Orient Magazine Special Orient Supplement: Future of Work | Page 14

Orient - The Official Magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore - Issue 71 April 2019

Navigating the
Future of Work Through Collective Intelligence

By Nicole Scoble-Williams, Director, Centre of Excellence (CoE) for the Future of Work, Deloitte

Driven by accelerating connectivity, new talent models, and cognitive tools, work is changing.

We have entered a new digital age where the adoption of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating dramatically, bringing a shift from job design to work architecture and creating the “augmented workforce” where humans work side by side with their emerging machine co-workers to drive business value. This new world of work is having a profound impact on business and societal changes.

The Future of How Work Gets Done

According to Deloitte’s Readiness Report, only 14% percent of senior executives are highly confident in their ability to harness the changes associated with the modern digital age and only 25% are highly confident that their workforce has the skills needed for the future. Despite 86% of business leaders reporting that they are doing all they can to build the right workforce for the future, less than 20% of business leaders regard talent and HR issues as a high priority.

Radical change is needed for business leaders to ready their organisations for the new realities of work. It has been estimated that 57% of all jobs across the globe are at risk of being automated within the next five years. However, the likelihood of an entire profession disappearing due to automation is low.















Collective intelligence is the fundamental design principle for the emerging augmented workforce and requires business leaders to think in new and different ways about how to harness the best of what human talent can do and how to combine that with the extraordinary capability of exponential technology, in order to optimise the balance between the relevant business drivers such as productivity, profitability, brand and culture.

The Future Workforce

The digital age demands new talent structures and enabling mechanisms to engage the collective intelligence of the augmented and untapped workforce. This has resulted in a rapid rise of the open talent economy with more than 40% of the workforce estimated to be contingent by 2020.

The traditional employer-employee relationship is being replaced by the emergence of a diverse workforce ecosystem—a varied portfolio of workers, talent networks, gig workers, and service providers that offers employers flexibility, capabilities, and the potential for exploring different economic models in sourcing talent. This provides business leaders with new opportunities to engage workers across generations and create pathways for more meaningful, productive multi-stage and multidimensional careers.