Working from home in 2020 has been a big change, and an even bigger challenge, for many people, but ... [+]
It is now an unbearable cliché that 2020 has been the most disruptive and unprecedented year of this generation. While it has been an incredibly challenging period for the vast majority, there have been positive developments in terms of how we work, with flexibility and overall wellbeing put ahead of unfettered productivity for what may actually be the first time in living memory.
As we move into a new decade, with so many powerful tools and technologies at our disposal, many companies are looking at ways to continue the changes wrought by 2020 and turn them into a more positive way of working with or without restrictions. Here are my predictions for how technology, wellbeing, and human skills will all come together for good in 2021.
Tactile, timely technology
Video calling has become ubiquitous in 2020, with Zoom alone seeing approximately 300 million daily meeting participants throughout April, but this restricted form of communication has worn thin and the value of being close to friends and colleagues has been made abundantly clear. Consequently, tech companies have leaped to the challenge, taking novel approaches to try and keep people engaged while working from home. Nvidia, for example, have prioritized human expression at expense of the background of video calls, significantly reducing bandwidth for these calls and helping people to read body language and facial cues to try and replicate a human connection remotely. We can expect to see many more of these projects springing up in 2021 as advanced tech becomes more refined and accessible.
Projects like Oculus Rift and Facebook’s Infinite Office utilise VR (virtual reality) to create an immersive virtual office space by visualizing things like a multiple monitor setup. Facebook is also looking to integrate with AR (augmented reality) company Spatial to allow for socially distanced meetings in augmented reality, an example of which you can see here. The concept of a virtual working environment is also piquing the interest of VR researchers such as Professor Anna Quieroz of Stanford University, who explains the value of this kind of technology: “Many companies are saying they will continue to work from home, but employees need these spaces where they can meet and communicate. VR can allow for that proximity and collaborative mindset to take place.”
Wellbeing at the forefront
Alongside the importance of the intangible benefits of an office space, employee wellbeing has risen to prominence in 2020. Recognising the vital connection between productivity and wellbeing, employers are making provisions to make sure that employees are happy and mentally healthy while working from home, and that the phenomenon of ‘toxic productivity’ does not sour the move to remote working. The 2020 annual report by CIPD (The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) and SimplyHealth entitled ‘Health and Wellbeing at Work’, found that 89% of respondents “observed ‘presenteeism’ (people working when unwell) in their organisation over the last 12 months” and a similarly high observance (73% of respondents) of “‘leaveism’, [defined as] employees working when on annual leave or outside contracted hours.”
This feeling that one must be more productive to compensate for difficult circumstances needs to be quashed in 2021, and the focus on wellbeing extended to account for this counterproductive notion of being ‘always-on.’ The CIPD report makes clear the detrimental effects of this mindset - “nearly two-fifths (37%) [of respondents] have seen an increase in stress-related absence over the last year, while three-fifths (60%) report an increase in common mental health conditions” the report states - and indeed a wider view of the importance of wellbeing and mental health will be a key fixture in 2021.
Competency-based organisations
The concept of productivity is being interrogated and adapted as much as anything else in 2020, and the traditional assumption that making everything into a measurable, finite process is one of the main aspects of productivity that is being exposed as counter-intuitive. As automation technologies propagate even more into working lives, no longer reserved for industrial manufacturing or even the most cutting-edge medical applications, the idea of putting humans to work on processes that can be completed many times faster and more efficiently by artificial intelligence is uncompetitive. The pandemic has put this contradiction into stark focus: as the largest AI and data companies in the world have been growing and improving this year while many jobs have been lost or furloughed, the importance of building on human skills and competencies that cannot be replicated by AI (such as initiative, creativity and emotional intelligence) has become clear. As companies realize that happy, trusted, and engaged employees are infinitely more productive than process-driven ‘corporate drones’, competency-based organisations will thrive in 2021, building on human skills and using AI for the mundane, repetitive processes for which it was designed.
Retraining remotely...
Moving to a completely remote way of working is not easy, as many of us have experienced over the past year, and retraining people to work remotely while they are already at home poses some unique challenges in itself. Traditional training methods such as classrooms or even standard elearning tools are either not feasible during a pandemic, or are not engaging enough for isolated employees. In a useful twist of fate, the technology that people are now having to get to grips with is also helping them to adapt to and retrain for a new way of working. AI-powered training platforms are helping to personalize the learning process, make it more engaging for each individual user, and automate parts of the process that may prove to be redundant depending on the rate of learning of each user.
…And training the future workforce
This drive to retrain and get people used to working alongside automation by building on their own human skills will therefore certainly be a pivotal factor in 2021, and looking ahead to the future workforce. In response to a less predictable and process-driven future of work, some schools (such as CISGLOBAL in Sevilla, LearnLife in Barcelona, and The Mabin School in Toronto) have decided to change the educational paradigm to be more relevant in a human-centric working world. These educational programs focus on "liquid learning": instead of following a strict fixed curriculum, students are encouraged to explore their interests through projects, peer to peer collaboration, and experimental learning methods. This framework of "liquid learning" not only builds and promotes adaptability, resilience, curiosity, and empowerment but it is also much better suited to the work of today and tomorrow that will be more based on human skills and competencies, and more ‘liquid’.
The year of the Ox
2021 will be another year of new developments and disruption, undoubtedly, but the way in which companies harness that change and respond to disruptions will be the defining factor in who survives, who thrives, and who fails to keep up. As automation becomes more useful and usable in real-world conditions, work will become more focused on human abilities and needs. We now need to build on the lessons of 2020, and continue to promote wellbeing, think in terms of competencies over processes, and use technology and our human skills to the best possible advantage.
