What's driving the future of work?
“The future of work consists of learning a living”
Marshal McLuhan, Canadian Scholar
The last two decades have brought unprecedented change, and technology has evolved into so many aspects of our daily lives. Whether we’re asking Alexa to play us a tune, using our phone’s weather app to avoid a downpour, or marvelling at how our social media is filled with ads for things we were just chatting about, we’re embracing new technology every day, often without even realising it! We’ve quickly changed the habits of a lifetime because we’ve seen the benefits technology brings to our everyday lives.
This is exactly the approach we need to be taking to technology in our working lives, too. We need to continually learn and embrace advances in technology to improve our working lives as much as it does our everyday lives.
People first
Before we get into the details of this on-demand webinar, let’s firstly address the elephant in the room: the future of work isn’t about ‘the robots taking all our jobs’. The reality is that the advances in automation and AI are designed to make our lives easier. In the words of Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, “these new technologies are first and foremost tools made by people for people”.
Through the power of technology, our workforce can move on from task-based roles to skill-based roles, helping businesses to innovate and move forward at speed. And we need to inform and engage our employees in the benefits that advances in technology can deliver in order to make any digital transformation successful and avoid the friction and fear of change.
Humans are still the most valuable business asset and technology complements the work we do by automating mundane, repetitive tasks and making collaboration easier than ever. With the right technology strategy in place, we’ll all have more time to focus on making a positive impact using skills that robots can’t replicate, like our imagination, emotional intelligence, determination and compassion. Best of all, advances in technology mean we may even have some more time to breathe in our working day! This is the future of work that benefits everyone.
Find out more, on-demand
In this engaging 45-minute session, we dive into these factors and review what’s driving the future of work, including:
- the Consumer-led era;
- employee empowerment;
- the pace of change;
- business scalability, risk and resilience
We then do a little jargon-busting before we move into the priorities and pitfalls of preparing for the future of work, such as:
- closing the divide between IT and the business
- getting your strategy right
- engaging your workforce to reduce friction
- managing data and platform sprawl
Finally, we take you through some interesting use cases that show the power of automation and AI to improve ways of working, customer experience and productivity.
Audience engagement
The future of work is one of the hottest topics in business today, and this was clear to see in the fantastic engagement we had from the audience during the live session. We ran a few polls during the session to get a feeling for where the audience is on their journey, and we were pleased to see that these aligned with our expectations. You can see the results below.
We’re excited to be a part of the revolution in ways of working!
The results of the polls are below. Take a look.
Final thoughts
We’d like to leave you with one final thought on the subject of how technology is shaping the future of work…
No matter what business you’re in, you’re ultimately delivering an experience to people, whether that’s through products or services, and whether it’s to consumers or employees. The likes of Amazon and Uber have shaped our expectations for super-fast, technology-driven, automated experiences and our expectations are higher than ever. Companies that are not meeting expectations are disappearing at an alarming rate as experience is the only true differentiator in the digital era. One thing is becoming very clear as we witness the domination of digital-first companies, you can’t compete in delivering people-first experiences without technology at the heart of your strategy.