HOW GAME-CHANGING TECH WILL REVOLUTIONIZE WORK WITH DR. AYESHA KHANNA, CEO OF ADDO AI - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we look into the future to examine the implications of big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

We’ve got a great guest today as we welcome Dr. Ayesha Khanna, cofounder and CEO of Addo AI, an artificial intelligence solutions firm and incubator. She has been a strategic adviser on artificial intelligence, smart cities and fintech to leading corporations and governments. Ayesha serves on the board of the Infocomm Media Development Authority, Singapore’s government agency that develops and regulates its world-class technology sector to drive the country’s digital economy and power its Smart Nation initiative.

Ayesha is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils, a community of international experts who provide thought leadership on the impact and governance of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Ayesha was named one of Southeast Asia’s groundbreaking female entrepreneurs by Forbes magazine in 2018, and Addo AI was featured by the publication as one of four leading artificial intelligence companies in Asia. Ayesha, welcome to the program.

Ayesha Khanna: Thank you so much for having me here.

Kornik: So, you’re the cofounder of Addo AI, an artificial intelligence advisory firm, and I think we can all agree that AI is going to radically transform how we work in the future. There are a lot of technologies I want to talk to you about, but let’s start with AI. Can you talk to me about AI and its impact? It’s already having an impact, but let’s talk about the impact it’s having, and then the impact it will have, on work over the next, let’s say, decade.

Khanna: The biggest impact that AI is having is that it has become a new team member in the workplace, and that’s the way we should look at it. It’s there as everyone’s little assistant, taking away a lot of the grunt work that we did, whether it’s legal, it’s HR, it’s manufacturing on the factory floor or it’s even doctors who are helping personalize their recommendations of diagnostics and prognosis for patients.

Once you have AI, it does a couple of things: First, it makes the work more efficient so you’re taking less time to achieve the same thing, which means now you can do other things that are of strategic value. The second thing that it does is, it allows you to optimize your work as well, which means without changing anything, for example, you’re getting more output in terms of if you are in a factory, you’re actually making a lot more output from the same inputs. Or, if you’re delivering goods, like we do with a large transport company, then you’re able to deliver more goods during the same time frame. These two are really important, and we haven’t even touched on the innovation, where you can transform yourself and serve your customers better.

Kornik: When a lot of people talk or think about AI, they think about the potential, for one. But a lot of people also are concerned that AI may make their job obsolete — it may make jobs go away. I always hear AI and the loss-of-jobs comparison made, and surely, with technology, some jobs will go away and probably won’t come back. But I know that you talk a lot about amplifying human potential in the technology revolution. So, how do we do this?

Khanna: That’s such a good question. People should be asking this question, because it’s true: Parts of every job, some tasks, will get automated, but that doesn’t mean the job goes away, the role goes away. If anything, it transforms into something that is easier for humans to do, which is emphasize the client, think about the larger strategy, enter new markets, design new products — that’s a much better use of the holistic skills that human beings have, the out-of-the-box thinking we’re capable of doing, rather than doing repetitive tasks every day. That’s what AI is.

That’s why I always say, instead of thinking of AI as a threat, if we just changed our mindset and thought of it as our little assistant, then we would have a much better perspective on it, and we would actually then feel empowered instead of threatened to go and get some new skills to go to the boardroom, to go to the leadership, and have ideas because we have a little assistant who’s doing the analytics and the forecasting and the optimization for us.

Kornik: So, Ayesha, I know that you deal with more than just AI. Since I have such a technology-savvy person on my show today, I want to ask you about other game-changing technologies that will have major impacts on the future of work, and I’d like to think like a decade out. If you could think about 2030 and beyond, what are the game changers in terms of technology?

Khanna: There are about three game changers that that are going to immediately have an impact: One is with the Internet of Things and 5G. For the first time, we are going to have data which is just not between people, but a lot more with things. It’s almost like every object around you becomes digital — the building becomes digital, every aspect of your kitchen becomes digital. So, what does that do to our lifestyle, to our work? It absolutely changes the way that we interact with each other and with our environment, and it hopefully makes it easier for us to personalize a more meaningful, efficient environment around us.

The second thing that is going to be very meaningful for the future of work is going to be the metaverse. This is when we’re using virtual reality to engage digitally with social presence in completely alternate universes rather than our physical spaces. This also changes the future of work, in terms of how we work with international colleagues, and, of course, it opens up so many more colleagues than one has just through Zoom. But it also opens up new kinds of work that will emerge — everything from fashion designers for digital clothing to more game makers to entirely new education classes being given in the metaverse.

Then, of course, we have robotics. We haven’t really seen robots — we’ve seen them either in the movies or we’ve seen the Roombas, but even if you come to cities like Singapore, it’s now become usual for us to go into the street and have vacuum cleaners, or in airports everywhere, there are robots that talk to you and say, “Please, could you have some social distancing” or “Could you throw that away?” We go to restaurants, we have robotic baristas and I haven’t seen that so much in the rest of the world, but we will live amongst machines and we will live in machine environments.

There are two things that happened: One, we need to anticipate this as employees, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, and we need to both adapt to it as workers and need to kind of think about it in an exciting and innovative way as entrepreneurs in our company. But then there’s always a third part: We have to have our ethics and our critical thinking hat around us and think about any unintended consequences. This allows us who work every day in our adult life, almost all of our other life, to enter into a new world of possibilities and to exercise every part of our brain and mind and creative juices to come up with responsible and exciting and interesting ways to serve customers.

Kornik: Interesting. Certainly, I’m not seeing a ton of robots around New York City yet. I’m sure they’re on their way. You mentioned the metaverse, and I’m curious: We’re in the early stages of the metaverse, and I’m wondering, the business applications, do you see it more as something that’s just fun to play around with? At what point do you think it becomes serious business, and how will the business applications of the metaverse be utilized?

Khanna: It’s absolutely going to become serious business, and there are 3.46 billion gamers in the world who are used to this environment. Remember, just because we are not gaming all the time doesn’t mean that there isn’t almost half the population that understands what it’s like to socially interact, to do trading — in other words, to have a digital economy. Now, the question is, what else can you do there?

Already, we’re seeing startups that are providing education in the metaverse — where, if you combine virtual reality and surgical rooms, for example, imagine doctors can experience unexpected crisis moments when a vein bursts, for example, instead of experiencing it for the first time in reality. This has shown to help some trainees deal better with unexpected situations. That’s just one little example. Another one is, if you literally want to have a concert for your entertainment, and you don’t want to spend huge amounts of money traveling around the world putting up unsustainably large concerts, Roblox has had many top pop stars earn millions of dollars — some of whom are not very well known.

It also opens up this whole area of independent creators to have access to another place without having to spend so much on marketing. NFTs — owning digital assets, how will it change the way that we actually talk about digital ownership? I’m working on some of these issues with some lawyers right here in Singapore. Everywhere you go, whether it is participating in the use cases in the metaverse or trying to build the structures around it, there are so many new jobs that will emerge that this is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Kornik: That’s fascinating. You mentioned jobs, and obviously, I’ve heard a lot about talent shortages and recruiting and retention and how, specifically, AI could shape that in the future. There’s a role that that AI will play in that. When you look at the future of shaping workforces, will there be a role for AI, and how will that impact recruiting and maybe even retention?

Khanna: Artificial intelligence has a huge role in identifying talent, but not in a way that that takes in the unconscious biases that humans have had. If it’s designed properly, then it can nudge people. You can have an AI assistant, at a minimum, that is your personal HR counselor that you can talk to and that is giving you advice on what other jobs are available, that is communicating interesting things that you want to the leadership. And you can also have the typical ways of identifying talent by looking at job résumés, by looking at people, the way they answer questions, going beyond typical things like looking at your résumé — democratizing access to great jobs, to great work, by looking at your experience, by being a bit more nuanced, by looking at your skills, by giving you tests to do, by looking at the way you speak about your experience, instead of only hiring the elites. I’m very against elitism in the workplace.

It’s also very good when you think about our aging population. I didn’t talk about biotech, but biotech, and the fact that we’re going to live longer, is another big trend that’s going to affect the future of work. We are going to be with people who are 60, 70, 80, maybe over 100, as colleagues. On the one hand, you have machines and robots, and then, on the other hand, you have people who were never in the workforce when we were growing up because now there’s rejuvenative medicine. There was a case study where they said even elderly grandmothers can operate, and do great construction work that young men do, because they’ll be working with robots, and just think of the world of possibilities. Why should we put people in old people’s homes, where they’re bored? That’s what I mean by amplified potential for everyone across ages, genders, races, geographic locations.

But as always, Joe, as you know, technology has a bad side. We have to keep an eye on it. In other words, we have to make sure that any AI that helps in the workplace is not manipulative, is not biased, and you need a very diverse and inclusive team to build AI. And if we use it properly, then it’s very helpful.

Kornik: I was going to ask you about sort of technology’s role and AI’s role in the many traditional HR functions. There’s a role for it in training or leadership development, talent management, keeping employees engaged. For some of the more traditional HR roles, how do you see AI playing in that space?

Khanna: There are a couple of things: First, recruiting — identifying the right people and allowing people to be adaptive. The problem with HR right now is that it is difficult: There’s a quarterly review. People feel shy about what they want as a career change. They don’t know what’s happening. But if there is a little HR assistant that you have, its job is to observe some of the things you’ve been writing in a confidential manner, some of new meetings you’ve been participating in, and it realizes, “Ayesha, you’ve been doing data science for a long time, but it looks like you’re getting some good feedback on your business skills and the fact that you’re doing some strategy. Have you considered doing that?”

There is a talent war, and you have to keep your employees constantly evolving, learning and feeling that they’re doing exciting things. So, build an entirely different HR culture which is rewarding people as they’re learning because it’s observing them, which humans can’t do alone. It’s observing them in a safe, private manner just for them and giving them those nudges. It is very helpful, and if you allow those nudges to be communicated up to HR, then HR becomes aware of these talents as well and can place you in different geographies or locations or different departments, and that’s what’s going to change.

Kornik: What’s your call to action for business leaders as they prepare for their companies to be human-centric in this technology revolution?

Khanna: The most important thing is to not think that the technology is going to solve your problem, but to sit down with your senior leaders — have a design thinking offsite and say, “Guys, what is our goal?” and then you call in either your data science team or a provocateur. We often go in as provocateurs and ask them, “Guys, this is what we want. How could AI help or disrupt businesses?”

You’re always looking at two things: You’re not just looking at “How can it help me?” You’re also looking at your competitors or an Amazon that comes out of nowhere and takes business away, and then you work backwards from what you know is important to your customers, and you’re trying to understand how they’re changing. You keep your eye on the ball, which is your enterprise or your retail customers, and then work backwards from there and see, what are your competitors doing? How are your client’s preferences changing, and what are your investor goals or stakeholder goals? And then, based on that, you have a plan. Then it has to be very agile — actually, the new word is hyperagile. You need to test things. You begin to have small tests for three months each, and then, very quickly, those couple of tests become these rallying calls for the whole organization.

Now, here’s the difference between the old way — and by “old way,” I mean “a few years ago” — and the new way: In the old way, people would do these little tests, and they were these shiny little objects we talked about in the media, but it wouldn’t lead to at-scale transformation for the company. But now, with the cloud, there’s a way that you can make your technique and ask them. But every little pilot we do, make sure that it builds the foundation for 100 more — just make it right from the start — and this is called modernizing your data architecture.

And if you do that, then, even if that doesn’t work, you set yourself up for four others. You trained for the marathon. You didn’t win the marathon, but guess what? You can now do 17 other sports, and you’re much better and more athletic at it, and that’s really the purpose — to think beyond that one thing, to use it to build your muscles, and it starts with that workshop starting with your leadership team.

Kornik: Ayesha, thank you. I have one final question before I let you go, and it’s one that we like to do here at Vision by Protiviti, which is, we look out, and we ask for bold predictions. I’d like you to look out to, say, 2035. Think about all these technologies, all their potential, and, assuming we get it more right than wrong, what does work look like from a technology perspective in 2035. What may surprise us? What haven’t we thought of?

Khanna: By 2035, we’re going to see a massive change with the metaverse. We’re going to see that at least half of our work is going to be not on Zoom or in the office but in these virtual environments, and we are going to have the ability to simulate every decision that we make in the company by doing forecasting analysis with tools, trying to imagine if we build a new factory, what would happen under different scenarios? There will be digital twins for everything that we do, and this will allow us to experiment with more confidence. It will allow us to be agile and be light on our feet. That’s just the way, and where, we’ll be working.

But talent will be very different. I don’t want to say we’ll be highly dependent on these little assistants, but to a degree, we will, and we’ll each have our own, because right now, we don’t have our own. We have this one that we go and talk to, and it’s some FAQs. But we’ll each have our own little assistant.

Some of us are used to personal assistants, but for the vast majority that are not, it’s really fun. It’s nice to have somebody who’s totally helping you, whether you’re a data scientist or a lawyer or anything. You could ask any questions. I could say, “I’m going to meet an economist. Can you give me — on Romer’s growth theory, just give me an update,” for example. They’ll quickly do that for you, or I’m running this forecast, and it’ll all be voice-driven. You’ll just talking a lot more and typing up less. That will free you up. Not only will give you information, it will also free up your mind, and we don’t remember what it’s like. Even CEOs are in so many meetings all the time. A lot of it is just bureaucracy.

And then, finally, in general, people will not tolerate any kind of unfairness, bias, lack of inclusivity, lack of sustainability, and people will use these metrics. People will use AI to rank companies, especially for consumers. And this kind of thing will not just be people speaking in magazines or conference panels, but values will separate the companies that do well from those that don’t. I think that’s a wonderful evolution, and even though AI will not be responsible for it, it will help all these young people and people who care about the planet use AI and technology to get to that point.<>Joe Kornik: Ayesha, I enjoyed our conversation immensely. That was so enlightening. Thank you so much for taking the time be to with us today.

Khanna: Thank you so much for having me.

Kornik: Thank you at home for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, and we’ll see you next time.

TALKING TALENT AND TRAINING IN 2030 AND BEYOND WITH HR EXPERT NIGEL JEREMY - Podcast transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource putting megatrends under the microscope and looking into the future to examine the strategic implications of big topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work and all its implications for employees and employers as well as clients and customers over the next decade and beyond. Today, we’ve got a wonderful guest on the podcast, as I’m joined by Nigel Jeremy, a globally recognized expert within the HR and learning and development space. Previously. Nigel was the chief learning officer for British Airways and, before that, lots of others, including Marks & Spencer, a British multinational retailer with some 78,000 employees, which was voted most admired company for attracting, developing and retaining talent while Nigel was calling the shots. He’s been at this for over three decades, and I’m thrilled to welcome him to the show today. Thanks so much for joining us today. Nigel.

Nigel Jeremy: Thank you, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kornik: Nigel, I thought we’d be past this point of starting these conversations around COVID-19 and all its various forms. But unfortunately, we do need to start there because we’re essentially now two years since the disruption, and I am curious as to your thoughts and biggest takeaways about how it has impacted talent and the workforce. Maybe some of your thoughts on how we’re doing, and how we did, with the pandemic, and then how you think those last two years will impact the next 10 when we talk about the future of work.

Jeremy: The pandemic obviously has affected every life on the planet. As of today’s date, about 382 million people have already caught COVID-19. Very sadly, six million people have passed away as a result of it. So, that this thing is still with us, and it’s likely to be with us for years to come in some shape or form, even if we learn to live with it somewhat. But there are things about COVID-19 that we have to remember in terms of the world of work. There are still some things that remain true that will not have changed, but clearly, there are some things that will have changed quite dramatically.

I’ll touch on both of those areas very briefly to set this up. Companies are still going to need to be profitable in the future. COVID-19 does not change that, and they will need to grow — they’ll need to evolve and develop their people to be successful. They’ll also need to attract and retain talented employees, but clear direction is no doubt going to continue to be needed from the top too, and leaders will need to engage and inspire their people just like they’ve always done. Employees need to be trained, and we will need to be able to spot talent. And significantly, we still do have a multigenerational workforce in the workplace, and we will need to consider those people for their engagement needs as well.

A lot already remains true when we look at business. But what’s perhaps happened is that the context has changed. The world population, for the first time, has experienced what I would cast as home isolation. We’ve experienced fear as a global community, in terms of our mortality, fear in terms of traveling to work and commuting, whether that’s international or more local, and fear of social contact too. These are things that are shifting the way we’re thinking about our daily lives as well as work in and of itself. The working-from-home routine has come up in any Western society, with any office-based working, a significant amount of home working has now started to happen, and that’s, of course, been coupled by the mass adoption of videoconferencing technology too.

We’ve got some things that are shifting the nature of work that we’re seeing right now as well. But from a psychological perspective, we’re also seeing two things going on: one, frustration, sadness and perhaps boredom with individuals who have been isolating for a little too long and miss the social contact with colleagues and friends and family.

Also, what’s become apparent is that people have been using this increased time at home with slightly less commuting time to take time out to reflect on their lives and their desires and their aspirations and asking themselves in the millions, “Is this actually what I want to do anymore? Should I just do things differently, because the old ways weren’t really working for me?” We’re now seeing that manifesting itself in what’s called the Big Resignation. We’re seeing, particularly in the U.S and the U.K., hundreds of thousands over here, millions in the U.S. looking at either changing career paths dramatically or opting out of work altogether and retiring early, and that’s going to create a big set of pressures for us in terms of our recruitment activity as we move forward.

Undoubtedly, this is a global challenge unprecedented in nature — a huge leadership challenge. We’ve done incredibly well as a global society in terms of dealing with it. I don’t think it’s over yet, but we’re certainly at, hopefully, the beginning of the end or the beginning of the return to some sort of normalization. But what this does, Joe, when you put all of that into context, it gives us some hints and tips in terms of a way forward for business — some of the things that we should be prioritizing right now.

I’ve got three for you, and then I’m sure we’ll get on to the next question. First, I would be talking about organization strategy. This is an opportunity for businesses to reshape and redesign their business. They’ve had a lot of employee shifting going on in the last 12, 18 months. There’s an opportunity, therefore, to relook at their business and, in doing so, start rethinking how serious they are about their corporate- and social-responsibility strategies, because we will come on to generations shortly, about how important some of those things are to some of the younger generations.

But if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that businesses that have been seen to do the right thing and support global communities are the ones that will end up winning in terms of brand at the moment. And the companies that haven’t been seen to do that may take a long time to get back to the sort of brand recognition and affiliation that they perhaps previously enjoyed. There’s a piece there on strategy — also, about property portfolio use and real estate use. But again, I’m sure we can cover that in a bit later.

The second piece is the home-working and working-hour activities that businesses now need to start looking at. We have now got to a point where it is seen to be totally acceptable to work from home and, we’ve proven, as a global working society, that it can be done — it can be just as productive — and any barriers to that continuing have to a great extent been removed. But what we also have to consider is that although that might be convenient in terms of efficiency — perhaps not to have to commute so much — we also have to consider that we are by nature social beings, and we do need to be interacting with each other on a physical basis to at least some extent.

We also have to think about how our organization, culture and brand can be maintained if people are spending a little less time in the office than they previously were. We need to be talking about things like reward strategies, because what has definitely come out of the pandemic is that job security and financial security have been affected. Therefore, people are going to want a lot more of that if it can be facilitated by organizations.

But again, for the first time — certainly, in my lifetime — the term “health security” is now being talked about in terms of ensuring that people are in a position that they can feel secure with their health, whether that’s mental or physical. And of course, to finish all of that off, we’re going to need some training and development strategy to talk to our employee workforce in terms of how they adopt new ways of working — things like meeting protocols and meeting etiquette, to name just one obvious example. There’s a lot going on in the whole pandemic, but there’s a lot to be getting after. It’s a very exciting, if not challenging, time for us as leaders.

Kornik: Yes, and certainly, you’ve put a lot on the table there for us to discuss, Nigel, as we go through this, and we certainly will get to a lot of those. I want to start with something you touched on a few minutes ago, and that’s this idea of the multiple generations in the workforce — four, five, even six generations working side by side. I’ve heard you talk about this before, and it’s a fascinating take.

Jeremy: Where this really stems from is that social studies over the last 200 years will show that teenagers, typically, but youngsters under the age of 20 in every major generation, have typically rebelled in some way, and that rebellion might have been something as simple as hair or fashion or food or alcohol. There has been something that is as mark the zeitgeist of that particular age. And, of course, as people grow up, they normalize into society — they’ll go through whatever social processes that we have: They may get partners, they may get families and they may get jobs, and all of that sort of thing will tend to go on, and they will normalize.

But what happens is, from that rebellious piece that happened in those teenagers, driven predominantly by major world or national events that were going on during their childhood and into their teens, those values and belief systems remain, and they’re not maybe at front of mind, and they’re not positioned in front of everybody in terms of a piece of fashion, for example. But the value that was developed as a result of that is sitting there.

That means that in the way that individuals look at life and the way that individuals look at the workplace, that can differ quite dramatically between these generations. And that’s what this is all about. For the first time, because we’re getting older as a society — we’re living longer and we’re retiring later as a society — we now have hit the position that we do have five different generations, five rebellions in the workplace. And it’s very interesting to see the differences between those because as leaders, we therefore have to consider these different generations in what they want in order to truly engage them as employees.

Very briefly, there are five generations right now: We’ve got the traditionalists that are over 75. They only make up about 2% of the working population globally right now. They’re important, and they were incredibly important, but with 2% of the population, we tend not to concern ourselves too much, frankly, with their needs because it’s such a small percentage of the population.

Then, you get into the big groups after that: baby boomers, 60–75 years old, 10% of the population. Generation X, my generation, 39–60, the majority of which are the leaders in their business — most leaders worldwide will fall into that age bracket. They’re 25% of the population. Then you’ve got the millennial generation, 26–38, the biggest working population we have worldwide — 45% millennials, or Generation Y make up the employment pool at the moment. Finally, the Generation Z’s, our new kids on the block up to 25, they are making up already 20% of the working population.

Now, this is not a test. I just wanted to give you a sense of that percentage level. But what this means is — and this has all shifted in the last three or four years — that Generation Y and Z now make up 65% of the global working population. They are in the ascendancy, and they have some very different needs to us Generation Xers and our baby boomer parents, and that’s where this is now becoming very interesting. Technology — baby boomers grew up in the world of paper, emails, everything in triplicate, and of course they’ve adopted new ways of working and some level of technology, but they have adopted it, as have we Generation Xers.

Millennials however, grew up with tablets and iPads and any other form of technology we would class as state of the art today, and they are digital natives, and they, as well as Generation Z’s, are into everything being online, everything being available, everyone being unique. And if you need something, you can get it by tomorrow, and that it creates a whole new paradigm for the way you look at life and work. And the tech natives are truly the Generation Z group. These are the people that are now performing their lives. If it’s not online, it’s not real.

They need constant connection. They absolutely want freedom, flexibility and choice just like the millennials. But they also want time with their manager. They want to feel unique and different and that things are tailored towards them, because online, that’s how they’ve grown up. And the one big shift, and the last big shift, I mention now between the boomers and the Generation Xers together — this is the Y’s and the Z’s — is the embracing of diversity and uniqueness. We’re seeing a sea change.

We only have to look at any news these days to see that social consciousness — doing the right thing, is at the forefront of these generations’ minds, not something that we do alongside, perhaps — as it might have been with us as Generation X, and that that gives rise to different types of issues in the workplace. A big question for any board group will be, how do we innovate? Do we involve the Y’s and the Z’s — particularly the Z’s a bit more — and does our attraction narrative for employees need to be green and socially responsible because they just won’t join unless we’re seen to be a force for good as a corporate entity?

Kornik: Right. That sense of purpose certainly permeates everything. I want to talk about that new generational reality you just laid out for us. It obviously has a lot of impacts around talent models and talent strategy. And you got into this, but if you could put a bow on it for me as it relates to, say, training and development, leadership development, high-potential employees, some of those traditional HR things that you certainly had a lot of success with as chief learning officer at British Airways, where you were responsible for 40,000-plus employees. You’ve certainly had your experience in this. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about how this new reality, this generational reality, turns those talent models and strategies on their head.

Jeremy: For me, the good news is that the talent strategy, in terms of the structural approach to talent identification and development, I don’t believe needs to change. Most strong organizations on the talent front create a language of behavior and look to develop everyone around that in terms of the competency frameworks that they’ve got, and that’s a portfolio of learning for everyone. But then they surround that with a strong performance-management system which identifies who the top-performing employees are. They then match that up to a very clear set of criteria around talent identification in terms of who has the high potential to succeed further in the organization.

When they connect those two — past performance plus future potential — they’re then able to tailor individualized development programs for those high-potential individuals. If they get that right, we’re back to recruitment again, because these kids and older people are going to get promoted if you’ve done everything right.

Now, that process, broadly speaking, will stick. And it’s got its own challenges, but it is a process that will work if you if you’re strong enough to keep deploying strategy of all of those four, five areas that I’ve just talked about. The thing that will shift — that needs to shift — is that first thing that I talked about, that central language.

When we talk about the competencies of today and the high-potential indicators — the specific competencies that draw out the individuals that might lead in the future versus the individuals that are going to be great employees but may not have that leadership potential — when we look at the language, you could pretty much go to most organizations, certainly, in the last 20 years, and they all have a fairly similar competency framework. It would be very rooted in ’80s and ’90s and early-2000s business-speak. However, what we now are in a place of looking at, when we see the new generations coming through and what that will mean for organizations, is that that core language needs to shift quite dramatically.

Kornik: Let’s talk about skills and capabilities that will be shifting, because clearly, not only generationally, the world is evolving, and we’re going to obviously end up at a very different place. When you look out to 2030 and beyond, what skill sets and capabilities do you think will be in the highest demand?

Jeremy: For me, there are five or six major skill sets that we have to be thinking about, and we probably need to start investing in those things now for them to be available and at our disposal by 2030. I’ve touched on a couple already — critical thinking and problem-solving. We’re going to have a lot of intractable issues in the future that we are going to have to try and make some very big judgment calls on not just as leaders, but as individual day-to-day operational activity — creativity, innovation, the ability to self-manage.

If we see technology going the way it is in terms of interaction in the workplace, the ability to self-manage would become a big competence for us. The whale in all of this is quite clearly technology use and technology development. The skill sets associated with big data analysis, building new technologies, those are massive, and I don’t pretend to know anywhere near as much as I should about that particular competence, but it’s impossible to underestimate how big that shift is going to be in the years to come.

The big one I would connect particularly with what we’ve talked about earlier in this discussion would be leadership and social influence and social intelligence. I touched on leadership earlier in terms of that the way we now undertake, and the way we will need to undertake, our leadership activity in the future may need to change. We still need to be good leaders, but how we do it will be somewhat different. The social influence and the social intelligence, this is more about how we get the capabilities within our organization that are going to speak and resonate with the public, our customers — that it’s not just our employees that we need to believe in what we do.

I believe it already is starting — a worldwide movement of, we will only want to deal with people who are doing the right thing. We will only want to spend money with people who are doing the right thing. From an economic perspective and a business perspective, we need that skill. But also, it’s a pretty damn good thing for society in general that we start developing those types of skills and intelligence within our workforce right now. The social intelligence stuff is for everybody. It’s all about diversity, inclusion, the ecology and environment — how we interact with each other and with the planet and with other businesses and with our customers — that helps our organizations be seen and be a force for good. Technology is the whale, but this whole social influence and social intelligence would be the big leap alongside that.

It’s an interesting time to watch this unfolding, because the role-purpose values, the satisfaction engagement, all of those issues, they have been high on the agenda in most organizations, I’d argue — certainly, most I’ve seen — and they will remain high on the agenda in the future. The difference now is that Generation Y and Z’s employees — and don’t forget, within 10 years, they will be leaders of organizations as well — they will demand that purpose, values, engagement are real and meaningful in their organizations.

If organizations in the interim, while we make that journey, don’t deliver on this, we already know that 65% of the workforce are either Y’s and Z’s, are in a place which is, “If you won’t do it, I’ll go and work for somebody that does.” We’re really at a tipping point here in terms of which generation has got the power at the moment. I feel as if I’m handing the X rings over to the millennials literally and figuratively as we speak.

Kornik: What’s the future of the corporate office as we know it today? And look in 2030 and tell me your view of that of that office space.

Jeremy: Certainly, in the initial stages of the pandemic — in that first year, where many people were genuinely stuck at home for months and working from home — there was a thought that perhaps this was a complete sea change, and this was going to be the complete way of working for the future. I don’t subscribe to that. Even today, it’s starting to pan out that there is some level of return to the office. But it is a shift. We are on the journey on this.

My sense is that we will see a typical role by 2030 having — I’m talking for office work, obviously, Joe — typically, two to three days in the office and two to three days at home or, in fact, anywhere. We talk about home working right now. I think it’s going to not necessarily be home working. It could be you’re sitting on the beach in Miami. As long as you’re working, who cares? We’re on that journey, and by 2030, it will be seen as it would be very arcane to think you have to be in the office four or five days a week. That’s coming. Part of it’s here. It depends on the forward-thinking nature of different business leaders in terms of how much that’s happening — clearly, true, open-plan hot desking, these are not new ideas, but I think that it will be endemic in itself. Everywhere you will go, you will see this.

Also, we can expect house builders and landlords, the rental market, to respond. We may see that whereas perhaps somebody right now would get extra floor space in a new house for a bathroom, we might see a lot more new housing going up which has got extra studies or office space within, because there’s definitely a shift going on with that. The builders will go with the marketers where the demand is. We will see that, and landlords trying to convert their properties to be more available for home working too.

Clearly, videoconferencing is already here, but we’ll see, again, technology on this develop in the coming years to an extent that it becomes as simple as a phone call — literally, a press of one button, and you’re with your friends, and you might have six or eight people. I’m interested to see if we can develop — and we will develop — technology that creates a virtual room, a virtual desk around you. I’m not talking on-screen here. I’m talking about chairs around you with faces in there that sometimes you see in movies. That will be coming to a point near us without too much delay.

As we’ve said, business and opportunity to reduce the real estate costs, but which also delivers environmental benefits. Of course, let’s not forget that. There’s a win-win if you think about that social consciousness that we’re talking about here as well. It’s more of the same but a bit more developed. By the time we get to 2035, though, Joe, there’s a real question of whether there will need to be corporate offices. And if there are places of social interaction, work interaction, then it’s certainly growing in the U.K. and the U.S., this ability to rent an office for a day — these types of businesses where you can rent a boardroom and eight of you turn up, and then you do your business for that day, and then you’ll see each other again in two weeks’ time for the one day. But it’s just one-fee-type approach. We will see that, at least, as a market that’s trying to break through amongst, clearly, a number of other things.

Kornik: What about these companies that have built a lot of their success on culture in terms of employees and in terms of having a culture where they bring people together and there’s a lot of interaction and collaboration? Can we do that without a corporate office or an office space? We’ve been doing it for two years, but can we continue to do it? Is it sustainable?

Jeremy: We’re going to have to think differently if we are going to do it. Fundamentally, as I said very earlier on in this cast that, we have to remember that humans are social beings. We need physical interaction. It’s great to have an audio, it’s great to have a moving picture on the screen, but we should never pretend that anything can truly replace looking somebody directly in the eye and feeling their presence in the room opposite you, and therefore creative and innovative ways of making that happen. This is where I came into rental offices, where we don’t necessarily have to be together to create culture, to create brand. You don’t have to be together five days a week. You might need to be together 20 days a year. If those 20 days are beautiful days ingrained in brand-customer relationships, that would be the fuel that we can use when we’re using other media afterwards to sustain us.

Kornik: When you look out, you mentioned 2035, and that’s a nice, round number we can look at, and you’ve made many predictions here. But I’m wondering if you have a bold prediction in your mind about where we’ll be from a work perspective. What will be the most striking difference between 2035 and today? Ultimately, what I would love to know is, will employees be more engaged, more productive, more satisfied — essentially, more fulfilled with their working lives, let’s say — in 2035 than they are today?

Jeremy: I’ll answer your last question first, Joe, if I may. They will, is the genuine answer, and it will be incumbent upon us as Generation X leaders to try and make that shift happen. But that shift will truly embed when we get Generation Y and Z’s leaders into the boardrooms. We can’t rush that. They have to develop their own careers to a point where it’s right for them to join the boardrooms. But when they do, and when they become the large minority or the majority in that boardroom, we’ll see things change very quickly.

By 2035, doing the math, we should be in that in that space by then. We will see corporate responsibility as a business imperative, and that would be driven, as I said, by those Y and Z’s leaders. We’ll see leaps of innovation in technology. We will be solving global societal problems, whether it’s energy, climate issues, hunger, disease. We’ve shown in the last two years what we can do in terms of vaccine programs. It shows that when the world puts its mind to something, things can happen. It’s having enough of a burning platform for us to make these types of things happen.

Kornik: What a far-reaching and deep dive into the future of work that you’ve taken us on here today. I appreciate that. Thank you, Nigel, for your time today.

Jeremy: Thank you, Joe. It’s really a pleasure. Thank you.

Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Be sure to visit us at Vision.Protiviti.com. For Nigel Jeremy, I’m Joe Kornik. Until next time, thank you.

LISTEN UP! THE FUTURE OF WORKFORCES AND WORKPLACES - Podcast transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we put megatrends under the microscope and look into the future to examine the strategic implications of the topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work, and I’m happy to be joined by my Protiviti colleague, Peter Richardson, managing director and architect for the future of work at Protiviti. Peter leads the firm’s focus on the future of work globally, where he emphasizes rebuilding the operating model and future-of-work engine by empowering teams, equipping them to contribute fully in a hybrid environment, and developing and underpinning culture. Today, we’re going to discuss the future of work as it relates to culture, collaboration and location for knowledge workers. Peter, it’s so great to have you with me on the podcast today.

Peter Richardson: It’s great to be here too, Joe. Thanks very much and thanks for the opportunity to discuss this topic, which is very close to my heart.

Joe Kornik: I’m looking forward to it. Peter, as much as I thought that by March 2022 we would be able to be well past the pandemic, it looks like we’re not quite there yet, but I do think it’s pretty safe to say these last two years have had a pretty profound impact on those three things I just mentioned above: culture, collaboration and office locations. We’ll take them one at a time, but before we do, I’m wondering if you could share any thoughts you have on what the last two years have meant in terms of the future of work and what impact, ultimately, you think it’ll have over the next decade of work.

Peter Richardson: Let me say, first of all, I’m going to talk primarily about office-based workers or knowledge workers. My role doesn’t focus that much on manufacturing, retail or other forms of physical delivery, so I’m talking about work that’s not really site-based or particularly equipment-based. The pendulum has swung significantly toward a way of working that we’ve, to be blunt, never seen before. Work is no longer just somewhere we go. It’s something we do and can do everywhere, and we’ve proven that.

That trend has accelerated pretty rapidly over the last two years, and as you say, Joe, there are three major areas where things have changed most significantly. Ever-evolving remote collaboration has been enabled by technology and is changing the way we work, but it’s got potential to go much further in redefining work in a hybrid world that we’re now beginning to inhabit much more fully. Organizations have been keen and remain keen, of course, to protect and enhance their cultures, but what people have experienced over the last 18 months has engendered some significant and more permanent changes in the way people think and behave and interact within their ever-changing organizations.

The spaces that we once called offices are beginning to look and feel very different, so a better world of work is waiting. Now, why do I say that? We used to look at our businesses in a pretty rigid way. It was based on a certain way we work. It was more on a manufacturing model where people worked in fixed locations close to where they lived. They got up at the same time every day. They stayed in the same place to do the stuff we needed them to do. It was an old-world paradigm based on pre-mobile phone and pre-internet operating models — people in the office all the time, people 100% getting up early, people pretty much 100% commuting, pretty much 100% physical presence for management oversight and probably control.

When you think about it, that model had become already pretty outdated, but what we’ve learned over the past 24 months now, as you say, is about the irrelevance of much of that. When we’ve put ourselves to the test, as we have had to do over the past two years, businesses have been pretty good and very able at coming up with better ways of doing things, and doing them quickly.

There was some McKinsey research that asked CEOs about 12 potential changes and how long it took them to execute before and during the crisis, and for many of these changes, respondents said that their companies acted as much as 20 to 25 times faster than they had expected. In the case of remote working, the respondents, the CEOs, said that their companies had moved 40 times more quickly than they thought could be possible before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, executives said it would take more than a year to implement the level of remote working that took place during the crisis, and it took an average of 11 days to implement a workable remote-working solution, but we’re still learning and experimenting with how to deal with some of the paradoxes that have also been created over that time. There’s a question of remote versus in-person time.

Microsoft commissioned some research that concluded that — you have heard numbers like this before — 70% of workers want flexible remote-work options to continue, while at the same time, the paradox is that 50%, 60%, 65% have been craving more in-person time with their teams. Then, there’s a question of, are we more effective and more efficient now? And as a counter to that, what’s been the impact on fatigue and exhaustion? I’ve read some numbers from Unilever, which reported that for their office-based workforce, they had seen an increase of 22% in productivity, 30% in collaboration and 19% in external orientation from those office-based workers.

At the same time, if you look at other numbers, it’s actually the older workers and bosses who are identified as thriving, where the satisfaction index there is about 60%. Whereas, for those without decision-making authority, the satisfaction index is about 35%. And then, if you look at Gen Zers, those aged between 18 and 25, the consensus is that they’ve been struggling more to balance work with life, and they’re more exhausted than their counterparts. They’re not as excited, not as engaged about work, can’t get a word in during some meetings or bring new ideas to the table, and they’re yearning for much more in-person interaction, so there’s a lot going on there.

When you look at office space, office usage, businesses are talking about 30% lower office footprint, lower office usage, still struggling with the question of work from home versus should people be spending a certain percentage of their time in the office? Should we be enabling working from anywhere? When it comes to that, some leaders are still saying — somewhat ill-advisedly — “Let’s get back to the former reality.” “Let’s drop this,” as one leading CEO said, “aberration of remote working,” and others, equally ill-advisedly, are saying, “You will work in the office for three days a week.”

I would advocate specific use cases for bringing people together in-person as the way forward, and I’m sure we’ll come onto that later in the discussion. Looking at it in the round, the last two years have been a tipping point of historic proportions. That’s not to overestimate things. The pace of change is probably likely to slow down for now, but looking forward, more changes will still be required as the economic and human situations evolve.

Remote work has created an opportunity to bring in at pace — significant pace — digital transformation to fruition where many companies have been stuck in pilot mode for years, has created new job opportunities for some, has offered more family time and a better work-life balance for some but not all. There’ve clearly been some who have lost out, and I acknowledge that. It’s provided options for whether or when to commute or not to commute at all, but there are also real challenges ahead. Teams have probably become, over the course of things, somewhat more siloed.

Digital exhaustion is a real challenge, and it will be critical to learn and experiment going forward with how to use technologies to execute a delivery more effectively to change organization operating models, to change at a pace that continues to exceed prior performance, and to address, again, as you’ve alluded to, Joe, the cultural and people implications to focus on new capabilities in people — not just those designed for the crisis but also including digital fluency, data literacy and agile ways of working. In summary, overall, we’ve learned an awful lot and probably surprised ourselves equally with an awful lot too.

Joe Kornik: That’s spot-on. So much has come out of the last two years, but to your point, there is no going back. To try to reinvent the way we worked in 2016, it’s just a losing proposition. Peter, I’m old enough to remember when every phone call didn’t last 30 minutes, though, so we do need to find a happy medium where we used to just call our mate and talk for six minutes and hang the phone up because we were done. It doesn’t happen as much in this new environment, this environment that we’re in today.

You’ve brought up culture, and I feel like that’s a good place to go, to take this conversation next. I’m always fascinated by it. It’s such a tricky thing, because it means very different things to everyone, to very different people. A lot of companies build their brand on culture. It’s one of the differentiators. It’s one of the things that they talk about when they recruit employees, their culture. That’s all been shot in a cannon up into the sky, and we’re going to have to see where it all lands.

Employers, obviously, view it differently than employees. Employees view it differently from each other. For some, it’s all about the office and that interaction and that collaboration in person. For others, it might be all about no office or lack of office, and that’s great culture to them. That’s the way they want to work. Let’s start with employees. We’re going to look at this from both sides, but we’ll start with the employees’ perspective.

Peter Richardson: For me, culture is about survival. It’s about what individuals need to do to fit in and thrive within an organization, and that doesn’t come so much from the physical aspect. It comes from the behavioral ones. The basic underlying assumptions about what’s right and what works within this organization, that’s what drives the way people then behave within the culture, within that organization. Everyone within an organization experiences the effects of culture every day.

Culture manifests itself, of course, in a number of ways, but what you see, hear and feel isn’t always an accurate reflection of the true drivers of the culture in that organization. It’s made up of a number of levels. Starting at the top of what you might imagine as a pyramid are the artifacts. This is what people can see, touch — the physical aspects — and includes things like policies, procedures, mission statements and so on, but it can also include things such as office locations, buildings, who gets what desk on what floor. All of these physical and visible aspects of the organization environment convey messages about the way things are done.

At the next level down in the pyramid, underneath the artifacts, sit what Edgar Schein would call the espoused beliefs and values. This is what you hear as you move around in organization, what people say, how they interact with each other and what they do on the surface. Sometimes, what people say is genuine, but you may also find that those statements at that level could be examples of toeing the company line. And sitting underneath all of that, this is where the culture really manifests itself and what drives the organization’s culture. Sitting under that are the basic underlying assumptions within those individuals and organizations that drive the way they behave when no one’s watching.

What’s interesting is, as we go down through those layers, from artifacts through espoused values into values and then into behaviors, what’s most visible and out in the open reduces, whereas the conclusiveness, the impact, about what drives the organizational culture increases. I argue that, yes, on the basis of all that, as a consequence of what’s been going on over the past two years, cultures will have changed.

At the moment, given the extent of change over the past 18 months, it feels to me sometimes like we’re on a different planet. We’re almost on Mars and not on planet Earth. The environment is fundamentally different. Engagement is different. People are behaving in a different way. In many cases, they almost speak a different language about work. The atmosphere sometimes makes it difficult to think clearly, and the terrain ahead is not fully mapped out and understood.

Why do I say that? If you look at pre-pandemic, as I described in my opening comments, we lived in a well-defined world where people came together into offices, into the atmosphere that was very physical pretty much every day. In the remote working world of the pandemic, people have experienced an entirely different working paradigm, an entirely different skew to their work-life balance. Certainly, since children have been back in school, there’s been less onus on parents to participate as directly in their children’s education, and probably, quite strongly, a positive work-life balance.

If you ask leaders, as I do regularly, which paradigm they most support going forward, some argue that it’s option one — that we go back together again to rekindle our cultures and values is key to them — and others argue that maintaining alignment with this new agile and flexible paradigm supporting flexibility and recognizing work-life balance is the only way to retain and attract talent, which is becoming an increasingly significant challenge and, again, a topic we may come to later, Joe.

The fact is that both sets of people, both paradigms, both are right. The conclusion I draw from that is that in order to satisfy both constituencies, an entirely new paradigm that’s neither based on option one nor option two is the answer, and that still has to be fully designed. In the meantime, there’ll be a lot of experimentation and agility required as new hybrid operating cultures and operating models are tried and tested — so, a lot of change ahead.

Joe Kornik: When you look out over the next decade, I’ve been hearing about a talent shortage, particularly in Europe and North America. How worried should executives be about that, and having the skills and the capabilities and the people to get all the work done that they’ll need to in, let’s say, 2030 and beyond?

Peter Richardson: There are, as I’ve touched upon, some quite complex people and behavioral issues to deal with here, and this world doesn’t suit everyone. There’ve been, of course, losers in the way that things have operated in the last couple of years. I spoke on those pressures, but in particular, there’ve been pressures on women with children, on younger and newer employees. In order to continue to be able to attract and retain those people, organizations do need to look long and hard at the way they approach talent and the retention of their people.

I’d also like to touch upon a couple of ideas — in particular, the threat of how a two-tier system might develop, and what we need to do to avoid that. A lot of articles published in this area argue that people who come into the office will be able to advance more quickly and catch the eye of their managers more easily, and at the same time, those who choose to work more at home are somehow going to lose out from not being there in person, and these are very real concerns.

They’ve been shared privately in many of the events we’ve run and amongst some of our clients, and some businesses are being tentative in their approaches here, while others are making it very clear that being in the office will create opportunities. That’s mistaken and will potentially cause issues as far as the retention of key people is concerned. I do appreciate that there’s a risk of presenteeism coming back, but it’s important that we create a much more inclusive working model in the new models we implement.

Companies can use technology, physical locations and remote locations to ensure that people remain connected, and we can’t assume that all managers will go back into the office either, so let’s define the reasons for people being in the office. If what they’re doing doesn’t require them to be there, then why force them to be there? Why try and use that short shoe on to push people into those locations?

In our business, we’re asking ourselves questions like, “Is this something that people need to be with co-workers to do, or not?” If it isn’t, then it doesn’t make sense, necessarily, for them to be forced to be in a physical location to do it, and let’s try also to understand people’s motivations for social interaction and human connection. People want to be together for so much of their social life. It’s perceived that being in the office and being with their colleagues and friends is what it’s about. People aren’t actually yearning to be in the office, though. They’re yearning for that social interaction, so let’s make sure that we’re addressing that question rather than looking at it from a physical-location point of view, especially if people have got commutes, fixed hours that don’t suit them, or if they’re looking after families and parents.

Now, that’s what they’ve experienced much of over the past two years. That’s where they’ve experienced so much more value above and beyond being physically in an office together, and we need to be able to respond to that in order to make sure that we are able to respond to our people’s needs.

Joe Kornik: Let’s just keep going down that road to the office, because I feel like this is one of the more fascinating things that will develop over the next decade, around what the office of 2030 will look like.

Peter Richardson: It’s interesting, isn’t it? As you’ve just said that, Joe, there’s been a lot of talk about people “going back to the office.” Again, as I’ve said before, some leaders have made it clear that they want people to return, while others are much more active in exploring hybrid models between an office and other physical locations, and still more are confused. People talk about that the office is work rather than a place to go and work, and there’s a big difference. If companies continue to think about the challenge in these terms and focus on where people are on given days, they’ll overlook a much bigger opportunity, and that’s to fundamentally rethink, rebuild and reimagine the way their business operates and where it operates. That ranges from where people work to how they work to what work means through to things like their carbon footprint.

We need to start talking much more about how we involve, include and engage our people wherever they’re located, so our physical locations need to be equipped and designed to achieve that wherever our people are, whether they’re working from home or not. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about a world where people stay permanently out of the office. I’m talking about a world where we’re smart about the reasons for bringing people together.

The old Industrial Revolution-driven office environment is entirely about having people in front of you, and this raises issues about trust. I’m arguing that that’s a completely outdated model, and I can’t understand why people feel that going back to that is beneficial. Demanding that employees come into the office five days a week or three days a week or whatever it happens to be to do what they used to do will create a backlash. Asking employees to come into the office once five days a week from to time to do things that are valuable is a redesign of the way we work, and that’s fundamentally the point that people really need to consider deeply.

I consider that mainly in terms of person activity. The question is, how do we get the most value out of assets that will become scarcer over time and the most value out of in-person activity for our clients, for our people and for our business, and what are the use cases that most require or demand or benefit from in-person activity?

The best definition I heard on this topic was in the relatively early days of the pandemic, when a senior person in marketing in a major confectionary firm talked about, as she termed it, the five C’s, and she used these words: connectivity, collaboration, creativity, celebration and compassion. They were the five strong rationales, as she put it, for needing people in person together.

I’ll add a couple more: culture — things like how we introduce people to the business, how we induct people, how we train people, etc., and possibly something specifically to do with client engagement, although that could equally be probably covered under the term connectivity, but something that specifically focuses on in-person connectivity, relationship building with clients. I agree with that list, and businesses will increasingly bring people together for in-person interaction only when they actually need to, because it’s the right thing to do.

I’m remembering, too, that these use cases need to work for all types of in-person interaction, ranging from when it’s 100% physical, so we have everyone together in one meeting, through to some physical and some virtual for your people and your clients where there’s a good degree of in-person presence in a physical location and a degree of remote presence too — a true hybrid model.

We’re still really learning how the make this work in practice. Remember that I referred to living on a different planet? We need to equip our people wherever they may be to be able to facilitate and manage these types of interaction in an entirely different way, and that doesn’t just mean by providing technology support. It means by training them, developing them, enabling them with new soft skills around facilitation, around client management, around presentation. My job these days seems much more like being a television presenter than in my world, a consultant who visits my clients every day, so I need new skills to be able to do that in the new world in which we’re expected to operate.

Looking further forward, those work environments will be effectively zoned along the lines of those five, six, or seven C’s I mentioned. I look on these zones as being more like film sets or film studios, so the collaboration studio — call it studio one, for example — will be fundamentally different from the creativity or the compassion studio. We’ll call them studios two and three. And each one will have a different script, will have a different technology usage, will have different scenery, will have potentially different costumes, wear different clothes. The direction of the activity in those studios will be different. The production will be different. The locations may be different. We talk about the office. There’ll be many more hybrid office locations, maybe even pop-up locations that we use specifically for specific purposes. There’s a huge amount of change to come there, Joe.

Joe Kornik: Yes, it sounds like it. What an interesting look at the future of the office space. You mentioned how often you are in front of clients, talking about these very same things. I’m wondering if you could boil it down to a few succinct calls to action for business leaders. It’s no secret that we’re facing a tumultuous future of work. We can all agree on that. What do you tell them to make sure that they get that right?

Peter Richardson: I look at it in terms of barriers that need to be overcome: There are a bunch of barriers that will get in the way of creating that new vision and making things happen. There’s a real momentum to refine and redefine the way business is done, but there are some significant challenges. One is, let’s be honest, that many business leaders are grounded in that old paradigm and find it difficult to imagine a way of working that’s fundamentally different. I respond by saying, “Well, what are the consequences of not doing anything?” We’re already seeing companies experiencing highly unusual levels of attrition, people leaving. That is as a consequence of not having answers for those people, including parents with children, millennials, Generation Zs, who are looking for smarter answers. If they don’t get them from our business leaders, then they’ll move on.

Another barrier is a clear communication about what’s next, which is linked to the point I’ve just made above: Most organizations have been good at communicating and engaging strongly with people in the current environment, but as they start to tackle the challenges looking forward, they’ll need to maintain or find a new level of engagement and connectivity that’s about the future, that’s about looking forward. Now is the time to push again, to push harder, and it’s going to require the same level of commitment, involvement and drive as it did during the beginning of the pandemic, when we were worried about communicating with our people and keeping them engaged.

Trust is still an issue that is linked to a model of working that’s essentially based on seeing people and monitoring them, and we have to acknowledge that what we’ve proven and seen in the last 18 months in many businesses is that we should trust people. It’s worked really well in many instances, and what evidence exists to prove widespread failure and bad behavior of people working in this remote world, I don’t think there is much. It’s proven the opposite. There’s more trust now, and we’re more able to be able to rely on our people working in an agile and flexible way that isn’t always under our noses.

There’s a fear of changing the working model that’s familiar, especially when solutions are going to be experimental, and I respond to that that some companies have implemented change programs between 20 and 40 times as quickly as they have done before, as that McKinsey research showed. It’s been an accelerator that’s applied here, and it’s proved that many things are possible that we often feared and prevented ourselves from being able to do before because of legacy concerns. We can’t just take that foot off that pedal now. There’s a danger that I’ll start driving in a slower lane, and if too many companies do that, the bigger opportunity will be lost.

Joe Kornik: Before I let you go, I’d like to ask people to live the VISION by Protiviti mantra one more time and to look out, let’s say, to 2035. Let’s go 13 years in the future and put yourself into that time frame. Any bold predictions about the future of work? What aren’t we considering? What may surprise us about how or where we’ll work in 2035? Have you got any bold predictions for us to share before we wrap up?

Peter Richardson: It’s a long time ahead, Joe, but I’ll try my best. We have this huge opportunity to continue to redefine what work is, what meetings are. We’ve only scratched the surface so far. Our application of the technology so far has been really to apply new technology over old operating models, old processes. We’ve run meetings, the same old meetings we always used to run. We just run them with video. I don’t think we’ve exploited the potential for fundamentally redefining what a meeting is, how we work, where we work, what we do it for at all.

The technology infrastructure is there now to deliver much more remotely, but also that means that we won’t need to go on planes and trains and run around the country as much as we used to do, especially in the context of the ever more important ESG agenda. Just think what the opportunity is in terms of carbon footprint if we continue not to travel to the extent we did.

Now, I know that’s not great for the travel industry, but certainly in terms of people in my industry, it creates a significant new paradigm. There’ll be fundamental changes to the employee value proposition, the employee experience. Cultures will be different. Leadership engagement will need to be different. Working conditions will be different. The opportunity for diversity, equity and inclusion will be different because we can employ people and include people and engage people from much broader environments and backgrounds and locations. Remuneration and progression will probably be different as a consequence of all of that.

The pathfinder, the leading organizations have already recognized that no one actually has the right answer, and they will continue to lead the way based on data and workplace analytics and surveys of staff and of clients. Those organizations, over the next many years, will be prepared to continue to test, review, experiment and throw away if it doesn’t work.

There’s a lot of change ahead, and that’s really exciting. As well as the physical experience and logistics of the workplace environment, there’ll need to be changes in policies in issues such as tax and legal; changes to contracts and employment policies that will all impact the employee experience and will need testing with new workforces; how people get access to their leadership; further opportunities for skills development, digital skills requirements; personal and travel time; and how we will recruit. There is a lot of change ahead, Joe. That’s a bit of a broad answer, but there’s an awful a lot of opportunity over certainly the next 10 years–plus.

Joe Kornik: Absolutely, and we will be here to chronicle it every step of the way. Thank you, Peter, so much for your time today and your insights. It was wonderful having you on the show.

Peter Richardson: Thank you, Joe. I’ve enjoyed it.

Joe Kornik: Thank you, at home, for listening to today’s podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Please do check us out at Vision.Protiviti.com or on LinkedIn at VISION by Protiviti. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time on the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Take care.

HOW WE’LL WORK NEXT WITH NINA HENDERSON, INTERNATIONAL WORKPLACE GROUP DIRECTOR - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, editor-in-chief of Vision by Protiviti, where we look into the future to examine the implications of big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

Today, I’m joined by Nina Henderson, director of CNO Financial Group, International Workplace Group and Hikma Pharmaceuticals. Nina chairs several human resource compensation committees and is a member of the audit, corporate social responsibility and governance committees for a number of companies. She is also vice chair of Drexel University’s Board of Trustees, a commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and a director of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the Foreign Policy Association. Nina, it’s so great to have you here with us today.

Henderson: Great to see you, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Kornik: Nina, when you think about the future of work, let’s say a decade from now — 2030 and beyond — and the people who will be doing that work and how they will be doing it and the impact it may have, what jumps out to you the most?

Henderson: I’ve been thinking about this in general, and there are so many things being postulated now about how going to work, being at work, what we’ll do, who will do it, where we’ll do it, and all that is near-term. So, the more fun thing is that you’re saying, “What about 10 years from now?” and we have to suspend what we used to call work and what we used to call productivity, and there’s going to be a lot of change in both of those aspects.

Also, what’s happened here is, we are enhancing a bifurcated society, and somehow, we’re going to have to learn how to work with that much more effectively. We can’t have two parallel economies funded by workers in two different worlds. That will be surreal, and there won’t be any synergy, and you need synergy to make the world go round. That will be interesting. There won’t be, hopefully, a severe cut between what is now being called knowledge workers — office workers — versus people that are day in day out producing, making, servicing.

Kornik: It’s interesting that you talk about that dichotomy between office workers and the two different classes, because one of the levelers, traditionally, has been technologies and some of the collaboration technologies that we’ve seen during the pandemic. Obviously, we probably wouldn’t be able to get through the pandemic without those collaboration technologies. We had them before. They were on rocket fuel during the pandemic in terms of their adoption and their use. I’m curious: What are their near-term and longer-term impacts on employees?

Henderson: The whole notion of collaboration, maybe we’re thinking about that, about the office workers who went home and/or went to another part of the state or their vacation home or whatever and collaborated on virtual platforms. Collaboration is a wonderful word, but I don’t know that we have propelled the ability for true collaboration against the multiplicity of synergistic employers and employees and deliverers of goods, services, products, etc. That’s one big thing. You have to redefine what collaboration means, and redefine what technology means as far as, there’s a subquestion that you bring up to me when you phrase that, and that is this whole notion of, how are people responding to this?

Now, we get a lot of commentary that people are getting the old ennui. They’re being bored about it. They’re being detached. One of the serious things here is that human nature is that you want to be around other people — you really do, whether it’s socializing, your family, your fellow workers. Even to see people walking around the city is kind of exciting, or out in the woods — it doesn’t matter. We will, as human beings, always want to see other people, and we’ve been in a forced situation here where we’ve had a limited ability to interact. If you’ve got a family at home, you’ve been interacting solely with them.

Yes, you interact a bit on these virtual platforms, but you’re not with anybody. It’s a digitized representation. You’re not with anybody, and the reality is, you can’t see if someone’s looking at you. You can’t get all the other cues of communications that humans have in terms of, am I leaning into you? Am I really interested, or am I shrugging my shoulders, or am I looking down at my desk and doing my email while I’m on Zoom or Microsoft Teams? You just wonder what’s happening here.

There are a couple of things that do concern me as we continue to use this technology. One, it’s very hard to maintain a cultural identity with it — almost impossible. Two, it’s transactional in nature: You get things done. You check a box. You move on. My niece, a 25-year-old, gave me a mug for Christmas that says, “I made it through another Zoom that could have been an email,” and we’re not sophisticated enough to be selective about how we’re doing things — the cultural thing, the transactional nature.

The other thing is that it’s very hard to have a sense of belonging — not just culturally, but also belonging and exchanging. That will become very difficult for human beings to continue. The fourth thing that I’m concerned about is innovation and creativity. Innovation can be sparked by an individual. Yes, but more than likely, it’s brought to life by groups of people working together, 1-2-3. All of that is being lost. If we were to rely on using, in your words, collaborative technology, we would fall behind in a competitive race worldwide.

Kornik: Nina, you make a lot of great points. I just wonder, I think how different even this conversation would be between the two of us if we were sitting in a in a room on the couch, across from each other. All the verbal cues that we’re potentially missing, and we’ve been on so many Zoom calls for so long now during the pandemic. And as we move forward, the key is, how do we position these tools, and how do we use them? You mentioned your niece, who clearly comes from a different generation than you or me, and how they process information is obviously very different. So, there are a lot of generational forces too that business leaders and executives need to be thinking about as they look forward for the next 10 years.

Henderson: First of all, the niece that you mentioned, she’s 25 and she’s working, and she’s out of college, and she went through college, came out, etc., went to work before the pandemic. There’s a big difference, and I’m going to make that point now. We as employers and as people wanting to bring along groups of people to do well for society and for themselves, we have a major issue, and that is, when you look at the high school children and the college-age young adults over the last two years, they’ve essentially spent all of their time in their childhood bedroom. This is a tremendous strain, because many things happen, as we all know as parents and as family members, as teachers, as employers, to young people as they proceed through their last years of high school, enter college or enter the workforce if they don’t go to college — if they don’t want to, that’s just fine.

But all of the adulting skills that would have naturally progressed in a very formative period of these young people’s times have been squashed. From a standpoint of employers and societal needs, we’re going to have to help these young people come along. I’m vice chair of the board of trustees of a university, and I also chair academic affairs there. We used to give a student that was having trouble three semesters to be able to bring themselves up to the capability that was required. We now have expanded that to four because we realized that they just weren’t ready when they came in.

It has nothing to do with how wonderful the high school teacher was or how much they decided. It’s just darn hard when you don’t have the decision-making that comes with having to go — even in high school, when you join the team, all of those things, you were allowed to learn to socialize, make decisions on your own when you went away from home, all of that has been left. We’re dealing with, as employers and a society, a solid 10 years of that group of people needing extra help and some understanding to move forward. That’s one.

Number two, let’s think about the fact of looking up. For most all of us, the reality is that we have spent the last 10 years looking down. We are looking down at some kind of a machine, and if one loses the ability to look up, you are going to lose the ability to notice colors, to notice forms, to notice those communication cues that you and I mentioned earlier. There’s a real issue there.

Also, if you’re spending a large portion of your time on apps, which are predigested information being given to you — yes, you’re selecting which one you want, but basically, what’s in there, you haven’t curated. It’s been curated for you, and as it has progressed from, let’s say, Facebook to Instagram, and now we’re down to TikTok and Snap, what do you do with a population whose attention span is 46 seconds?

I’m not criticizing — that’s really interesting. But how do you work with an entirely different group of people used to receiving things in a quick, shorthand way with attention spans — I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying these are realities, and we have to think about, how do you enthuse people like that? How do you keep them involved? How do you let them work their own magic. Does this resonate for you, what I’m suggesting here?

Kornik: Absolutely. I’ve had these conversations, you know, exploring this topic with several people, specifically around the generational differences between the multiple generations in the workforce leadership styles — how people have come of age in an age of technology versus not an age of technology. It’s fascinating.

One thing that will be interesting for companies and business leaders to think about over the next several years, the next decade, is, where do those people work? Are you going to bring all those people back into a traditional office setting where they get to collaborate or interact with each other or maybe mentor or maybe shadow someone and see leadership styles? There’s a whole generation now, or two years’ worth, of employees who are maybe even more comfortable working from their home office or working from their kitchen table and not having to be elbow to elbow with their coworkers or even clients or customers. That’s a fascinating piece of this. I’m curious as to your thoughts: Do you ever see us returning to what we call a traditional workweek in a traditional office space?

Henderson: There’s still the traditional workweek — actually, it’s been expanded. I feel like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey — “What is a weekend?” because the reality is that your workweek now goes right into Saturday and Sunday, and unless you provide some dropdowns on that, it just stays that way. Work is done when you can fulfill it and when you make the time to do it. I don’t think that’s going to change. That’s going to evolve more. There will be a work time period — maybe not a workweek, but there’ll be a work time period — and depending on whether it’s a team effort, you’ll have to figure things to schedule with other people. Other times, if it’s a sole-capacity or thinking situation, you might do that at your leisure, whatever the case may be. The time parameters around work will change. The definition of work will change, and the word productivity will have to have a whole new definition.

Kornik: I’m curious about what your definition of productivity will be in the future.

Henderson: I don’t think it will be the number of virtual platform meetings that you can throw into a day or how many boxes on those virtual platform meetings you can get on — you know, 20 or 30 people. I do not think that will be a definition of productivity. Right now, we have fallen into the trap of thinking of transactional activity as productivity. That’s not productivity. Productivity is being able to build, to add on, to create, to open new territories, to open new thought waves, to make new products, to open new markets, etc. That’s productivity, and that is pretty hard to do in the way we have been operating the last two years.

Kornik: We talked about a lot here today, and you’ve given us a lot to think about. I’m curious, though; When you look out, let’s say to 2035 — we’ll take 13 years in the future — give me a few examples of how that might look. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed today that you think will surprise us or will be a little bit different or that hasn’t been in the parameters of this conversation? Ultimately, do you think work will end up being a more fulfilling, engaging, positive, enjoyable experience for employees in 2035, maybe more so than it is than it is now, or it was pre-pandemic, even?

Henderson: We have to be realistic. Work is work, Yes, work is to underwrite your capability to live your life, so it should be engaging. It should be rewarding both financially and in terms of personal sense of self. It should give you a place in community, within your overall local community but also within your business community, your operation community. But it’s still work. So, I don’t think that that’s going to change years from now. And sometimes you’ll have jobs where you feel tremendously fulfilled, and sometimes you’ll have positions where you’ll think, “Oh, boy.” That’s going to be there, but how we work and what we value within work and how we will choose who to work for or with will change dramatically as we go forward.

Kornik: Nina, thank you so much for your valuable insights, your unique insights. It was such an interesting conversation. Next time, we’re going to do it in person.

Henderson: Yay — wonderful.

Kornik: Thanks so much, Nina Henderson, for joining us on this VISION by Protiviti interview. We’ll see you again next time.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR WORK WITH MICROSOFT’S CORPORATE VICE PRESIDENT OF MODERN WORK, JARED SPATARO - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our content initiative where we examine big topics that will impact business, the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work, and we have a wonderful guest to help us to do that in Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of modern work at Microsoft. In this role, Jared leads Microsoft’s Modern Work team, which is dedicated to helping every person and organization navigate the shift and adapt to the new world of work. His team is driving research to help predict and shape what the future of work will look like across industries while also delivering new products and features within Microsoft 365 that will enable everyone to thrive. For this one, I’m happy to turn over the interviewing to my colleague, Joel Hammer. Joel is a Protiviti managing director and Microsoft lead. Joel.

Joel Hammer: Thanks, Joe. We’re excited to be here. I’m looking forward to our discussion today. Jared, again, I appreciate you taking time to meet with us today and discussing the topic of the future of work, and specifically, we’re looking about 10 years out. This is a vision piece for us that we like to do and focus in this area. First question here, Jared, is, we thought by now that we’d be past this point, but unfortunately, we have to start with the COVID-19 question and there are positive horizons on the forefront, but it’s been two years now since the disruption. I know that Microsoft has used this unprecedented time in terms of learning. What are your biggest takeaways, and how it impacted work? What do you think that legacy will be, and how do you think the last two years will shape the next 10?

Jared Spataro: A really good set of questions. I’m glad we go all the way back to COVID-19, because my experience now has been after looking at so much data in different ways, you do have to go back down. What I mean by that is the following: Going into the pandemic, the thing that I never would have guessed about the way this would have changed work is that it’s changed the people that work. In other words, what the data seems to point to—ours and many other studies that I’ve seen—is that the people who are going back to work here as we come out of the pandemic are not the same people that used to go to your office. They’re totally different people.

In some cases, we’ve hired at lot. At Microsoft, as an example, we hired about a third of our company. We’ve had that much turnover over the two years. Even if you take the same workers, they have changed in the way they perceive life and the things that they value. The research that I’ve seen indicates that there’s a rethinking of the why of work: What role does work play in my life? Ultimately, the shared experience that we’ve had is going to be every bit as impactful as the Great Depression was on my grandparents, my great-grandparents, as an example, as the world wars had shaped the way people think.

We’re seeing that play out already right now in that people are rethinking things like well-being. They’re rethinking work-life balance. They’re thinking differently about geography and work. Two years of being able to work away from the office—for information workers, at least—has them thinking differently about what they must go into an office for. There are a lot of changes that we have seen psychologically for workers, and that’s going to be the lasting impact. We’re going to see those psychological changes—even many that we don’t recognize right now—play out over the next decade in the labor market, and those shifts in the labor market are going to show up in the office. We can talk more about that, but that sets the table for what I believe will be the lasting and the most durable impact of what we’ve experienced.

Hammer: Great input there, Jared. I agree with you. We’ll come back to some of those topics here in a couple of questions, because I think you set some great points there. The pandemic accelerated several of the trends that were already in motion. We look at hybrid. We look at remote work with teleconferencing, collaboration, software. We think specifically of Teams and Viva and Loop and others. How do you envision organizations continuing to incorporate some of the most successful pandemic strategies in the future?

Spataro: Well, I’m biased on this one, you know. Full disclosure: It’s my job to sell technology, so I have a technology perspective. The most common trend I see coming, on the technology front, out of the pandemic is this idea that leaders across the world and organizations of all sizes have realized, “We need the equivalent of a digital fabric that binds the organization together.” That used to be a visionary statement: “Let’s paint a picture of this digital fabric through space.” It’s not a visionary statement any longer. It’s simply this: My employees expect to be able to work from anywhere. I’m never going to have all of them back in the same physical space again.

How do I create an environment where we can keep on working, keep on being productive, move the ball forward regardless of where people are physically and regardless of where they are in a time continuum as well? That’s what we’re seeing across time and space: Those changes were creating new patterns. As I think about how to create that underlying digital fabric, Teams is our answer here at Microsoft. We think we’ve got a winner in that we’ve combined different workloads—chat, meet, call, collaborate, automate—into a single platform. We’re trying to build on top of that fabric, and many companies, even if they don’t choose Teams, are going to have to do same thing. They’re going to have to figure out, “How do I connect everybody from my frontline workers all the way up to the executive suite so that we’re operating together?”

What I call the increased clock speed of business will demand this. You just can’t wait for the water to get to the end of the row with paper-based or even email-based processes. You’re going to have to speed up the clock speed of your organization, so that’s how it will start to play out, and then, there’s still a lot for us to learn.

Hammer: Great input there. Coming from a farming background, I understand the water getting to the end of row there, Jared. As we look at Teams, we’ve had a lot of success as a firm with Teams and implementing them at our and clients for ourselves. We’re hearing about metaverses. We’re hearing about virtual spaces. Can you talk about the potential of mixed-reality capabilities such as metaverses and virtual spaces inside of Teams?

Spataro: I’m very happy to hear that’s all the buzz right now, for sure. Let me start, even before answering the specifics on what people had considered to be a metaverse application or not, and just say, we should pause for a moment and recognize that over the last two years, we have all operated not in physical spaces, but in digital spaces, at least. We’ve gotten work done, in at least the information worker context, through these shared digital spaces that are pretty miraculous.

I was pausing the other day and thought, “What if the pandemic would have hit even five years before—certainly, 10 years before?” We wouldn’t have had the technology to keep things going the way that we have. It would have been a very different picture. Then, if you start there and say, “We have been operating in a digital format, or in a digitally shared space. Where is this going?” That is where, at least, in the business context, the metaverse picks up.

We see three specific click stops of metaverse coming into these digital spaces. The first will be the increased use of avatars. We’ll see this in Teams here over the next few months—we’ll be adding avatars into Teams so that you can choose not just to have your camera on or off but also to choose to have a digital representation of yourself. That may seem like sci-fi. Our work in what we call our Human Factors Lab seems to indicate that this will have some amount of virality to it. People, when they see others using these avatars, start to recognize that there’s value. That’s one thing.

The second thing that we’ll see is the adoption of what I call augmented reality scenarios. This is where we’re bridging the physical and the digital in a way that helps people get tasks done, at least in the business context. We’re already seeing these types of things. We see teams integrated, for instance, in the helmets—that’s putting a clear glass onto which we can project different images, and then, ultimately, if you use something called HoloLens, we’re able to project onto reality digital figures, whether that’d be objects or markup.

This is going to be a very fast-follow part of the metaverse because of real value for customers here. We see them using it in manufacturing-type scenarios. We see them using it in field service-type scenarios. It’s just so much more practical to bring in an expert from thousands of miles away and have them literally work on the reality that’s right in front of you by diagramming things out and teaching you what you need to do. We’ll really see that as kind of a fast follow-on to the avatar space.

Then, finally, we’ll move into more virtual reality immersive spaces. That will be a thing. In many ways, we’ll see companies experiment with that. We’ll see our most forward-leaning customers who will pick those things up, but they’ll be doing it because it will be a way for them to start to create a deeper connection between people. There’ll be a real business purpose behind them, as opposed to just being used because they’re eye candy or neat, and so we’ll see it play out. I do think you should get ready. We have some data from a recent survey we’ve done that shows that employees are quite ready. A high percentage of them say that they feel very comfortable in digital spaces, and they’re ready for more innovation. Companies at large are still not quite sure what to make of all of this, so it’ll be interesting to see it play out.

Hammer: I know I’m certainly very interested and excited for that, to see those things. We’ve done a few things at our firm with avatars and leveraging those to train and put real-world examples in, and it’s amazing how once you get into that scenario, it’s real. You shut everything else out, and you’re in a real space, and so I’m looking forward to being able to take more of that.

You talked a little bit ago about Microsoft and hiring almost a third of your company over the last two years. As we start talking about talent, we’re seeing that there are talent shortages out there on the horizon, or even today. Maybe it’s overused, but we hear “the Great Resignation,” and that’s coming on. Those two seem to create somewhat of a troubling combination. In your opinion, what will organizations need to be aware of in shaping their workforce of the future? What skills and capabilities will be in the highest demand? How do you see artificial intelligence playing in that space?

Spataro: Those are some great questions. Let me give the source of a lot of what I’ll reference over the next minute or two as I answer. We have been doing a number of different studies, our broader space studies. It’s something we called the Work Trend Index. That’s a study where we go out and ask a battery of questions to 30,000 people across 31 countries to try and a get sense for their perceptions, their experiences, and then we follow that up with smaller pollster base, between 9,000 and 10,000 people, on special topics. That’s where some of what I’ll tell you is coming from.

As I think about this, it’s important to start with the fact that people have changed. In particular, the why of work has changed. You can translate that economically into a worth-it equation for every individual. They’re trying to figure out what makes it worth it for me to work for you or to sacrifice what I do and give you my time in exchange for what you’re going to give me in terms of compensation. That equation has changed and is still changing.

What we see companies or what we see individuals telling us is that more than ever before, they value, for instance, culture and values among organizations, and that’s a factor of the rising generation where that has been more true even pre-pandemic, but also of how people have felt and how they have changed over the course of the pandemic. We have not only seen culture and values become a big thing, but in general, we have also seen how a company gets its work done. We see people commenting on what type of technology is chosen and what that seems to indicate about the thinking or the mental models of an organization. That’s certainly coming out even already in the press as a thing.

Speaking more broadly, as I think about where companies are and what new skills are required, I will characterize it into two sections. First, for leaders, there’s a new set of skills that are definitely required. These skills not only are in digital skills—that’s a given—but leading in this day and age, at this moment, I think also requires a lot of empathy. It requires an ability to use culture to shape and drive outcomes perhaps as effectively as some of our predecessors who used the process in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It requires an understanding of the psyche of people, the cultural context in which we live.

It is a brand-new environment. Every leader has to be an incredible communicator in new formats, in new media. As you think about those skills, that is a profile for a new type of leader. That’s the first category. Then, for workers themselves, employees themselves, there are a whole number of new technologies that you have to learn how to master. You have to learn how to not just use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, but you have to be fantastic at videoconferencing. You have to be adept at using chat and understanding the etiquette that goes with that. You have to be able to put it all together for real-time and asynchronous collab. There’s a whole bunch of new skills that will be emerging, and new etiquette.

One last thing I’ll leave with you on this is running a hybrid meeting where some people are online, some people are together with you—the most basic things: Who do you look at? How do you look at them? How do you make sure you get input from everyone? Those types of skills, we’re all going to need to learn together as we put work back together and move into physical spaces again.

Hammer: That’s great. Jared, you mentioned there about the leadership and some of the important talents and skills that they’re going to need to have. We saw where you had shared recently how companies are needing to be more proactive in that space and planning for what you talked a little bit about today. Some have created strategic C-level positions specific to the future of work. Do you think that’s the next executive role to emerge, and if so, where are those leaders coming from?

Spataro: We definitely see it. There’s data on LinkedIn that indicates that the future of work is not only a topic that’s being talked about, but there are also job titles out there that are increasingly using that phrase. We see hybrid being used increasingly. I think there’s an over 300% increase over the last few months of the word hybrid in things like job postings—all of these things that we’re feeling are making their way into the labor market. It’s good to have someone who’s thinking about the future of work.

If I’m honest with you, if I have a chance to sometimes meet CEOs and their directors to talk about these issues, I think it’s fine. If somebody wants to appoint someone on a senior leadership team to do that work, it’s good, but what I would tell them is, “You can’t escape the fact that reshaping your entire operating model, that rethinking your culture, is the job of the senior leadership team. You can’t delegate that to one person. It’s only when you wrap your head around that truth that you’re going to be able to do right.” With all this technology, with all this change, it is not a given that this is all going to go well. It’s going to take real leadership.

Now, I’m positive about the future. I’m optimistic about the future, that we can get it right. But instead of delegating it to people in your team, I encourage leaders to take it head-on and recognize that they should roll up their sleeves and not be afraid to tell people they don’t quite know, but are very willing to get in there and learn as they go.

Hammer: Yes, I agree with that. As we look out there, we are in that market of placing resources with different organizations and have a significant vision into that. It seems, as we look at the gig economy and networks of more nimble and collaborative teams, that that’s going to be what the future is going to look like. From your perspective, how do we get there with those teams and current talent models? It seems they don’t do it today. As we look through that, what are the things that you’re seeing with teams and individuals in the important skill sets that they’re going to need to be successful as we look out into the future?

Spataro: Increasingly against the backdrop of that faster clock speed that we talked about in just about every industry, competition is more fierce. Cycle times are shorter. That sets the stage for what we’re doing. We are increasingly seeing, at least in our research, what we call more adaptive teaming. This would be this idea of bringing together cross-functional teams, whose job it is to solve a problem end-to-end. You need experts, because you need so much depth in domains, but then, you need a way to put that together into a synthesized solution, as opposed to, “Here’s what marketing, here’s what research, tell me. Now, we’ve got to figure out what to go and do for real.” That is definitely becoming an emergent pattern.

You’re right. It’s not just that one part of our overall work system doesn’t support that. Talent models don’t support it, but the labor market isn’t quite there. Our systems in place to pay people and bring people on, our IT systems, and all of these things are going to need some work. The way we think about it is simply this: The future, if I could choose one word to say, “This is what the future is all about,” it would be flexibility. It’s flexibility in how you work. It’s flexibility in when you work. It’s flexibility in where you work. Today, a lot of the focus in the media, at least, is on where. We’re all talking about going back to the office and what that will look like, but you’re hitting on the point of how you work will be just as important.

This is part of that reprogramming of the operating model. We need to think about the agility that they want to program in. Now, the good news is, we can see from our analysis of things like telemetry that people are being able to get in touch with each other faster than ever before. This digital fabric allows them to, one ping, and I’ve got Joel, and I can quickly get the information I need from him, where previously, I might have needed to bump into him or find him or send him an email and wait for him to reply. We are finding ways to use the tools, but we’re going to have to put it all together.

I don’t have a satisfying answer that says, “Here you go—here’s how it’s going to work.” It’s really important for people to recognize that this new pattern of teamwork, this new pattern of getting work done, is a part of that “how,” and I would focus everyone on flexibility, recognize that that is going to be the keyword over the coming two to three years that will set the trajectory for the next 10 years.

Hammer: Great input there, and insight. There are going to be a lot of business leaders, board members that view this video. What’s your call to action to business leaders and board members? You’ve talked a lot about the culture. You’ve talked about making sure that they’re prepared, that they’re setting the turn there. What’s your call to these leaders? What should they be taking right now to make sure that they’re prepared when it comes to the future of work?

Spataro: I have to start with the moment, because the moment sets the tone for everything else. If I have a chance to speak to someone who has decision-making authority at any level, I like to emphasize that this is literally a once-in-a-generation moment. You have to recognize that. Your kids, and your kids’ kids, are going to look back on this moment just like we had looked back on the Great Depression and the world wars and say, “What changed?” With that in mind, then, if you hold the authority to shape culture, to think about structures and processes, you can’t take this as a moment of “Let’s get back to business. Let’s get back to how we were doing it.”

Instead, you need to think, “There could be winners and losers out of this.” In my particular setting, in my industry, what’s going to set apart those winners and losers? What are the key things—and there aren’t many—that are going to differentiate the people who emerge out of this situation stronger and performing better than everyone else? We have to go down by industry and perhaps by the competitive environment in a small cluster of companies to determine that. If you determine that as a leader, then you take that and turn that into a plan for your culture, a plan for your processes, a plan for your organizational structure. You put that together into a new operating model.

Simply put, recognize the moment. Get a plan grounded in the things that will make a difference over the long term, and then execute with alacrity. If you do that with real energy, people will recognize, “That’s a leader. She knows what she’s doing. He knows what he’s doing.” They will follow leaders who have that clarity of vision. It’s a rare opportunity.

Hammer: It really is to be game-changing, as you said, back where our grandparents and parents had back in the Depression, world wars, looking back on those things.

A final question here, Jared: As you look out to 2035—and we’re just shooting out here—we talked about a lot of things, but when you compare where we’re at today and you look out to 2035, what types of bold predictions would you make as it relates to the future of work?

Spataro: I’ve gotten one that I have a lot of confidence in. Presence, and how we project our presence to each other and share presence, is going to be become increasingly mediated digitally. That doesn’t mean that physical presence won’t be important. It will be, but we are going to get to the point where time and space matter less. They won’t not matter, but will matter less. We will have the tools to project presence so that with that presence, we can create real human connection. That’s the thing that has been missing. A lot of the commentary is that that presence is a means and the ends will be human connection, because all the great things we have done as a human family over the course of history have been done when we rallied together, when we bring the best and the brightest and the strongest into a unified sense of doing things, getting things done. All the things we’ve done that have been amazing had been done that way.

So, with presence mediated digitally, we’ll be able to create connections—new connections we’ve never had—and it will be that human connection that drives things. We’ll see holograms. We’ll see the ability to project ourselves into all sorts of physical and digital spaces, all in the name of getting that connection we need across time and space so that we can engage in some meaningful endeavors. We’ll look back and say, “It all started there. It started in 2020 with lowly videoconferencing as the beginning.”

Hammer: That’s fascinating, Jared. I was at one of the Microsoft partner conferences and saw where one of the CVPs over marketing who does a lot of marketing for Azure, I was impressed: She put a HoloLens on and stood back, and she introed, but then took a step back, and it projected a hologram, and the technology had learned the inflections of her voice, and she started her hologram, delivered her message, in perfect Japanese. I thought, “That is going to be cool,” and so I do. I look forward to those things, and the other things that we talked about today, and I really appreciate you taking time to meet with us. We’re excited about this as a firm, as, overall, people in the world to be able to experience this future of work. Truly, thank you for your time today.

Spataro: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Hammer: Back over to you, Joe.

Kornik: Thanks, Joel. Thank you, Jared, for those outstanding insights and that look into the future of work. I certainly enjoyed the discussion, and I hope you did as well. Thanks for joining us for the VISION by Protiviti interview. We’ll see you next time.

VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER: NSW’S CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF WORK - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our content initiative where we look into the future and examine the strategic implications of big topics that will impact business, the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide over the next decade and beyond.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work and all its implications for employees and employers, as well as clients and customers. We’ve got an outstanding guest today as we welcome Dr. Ian Oppermann, the New South Wales Government’s chief data scientist working within the Department of Customer Service. Dr. Oppermann is also an industry professor at the University of Technology Sydney and served as CEO of the New South Wales Data Analytics Centre from 2015 to 2019. He is considered a thought leader on the digital economy and big data and an expert on the future impact of technology on society. Dr. Oppermann will be interviewed by my colleague Ghislaine Entwisle, a managing director at Protiviti Australia and co-leader of the IT Advisory practice. I’m looking forward to an enlightening discussion, so I’ll turn it over to Ghislaine to begin.

Ghislaine Entwisle: Thanks, Joe. Great to be here, and it’s so lovely to be joined today by Dr. Ian Oppermann. Welcome, Ian.

Ian Opperman: Thanks, Ghislaine. Great to be here.

Entwisle: Ian, the global pandemic has had such a material impact on the way we work. What do you think are the biggest takeaways from the pandemic, and what will be its legacy in terms of how it impacted how, where and when we work?

Opperman: Thanks, Ghislaine. That is the question of the hour. COVID-19 has really changed, or accelerated, so many things that we were doing, at least from a tech perspective. It’s had an incredible impact on the entire globe. It taught us about the value of inequality. It taught us about the value of thinking and acting globally. But from a tech perspective, what it did was accelerate telework, telehealth and tele-education. The conversation we’re having right now is one that we might have had under normal circumstances, but it’s something which has just become normal. Each and every one of us now has a little home studio, and sometimes there are screaming kids in the background, sometimes there are dogs and cats up on the screen, but this is normal. Work environment is one thing, but the implications for things like telehealth and tele-education, I think we’re actually much more profound.

Australia has a real challenge with the tyranny of distance. We know that health outcomes in regional and remote Australia are very different to urban environments. I’m hoping that the greater acceptance of telehealth, in particular, will have very substantial impact on a whole range of life outcomes. Tele-education, I hope will also have some substantial impacts on educational outcomes.

Entwisle: You mentioned technologies being a cornerstone to this. It has been so crucial to working through this pandemic, and it will perhaps be even more important in the future. In your view, how will technology continue to influence the future of work both in the near term and the far term? Do you have any local examples that you can provide on this?

Opperman: That’s another great question. Pre-COVID-19, we spent a little bit of time thinking about what the future would look like, and the big issues were being able to handle data in an appropriate way of getting our governance right, being able to increasingly be comfortable with increasing use of increasing amounts of data. Fast-forward with COVID-19, what we’ve seen, of course, is that all of those long-term trends still remain, but the need to get serious about cybersecurity where everybody suddenly is a node in a network, as opposed to people working in a normal office environment where normal security and governance can be applied. Everybody is that — our own little home office now. Being serious about cybersecurity, being serious about making sure that we are connected in an appropriate way, it’s not so subtle, but it’s a reasonably important shift to the way we think about decentralized engagement.

The longer-term consequences are that increasingly, we are not just connecting with people, we’re also connecting with devices, and devices are connecting with devices. Those futuristic ideas of the Internet of things suddenly become much more significant, much more important.

Rather than you and I talking to each other via a video system, many distributed devices are talking to each other in environments which, again, are not as well controlled as if it was a centralized office environment or a centralized network. That broad distribution of many devices operating in a relatively insecure way, where any particular device could be compromised deliberately or due to some sort of failure, is the thinking we need to bring to future very complex systems where we are forced to rely on inherently unreliable systems potentially creating vulnerabilities, but requiring us to think differently about how we deal with very complex, very distributed systems.

Entwisle: Your point around it being so much more of a complicated technology landscape than we’ve had before does mean that organizations and people have to be a lot more switched on around all those potential vulnerabilities and risks that they previously haven’t experienced, or certainly have not experienced as intensely as they have in the examples that you provided. Specifically, around the technologies, what specific technology do you think will have the greatest impact on the future of work over the course of the next decade?

Opperman: There is some big tech looming on the horizon. Quantum, I think, is one of the really most important ones. As we increasingly move towards viable quantum computing, there are a couple of fundamental issues we have to address. Security, as we know it, suddenly gets a very great challenge simply because we’re relying on hard puzzles being solved by linear computing devices. A quantum computer can do things very differently.

We also, of course, are thinking about technologies, again, where everything is connected to everything else. I spend some of my time working with the world of 6G — trying to bring 6G to life. The idea of not billions of devices but hundreds of billions of devices being connected, again, means you need to think very differently about not just issues of complexity and cybersecurity but also issues around energy consumption.

At the moment, it’s estimated that something like 2% of the world’s energy is being consumed by data centers. If you replace data centers with an incredibly distributed data storage, data-connection type of devices, plus everything being able to communicate with everything else, and data analytics and AI being thrown in on top of all of that, the percentage of the global energy budget we consume with data analytics, AI and moving data suddenly has the potential to skyrocket. Thinking about energy consumption in data analytics is a very important aspect of how we think about the future.

Entwisle: As data, there’s more and more of it every single day. It’s going to continue to be a very big thing that we need to worry about. You’re right. The energy impact is something that we should be more aware of — the impact on how we can manage that and mitigate some of that as well. Thinking about it from the future of work, from an employee engagement and customer experience perspective, how do you think that might change in the future?

Opperman: That’s interesting. Our idea of that total customer experience in general is something which is based on the historical model of slowly but surely building up an engagement between people. Again, if what we’re doing right now is the new normal, that 2D projection of an engagement is something which we’re getting better at. At the very best, you could say it’s a 2.5D engagement, as opposed to a real human interaction — being able to accept this as a reasonable way of engaging, just as we accepted the telephone as a 1D engagement. It was OK, it was normal and that’s what we expected.

If we are trying to replicate an in-person engagement between people, between people and customers, between coworkers, between a doctor and a patient, or between a teacher and a student, there’s a lot more that we need to bring to bear or we need to change our expectations. We’ve all accepted that COVID-19 means we need to do this, so we will engage this way. The challenge has always been that during COVID-19, we can’t build teams — we can’t form, we can’t norm, we can’t storm. We’ve got along as best we can. If that was really the long-term future, then it has all sorts of great implications for where teams can form, but it has got implications for the human interaction.

There’s another interesting part to that. I spend a lot of my time working with international standards, and that’s by definition global. We’re trying to use three different time zones to ensure that we are as inclusive as possible, but the reality is, there are a lot more European-centric or North American–centric time zones than those which are favorable for people in Asia-Pacific.

If we are to work like this in the future, we need to think more about diversity and inclusion, and that means geographic inclusion and time zone inclusion. I would never have thought we’d be talking about time zone inclusion as a real issue, but the midnight–to–3 a.m. calls, and falling asleep during a meeting, which is something which would be outrageous two years ago — you start to hear people get quieter and quieter as the meeting progresses, and you think at some point, “I’ve probably lost my colleague.” Again, that’s something which we hadn’t really considered as a real issue. We are prepared to make allowances during COVID-19, but we have to get that right if we’re going to operate in a genuine distributed tele-world.

Entwisle: There’s a difference between allowing it for a short-term period during the pandemic, but then going back to it afterwards, you’re right, this is something that we’re looking to build into the way in which we operate in the future, in the future of work. We do really need to think about what that looks like and what that means for our customers and our employees as well. Interesting insights there.

What will organizations need to be aware of in shaping their workforce of the future? I’m interested in your perspective on what role artificial intelligence would play. Also, a bit about how that might impact the diversity of the workforce in 2030.

Opperman: I was thinking about that when giving the last answer, because AI will play an increasingly important role. The good thing is, we’re still a long way from that point of singularity where AI is much, much smarter than human beings, but AI is increasingly good at doing mundane, repeatable tasks but moving up the value-creation stacks, so it’s not just doing something again and again and again. Things like e-discovery have shown that there are some aspects which we used to think were relevant to people that can be done by devices. One of the important dimensions of this opportunity is that as AI becomes more generalized — and again, there’s a long way from that point of singularity — it’s the creativity of people, it’s the diversity of thought, it’s the inclusiveness of people with different perspectives that will really be competitive differentiators.

In my robust discussions with the standards community about the need to have rotating time zones and allow everybody to be included, I say that if we don’t have diversity, we run the risk of having this relatively small group of people think through a particular approach to a challenging problem. And it will be not just a nice-to-have, but diversity will start to become a genuine competitive advantage when things which are not that creative or are increasingly more repetitive start to be able to be done through AI. Diversity will be one of the really interesting opportunities for all people in the workplace. As increasingly mundane tasks get automated away, diversity will be a competitive differentiator, and I hope companies start to see that and start to compete for diversity in the workforce.

Entwisle: That would be a wonderful outcome. To your point earlier, around the time zone inclusion and other components that do mean some parts of the world are less well represented, the quality of any of our solutions that we develop is tailored to a small minority, and that’s not what we want. We get the power of innovation through leveraging the diversity of what the globe has to offer. I love that insight, Ian. If we look now from the perspective of education, training, leadership development, talent management and career pathways, how will that change in the future?

Opperman: There’s a lot to what you just said. One of the things that we saw pre-COVID-19 was the advent of massive online training — the MOOCs. What it meant was that someone in Sydney could reach out to many tens of millions of people in China or North America. I have a colleague from the University of Technology who’s done exactly that — really popular online courses on AI. Again, that takes us a step forward in terms of our ability to be able to expand and scale the influence of an individual — but again, that’s not all of it.

That point about developing an integrated, diverse and inclusive perspective on a whole range of different problems that people tackle will remain the challenge. Telecommunications and scaling and recording and the use of ICT allow us to project one to many. It still doesn’t address the many-to-many or the many-to-one — that challenge still remains. There are some uniquely human aspects to all sorts of team or workforce or educational developments where people are still the unique elements in the network. We don’t scale very well, in particular, when we’re many to one, and yet it’s that genuine human interaction with teams, that forming and norming, which really allows for the storming, which we haven’t quite got right.

There are still some important scaling issues we need to think about, and there are some important elements of going beyond 3D. If phone is 1D, what we’re doing now is 2D. If, perhaps, other sorts of integrated media give us 3D, that’s still not quite it. As a species, we have always done well when different people come together and exchange ideas in a meaningful way and build trust and build relationships and then work together.

A casual interaction may allow you to exchange an idea, but to really move forward as a high-performing team, you do need to have those human interactions where you long-term trust the people you’re working with, are long-term are willing to bring your full self into that engagement. If I had never met you before, Ghislaine, I’d be enjoying this conversation, but I know who you are, I trust you and I’d be very happy to collaborate in this form for some time. But if we’d never had that initial building stage, it would be difficult.

Entwisle: As you say, that then makes your education or training experience far less rich, and so you’re not getting the innovation, the creation, the great outcome of rich interactions, and so, as you say, there’s a way to go to, to lift that, to enable us to have those rich experiences. What type of tools and techniques will organizations need to be proficient in to grow at the pace we expect change to move?

Opperman: There are some fundamentals. There are things that we’re using right now — the ability to have secure, reliable, appropriate and quality communications, which is very important, the ability to have distributed security in systems like this, which is very important. Then, beyond that, the knowledge management and exchange are going to be very important. Again, at the risk of harping on about some of the issues I’ve already raised, the ability to find ways to collaborate, there have been a few really interesting tools that we’ve tried online. Online whiteboarding is not quite the same as holding a pen and standing there and sparking up each other. There are some tools around sidebar conversations, and we’ve got breakout rooms and such things. Again, they’re a good step, but they’re not quite all the way there.

But if we project forward to, say, 2050 and the sort of challenges we’re looking at there, I hope we’ll have data and security — well, maybe not security, but at least we’ll have data and governance issues sorted out. It’s fingers crossed on that one. The issues we’ll be looking at in the world of 2050 will be very different issues: changing climate, aging, an urbanizing population — very different world in terms of where we live and the intensity with which we’re living in that world.

The issues, then, are going to be issues about inequality, and issues around things like a global pandemic — which will keep coming back to bite us in waves, because the world has different access to resources, different access to medicines, different access to education and different perspectives — are the sorts of challenges we need to think hard about how we globalize these local pockets of connectivity, pockets of creativity and pockets of interaction. What we all need to get better at is thinking about a global community, thinking about the inequalities which will inevitably arise because we all live somewhere, we all interact with the real world in some way, and thinking about what we could do with the digital world which will allow us to increasingly address some of those real physical geographic inequalities.

Entwisle: That’s a great challenge to everyone listening today: How can we influence that in a positive way so there is less inequality in the world, there’s more opportunity to connect equally. We were touching a little bit there around global perspectives. I was keen to get your thoughts around, how can government and industry bodies influence global standards and policies to perhaps either enable a faster pace of innovation or just connect more?

Opperman: One of the things that COVID-19 has shown us is that this is a global problem. If we’re not all equally vaccinated or have access to vaccines, if we’re not all equally aware and understand the challenges, then we will find that that inequality allows COVID-19 to do its next trick and come back and impact the world, and then another pocket of inequality allows COVID-19 to do its next trick and so on. As a consequence, we have this dance with COVID-19 which will potentially go on much longer than if we all have equal access. One of the things governments can do is, first, agree with each other that there are a minimum set of standards with the smallest around the access to different resources, a minimum set of standards around understanding that if we don’t have the access to resources, we don’t access to the tech, we will start to create a multispeed global economy or multispeed global community.

We’ve talked about third-world and we’ve talked about first-world and sometimes second-world. That labeling of the different environments people are in is great if you’re a 19th-century economist or a 20th-century economist. It’s not going to work for the 22nd century. If we think about the fact that differences drive the opportunity for catastrophic outcomes, either through mass migration or through people looking for a better life — physically leaving the environment they’re in because they don’t have access to those resources — or the opportunity for viruses to essentially have an environment where they can propagate and reproduce and evolve, those massive inequalities have the potential to constantly bite the first world and the second world.

So governments are acknowledging that in many respects, we don’t have a choice but to think globally, and we should operate with the global mentality. That’s important. Things like COP26 — a great opportunity for the world to come together and say, “Climate change is real. There are some minimum things we need to do.” That’s really important. Local politics drives local decision-making, and as a consequence, we have to be able to, to some extent, acknowledge that whilst we might want to do things locally, we always have to have an eye on the global environment.

Entwisle: As you say, thinking globally is going to be more and more important in the future, so we can’t just have that as an afterthought and be selfish about the location wherein we exist or wherein we’re represented politically — we need to be thinking globally. That’s certainly very interesting. Ian, when you look at the overall landscape of work, workers and workplaces a decade from now, what do you see, and how different do you think that will be? What are the most radical changes that you envision?

Opperman: For the gig economy and for piecework, the sort of thing that we used to see in the 18th century in Europe, there’s a real potential for that to return. And in order for that to return and be beneficial, then, again, we need some minimum conditions around what it means.<>It’s not going to be OK anymore to just outsource dangerous, dirty, dull tasks to third world countries and say, “Off you go — do it” — the sort of things that we’ve seen in the past of recycling, where people are sitting in appalling conditions, pulling apart devices with potentially toxic materials in a very dangerous environment compared to what we would expect in the Western world. It can’t be OK for us anymore to send fast-fashion development requirements in batches to developing countries and say, “We will benefit based on that short-term piecework,” which ultimately leads to a pretty dramatic misuse or wastage of resources. Fast-fashion has been a disaster for the environment.

Regarding the future of work, piecework will be with us, but we need to think differently about how it happens. We also need to think much more in terms of the circular economy. There was something just recently announced about a race in Australia to develop a recycling environment for solar panels. They have an approximate life for 20 years. They’re pushing really hard to develop solar panels as a response to climate change.

It’s generally good for energy systems to have distributed sources coming in — all good things, except that 20 years on, you’ve got a massive waste problem. The ability to think constantly about the entire life cycle of materials, including the human involvement in those materials, including what happens to materials after they’re manufactured, and then headed towards what would otherwise be waste, and acknowledging that there are some elements that we have no choice about.

We’re running out of some of the exotics. We’re running out of some general materials. Lithium is a great example at the moment. It’s becoming such an incredibly contested resource that the price of lithium has gone up fivefold in a relatively short period of time. Rare materials are going to be things we need to think about. The intersection between waste and water and energy are things that we also need to think about in much more profound sense. We have a finite set of resources on the planet. No more land, no more water, no more natural resources. We have what we have. Water is something which always has been a problem for the entire life span of humankind, and we haven’t necessarily treated it as one of the most valuable commodities we’ve got because it’s in relative abundance in relative areas.

The one thing we do have in abundance is energy — not necessarily from digging up coal, digging up fossil fuels, but the fact that we get hit every single day by enough energy to power the entire planet from solar means that we’ve got a window of opportunity to think about how we use the resources we’ve got, how we harvest the waste we’ve got, and take advantage of natural sources of energy — and think about all of that in a small, sustainable way in a circular economy sense.

Again, not just materials, not just what we do with waste, not just what happens when something leaves the circular economy by becoming toxic or radioactive, but thinking about all of that and the intersection of people and their role in those different stages. I hope some of the things that are happening in the world at the moment will help us think more like that, but that more holistic perspective of resources and people and circular, I hope, is the future of work, the future of all economies, and the future of that much more inclusive and more equitable interaction with different parts of the world.

Entwisle: That’s a great vision. If all organizations, as they’re shaping products or designing services, are thinking in that globally sustainable “What’s my impact on the world from a people, process, technology perspective?” then we’re all going to make much better decisions and have a better future for the next generation. Those are great inspirational thoughts, Ian — thank you for that. One final question: Will how we work be better in 2030 and beyond?

Opperman: We always look to the future and say, “There’s a beautiful potential future waiting for us.” But ultimately, we as people, we’ll still go to work. We’ll still get bored. We’ll still think that our boss is a numbskull from time to time — in particular, if our boss is an intelligent device. We’ll still dislike our colleagues on and off. Some aspects about the future of work will be reflective of us as humans, but I genuinely hope we have more flexibility. I genuinely hope that some of what we’ve learnt during COVID-19 — that it isn’t a nine-to-five-presenteeism issue, and that you can be creative after five, even if you haven’t worked in the morning — I hope some of that flexibility is part of the way we think in the future.

All of the professional people I know who’ve retired are more busy after they have retired than before, and you say, “I don’t think you actually understood the point of retirement.” The response is almost inevitably, “Now I get more choice. I get to choose when I do things and how much effort I put into them. I get to dial up things up and dial things down.”

If we can bring that into the normal work life, the normal career period, not only will it mean that retirement can get pushed out a little bit or transition to retirement might change — which again, if we’ve got an aging population and a growing population, those retirement thresholds and things that we’ve been seriously looking at over the last decade in Australia, and increasing the age of retirement and the age you can access superannuation or even the pension — it will also make that transition to retirement easier. It will make it easier for people to stay in the workforce. It will actually make working more enjoyable, but I guarantee you, people will still like and dislike their colleagues during the course of their career, and they’ll think their bosses are numbskulls during the course of their career.

Entwisle: That’s true. After all, we are human, so there’ll be some of those things that don’t change.

It’s been wonderful to spend the time with you. Thank you for your time. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. I think everyone will take something away from this, whether it’s a little bit more sense of responsibility about the impact of our decisions and organizations’ decisions, or whether it’s just a feeling of “We’ll take the challenge” or how we’re going to influence that to be a better 2030 or 2050 around the roles that we play. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ian — you’ve been an absolute pleasure.

Opperman: Thanks, Ghislaine — great to be here.

Entwisle: Over to you, Joe.

Kornik: Thank you, Ghislaine, for those great questions. Thank you, Dr. Oppermann, for those insightful answers. Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, and we’ll see you next time.