The unintended consequence of forgetting people in the
age of the machines
While there
is a fair bit of moral panic over the idea that machines are going to take all
our jobs -- some reports say that robots and artificial intelligence will
replace almost a third of the workforce in the UK in the next 15 years – today
it is more important than ever to keep your people front of mind. Especially
when considering recruitment and succession planning.
Previously a
wash, rinse and repeat approach was fine: make sure you have enough mini-me
managers and leaders moving up through the ranks, and a good supply of top
talent at entry level. This has all changed. Today you are recruiting for
roles, like data scientists, that have no formal career path. You need to find
people who are both comfortable working with machines, and flexible enough to
change their roles as the machines get more capable. Despite the headlines, the
sweet spot for the foreseeable future is going to be humans and machines
working together. This last point became incredibly obvious during Facebook’s
last earnings call, where it emerged that the company was hiring more people to
filter inappropriate content, to make up for the limitations of artificial
intelligence.
Finally, once
you’ve hooked top talent with promises of barista coffee and a relaxed dress
code in the job spec, you’ve got to keep them hooked. And you don’t do this by
making them work in old-fashioned ways. In my world this looks like the way too
many companies still do budgeting and forecasting. Usually this is done
ineffectively using spreadsheets that get sent around the office like ticking
time bombs. The process takes time and is open to errors, thanks to the
limitations of spreadsheets compared to better, more up-to-date ways to do this
task. This is also typically a top-down process, with finance dictating budget
parameters to non-financial managers, so there is little chance for the budget
to reflect the realities of the coalface of the business.
Working like
this is not going to fly with the next generation. They digitalise and automate
things in their day-to-day life, so why should they grapple with spreadsheets
or any other out-dated systems, processes and hierarchies in the workplace? And
worse, not having the freedom to innovate and fix these anachronisms and
inefficiencies.
An example of
this conundrum: There's a thread
on the Workplace StackExchange site from 2017, where a developer asked for advice on the
ethics of them having automated their job. They had been hired full-time to
maintain a legacy database using SQL scripts.
The job was
pretty boring, and after a year the person had written a program that completed
a month's worth of work in 10 minutes. An added complexity is that the analyst
who created the spreadsheet in the first place typically spent a fair bit of
time verifying the completed work because the task was so mind-numbingly dull
that it was easy to make mistakes. So ingeniously, the developer deliberately
added a few bugs and errors every month, to make it look like a human did the
work. In total, they spent one to two hours a week on what was supposedly a
full-time job.
Interestingly,
while the advice that followed was mixed, ranging from ‘fess up (and different
ways to do this while still keeping their job), to keep doing what you're doing
and don’t lose any sleep over it. But, the point most people had an ethical
concern with, was the introduction of deliberate errors, which wasted other
people's time and created the risk that the errors would not be picked up and
so enter the live data.
In this case,
the developer is a contractor working remotely, so the time they save is spent
on things that are meaningful to them. But similarly, if full-time, on-site
employees were empowered to innovate themselves out of their mundane jobs, they
would free up their time to do more meaningful, creative, and strategic work in
the business. Which is a win for the employee and a double win for the
organisation – they keep their good people, and their operations are improved,
dramatically.
The developer
in the story above is an excellent example of someone who is quite happy
working hand-in-hand with machines, plus is flexible enough to shift their role
as the machines gain capabilities. Unfortunately, their current employment
culture doesn't favour this, and in fact, works against it.
Which is a
double whammy for organisations as they start to lose their best recruits, and
also start falling behind the digital transformation curve. No number of
C-suite appointments will transform your organisation without an influx of the
new generation who understand your future market, because they are your future
market. For real change, an organisation needs to drive this progress by hiring
a lot of people at entry level who understand technology and its impact.
And then,
this needs to be underpinned by a shift away from a top-down, command and
control leadership culture and hierarchical org chart that is more suited to
the industrial revolution and its assembly line. For companies to be nimble and
responsive, they need to prioritise transparency, collaboration, trust and the
free movement of the information people need to get their jobs done. This will
enable better decision making and more ownership through the ranks.
So, it turns
out, our machine-filled future is still all about the people.
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