Digital Innovation
Meeting the
challenges
of the future
workplace
Evolving as individuals and
organisations to meet the
challenges of the future workplace
is a deceptively difficult task. It
requires us to think, not about
what people need to know now, but
in 5, 10, or even 25 years, argues
Philosopher Alain de Botton.
All too often organisations
prepare their employees for what
the world looks like now, or even
what it looked like in the past. As
a result, employees sometimes
learn skills that are – like a whale’s
vestigial leg bones – things that
once were crucial, but are now merely a remnant
from an earlier time.
To meet the challenges and opportunities of the
years ahead, we’ll need to pay close attention to a few
key areas in which we might all ‘evolve’.
First, of course, we’ll need to adapt to the near
blindingly fast pace of technological development,
from artificial intelligence to automation. Self-driving
cars, customer service robots, and artificial intelligence
data analysts are now reality, not science fiction.
What these technological developments have in
common is that they signal that we are, as a species,
moving away from certain types of work altogether.
What once might have seemed a core part of a job
– perhaps encyclopaedic knowledge of a particular
financial index or a knack for catching errors in
computer code – is now useful, but no longer what
makes an employee exceptional. Instead, it is their
capacity for critical thought and their social and
emotional skills that will make the difference, and
we need to adjust our paradigms of education and
employment accordingly.
Instead of focusing only on the hard skills that are
useful right now, employees will increasingly need to
develop emotional skills such as empathy, resilience,
and persuasion.
As a species, we are now finally able to focus on some
exciting and previously under-explored territories.
Technological development frees us to focus on what
we do best as humans. We are now better placed than
ever before to devote our best efforts and energies to
the greatest tasks there are: building trust with others,
choosing the right moral priorities and meaningful
goals, and convincing others to join our work and take
up our cause. It is these psychological and emotional
tasks, and the skills they entail, that will remain
relevant in 25 years’ time, even if benevolent robots
take over the rest of our jobs.
“Technological development
frees us to focus on what we
do best as humans”
Issue 1 - 2017
13