The Future of Work

Technologies such as cloud, mobility and social media are changing the way we work

One of my favorite ad slogans is from the satellite communication firm Iridium: Geography is history.

I am reminded of this as I key in thoughts on the futuristic dimensions of white-collar work. Will the physical office and fixed seats be history? How about the 9 to 5 rule or working fixed hours? What kinds of work will get most dramatically impacted?

Reams have been written on the subject and extensive studies conducted, so I will not go into the statistics of a growing remote workforce, home opportunities and the like. Instead, let me focus on how technology is making an impact on the way we work.

One of the biggest changes comes from the increasing interplay of personal and enterprise technologies. CIOs are now talking about consumerization of technology, the movement toward, say, user-centric, friendly apps rather than dense lines of code or cumbersome interfaces to configure resources. BYOD (bring your own device) is already a growing phenomenon and people are frequently switching screens from Facebook and LinkedIn to the intranet and CRM.

Given this growing mix, I think certain companies will need to look at the “work output” as a performance measure rather than hours spent in the office or logged into the system.

Another big change: more workers are going to be empowered down the line than ever possible before. Through the Web and the tools it provides, through user-driven business intelligence and through other means, people at various levels will need to take more decisions more quickly—for the collective enterprise to be competitive.

Social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are also making an impact on assessment and hiring. Not just in jobs that require social media skills but generally in “judging” the future hires and their abilities through posts, usage patterns and circle of friends and followers.

In my own sphere of journalism, for instance, tech is making a big impact by connecting writers and readers in multiple ways; by bringing the whole blogosphere into the picture; by making it easy for us to find “material” through Google and Bing (and others I'm forgetting) yet difficult to escape the barrage of criticism if we slip; by making the whole writing-reading process quick, transparent, conversational...

On a more futuristic leap of imagination, in keeping with the vendors' fondness for “personalization,” shall we see a day when companies come knocking on your smartphones and say: “Hi there, if we were to offer you the job of the CIO, which of the following amenities will suit you? Please select as many as you like and we will come back with a personalized offer.”

Now, now, I didn't say that job search will be history!

Twittering out the Social Media Thingy

Okay, I won't begin with how Twitter-beat-Facebook-beat-Internet-beat-TV...quicker and quicker in terms of popularity or user base -- we are now beyond that stage.

I'll begin instead with how everyone is perplexed about this "social media thing". As I write this, new social media agencies are being set up, articles are being written about this *phenomenon* (including this one, if you can call this post an article), and the marketing pros are figuring out whether to suck at the Vampire widget or indulge in a Mob War to reach their target group.

The point is, the buzz around social media (btw, did we have anti- or un-social media before that?) is growing.

At the same time, some are even beginning to wonder if we could indeed be outgrowing Facebook. Lane Wallace of The Atlantic magazine says, for instance, that we might be at a stage where our initial, teenager-like fancy to FB may give way to fatigue or boredom. Still she admits that sites like FB and Twitter are growing and becoming increasingly popular with 30-plus folks and not just teeny-boppers.

Something doesn't gel, isn't it?

I think if we look close enough -- at human behavior, not websites or widgets -- we'll discover that the process of social evolution takes a long time (Darwin already told us that anatomical evolution takes even longer). In contrast, the breakneck technological evolution of the past decade or so has thrown up numerous tools and twitgets (note that!) for humans to play around.

So it's a playground out there, all right. But unlike earlier, when people played in more segregated age groups, in the virtual world we now have a whole smorgasbord of pre-teens, teens and umpteens 'behaving' in unprecedented ways. Combine this with the fact that this interplay goes on in several handshakes of connected gadgets, irrespective of where the players move across the globe. (We even have extreme cases in which people are being de-addicted for being too connected!)

Personally, I feel that the new tools of staying connected and sharing have brought out the kids in adults and allowed younger people to acquire wisdom or knowledge at an accelerated pace. If anything, the contours of our age-tied and time-bound behaviors are being pummeled into newer and more possibilities -- of what communication and sharing in this or the next digital world (Web x.0) will be really like.

So it's only natural that there's so much complexity and perplexity. I guess it'll be a progressive case of profusion - confusion - infusion (until more things come up and the cycle repeats).

Keep your fingers clicking...