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.

VIEW FROM THE VICE CHAIR: MORGAN STANLEY’S CARLA HARRIS ON HOW WE’LL WORK IN 2030 AND BEYOND - 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 businesses in 2030 and beyond, as well as the decisions being made in C-suites and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future of work and all its implication for employees, employers and the customers with whom they interact.

We’ve got an outstanding guest today as we welcome Carla Harris to the program. Carla is vice chair of wealth management and senior client adviser at Morgan Stanley. She was the chair of the Morgan Stanley Foundation from 2005 to 2014 and sits on the boards of several community organizations. In 2013, Carla was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the National Women’s Business Council. She’s a renowned public speaker who offers guidance to corporate audiences based on her book Expect to Win. She is also, no doubt, the first gospel recording artist to appear with us, having released two albums and performed a solo concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. I’m happy to pass off interviewing duties today to my colleague Fran Maxwell. Fran is the global lead of workforce and organizational transformation at Protiviti.

Fran Maxwell: Thanks, Joe, and thanks for being with us today, Carla.

Carla Harris: Thanks for having me, Fran.

Maxwell: So, just a handful of questions, all around the future of work. When we think about the future of work in 2030, where do you see the most impact occurring?

Harris: I see the most impact occurring, Fran, with respect to how people are working and where they are working. We will continue to have some form of hybrid model — no question about it. There is going to be a migration in a couple of years back to the office just because as humans, there’s an appetite for people to be together, and as companies try to think about what they’re going to do with the time that they have together with their employees, whether it’s time to create, innovate or ideate, or just to network or to problem-solve. The way that we spend time together in an office environment is going to be different, if we’re smart about it, and it will be more productive. That that’s going to be the biggest shift that you see — that we’re probably not going to go back to five days a week, 40 to 70 hours, inside of one building together. That’s going to be where you’ll see the biggest shift.

Maxwell: I’m curious to know your thoughts on the hybrid work model and the impact on a company’s culture. Do you have a thought on what the cultural impacts might be with the change to hybrid?

Harris: Leadership, in particular, is going to have to be far more engaging and far more involved in defining what culture is all about. Most companies — and I’m going to make a gross generalization here — have just allowed the culture that has been. If they’ve been around for 20 years or 100 years, there’s been a macro sense of the culture, and that’s been the overarching thing, with tweaks every now and then when it’s identified that there have to be tweaks.

But leadership is going to have to be far more thoughtful and intentional about, who are we today in the context that we’re working in with all the exogenous pressures and factors. And, with the fact that we have Millennials and Z-ers as the dominant population in our workforce now, who do we want to be, what do we want to stand for, and being willing to evolve that in a way that is more regular than we have done in the past.

Maxwell: What about the future of work for Morgan Stanley? Where do you envision that going?

Harris: Watching how financial services has responded throughout the COVID-19 environment and on the back of it as we move through it, it has shown itself to lag for a bit. If you think about how the technology companies and the entertainment companies and the media companies came out first, saying their employees didn’t need to be back until July 2020, then February 2021 and now March 2022, you don’t hear the financial services, of which we happen to be a part, saying the same thing. Financial services as an industry, it’s still focused on the way things were, with a public acknowledgment that there’s going to be more flexibility, but they haven’t been so quick to say what that looks like. They may not necessarily lead in this space — they may be fast followers, but I don’t expect them to innovate around the flexibility point.

Maxwell: In regard to the future of work, how do you envision artificial intelligence, automation and robotics impacting work?

Harris: Artificial intelligence, in particular, is going to play a big role as we go forward, especially in retail, because obviously, over the last couple of decades, as e-commerce has risen in its importance in that industry, now they understand what to offer you. It’s going to be really important with respect to inventory, what you sell, as well as thinking about how to engage you differently, because they now understand your appetite. It’s going to be really important in retail.

Robotics is also going to be very important in retail because if you think about what robotics could do in the warehouse, how it could make the warehouse more efficient in terms of packing, in terms of distribution, the overall supply chain, that’s one industry in particular where you’re going to see AI as well as robotics transform that industry and make a difference. AI is also going to be important in anything where there is a B2C application because, again, they understand your needs, they understand the frequency with which you buy, how you use. Whether it’s healthcare or entertainment, it’s going to be critical as we go forward.

Maxwell: Let’s shift gears again and talk about talent. There’s been a lot in the news lately around the talent shortage, the Great Resignation, etc. Do you think the talent shortage will continue to be a problem in going into 2030 and beyond?

Harris: I don’t think the talent shortage will be a problem by the time we get to 2030. This is a short-term phenomenon. The last two years, and the 18 months that we have been in a shelter-in-place protocol, has caused people to think. There’s no question that there have been issues around child care and around elder care, and around flexibility that employees never had before, and there have been so many companies and so many industries, Fran, where they’ve had record years in 2020, and they’re about to have another record year in 2021. There’s no question that you don’t have to have people in the same place to get outside productivity. Look at the company performance industry by industry by industry — the numbers do not lie.

The issue — what we have going on in the Great Resignation — is that people have had an opportunity to think, “Am I in my best and highest-use role? Is there something else I could have been doing? Did I take this job just to get a job because the economy was tough when I came out in 2008 or ’09 or ’10 as an undergrad, or when I came out of graduate school? This person over here, Bob, is actually living his best life, or he seems to be living his best life. What does that mean for me? Could I do that? I’ve already had an entrepreneurial appetite — I never had the courage to do it. Well, why not?”

You have all of this going on when people have finally had a chance to stop and think. Now, once this sorts out and we get on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis, you’re going to find people starting to settle down in the seats that they have, they’ll just stay, or they will migrate to the seats that they want or that they aspire to, or they’re going to create seats for themselves, but by the time we get to 2025, you won’t see the shortage that we have now.

Here’s another thought for you: Millennials who are younger today who are willing to take those risks, they’re going to be a little older three years from now, four years from now — certainly, nine years from now — with different appetites, different pressures. There may be a renewed appetite for the regular way, W-2, and those companies that have figured out a way to create an environment where they can get outsize productivity from the person that’s just walking in the door or the person that’s been there 15 years, that’s the industry, and the company, that’s going to win as the employer of choice.

Maxwell: Great. I hear you loud and clear. Talent shortage, we think, will work itself out. What about skills and the lack of potential skills in the industry, particularly as it pertains to AI, etc.? There will be new skills that will need to be developed in the marketplace. I’m curious about your thoughts on that shift.

Harris: The good news, Fran, is at least we’re having the conversation now. There is a growing awareness that we don’t have the talent in those spaces, and companies that choose to pursue those spaces, that want to win in those spaces, are going to have to be creative about how they develop their own workforce.

Some of the conversations that I’ve been having with companies that think they’re going to need certain technical skills or they’re going to need software programming skills, I’ve said, “Well, there are certain undergraduate institutions where they are focused on those things at the undergraduate level. What’s to stop you from naming a building or putting a building on those campuses and rotate those students who are interested through internships in the freshman year, internships in the sophomore year, internships in the junior year, and if you’ve treated them well over the course of those summers and even term time, then you’ve already created your own pipeline of talent.” So, those kinds of creative solutions — co-locating where the students are — are some of the things that those who would need those skills are going to have to do.

Maxwell: What about how work gets done, or even how jobs are constructed? Do you see a shift with large organizations rethinking how jobs get done and leveraging a contingent workforce a little more?

Harris: That’s an interesting question, because if you had asked me that question five years ago, I would have said, “Absolutely — we’re going to find ourselves in a W-9 environment, not a W-2 environment, where Bob can work three hours for that company, and Joe can work three hours for that one and then three hours later for another one, all providing the same type of skills, because those companies need them.

The reason I would have said that, Fran, is that the companies that were coming into our Multicultural Innovation Lab, there were lots of business plans around that that we saw, and I said, “A-ha! Here’s where the puck is going with respect to labor.” But I haven’t seen that as much in the last couple of years. So, my jury is out as to whether we go in that direction. There is something to be said about that kind of flexibility, but there’s also something to be said about belonging to a culture or an environment, pursuant to your earlier question.

Maxwell: How about real estate? There’s been a lot of conversations about how real estate is going to be used more moving forward, how office space is going to be used. Where do you see that going in the future?

Harris: Again, I’m putting on my innovative/creative hat. I certainly don’t think that we will necessarily need the kind of real estate that we’ve seen in the past, especially if we go to a hybrid environment, just by definition. The math says you don’t need all that corporate space. If you’re going to allow people in certain jobs to work away from that corporate space all the time and you’re going to allow some of the people to work away from that space some of the time, you certainly can come up with an algorithm that maximizes your use of space, and less of it. So, that’s just the math of the question.

But, here’s another thought for you: There’s been a lot of conversation about women leaving the workforce, and if — and I’m not saying I believe it’s 100% — it’s because of childcare, you might think of alternative uses for some of that real estate. If you have a five-building campus, why wouldn’t you take one of those buildings and turn it into an early-childcare learning center? You might outsource it to those who actually know how to do that and do it well — and there are lots of chains across the country that do that quite well — and create an opportunity that makes it easier for those who have kids under the age of six, and make it easier to attract the female workforce if that is, in fact, an issue.

Maxwell: You’ve answered all my questions, Carla. Thank you.

Harris: You’re most welcome, Fran.

Kornik: Thanks, Fran, and thanks, Carla. Carla, you’ve given us a lot to think about with some really interesting takes there on the future of work. So, thank you for your time today, and thank you for joining us at VISION by Protiviti. We appreciate it.