Rishad Tobaccowala is the author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data”. Data, magic, soul and playing frozen music. . I was very interested in his new book “Rethinking Work: Seismic Changes in the Where, When, and Why”. A version of “Shift” or “The end of jobs”
Some of the question in the book
- How do you ensure the company’s products and services remain relevant and competitive as technology shifts happen faster and faster
- How does the organisational leadership ensure that they possess the right talent and organisational design, given the technology that is affecting their business?
- Do you understand the new technology and talent landscape?
- Is your organisation biased toward yesterday or tomorrow?
- Does your company possess agile systems and processes?
- Is it flexible when it comes to how and where work is done and how partnerships are initiated?
- Can you deliver customised products and services?
- Does your organisational structure support personalisation, or is one particular system or process mandated?
- Are the policies and protocols of your organisation designed to facilitate trust among teams and customers?
- Is hierarchy holding the company back? Are bosses followed due to their zone of control and intimidating titles (conductors) or because they’re leading through a zone of influence (talented players)?
- Is the organisation rethinking things by starting with a blank sheet of paper (a license to improvise)?
- Or are they replicating operational standards that may have made sense years ago but no longer do? Is sufficient time and budget being allocated to help people learn to self-manage and to help leaders learn how to be more agile and adaptable?
How to remain (or become) relevant
That is the real question The companies that succeed in the future will reinvent themselves continuously. Rather than starting with where they are or have been, companies need to build models based on what they would do if they opened their doors (real or virtual) today.How interlocking forces are sculpting the future of work. Generation shift, technology, platforms, new ways of working, demographics and the long-term impact of COVID. You have two choices as a company. You can be reactive and struggle to adjust to transformational events on the fly, or you can be proactive and control the narrative.
The statistics
- By 2027, 86.5 million people, or half the workforce, will be freelancers.
- In 2022, more than one-third of US workers and two-thirds of those under age thirty juggled different “gigs”.
- 16% of Americans have earned money from a gig platform.
- 59% of respondents (in a study conducted by Owl Labs) said they would be more likely to choose an employer that offered remote work over companies that didn’t.
- IBM has more employees from India than from the US.
- The epidemic of disengagement, then, seems to be spreading globally, at least among younger workers (lack of clarity about expectations from managers, not feeling connected to a company’s mission or purpose, little to no recognition for hard work, and receiving scant career development as key reasons).
- A study found that 52% of managers agreed that working from home improves concentration, 60% said it improves productivity, and 63% stated it increases motivation.
- Africa will contain more than 40% of the global population in 2100.
- IBM believes that AI will replace 30% of jobs in five years, and it will affect white-collar jobs more than blue-collar ones.
- US training expenditures passed the $100 billion mark for the first time in 2021–2022, rising 10% to $101.6 billion.
- The balance of power is moving to labour and away from capital.
- The biggest change in the ecosystem of companies will be the proliferation of smaller companies connected directly and indirectly to the giants.
In other words, the “fractionalised” employee is becoming a reality. The nine-to-five day has long since passed. We will see a trend toward less supervision and more independence—a trend that will have an enormous impact on everything from hiring to culture to performance reviews.
Some predictions
people will work in the metaverse (read “Our Next Reality”. The office will not be a location but a mindset. New tools and platforms that allow people to find work globally and deliver solutions using top-notch technology such as AI, blockchain, 5G, AR and web3. Ultimately, it is not about technology (it only levels the playing field); it will be about talent. Leadership is changing. Success definitions are changing, the meaning of life is changing, work views are changing (read “Technosocialism”, innovation is changing, everything is changing.
What to do
- Integrate sustainable social, environmental, and cultural practices into all aspects of the business to build reputation.
- Be open to different ways of working.
- Be open to different lifestyles and viewpoints.
- Be open about your policies on sustainability, diversity, and wellness:
- Be open about key decision-making and compensation:
- Use open scorecards: publishing and benchmarking key policies from gender mix, sustainability, and other variables, including tracking over years.
- Prioritise the new scale over the old scale. Scale ideas, data, networks, and talent.
- Manage hybrid cultures
- Address talent burnout.
- Create fractionalised employees.
- Redesign infrastructure.
- Unbundle and reimagine the office.
- Play jazz, not classical (it is a reference to his earlier book)
- Move to zones of influence and coaching rather than zones of control and “bossing.”
- Redesign the structures. Fixed structures no longer make sense, given that talent, today often seeks autonomy that runs counter to most locked-in processes and policies; the fluid ecosystem of global partners and dynamic marketplaces has replaced many vertically integrated structures; modern connectivity places a premium on speed and agility.
- Outcomes and goals should take precedence over process and control.
- Recognise and incorporate multiple variables and metrics.
- Factor in the intangibles.
- Embrace AI.
- Prioritise inspiration.
- Connect the dots. This is something technology can’t do and probably won’t be able to do in the future. Cross-pollinate different people and their ideas—different functional expertise, different offices, different countries.
Hybrid becomes the norm
Distributed work and enabling technologies allow people to stay in their current jobs while testing a new business concept. Check out Haier as an example. It’s not just Gen Z and millennials who are taking advantage of the small revolution. The combination of facilitating technologies and emerging business opportunities provides older workers with the chance to work beyond the traditional retirement age.
Hollywood as an example
When you stop and think about how Hollywood businesses are structured, you realise that they’re an unusual mix of gig work, long-term deals, side hustles, and other alternative approaches. To ensure fluidity and minimise friction, employees—actors, writers, set designers, sound technicians, and so forth—belong to a guild or union that negotiates compensation. Hollywood may not provide a model that is exactly transferrable to other industries, but the agility and open-mindedness they demonstrate should provide CEOs of all types of companies with ideas for transitioning to the gig economy environment.
Trust
Can you trust people to work as hard for your company as for projects about which they’re passionate or ones that may become financially lucrative businesses? If you distrust your people, you’re going to bear the consequences of that distrust. The best twenty-first-century companies trust that their people will be sufficiently professional.
The benefits
Engagement, retention, greater use and absorption of technology, cost reduction, maximum flexibility, access to more talent, network effect, more diversity, increased innovation capability, automatic delayering, knowledge transfer, learning, unlearning, access to a wider spectrum of resources and ultimately the ability to adjust and respond at speed. Also read “We’re all programmers now“. Fractional citizen.
It is all about people
Businesses are a collection of ideas, technologies, patents, brands, ecosystems, and people. People are the key because they create the ideas, technologies, patents, brands, and ecosystems! The transformation, therefore, is treating these assets as the roots of the company—as foundational pieces from which new life grows. They provide the basis for this new life to take wing and soar, to become organisational designs optimised for new customer segments or other future targets.
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