The future of work is already here, so what’s next?

FUTURES

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future

You work from home, at least a few days a week, keeping up to date with colleagues via Zoom and Slack. Meetings are recorded or transcribed so offline workers can catch up. Line managers engage with employees to avoid quiet quitting, rust out and bare-minimum Mondays. AI helps you code more quickly, manages workflows and suggests email responses, and there’s a trial at your office for VR training.

This isn’t the future of work. This is now. But how is it working out for all of us – and what’s next?

Hybrid life

Some workers prefer office life. Others would rather work from home. Some companies want all hands on deck all the time, others appreciate the cost savings of downsizing corporate headquarters. The answer is, of course, hybrid working.

Ever since the Covid lockdowns began to wind down, many workers became reluctant to give up the many benefits of staying at home to work. Thus emerged the hybrid model with many companies specifying a set number of days required for being in the office. It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many office workers have hybrid options, but the Flex Index surveyed 5,000 companies that employ three million people, finding three-quarters offer flexibility to corporate employees, with 44% using a structured hybrid model, with the largest percentage requiring two or three days in the office.

Hybrid work requires staff to be able to work anywhere, and that does cost companies. “All – literally all – capabilities need to be available for both in-person and remote work environments,” said Mike Schumacher, founder and chief strategy officer of Lakeside Software. “And the service and support need to be the same for both workstyles.”

Business support company Town Square Spaces shifted to remote during the pandemic, but that eventually evolved into hybrid working. While that came easily for a company that sets up coworking spaces, there were technical challenges – though many were solved when everyone worked from home during lockdowns.

“That’s not just things like videoconferencing,” said Mandy Weston, cofounder and chief operating officer. “Improvements to items such as security on cloud technology have been important and probably wouldn’t have advanced as quickly if the world hadn’t been forced to adopt remote, ‘access your data anywhere’, working practices.”

Hybrid for all

Schumacher believes most tech workers will end up in a hybrid environment as it simply makes the most sense. Staff can work how, when and where suits them, but it maintains personal interactions and collaboration that are key to team building and training.

“The organisation benefits most from in-person work while some individuals enjoy the freedom of work from anywhere,” he said. “There is a happy medium that allows both to achieve their goals.” That is backed by research: Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom studied hybrid working, finding it a “win-win” for productivity, performance and retention.

If you’re not already offering hybrid working, your staff will eventually demand it. Or they’ll go work someplace else. A Skillshub survey of employees found 43% of respondents would quit if their employer mandated a full return to the office.

Virtual first

One way of looking at hybrid working is the idea of “virtual first”: enable staff to work remotely, and give them an office space set up for collaboration. That’s what Dropbox did, turning to its own platforms to build its company as digital first, in office second.

“While it is important to develop the right culture to underpin the Virtual First model, technology is critical to facilitate this level of work,” said Caroline Nangle, HR business partner at Dropbox. “As practically all office-based work is now digital, our own technology provides a streamlined and centralised database to store and organise all digital content.”

Networking company Cloud closed six of its eight offices, rejigging them into collaboration hubs for teams to gather – they’ve even been used on weekends as a birthday venue and daycare. “Simply using Zoom or Teams in a conventional manner was never going to create a great experience,” said Jeff Dewing, CEO of Cloud.

“I decided to invest in the best camera and microphone technologies, large 90in screens resulting in the people that are present mixed with the people that are remote feeling like they are in the same room,” he added. “We also invested in pinpoint cameras, enabling remote personnel [to be] able to see what’s being written on flip charts in the present meeting room.”

Does it work? Dewing reports that productivity is up, employee retention is better and staff are taking fewer sick days.

Time no longer matters

If you’re not working in the same place, why work at the same time? This is the idea behind asynchronous working, and it’s perhaps the next office trend.

Nangle says Dropbox is working towards an “async by default” mindset to combine true workplace flexibility with in-person connections. This is partially necessary for Dropbox because the vast majority of its staff work with colleagues in another time zone, but it can also be helpful to smaller businesses offering flexible work times to staff to fit around school drop-offs and the like.

“We set up core collaboration hours and hold these for real-time connection, including one-to-ones, brainstorming sessions and key decision-making forums,” she said. “These overlap between time zones and encourage employees to design their own schedules when it comes to dedicated focus time, while still enabling collaboration without hindering individual effectiveness.”

There are plenty of tech tools to help shift to asynchronous working. Videoconferencing software such as Zoom and Teams can record calls, transcribe every word using AI, and even summarise key notes, making it easier to catch up on missed meetings. Collaboration tools such as Slack make it easy to indicate whether you’re available and to share working times, and keep messages in one place so discussions can happen when you’re away from your desk without missing out.

If that all sounds like a lot of messages to work through, you’re right. Andy McCaul, managing director of The Bigger Boat, notes that sometimes older tech is the answer. “For example, a colleague might rely on messaging, when a call would be quicker and more accurate,” he said.

Nangle says Dropbox found that its “virtual first” model led to more messages, meetings and notifications. “As a result, some employees are having a hard time finding what they need because of the overwhelming number of notifications from the tools required to get work done,” she said, citing Dropbox research that revealed that the average worker spends 122 hours per year recovering focus after sifting through their inbox or attending a meeting.

To address that, Dropbox offers guidance on how to communicate asynchronously, so employees all stick to the same method. And, Nangle says, AI can help by making it easier to search through all tabs and apps to find what they need.

AI in the office

Ah, AI: a problem to workers facing job losses, but also the solution to workplace challenges. And while other cutting-edge technologies are also likely to make an impact – be it virtual reality for training, immersive metaverses for meeting up in digital environments or smart sensors for watching employee health – everyone we spoke to failed to mention those innovations in favour of AI. It’s just on everyone’s minds.

“Every job in every company will be impacted by AI,” predicted Lakeside’s Schumacher. “What job today doesn’t use a computer, a spreadsheet or email? Similarly, every position will leverage AI. Some positions won’t exist – they will be completely automated. But in the shorter term, you might be replaced in your job by somebody that is better at using AI than you are. At one time, knowledge of Excel was novel; you need to learn to use AI now.”

So, what should you use it for? “In the short term, using AI to augment the current business approaches will yield benefits,” said Schumacher. “But the huge benefits will derive to those that reinvent business processes in light of an entirely new approach.”

Yes, but how, exactly? As we cover in our main feature on p54, much depends on your business and sector. The easy way to get started with AI is to test out the tools that are increasingly embedded in the software you already use, such as Microsoft Copilot or Zoom AI Companion. There may be costs associated, though some tools are offered for no extra charge.

The other way to consider AI is to figure out what problems you have in your business – your bottlenecks, the dull routine tasks staff have to do repeatedly, what annoys your customers. Then see if AI can be applied to address those challenges, perhaps sending a handful of keen

staff on AI training so they can consider the issue on behalf of the company. AI guided workflows and chatbots might not solve your problem, of course, but it’s worth a shot.

As Schumacher notes, using AI to tweak business practices this way really is the low-hanging fruit. Once you’ve gotten to grips with AI, it’s time to consider bigger ideas, he says.

Four-day weeks

Here’s a big idea: work four days rather than five, on the same pay. Effectively all the research shows that productivity either stays the same or increases, showing how much time we waste at work when we could be living our lives. The idea is beginning to grab attention, with massive trials showing positive results across different sectors.

Gareth Hoyle, founder of Marketing Signals, shifted his team to a four-day week in 2022 with no loss of pay. “I already measured my teams based on output not attendance, meaning it’s incumbent on team members to produce results, rather than to demonstrate how many hours they spent working on something,” he said.

The firm covers the full week by having two shifts: one working Monday to Thursday, the other working Tuesday to Friday. The shifts flip every week, so the team has alternating two-day and four-day weekends. “While regular group calls on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday [when both teams are working] help, I’ve found that investing in task/project management software is the best way to promote a seamless workflow,” Hoyle added.

Productivity is of course a valid goal for any company, but it’s reasonable to expect all this extra tech could allow us to work less, too – sharing the benefits with companies and workers. That largely happened with the shift to hybrid working – companies could cut real estate spend, employees can take their children to school – so perhaps the AI-fuelled workplace revolution could have upsides for both, too.

Digital access

The shift to flexible working powered by digital technologies has helped businesses recruit from a wider range of people, be it those unable to commute daily because of health reasons or caring responsibilities, or people from different geographies. That’s the good news. The downside is that digital technologies aren’t always inclusive.

Beyond setting up secure access to corporate networks and upgrading the Zoom account, companies need to remember to avoid digital exclusion. Jonathan Hassell, CEO at digital accessibility consultancy Hassell Inclusion, notes that as businesses become more reliant on digital technology, it makes it harder for those with additional challenges – perhaps because of reduced vision or fine-motor difficulties.

“Often this ‘exclusion’ starts in the recruitment process, which means that employers are effectively falling at the first hurdle, disabling people from applying for positions, or performing to their best in online interviews,” he noted. “Beyond that, there are at least ten other points in the employee journey where accessibility needs to be considered in digital tools and comms, including onboarding, training and meetings – all of which also contribute to employee retention.”

He added: “In a technology-first world, a proactive approach to digital accessibility is not a ‘nice to have’, it is a business essential.”■