to work has many health benefits. Research has shown that it lowers stress and employees are healthier and happier if they are allowed to bring their pets to their place of work.

The Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HARBI) has reported that workplaces that were pet-friendly were 52 per cent more likely to report a positive working relationship with their boss, and 53 per cent more likely to report a positive working relationship with their co-workers.

Introverts are 10 per cent more likely to experience a lower sense of wellbeing in the office compared with extroverts, according to a study by psychometric testing firm Myers-Briggs.

The study also found that 40 per cent of executives, top executives, and senior managers leaned towards introversion.

“Our recent global wellbeing research has highlighted that when companies encourage and reward more extroverted behaviours, they do not always inspire the best performance

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in introverted employees,” said John Hackston, head of thought leadership at The Myers-Briggs Company.

“This can also have effects on their workplace wellbeing, and so it is highly important that organisations work to understand the personalities of different employees, and thus enhance their performance.”

Employees that work flexible hours are working at higher productivity levels than if they worked “nine-to-five”, research by the Association of Accounting Technicians (ATT) has shown.

A quarter of employees said they worked longer hours in their flexi routines than they did when they were shackled to normal office hours. This equated to an extra 6.7 hours more each week on average of working.

Half of flexible workers also said they could never see themselves returning to a more traditional work routine. Around 77 per cent said the option to work flexibly has encouraged them to stay at their current place of work for longer than they might have otherwise.

Other main benefits the study found of flexible working were that 38 per cent of respondents felt happier, 36 per cent had more time to spend with their families and 35 per cent felt less stressed.

talentculture.com

Meghan M Biro founded the blog TalentCulture in 2008 after stints working as a high-tech recruiter for big brands such as Google and Microsoft. She ranks fourth on the Rise Global HR Influencer list – articles on her blog cover subjects such as work culture, leadership and talent management.

HRZone

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Half of the UK’s workforce feels misunderstood by their bosses, according to research from ADP (Automatic Data Processing).

The study, which surveyed more than 2,000 workers across the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, discovered that 50 per cent of UK employees felt their employers didn’t understand them or their potential. This was higher than the European average of 46 per cent.

Around 40 per cent of UK workers surveyed were also unhappy with the quality of leadership they faced in the workplace. Around 41 per cent of UK employees felt like quitting at least every few months – significantly higher than the European average of 28 per cent.

Jeff Phipps, managing director at ADP UK, said: “If employees don’t feel valued and understood, they are far less likely to be engaged in their role and be productive in their work.

“It is always important to invest attention and effort in understanding employees.

Employers who fail to do this risk a disengaged workforce that doesn’t deliver, and potentially a high turnover of staff.”

HRZone offers advice about the workplace, guidance and opinions for HR professionals and business leaders. The content is written

by HR leaders, industry commentators and consultants and includes premium reports and research on the sector. Topics covered in recent articles include employment law, HR technology, wellbeing, diversity, training and benefits.

Gordon Tredgold

gordontredgold.com/blog

Ranked as the number three HR influencer by Rise Global, Gordon Tredgold has written for numerous highprofile publications such as Inc., Business Insider and Fortune. Recent blog posts include “Why Motivation is Not Enough!” and “How Companies Can Embrace Technology to Better Their Output.”

HR Bartender

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BambooHR (iOS, Android)

This award-winning app enables users to gain HR insights, on-board employees and customise workflows.

Yammer (iOS, Android)

Social networking app Yammer helps teams enhance communication and engagement by sharing best practices and crowdsourcing ideas for projects.

This blog, run by Sharlyn Lauby, has been rated one The Society for Human Resource Management’s top five blogs. Recent pieces by Lauby cover topics such as why business growth depends on effective talent management, and why employees should learn about happiness.

The future of work is automation. And that’s good news 77% The percentage of people who believe that automation will allow them to spend more time innovating at work Source: Workfront State of Work report

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CCORDING TO the Workfront State of Work report, which includes survey data from 2,000 UK knowledge workers annually, 77 per cent of us believe that automation will free up our time so we can innovate at work.

In light of this excitement for automation, certain solutions are quietly (but quickly!) gaining traction. Chatbots are revolutionising customer service, algorithms are changing the hiring process, machine learning is upending the way we sell, and the success or failure of marketing campaigns is tracked in real time. Even building

facilities are being managed by automation, with temperature controls automatically shifting depending on the time of day or day of the week.

Still, the situation can sometimes be daunting, as 40 per cent of those we survey say they know people who have already lost jobs because of automation. It’s clearly not a time to coast – blindly hoping that the best will come regardless of how you prepare.

Instead, it’s a time to be proactive, yet optimistic.

After all, as automation takes over more of the mundane tasks we don’t want to do, we’ll find that

we have more time for the tasks that make us human. Instead of rummaging through email or filing our 20th invoice of the day, we will be able to spend more of our time solving intricate problems, brainstorming potential solutions, and being face-to-face with each other.

Once this is the case, as so many UK workers believe it will be, we’ll find that work is more pleasant and engaging than ever.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Jada Balster is vice president, marketing at Workfront @workfront workfront.com/futurework

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16 “You can look at automation like being an assistant rather than a replacement. For example, in kitchens we have food processors – it does not remove the need for the skill of the chef” – Simon HaightonWilliams, Adaptavist

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Setting the automated Every sector, from manufacturing and finance to cars and retail, is set to be disrupted by technology – but are firms truly prepared for the change?

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UTOMATION IN the workforce is set to give employees new roles which are more creative, innovative and of higher value to companies. These jobs will be able to help firms solve problems, find new opportunities and enable staff to be more attentive to their customers.

Analysis by JPMorgan Asset Management predicts that over the next 10 to 15 years technological advances such as automation, could increase gross domestic product (GDP) by more than $1.1trillion worldwide.

But using these technologies will require investment. Companies need to update old legacy systems, put money into new infrastructure and train their staff accordingly.

A recent Future of Automation report by IT services firm Adaptavist found only 8 per cent of companies thought they had all the training, tools and processes in place.

“A lot of organisations aren’t really ready yet,” says Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO of Adaptavist. “But there is a high degree of variability around that.”

The survey also showed employees were still spending a lot of time completing tasks that could be automated, with 36 per cent spending two to four hours of their working day on manual tasks.

What do companies need to do?

Haighton-Williams believes a big part of the reason organisations have been slow to implement these types of technologies is a lack of training, and fears that automating systems will hinder regulatory compliance. The research found that 92 per cent felt more training was required before automation could take place.

In order to get businesses ready for this disruption, there needs to be a certain amount of behavioural change by employees, states Haighton-Williams. To make automation a success within a company, employees need to change the way in which they think about work.

He points out this can sometimes face resistance. “The fear of uncertainty and change is probably the biggest challenge,” Haighton-Williams says. “Businesses need to look at their culture. How they operate and how they are going to engage with

their staff and reward them for adopting this. The biggest challenge in reskilling is finding the time and the cultural space for people to do it.”

The coming changes But, he thinks, most of these concerns will disappear once the advantages of these technologies are fully understood. Furthermore, he feels that, as younger people move into management, resistance will ease, as automated technologies are already a big part of their lives.

For example, millennials are known for their familiarity with technology, he explains.

They communicate to their friends through their smartphones, listen to music by asking Amazon’s Alexa or set their lights to come on through a home-automated device. “It is a step towards a brave new future where there is an integrated computing platform, that delivers what people need on a day to day basis,” says Haigton-Williams. He believes that, as home automation becomes more popular, people will also start to see the benefits in the workplace.

But despite many businesses not being ready, the report showed they were positive about implementing automation technologies. Of respondents, 95 per cent believed it would increase productivity and 78 per cent thought that, although some jobs would disappear, they would be replaced by higher-value ones.

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stage for an future “You can look at automation like being an assistant rather than a replacement,” says Haighton-Williams. “You look at how other new technologies have been deployed. For example, in the kitchen we have food processors these days. It does not remove the [need for the] skill of the chef, it just means they can do things faster and more predictably.”

Not all sectors are behind when it comes to implementing these types of technologies in the workplace. The IT and software industries have been successfully doing it for the past few years. “The reason why IT companies are so far ahead is because people are encourage to play and explore with new technologies as part of their dayto-day job,” says Haighton-Williams.

It has turned laborious manual work, Haighton-Williams points out, which can often produce inconsistent end-results, into work that has a greater deal of accuracy and can be more efficiently produced.

“Now you can simply push a button and have a whole solution, a whole

separate service, processes and tools delivered repeatedly quickly and the same every time,” he says. “That was not the case 10 years ago.”

The finance industry, although not as far ahead as the IT sector, has also been turning towards these technologies to make services more efficient.

For example, by automating tasks once done by a human, a mobile bank account can be set up in 10 minutes on a Sunday morning, says HaightonWilliams. “Recently – as little as two or three years ago – it was a real ordeal,” he says. “It could take days.”

Traditionally, such processes would rely on a person having to type information into the same system multiple times, making it time consuming and errorprone. Now automation has enabled services to become connected, rather than rely on a human to cut and paste data between services.

What will the future look like?

Haighton-Williams sees automation enhancing the way people work rather

The future of automation: company concerns

“Businesses need to look at their culture, and how they operate and engage with staff. The biggest challenge in reskilling is finding the time and the cultural space for people to do it.” – Simon Haighton-Williams, Adaptavist

8% 8 per cent of companies believe they have all the training, tools and processes they need

36% 36 per cent of workers are spending two to four hours of the working day on manual tasks

92% 92 per cent felt more training was required before automation could take place.

SOURCE: ADAPTAVIST

than replacing it. For example, if people had 10 things to do in the past, he says, five of those things will be automated in the future, allowing them to concentrate on more sophisticated jobs.

“As we increasingly move from a manufacturing to a services economy, it is inevitable that technology will come along, and you can’t stand in the way of it,” he says.

“It is going to take away the hard bits of the service industry and allow people to focus on the softer elements,

which technology is a long way off from being able to touch. It frees people to do more of the human side of things that aren’t so predictable and repeatable.”

The big advantage is that it will give firms a competitive edge, as they can do things more productively. But HaightonWilliams warns that companies risk being left behind by their competitors if they don’t move forwards.

“Businesses can either let change happen and risk missing out, or they

can drive it,” he says. “As businesses think about their journey over the next 10 years, they need to accept the fact they’re going to be changing constantly.

Automation helps the enterprise keep pace with that perpetual change.”

These new technologies will take the mundane out of work and give employees a new purpose in their jobs.

And by focusing on higher-value work, employees will become more productive, helping companies to gain that competitive edge.

Hubris, Brexit and the demand for “servant leadership”

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UBRIS IS on the rise, writes Henley Professor Dr Ben Laker, with unprecedented numbers of typically white, middle-aged men flagrantly abusing positions of power. No organisation or sector is immune – hubris is not exclusive.

Defined as an excessive pride in one’s ability that leads to disaster, the warnings of the story of Icarus are lost on today’s leaders. From Harvey Weinstein to Philip Green, Carlos Ghosn to Donald Trump, they remain intent on resurrecting command-and-control, top-down leadership practices that serve their own interests.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, many hoped that business, politics and all organisations in society would return to more collective, traditional values in leadership – a “people’s capitalism” and a “new conservatism”. Sadly, that hope has dissipated. In 2019 Britain, a chronic betrayal is felt towards politicians who have

reneged on their social contract. The outcome of the referendum on Britain’s departure from the EU was never accepted by many of the UK’s political class.

En masse, parliament has collectively demonstrated a hubristic refusal to place national interest above its own. Many have attempted to reverse the outcome. Others, galvanised by a slim but decisive majority, have insisted on a “pure” Brexit, disregarding the concerns of the 48 per cent who voted to remain.

Ironically, one could argue Mrs May is the only politician displaying determination to execute public service duties, and so exemplifying the concept of servant leadership – an interconnected series of principles coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1977, but which can trace their roots to ancient civilisations in China, the Middle East and Greece.

Its core principles of stewardship, authenticity and empowerment represent the antidote to the

hubristic leadership that has been the root cause of so many recent problems in the world.

But there is hope. I recently discovered one organisation, the newly formed National Centre for Leadership and Management, which is delivering postgraduate (including MBA) programmes which put principles of servant leadership at their heart. “The irony of these recent examples

is that command-and-control leadership is entirely opposed to the needs and desires of the modern workforce,” explains CEO David Cobb. “Research tells us that generations Y and Z in particular are seeking leadership that delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose – the key drivers of job satisfaction, creativity and productivity. As the global war for talent hots up, business leaders will need to respond and adapt to these demands in order to attract and keep the best talent.”

He’s right. My big hope is that business, politics and all organisations in society support the National Centre. Now is the time to return to more collective, traditional values in leadership.

Let’s not rehash 2018, for if we do not learn from the past, surely we are the hubristic ones.

INDUSTRY VIEW

@DrBenLaker www.ncflm.org

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Why it could take 202 years to close the gender pay gap Women are still facing significant hurdles when it comes to the workforce, according to a new study – in particular when it comes to being fairly paid.

Why is this?

“Proactive measures that support gender parity and social inclusion are essential for the health of the global economy” – Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum

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N AVERAGE, the world’s women are paid 63 per cent of what their male colleagues receive, according to research by the World Economic Forum (WEF). And this gap is expected to take a full 202 years to close.

The WEF 2018 Global Gender Gap Report found economic power was still typically in the hands of men, and minimal progress had been made since last year.

The data suggested proportionately fewer women than men were participating in the workforce, and that automation was having a disproportionate impact on roles traditionally performed by women. Women were also under-represented in growing areas of employment that require STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills and knowledge.

Furthermore, analysis conducted by the WEF in collaboration with LinkedIn found gender disparity was particular prevalent in the technology sector. In the artificial intelligence (AI) industry there were fewer women entering the profession than men. Women represented only 22 per cent of the AI workforce, a gap three times larger of those in other industry talent pools.

The study suggested that, in addition to being outnumbered three to one, women in AI were

less likely to be positioned in senior roles or signal expertise in high profile, emerging AI skills.

“New forms of insights can help policymakers, employers and education institutions understand – and prepare for – the technological changes that are transforming the global economy,” says Allen Blue, co-founder and vice-president of product strategy at LinkedIn. “Shedding light on the persistent gender gaps in fast-growing fields like AI is a critical first step in creating policies and practices that can close those gaps.”

Women with AI skills were more likely to be employed as data analysts, researchers, information managers and teachers, the research showed. On the other hand, men were more likely to be employed in the more lucrative senior positions such as software engineers, heads of engineering, heads of IT and chief executives.

“Industries must proactively hardwire gender parity in the future of work through effective training, reskilling and upskilling interventions, and tangible job transition pathways, which will be key to narrowing these emerging gender gaps and reversing the trends we are seeing today,” says Saadia Zahidi, head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society at the WEF. “It’s in their long-term interest because diverse businesses perform better.”

The WEF has called for proactive measures to be taken to close this gap, given the increase in demand for AI skills across all industries, including traditional female sectors such as non-profits, healthcare and education.

“The economies that will succeed will be those that are best able to harness all their available talent,” says K laus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF. “Proactive measures that support gender parity and social inclusion and address

historical imbalances are therefore essential for the health of the global economy, as well as for the good of society as a whole.”

The 2018 Global Gender Gap Report measured economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment and health and survival for women compared with men in countries around the world. The study suggested it would take 108 years for the overall gender gap to close.

The country to take the top spot for gender equality was Iceland, having closed more than 85.8 per cent of its overall gender gap. But despite its top performance, the country saw a slight regression on economic participation and opportunity after an increased gender gap in the number of women legislators, senior officials and managers.

Other economies in the top 10 include Nordic countries Norway (second, 83.5 per cent), Sweden (third, 82.2 per cent), and Finland (fourth, 82.1 per cent), as well as Nicaragua (fifth, 80.9 per cent), rising one spot to overtake Rwanda (sixth, 80.4 per cent).

The newest entrant to the top 10 was Namibia (tenth, 78.9 per cent), the second country from the sub-Saharan Africa region to make the list.

The UK came in 15th, having closed more than 77.4 per cent of its overall gender gap.

As work changes, workspaces must become more flexible

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F YOU look back at the workspace of 20 years ago, it appeared fundamentally different to the workspace of today. The fax machines and cumbersome computers have been replaced by ever-more-powerful, ever-smarter, ever-shrinking technology, which sits within vibrant, flexible open spaces that facilitate collaboration and accommodate the requirements for more comfort at the workplace.

Today the three pillars of the unfolding revolution in flexible workspace are based on technology, flexibility and comfort.

For the BCA, the changing shape and growth of flexible workspace presents innumerable opportunities as well as challenges. Our code of conduct commits our members to “strive to create a beneficial environment for their clients and the

wider business community”. In the last 20 years, the constituent parts of that “beneficial environment” have changed considerably as more people have taken advantage of flexible working arrangements and remote working technologies.

The challenge for the workspace sector is the need to further adapt to maintain a value-adding proposition and retain relevance in the face of that change.

Many are doing this. The workspaces that are getting ahead in the sector are those that create a high-quality technological and physical environment to underpin other propositions such as wide-ranging event programmes and culinary offerings, as well as meditation rooms and on-site gyms providing an additional element of comfort and functionality to the workspace user.

Some operators actively curate their customer base in order to bring together those who are sectorally or strategically aligned, with community managers appointed to bring together those with shared interests. 20 years ago this set-up was unusual, but it is now common and will become more so. To provide just the physical space is no longer enough.

As the future of work changes, so will the flexible workspace, and, as we embark on that journey, much excitement lies ahead.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Jane Sartin is executive director of the BCA, which represents the flexible workspace industry jane@bca.uk.com www.bca.uk.com

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How robotic process automation could help realise your automation ambitions

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VERYONE KNOWS automation is the future. What’s less well known is precisely how it works, or how to take full advantage of the untapped business potential it offers, especially when it comes to back office tasks.

World-leading automation specialist Kofax is currently applying more than 25 years of experience developing smart software automation to help businesses realise the full potential of robotic process automation (RPA).

Working with its in-house IT specialists, together with its large and well-integrated partner network, Kofax is empowering companies to achieve their automation ambitions in 2019 and beyond. In close collaboration with its clients, Kofax aims to help make the world of work more organised, better informed, and ultimately more rewarding for all involved.

Many of the largest Kofax clients are early adopters in the field of automation.

Several large international firms have been using Kofax’s information capture and invoice processing solutions for decades.

Some of these firms have used Kofax solutions to handle just one of many core business processes. Examples included using Kofax Capture to compile data for annual report cycles or using Kofax ReadSoft Online to handle invoicing across distribution networks.

For many companies, these solutions have proved efficient and reliable. But there was an increasing sense from both Kofax and its users that the full potential of its technology was yet to be discovered.

Kofax began working more closely with its customers and partners to help realise the full potential of RPA. The intention was to help companies reach automation maturity, by identifying further use cases within corporate architectures and increasing the value of RPA investments.

Achieving automation maturity One of the ways in which Kofax helps companies grow through RPA is to identify common patterns of work across disparate business processes. If RPA is already a good fit for one aspect of a company’s business, the chances are it can also provide assistance in several more – even if that potential has not yet been realised.

One of Kofax’s biggest successes with this approach involved a highly successful staffing company based in Atlanta. The company had previously used Kofax Capture to scrape information from multiple web pages for data aggregation and reporting purposes. Working with company IT teams, Kofax helped identify several other business processes which could be streamlined using RPA solutions.

“Kofax is currently applying more than 25 years of experience developing smart software automation to help businesses realise the full potential of robotic process automation”

The staffing company now uses Kofax Capture and other RPA technologies to manage several aspects of its core business operations. These range from gathering online CV and personal experience data to assess new hires, to managing company task assignments and employee leave.

Since realising the full potential of its Kofax RPA solutions, the company has deployed close to 20,000 smart software robots to streamline core business processes. This RPA estate is managed by a team of just four people, and all of them perform core personnel tasks more efficiently than was previously possible, even with a larger team.

The company’s exploration of RPA represents a huge financial benefit, increasing the return on investment in Kofax technology, and reducing long-term human resources costs.

Software gardening These combined efficiency gains and cost reductions are possible partly due to the inherent power of RPA technology, but also due to the unique approach Kofax takes to software robot management.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of smart software robots (the core technology behind RPA systems). The first type are attended robots, which are deployed and directed from an individual desktop. These often require a virtual machine for support, and they are guided by humans in a similar way to how building materials are dictated by an architect. The tasks that attended robots undertake are performed

automatically, but the robots still rely on a central authority.

The second type are unattended robots.

These are usually not controlled by any central authority, but can instead be deployed from anywhere, and respond to cues from specific applications, with human intervention possible in the event of anomalies.

Business analysts or IT support manage these robots the way a gardener manages plants: introducing them for necessary tasks, and “pruning” them if they encroach on important territory.

Until recently, many companies have primarily used attended robots in their RPA solutions. These robots are efficient, but maintaining a central authority on a virtual machine places a ceiling on scalability. In its efforts to increase companies’ automation maturity, Kofax RPA architecture eliminates much of the dependency on VMs for attended robots. This is because Kofax deploys the robots at the server level which has helped many clients deploy a scalable balance of unattended and attended robots.

The structure of Kofax solutions makes it much easier to run unattended robots reliably and at scale. Because Kofax offers many of its RPA services remotely, companies do not need to operate a centralised desktop to manage their smart software robots.

By removing the need to run virtual machines, as well as using the open nature of unattended smart software robots, Kofax can create significant savings while ensuring its RPA systems scale easily with increased demand.

Leveraging partner networks As well as mobilising the power of RPA solutions, Kofax is also leveraging its extensive partner network to create innovative technological combinations to serve the needs of its clients.

The integration of voice-command and speech-to-text systems with Kofax RPA solutions to create intuitive interfaces across multiple applications is only one example of this drive to create new solutions.

Other innovation projects include integrating Kofax solutions with chatbot technology with other cloud and AI solutions.

This has the potential to further improve customer services, and help more customers address their concerns without ever picking up the phone.

Kofax is also hard at work on groundbreaking security and compliance features for its existing suite of RPA solutions. A world in which digital workers are just as insured and accounted for as human ones is just around the corner, and Kofax is prepared to assist with integration and support.

Whatever a company’s specific needs, Kofax stands ready to help achieve them more smoothly, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively. But regardless of whether you’re new to RPA technology or a veteran, the chances are that Kofax RPA has something to offer you.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Find out more about Kofax RPA solutions at www.kofax.com

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Business Zone

Four pages of analysis and expert comment

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The era of the intelligent digital worker has arrived W HEN YOU consider some of the most innovative and disruptive inventions of all time, you would probably list Gutenberg’s printing press, Newcomen’s steam engine, the Jacquard loom, Babbage’s analytical engine and Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, to name a few. All these inventions have forever changed the course of civilisation. Now imagine an innovation in the world of computer systems – a completely autonomous digital worker capable of making independent decisions, which can augment, support and assist their human colleagues. The era of the intelligent digital worker has arrived.

The inspiration for the digital worker came in 2001, when Blue Prism attempted to tackle the longstanding issue of automating repetitive, transactional missioncritical tasks. How do you automate processes that aren’t integrated or have very limited IT interoperability, in order to execute corporate policies and business goals? The breakthrough came when the company launched its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software that carries out tasks in the same way humans do – via an easy-tocontrol, automated “digital worker”.

Extending the art of the possible These digital workers are quickly evolving and becoming very sophisticated. They not only mimic the way human workers access and read the user interface, to interoperate and orchestrate any third party

application, they also work like humans but faster, without human error and on a large scale, 24/7.

They can also collaborate, work in teams and combine forces to complete workloads, constantly regrouping for time-pressured tasks.

Digital workers adjust according to obstacles – different screens, layouts or fonts, application versions, system settings, permissions and even language. Digital workers can even prioritise the order of tasks based on demand or congestion, such as latency in applications and networks or systems outage. This added operational agility continues to operate within the full governance and security of the IT department, enabling human employees to focus on higher-value activities.

RPA the AI enabler This power to automate leads to a eureka moment because it becomes

the foundation for an ongoing digital transformation. RPA is emerging as the execution platform of choice, for swiftly exploiting best-of-breed artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies across the digital enterprise. The most advanced digital workers will seamlessly interact with human workers, systems and applications to create a powerful, intelligent, digital ecosystem.

We are already seeing a shift from rules-based decision-making to a more advanced intelligent automation. One that increasingly delivers “thinking” and analytical capabilities to ensure that digital workers more closely replicate human decision making. Blue Prism is working to embed and deliver six skill categories including; knowledge/ insight, learning, visual

perception, collaboration, planning and sequencing, and problem solving, so digital workers can extend automation capabilities by enabling artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive services helping customers drive more innovation.

For example, sophisticated digital workers are starting to make use of natural language processing, intelligent optical character recognition (OCR), communication analytics, process optimisation and machine learning (ML). A large Pharmaceutical company has an automated documentation digitisation and discrepancy checking solution using OCR that alerts teams of any data mismatches or gaps across shipping documents. Another combined digital workers and ML program scans for potential compliance risks from conversations with customers.

The future of work will require the blending of human and digital labour. But far from a bleak, dystopian future where robots replace humans, a digital worker is just another team member helping to increase productivity and drive better customer interactions through automation. In the end businesses must embrace this change to empower everyone and further drive innovation.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Pat Geary (left) is chief evangelist at Blue Prism www.blueprism.com /who-we-are

Tech that understands what text really means

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ATURAL LANGUAGE Understanding (NLU) is a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a technology that enables computers to extract information from human speech or text. While NLP can analyse the structure of a set of words, NLU aims to provide insight into what those words actually mean.

Doing this well is, understandably, difficult. There are problems with slang, irony, different syntax and, especially in spoken language, fragmentary phrasing. In fact, it’s known

as an “AI-hard” problem, one which, if solved, would put computers on the way to being as intelligent as people.

However, a new approach to NLU has been developed

by Cortical.io, based on the way the brain processes information. This approach enables businesses to reduce the time and costs of extracting meaning from documents by analysing the text automatically.

The technology is being used by many Fortune 100 companies because, unlike systems built on keyword statistical analysis, it can

analyse the meaning of whole paragraphs rather than individual words.

Francisco Webber, CEO and co-founder of Cortical.io, explains the firm’s technology is unique.

It solves problems other systems fail to do by being able to understand the semantic nuances in language. For instance, it can recognise sentences that have similar meanings even if they do not use the same words.

It avoids vocabulary mismatches which a system that just uses a keyword search can give.

“We have a system that works differently,” Webber says. “It does not work on statistical methods. It works by using computational neuroscience as a starting point. That makes the results better than [those] you would get from other systems.”

The system eliminates repetitive and error-prone manual steps, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value tasks. For example, Cortical.io’s technology helped a manufacturer of network equipment reduce the average handling time of support requests by 70 per cent. Used more widely, this new form of NLU could have a major impact on the economy as a whole.

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info@cortical.io www.cortical.io

January 2019

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Why people management will influence business performance more than ever “The successful enterprises of the future will be those that manage to fully integrate both the digital and human dimensions” – Brian Riddell, Delaware

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HE PACE of change in business is increasing at an exponential rate, bringing with it new opportunities and risks. Business models in all sectors are being upended by new technology, with start-ups challenging market incumbents.

It’s no wonder that digital transformation – leveraging emerging technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and the internet of things to create new opportunities − is a priority for a growing number of businesses.

While our thinking in this space can often be technology-led, the human factor is just as important. Digital transformation is a tricky juggling act, involving technology, people and processes. Most businesses are in the early stages of digital transformation, and proven techniques for managing digital projects and workplaces are scarce.

One thing is clear though. The successful enterprises of the future will be those that manage to fully integrate both the digital and human dimensions, redefining how people, processes and technologies are expected to work together and the outcomes they need to deliver.

Operationally, employee effectiveness can no longer be seen purely as an HR function, and the need to lead, develop and manage people will sit at the heart of business success. It will also place greater emphasis on personal responsibility where employees will need to shoulder increased accountability for self-management, training and skills development.

Empowering digital leadership There is strong evidence that some organisations may be underestimating the impact of the digital world we live in and the frustration caused when this does not extend to our workplace – what is simple in one’s personal life, such as booking a flight or buying something from Amazon, can be wrapped up in bureaucracy and delays at work.

What is equally true is that no matter how smart your technology, or how big your data, digital transformation will only succeed if employees support it and have the right skills and experience for their job − both now and in the future.

As business becomes more digitalised, HR departments will increasingly become managers of talent, spending more time identifying and predicting which skills and experience are in demand and, critically, helping employees chart their optimal career path through the organisation.

But what happens when your most experienced staff or those with critical knowledge or skills leave the company?

What’s the impact on your immediate

business or longer-term strategies if you lose those people? And how can those essential resources be retained?

With increasing competition for people with high potential and critical skills, organisations will also need to equip leaders with tools and approaches to be able to immediately acknowledge outstanding contributions and performance.

Winning the war for talent through retention and development Keeping staff trained, motivated and ready for the new ways of working will become increasingly important to all organisations.

Some skills will be so new that in many cases they will be immature or will be very rare. This puts business strategy at risk if companies are unable to attract or develop these new or niche skills.

All of which underscores the importance of HR developing and driving the digital talent plan. Fundamentally, they need to have a continuous plan for what the business requires and how to attract the needed talent, a learning framework to develop or augment skills, engagement and retention initiatives that adopt innovative and collaborative techniques to make the workplace highly appealing, and reward and recognition programmes to recognise the impact employees are making.

Real-time information, continuous improvement Cloud-based HR software (such as SAP’s SuccessFactors) can track interaction with employees, providing continuous feedback to help managers tailor training to their employees’ needs. Improved training and

feedback can make employees feel more motivated and help them to perform better.

Businesses that embrace digital technology will create an open work culture of personal improvement using a blend of apps, structured training, mentoring and continuous feedback, rather than the (often dreaded) annual appraisal.

The frequency of feedback employees want from their leaders can vary with age.

Research conducted by Oxford Economics indicates two-thirds of young workers expect informal feedback from their managers every month, while 51 per cent of older employees want quarterly or annual appraisals. Open and transparent communication can be analysed in real time and quickly acted upon, increasing people performance.

Integrating humans and machines Digital technologies can make us smarter and more efficient. However, while machines are great at handling laborious and high-volume tasks without making mistakes, they lack one important characteristic: the empathy factor.

As an example, transactional or repetitive work currently takes up about 50 per cent of our working time on average.

With the help of AI, people will have more time and mental energy for in-depth collaboration, relationship-building, qualitative decision-making and creativity – crucial factors for future-proof success.

As examples, AI algorithms could collect detailed information about potential candidates from various sources and identify the people most likely to join – and stick with – your company. In the near

future, chatbots may be effective enough to conduct initial interviews, or even provide biometric or psychometric analyses of candidates’ responses to interview questions. Machines can be immune to bias, stereotypes and preconceived notions, making them useful in screening settings.

Driving change HR departments remain vital to the success of any digital transformation project and digitalised workplace. They are best placed to understand employees’ motivation, skills and ambition and hence facilitate the optimum balance between people and technology. These departments themselves are changing and preparing for the future. They are introducing and fostering new ways of working and new roles to reflect the new digital businesses they are growing into, developing new skills and new systems to be able to support their organisations and its people going forwards.

In order to be as effective as possible, organisations will require highly integrated, people management systems that can highlight issues and trends, to help manage the human element of business plans, but equally attract, develop, reward, engage and retain talent. Only by getting this balance right will organisations be able to effectively drive results and achieve business objectives.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Brian Riddell (inset, left) is head of human capital management at Delaware info@delaware.co.uk www.delaware.co.uk

January 2019

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Business Reporter UK

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OST OF us spend the majority of our time at work, and yet too many of our days are filled with routine and time-intensive tasks that impinge on our ability to do more meaningful work. Too much of our working lives revolves around meetings, emails, processes and systems that don’t work properly.

ServiceNow’s annual research study, The State of Work, substantiates this, finding business leaders spend two full days – or 15 hours a week – on manual administrative tasks, 91 per cent of whom say that skilled employees waste too much time on mundane activities.

This is bad for employees and businesses. One CIO we work with sums up the conundrum brilliantly as the 85 per cent/15 per cent challenge.

As much as 85 per cent of what a company does drives little competitive advantage. The 15 per cent is where the magic happens – where innovation and ideas drive change and create differentiation, resulting in customer loyalty and employee happiness.

Unlocking that 15 per cent should be the goal of any business. But I also think that, as employees, we have an intuitive understanding of this fact – particularly as we become more used to digital experiences outside of work making our lives easier and more convenient. Why aren’t those experiences reflected at work? Why isn’t technology being used to liberate us from menial tasks and empowering us to be happier, more productive, more valuable employees?

Of course, this isn’t just about improving the employee experience, as important as that is. At a macro level sluggish productivity remains one of the UK’s biggest economic challenges.

Productivity growth has averaged only 0.2 per cent per annum since the financial crisis, while the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that UK workers are 16.3 per cent less productive than those in other G7 nations.

It’s an issue that continues to puzzle economists, but one key barrier to better productivity growth is the poor adoption of new business technologies by many UK companies.

This has to change. And if we don’t, we all lose out.

Making work, work better for people Putting people first is key to solving these challenges. Employees want to know that they’re realising their full potential at work, and digitising processes that make routine work simpler and faster frees up people to focus on the more challenging, essential and fulfilling aspects of their jobs.

This is how value is created and productivity increases.

Crucially, it’s possible to achieve this digitalisation with technology that is available today. This doesn’t mean sophisticated “deep learning” or artificial intelligence (AI) technologies

Why work isn’t working “At a macro level, sluggish productivity remains one of the UK’s biggest economic challenges”

that are still many years from being a commercial reality for most businesses.

In fact, in huge swathes of the economy intelligent, digital workflows can bring significant (and relatively easy to achieve) productivity gains.

ServiceNow’s own Now Platform enables digital workflows to be created to deal with all manner of repetitive tasks such as dealing with common customer enquiries, HR requests, filing and even basic issue resolution. Significantly, these functionalities can be built once and then reused across departments – enabling jobs throughout an organisation to benefit, including financial services, customer services, IT, legal, HR and facilities management.

This strategy simplifies enterprise architecture, reduces costs and enables digital transformation to move faster.

A perfect example of how this works in the real world is our customer Alexander Mann Solutions, a talent acquisition and management specialist.

The company handles more than 250,000 job interviews globally every year, but schedulers were relying on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage the recruitment process.

By adding digital workflows to take on the repetitive and manual parts of its interview-scheduling process, the average time to schedule an interview was reduced from five days to just two.

This has freed up employees to do more meaningful work and evolve their role into high-touch recruitment facilitators and solution designers, offering a better employee and candidate experience. Indeed, candidate satisfaction has risen to more than 93 per cent as a result of these intelligent workflows.

The productivity dividend This is particularly important as over the last ten years the UK’s growing knowledge economy has started to make a positive impact on multiple industries, according to the UK Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) from the ONS. Imagine if organisations adopted intelligent digital workflows to enhance their knowledge-intensive activities. The pace of development and change could be accelerated further.

Business leaders can create entirely new employee experiences and increase employee engagement. Because when technology is developed in the service of people, rather than the other way around, the magic within organisations can truly be unlocked.

In fact, based on the latest employment figures from the ONS, we estimate there are 5.7 million workers in the UK (16 per cent of the total workforce) who carry out roles in financial services, customer services, IT, legal, HR and facilities management, who could benefit from intelligent digital workflows.

Using quantified business outcome figures derived from methodology developed by Forrester Consulting, ServiceNow has proven that intelligent, digital workflow automation can deliver a 20 per cent productivity gain. Applied to those 5.7 million workers, this figure has the potential to boost the UK’s gross value added (GVA), a key measure of productivity, and enable the UK economy to benefit from a staggering £64.6 billion “productivity dividend”.

That dividend is entirely within reach – it just requires businesses to grasp the nettle. It’s why we are working closely with CIOs – listening, learning and building technology that addresses real challenges to ensure they’re achieving optimal employee experiences. It’s about having common goals and common values.

At ServiceNow we share the ambition of the CIO to create value and drive innovation, and we want to give them the support and guidance they need to act now and take on 2019 with a competitive advantage. Because ultimately there’s no time to waste – we need to make the world of work, work better for people now.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Philip van der Wilt (left) is senior vice president, GM EMEA at ServiceNow +44 (0)1784 221600 www.servicenow.com/workflow

January 2019

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The debate What is the biggest priority when preparing for the future of work?

Viboo Skanda-Kumar

Bryant Bell

Jon Addison

Murat Bicak

Jada Balster

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(+353) 1 518 5980 http://business.linkedin.com/ talent-solutions

For more information, please visit www.pmi.org/uk

@workfront workfront.com/futurework

Human capital management specialist, Delaware RGANISATIONS MUST be ready to adapt to fast-changing competitive markets and rapidly emerging business models and opportunities. Their priority should be the identification, management and development of key resources to take advantage of these changes.

With the increase in intelligent automation there will be changing roles and new challenges to address, and organisations will need to build flexible and dynamic resourcing models which take advantage of new modes of continuous learning and development. Adaptive organisations will require systems and continuous investment to enable continual development and management of their strategies and performance. They need to understand what success looks like, where targets or outcomes are not being met and where changes are required.

They need to be able to effectively measure and communicate business performance across their organisation, suppliers and customers.

This change will be underpinned by scalable real-time, integrated data processing almost certainly delivered via highly elastic cloud computing platforms, in turn driving changes to existing technology and data management strategies.

Director of product marketing Kofax Inc HE BIGGEST priority in preparing for the future of work is the destruction of routine business. I may be biased, but I do not know of any worker who actively enjoys sitting down and working on a spreadsheet for eight hours. Not one. That’s only human, but that human reaction means these processes are vulnerable to errors, whether through fatigue, boredom, or garden-variety mistakes.

The future of work will involve liberating human employees from these routine and error-prone processes. Contrary to popular belief, this does not involve taking away jobs – if anything, the opposite is true.

In our modern, data-driven society, it is paramount that businesses constantly find new ways to process data and manage content. Bots can perform routines, but creating those routines?

That’s something where only human ingenuity will do.

Robotic process automation has great potential to unlock the human factor in digital processes.

Ultimately, the future of work is about valuing employees to do the valuable work.

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www.kofax.com

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www.delaware.co.uk

Head of talent solutions LinkedIn UK

Senior vice president, strategy Project Management Institute

OMORROW’S WORKPLACE will be more complex.

Employers will be looking for different skills from candidates, who in turn are rethinking how to structure work into their lives.

Nine out of 10 UK HR and hiring professionals acknowledge that so-called “soft skills” such as creativity, persuasion and adaptability are increasingly important.

Humans are not robots whose achievements can be confined to a CV, and already today we see employers looking for people to contribute beyond qualifications.

At the same time, embracing flexibility and new ways of working will make companies less likely to miss out on great talent, while also making roles more accessible to groups such as mothers returning to work and older workers.

Businesses and recruiters are gradually changing their approach.

Helped by new innovations such as LinkedIn Talent Insights, they can better than ever follow new workforce trends, gain real-time insights into current and prospective employees, and find and attract the talent they need to remain successful.

Vice president, marketing Workfront

NDERSTANDING THE true potential of artificial intelligence. There is a lot of misplaced fear surrounding AI because of its presumed potential to eliminate jobs. True, it will eliminate many tasks, allowing humans to add the kind of value machines cannot offer. But we need to recognise that this technology can and will be used to complement, not substitute human effort and that it can never replace creativity or empathy.

As a workforce, we should look at AI as a game-changing multiplier that will only increasing human creativity and endeavour. That’s why, with regard to the future of work, the focus of our conversation needs to be on the evolution of roles that are increasingly project-oriented – and where people are brought into a project because of a match between skills and needs – rather than jobs, where people are limited by narrow descriptions of duties. Organisations will structure themselves much more fluidly in this way, delivering value through projects that come together to deliver a clear outcome and disband.

And talent will contribute specific capabilities to projects.

MBRACING, NOT fearing, technology will allow us all to master modern work.

It’s important to realise the future of work starts now. Robotics, automation, AI and virtual reality aren’t theoretical dreams. They are here now. The questions we now need to ask are “where should we apply this technology?”, “what jobs are best trusted to human hands?”, and “when should we automate?”

We all know everyone would prefer to work more flexibly, that most meetings are a waste of time, and that emails are an annoying but necessary evil. This is where we will see the value of cutting-edge technology – automating mundane low-value work so we can spend our time on the things that add the most value to our organisations.

Tomorrow will be automated, but there is no need to fear a machine apocalypse. The future will see happier and more purposeful workers who know they are spending their working hours doing things that not only matter, but that they are also best at. That’s a future we all want – together with robots that can bring us coffee in the morning.

AI’s age of implementation: how to ensure success “Rapid results with AI are crucial to building momentum”

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N THE span of a few years, AI has become ubiquitous in boardrooms around the world. It’s easy to see why. By 2030, recent reports suggest, the technology could grow the global economy by nearly $16trillion. With their abundant stores of data and valuable business challenges, enterprises have a big role to play in realizing AI’s potential. So what can organisations do to maximise their return on investment?

Enterprises that are already building value with AI have made sure to focus on matching its capabilities to existing

business challenges. At my own company, Dessa, we have helped enterprises achieve this in multiple industries.

Collaborating with clients to deploy AI solutions, Dessa empowers organisations to grow revenue while also securing the foundation required for subsequent AI projects.

In telecommunications, for example, we’ve helped a large enterprise build an AI solution that predicts customer complaints before they occur. The solution is now in production, and has already streamlined the company’s call centre operations.

Only a few months later, the organisation has already seen AI improve its business’s operations and enhance its bottom line. At the same time, this enterprise now has the foundation needed to build solutions that will yield even bigger impacts for its business.

Rapid results with AI are crucial to building momentum, but executives should also make sure their organisation keeps the long-term view in mind.

Thinking big but starting small, enterprises can ensure that the early-stage use cases they build now secure both immediate results and long-term impact.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Stephen Piron (above) is co-CEO of Dessa, a Toronto-based company that helps enterprises build value with advanced AI @dessa www.dessa.com