Part four: Smarter work futures: Closing the digital distance

Preface: by Tristia HarrisonChief Executive Officer of TalkTalk

Technology has radically transformed how we work. In fact, the change it continues to bring about is so profound that many experts believe we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, defined by the increasing prevalence of automation and artificial intelligence, as well as the remodelling of workforces across organisations and indeed entire industries.

The pressure on organisations to adapt in order to compete in this new technology-driven age is enormous. Still, most struggle when it comes to understanding which innovations are nothing but hype and which ones have the potential to change the way we work in the decades to come. However, to thrive in the connected age, businesses will need to get much better at identifying the tools and processes that will help them thrive in this highly competitive, always-on era.

In addition, we live in an age where the first crop of digital native employees is entering the workplace. These are people who have never known a world without the internet. They see the news as it happens, watch what they want when they want on Netflix and Amazon Prime, stream music on Spotify and make friends on Snapchat and Instagram. Today’s young employees divide their attention across multiple devices and digital technologies, at home and at work,

and are as comfortable collaborating with people in the same room as with those thousands of miles away. They expect the world around them to be automated, on demand and always-on.

Yet, the workplace is where this life they are accustomed to starts to change. Work technologies still lag behind those used by consumers. To this digitally savvy generation, stepping into an office is often like an archeological expedition into decades past. One where jobs were done manually, collaboration was only ever face-to-face and clouds were a possible sign of a rainy day. They are hampered by outdated devices that are often controlled by an archaic and slow-moving IT department. They have no choice but to step into the past in order to get work done, all the while knowing that the very devices and technologies they are forced to use are holding back their productivity.

There must be a better way. To remain competitive and continue to attract top talent, the workplace has to adapt. This is why we wanted to know how business leaders and their employees understand the impact of workplace innovation today, and how they believe technology will affect workforces in the future. To do this, we worked with YouGov to survey 500 UK executives and 2,000 UK consumers on the benefit of technology for the workforce of the future.

With a view to tomorrow, and to help contextualise our findings, we’ve also recruited industry-leading futurist Graeme Codrington. He will help explain what our findings truly mean for enterprises of all sizes, and the opportunity technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and automation will have on businesses in the future, as well as steps they can take today to start preparing for the future of work.

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This report begins by outlining where British businesses are today, and what they can do to start preparing for the future now. Then, we will set out an exciting vision for the future, placing technology front and centre, and helping you understand how to future-proof your business for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We will then provide helpful tips for how businesses can close the digital distance between their workforce and technology.

The world is changing, and it is an exciting time to talk about innovation in business. Technology is the way to empower people for a more productive and motivated workforce, and I strongly believe technology will make British businesses stronger and better.

We hope this report will leave you feeling as excited and inspired about the future as we are. While creating the workforce of the future may seem daunting, it is extremely rewarding to draw a clear path for the years ahead, with an understanding at every junction about how to maximise and leverage all of the wonderful innovations around us. We speak from experience, as at TalkTalk, we have heavily invested in our own workforce, not least with the recent opening of our new Soapworks office in Salford Quays. It is a future-proof space that gives employees the ability to flourish with the right technology and a flexible approach to working.

The future certainly looks bright, and we are looking forward to showing you what it will look like.

Welcome to:

“The world is changing, and it is an exciting time to talk about innovation in business. Technology is the way to empower people for a more productive and motivated workforce.” Tristia Harrison

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Foreword: by Graeme Codrington

Henry Ford once famously said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have requested a faster horse. We’re facing a similar situation today when it comes to digital technology and our workplaces. Although we are surrounded by constant advances in the digital world, from robots and driverless cars, to facial recognition in our mobile phones and chip implants in our clothes and bodies, very few people are able to visualise where these technologies will actually take us. We’re caught between dystopian visions and doomsday prophets on the one hand, who warn us that the robots are coming for our jobs; and on the other hand, the technology futurists with rose-tinted spectacles painting pictures of colonies on Mars, no more traffic and three hour working days.

Who’s right? What’s next? What does it all mean for us, for our work, and for our children? And who’s picture of the future should we believe? It can be quite overwhelming.

It’s for this reason that leadership in this space is critically important. We cannot simply rely on the trends to unfold by themselves for us to then follow later only once it’s all clear and obvious. Nor can we rely on our people to express a preference for one or other technology before they even really know what each can do.

We each need to commit ourselves to doing three things. Firstly, we need to improve our understanding of what’s happening around us. The Workforces 2025 survey clearly shows that although people have some idea of new technology, digital trends and disruptive forces, most of them have not spent enough time considering how they will change our world in the near future. It’s amazing that there are a significant number of people who haven’t yet even tried a virtual reality headset on yet, for example.

Which leads to the second thing we all must do: we must experiment more. We need to be much more curious about the world around us, and be prepared to try out the new technologies that are available to us. Some are not going to be that useful and others might be downright dangerous - or just a waste of our time. But a few are going to change our world, and make our lives much better. We won’t know which is which until we give it a go. This report will give you some good ideas about where to start.

Finally, each of us can take a lead, in our own way, in stretching out towards the future. It might be as a parent inspiring your children to embrace the future. Maybe it’s as an employee that you can make suggestions and show your team how to do their jobs better with new technologies. Or perhaps you’re a business leader who should be providing more resources to your employees to help them embrace the digital age. This fourth and final chapter of the Workforces 2025 report will provide you with some practical ideas and suggest a few experiments you might like to try with wearables, communication and AI to help evolve your workplace and employees.

The future might be coming towards us relentlessly, but it won’t just happen. The easiest way to predict the future is to create it. That has never been more true than it is now.

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This sounds reasonable until you consider that you’re asking something abstract. Ask someone in 1995 whether they would like loads of music on their phone and you’d get a polite but bewildered response. In the same way, you can also ask people when they want to work and they might give you an alternative working day; obviously there are numerous fields in which the customer’s preference will supersede our work-life ideals and what is possible from a practical perspective.

Also, as we have previously established there are misconceptions out there. Some employees might feel more cautious about technology like AI, for fear of being replaced. However, contrast this with the fact that, according to our survey, only 15 per cent of employers expect to make job cuts as a result of automation and you begin to see the reality compared to the perception. This is about liberating employees, not getting rid of them.

It’s essential to ascertain what people want to happen, but then to address what’s actually likely. The reality is almost certain to outstrip expectations. Towards the end of this report we’ll look at concrete steps you can take; first a little more on the backdrop.

What will you wear?A big change that’s been in the news and on the product shelves in recent times has been wearable technology. Smart watches, virtual reality headsets and other devices to monitor people and environments have received a lot of attention. So, what’s actually going to happen?

First, it’s useful to look at what people are expecting. For example, according to our Workforces 2025 survey just under half of 35-44 year olds, who are broadly in the middle of their working lives, are expecting to see virtual reality headsets in the staff training room. They believe this process will take 10 years, as do over a third of people aged 25-34.

Some companies wait a while to introduce smarter working or to digitally revolutionise the way people do their jobs. They go about it sensibly (apparently) by asking employees what they want out of it and how they would like it to work.

Part four: Smarter work futures: Closing the digital distance

Employers expect to make job cuts as a result of automation.

15%

Over a third of 25-34 year olds expect to see virtual reality headsets in the staff training room within the next 10 years.

10 YEARS

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This is significant because these age groups will be moving into management and very senior roles over the next decade – these are the people who will make these changes happen.

It’s perhaps a little counterintuitive, then, that just 19 per cent of employees are expecting to see virtual meetings with customers or suppliers in the next decade. When it comes to attending virtual events, this got a slightly larger response with 24 per cent, but this is still fewer than one in four. In contrast, when asked if they believe their business would be likely to incorporate VR in the next decade, just 8 per cent of UK employees responded positively. The jury is out in Silicon Valley as well. In October 2017 the BBC interviewed Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook on the future of VR; Facebook saw it as becoming pervasive (note that his company had just bought a VR firm) while Cook thought it would be niche, with augmented reality becoming important.

It’s almost certain that more wearables will emerge, but the key point is how they are going to be used and implemented.

Culturally the incoming generation will be more comfortable with the notion of wearables than its predecessors, with many using smartphones and watches to track heart rate, steps and sleep quality. It may be that this is reinforcing the idea of confidentiality of data – people often feel that their phone is part of their personal space, not that of the employer. Also, there could be an interesting debate to be had about why employers shouldn’t know how productive someone is!

It’s almost certain that more wearables will emerge, but the key point is how they are going to be used and implemented.

The flipside is that people don’t want employers to monitor them all the time.

said they would like to use them to track their own productivity.

of 18-24 year olds might be the happiest about tracking their own productivity.

felt comfortable using something wearable to get into work buildings.

of 18-24 year olds didn’t want to share the information with their employers.

said they would not want employers tracking their productivity.

were happy to use this technology to activate work computers.

53%

60%72%

69%

73%

65%

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The downsides, which (as stated previously) often contrast dramatically with employer intentions, include the fear of redundancy with just over a third considering it a bigger risk if their employer starts implementing AI, robotics and other technologies into the workplace. Over a quarter believe their salaries will come down, while almost a quarter believe it will lead to less collaboration with colleagues; again, findings from previous parts of this report suggest employers will be deploying technology to work smarter rather than more cheaply and they certainly want more collaboration. One in four employees were worried about a loss of company culture. Presumably they mean a change rather than a loss of culture, which frankly will happen as generations move on.

One result may be surprising to some, who have expressed concern about “Big Brotherishness” due to IT, is that If asked by an employer to have a micro-chip implanted into their body to help increase efficiency within the workplace, almost one third (31 per cent) of employees would refuse and leave the company, while just 5 per cent would agree to do so, but only if they were paid extra. This contrasts with a company in Wisconsin that started offering chipping to their employees in 2017 and found that half of their people were willing*.

That’s what people are expecting. So, what do the futurists among us expect?

Findings from previous parts of this report suggest employers will be deploying technology to work smarter rather than more cheaply and they certainly want more collaboration.

*Read the BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-40806583/wisconsin-company-offers-microchip-implants-to-employees

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Change may be bigger – the practical stepsIf we’re going to be bold, Futurist Graeme Codrington suggests we’re going to do a lot more experimentation and this means allowing ourselves to fail from time to time. “We’ve got to get out of the management mindset that says we’ll do things only if we have 100 per cent proof of concept and 100 per cent ROI,” he says. “Now we don’t want people to think they’ve got to ruin their business with experiments; experiments can be phased in.” So instead of suggesting everyone will work from home in one week’s time, you might

have a pilot scheme in which one group got that far, he suggests. In fact, you might have two or three people doing it in different ways to see what works. “You should be deliberate about those experiments so it’s not just ‘anything goes’, it’s a distinct policy.”

So, if there were one major takeaway from this report it might be that you need to be prepared to experiment and even stand up to the finance department when not everything produces an immediate return on investment. The IT department needs to be encouraged and empowered to put innovations in. IT needs to be cool again!

A second, related point, is that IT can’t be solely the domain of the IT department any more. Change and innovation has to be shot through the company culture, with all employees feeling that they can bring ideas and innovations to the company table. A third point would be that this is only going to work with the right partnerships in place. A business specialising in, say, manufacturing, isn’t going to want to acquire the skills to create a VR app suddenly, and nor should it. You need to be working with the right people in a partnership approach. Finally, the attitude to technology needs to change; it’s not a threat, as we’ll see in the next section.

Change and innovation has to be shot through the company culture, with all employees feeling that they can bring ideas and innovations to the company table.

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And be prepared for surprises. IT has a history of taking unexpected sidesteps.

In the mid-1990s, AOL opened up in the UK and people became accustomed to using IM on their home computers. It took a while, but they started asking for the right to use the same technology at work, and it happened. As this report is being written, devices including Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft, Cortana and other facilities are becoming very popular – will the incoming generation wonder why they can’t use their work computer by talking to it? And will they apply pressure to make it happen?

Jobs will evolve, not disappearBusiness owners and managers can expect to find a lot of requirement for re-skilling and retraining. The idea of making a change to the new world in one step is not realistic, and indeed it shouldn’t be.

Consider an Intranet; you can’t move from an existing worldwide Wide Area Network to an intranet in one step, you need to move gradually – but then the Intranet to which you move in 2018 or 2019 isn’t going to be the final one anyway, systems are evolving too quickly. Adopting an attitude of gradual evolution rather than a big bang.

Likewise, employment will evolve rather than stop. There has indeed been academic study that suggests AI will kill a lot of employment, but this seems to be based on the principle that a job that changes is extinct. Many futurists prefer to consider tasks rather than jobs. Personal computing is now ubiquitous so you don’t get typing pools any more, but this hasn’t resulted in a glut of unemployed people whose only skill is typing. Instead those workers’ successors became PAs, solving problems and engaging with people rather than parroting someone else’s words through their fingers; their lives have arguably improved. People with ambition and who want to take opportunities and retrain will be able to make a great deal of this – in fact they already are.

The new reality is not that we are moving towards something that’s going to be a fixed state, as mainframe computing, personal computing and later the tablet era might appear in hindsight, but into a time of constant experiment to see what works and what doesn’t for business in a particular context, at a particular time. The reality is that each of the Industrial Revolutions has been comprised of lots of mini-evolutions. In fact, it might be fair to say that there was a lot more perception than reality in the view that there ever were these periods of solid technologies.

Take TVs; people talk of the multichannel era and they talk of digital switchover in the middle of the last decade as if it was a single, revolutionary change. In fact TVs started as bulky boxes with a cathode ray tube receiving only in grainy black and white; colour arrived, flat screens arrived and so did VHS, Betamax, different forms of satellite dish. The perception of a single big bang is not accurate. There is a reasonable parallel in business computing; it has always evolved and changed and only with hindsight does anything appear to have been unchanged for any period of time.

It’s daunting because it’s change, but it’s also massively exciting. The prize ahead is a more stimulating work environment for everybody, supported by new technologies and extended communications throughout the world. The earliest companies to embrace it are going to be the pioneers and thought leaders of tomorrow – why not become one of them?

Good luck!

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For more insights visit www.talktalkbusiness.co.uk/workforces2025 or join the conversation at #workforces2025

About TalkTalk BusinessTalkTalk Business is one of the fastest growing B2B telecoms providers in the UK, serving the needs of business and public sector customers nationwide and working with over 600 partners. We deliver a full range of business-grade communications products and services, including Connectivity and Networking, Hosted Solutions, Mobile, Voice and IP telephone systems. We thrive on innovation, looking for ways to disrupt the market and deliver value back to our customers.

Following an investment of over £600m, TalkTalk Group operates one of the largest Next Generation Network, with 100% coverage, 95% on our own network, offering 99.995% reliability. Built for business, its network can deliver to over 3,000 exchanges, on-net for EFM and Fibre Ethernet, giving them circa 60% more local exchanges than BT.

With over 20 years’ experience providing support to customers, from national retailers to sole traders, and with future-proof, scalable technology, dedicated support, TalkTalk Business provides a full range of communications solutions aimed at making Britain’s businesses better off.

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