What Can We Expect the Future Workforce to Look Like?

It’s common for people to try and predict what the future will look like, but too many times the reality of what is happening today isn’t taken into account. Imagining the workplace and workforce of the future requires we look at where we are today, the pace of change, and what changes are anticipated. It may not go the way you envision, but the more empirical data you utilize to model what the future looks like, the less disappointed you’ll be when your imaginary benchmarks aren’t met.

Consider the world of science fiction. The Sci-Fi genre is less about fantasy-like images of a future world than it is about commentary about how humanity functions when faced with radical change. Many of the 20th century’s best science fiction authors really thought that by the turn of the millennium we’d have flying cars, have visited other planets, and have developed sentient computers.

Naturally, that time passed and now, almost one-fifth into the new century, we have barely mastered self-driving cars, haven’t really explored the solar system, and have created some machine learning capabilities that we label “artificial intelligence” when it is really just advanced data analysis. That’s not to say we haven’t come a long, long way in a brief period of time, and that the pace in which change is happening isn’t accelerating. Still, we tend to let our imaginations run away with us too often. Let's try and look into the future to see how the technology we’re developing today will alter the world, and how that technology will affect humanity.

Where Are We Right Now?
As stated above, the best way to calculate what will come is to look at where we are right now. Some of the technologies written in fiction have come to fruition: smartphones, tablets, nanotechnology, even A.I.  are all pulled straight out of a science fiction novel from the 1960s.

Modern businesses are operating on two fronts: their operations, and their online presence. Most times, the difference between two similar businesses is how they’ve been able to utilize the Internet to their advantage. As the transcendent technology in a time where there are several society-changing technology innovations, the Internet is now available on almost any device, and for the organization that hasn’t leveraged the technology, it can be intimidating to consider how to begin.

Some technology offered on the Internet (such as cloud computing and social media) are both relatively new and extraordinarily helpful. Many small businesses have started moving parts of their computing infrastructure to the cloud, utilizing virtual environments to reduce infrastructure costs and provide more reliable accessibility. Social media has also been extremely useful for the average small business by giving them access to a whole cache of potential customers, as well as a platform in which to engage with them.

With the development of these advanced, Internet-based technologies, the modern small organization is able to compete with larger organizations better than any other time in modern commercial history. Management software has permitted some businesses to stay lean, spending capital on production workers rather than support staff.

What’s Next?
Some technologies are still young, but are being billed as complete game-changers. Artificial intelligence has already been mentioned, but there are other technologies that are new over the past decade that people are trying to build use out of. Blockchain is one. Distributed networks are traditionally more secure, but had lost their function in the enterprise space (because of the demands of data storage and dissemination) until the development of blockchain technology. Adding encryption to the concept of distributed resources creates a static, secure ledger, that if innovated upon, could revolutionize the way people send and share secure information. This presents an expansive variety of uses for blockchain, and investors have noticed as venture capital firms have invested at least $1.3 billion in blockchain so far in 2018, up from the $900 million that was invested in the technology in all of 2017.

Another technology that organizations of all sizes need to be aware of is the growth in the Financial Technology sector. Called FinTech, which along with creating more opportunities for businesses to raise capital outside of the traditional banking structure, it also is forces those banks to change their policies to be more user friendly. In particular, a strategy called open banking is forcing financial institutions to build a whole set of processes that allow businesses to pay and get paid faster. Digital bank-to-bank transactions via secure applications can go a long way toward offsetting the costs most organizations incur because of a litany of unpaid invoices.

The Workforce
No matter how much technology we use today, the core of almost every organization is still people. The modern workplace has mostly changed from the repressive factory farm strategy that many older workers have had to deal with. With workers requiring a lot more work-life balance and the work they're doing being much more collaborative, businesses have turned to technology to increase productivity.

This has resulted in more businesses than ever implementing and using tracking technology, as they need to get the most out of their workers in order to compete. Permitting someone to work remotely has its own benefits for the worker, but to get the most out of that strategy, the business needs this tracking software to set performance indicators that need to be met by their workers in order for the business to prosper. Remote workers reduce a lot of utility and management costs, but with data security an imperative line item for almost any business, other considerations have to be made when it decides to permit people to access data, applications, and communications remotely.

According Pew research, 35% of the workforce is now characterized as “millennials”, while 33% are from Generation X, 25% are baby boomers, and the other seven percent consists of teens and the elderly. Most millennials have lived their lives with access to the Internet. Now that they are all of working age, and have become the largest part of the modern workforce, you are beginning to see a shift in the way that people are managing their employees. You are seeing more open office setups, more collaboration, more remote working, more outsourcing.

A trend that many analysts have expected for some time in just now coming to fruition: the replacement of human workers with automated smart systems. The robot workforce is increasing quickly and may turn into a troubling situation before long. In fact, Forrester Research suggests that automation will replace up to nine whole percent of U.S. jobs in 2018 alone. The trend of adding automation to cut costs is not a new phenomenon, but the better systems are at performing the jobs that humans traditionally have performed, the more expendable the human workers are. Also: human employees are more expensive overall.

What to Expect in the Future
Technology is replacing humanity at an alarming rate, and workers that aren’t technically savvy are going to have a harder time in the workplace down the road. As machines get smarter and better able to analyze data and “make “decisions,” humans will be forced out of the workforce. That’s not to say that humanity won’t react to this trend, but as it stands the increase of machine learning and the use of metrics to quantify the effectiveness of humans vs. machines are not promising for the future worker.

Organizations will continue to use innovative new technologies, software, and strategies to push productivity to higher levels. Based on modern trends, the worker in the future will be in almost ubiquitous contact with technological systems in order to push efficiency, and ultimately profitability, higher and higher. A reliance on technology will come with new and innovative ways to secure it. The more people are forced out the workforce, the more organizations will be looked on as subversive rather than champions of innovation, changing the culture in numerous ways.

Multinational professional services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that the next 12 years will be a time of great change. In fact, PWC estimates things could go in four directions. One scenario suggests that humans will get so fed up by technology that they will create a “Made by Me” strategy that would indicate that no machines have been involved in production of a product.

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