{"id":12143,"date":"2020-10-09T14:45:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-09T18:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/blog\/?p=12143"},"modified":"2020-10-09T14:50:36","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T18:50:36","slug":"how-technology-is-defining-the-future-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/blog\/how-technology-is-defining-the-future-of-work","title":{"rendered":"How Technology Is Defining The Future of Work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Tech Defining the Future of Work <\/strong>\u2013 the latest panel in <a href=\"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/events\/online\">BrainStation\u2019s Digital Leadership Event Series<\/a> \u2013 took place on October 8th and featured executives from League, Fiverr, Prudential, and Microsoft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can watch the full panel discussion here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"text-align:center;\"> \n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/466624235\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Technology was already transforming the ways we work, both as individuals and as companies, long before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. When offices emptied out earlier in the year, this process was greatly accelerated, which created daunting new challenges \u2013\u00a0and a few opportunities. The need to adapt the ways we work and the focus on digital continues to this day, and will persist well into the future \u2013 even long after the pandemic has ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We spoke with four experts \u2013 from Microsoft, League, Fiverr, and Prudential \u2013 about how they\u2019re leading the monumental shift toward more dispersed ways of working, both for their employees and for the clients they serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Embracing Tech Is No Longer Optional<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the pandemic drives workforces to disperse physically, technology has stepped in to keep us connected. The demand for tools like teleconferencing and cloud storage may seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn\u2019t diminish the challenge of rolling them out rapidly, and at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As Jordan Sheridan, Modern Workplace Lead at Microsoft, explains, \u201cRemote work isn&#8217;t exactly new in 2020, but this is the first time that everybody\u2019s had to embrace it: \u2026 What tools do we need? What security considerations do we have? \u2026 How do we connect, collaborate? Helping our customers put the infrastructures in place that will allow them to [work remotely] was the biggest challenge about scaling that infrastructure. In April, our CEO said that we saw about two years of acceleration in two months.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gil Sheinfeld, CTO of freelancer marketplace Fiverr, agrees with Sheridan. \u201cSince COVID started, the world has been forced to work differently. Remote work and digital transformation are not optional, but mandatory. We\u2019ve seen increased demand for all sorts of business services, especially for e-commerce related services. And also from many businesses who need to transform their business from the offline world to the online world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sheinfeld\u2019s observation speaks to a less obvious demand for new digital tools \u2013 namely, ways to help deliver traditionally offline goods and services with the online customer service users have come to expect.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cEvery organization is now starting to shift into a technology organization,\u201d says Shradha Prakash, VP Future of Work, Org Design and Talent Enablement at Prudential. \u201cCustomers want that one-click experience. And it\u2019s very difficult to replicate that. Businesses that were previously based on relationships, now, suddenly, are more about convenience, more about bringing that same experience to a digital platform. And if we need to provide those kinds of technological enhancements, what are the processes we need to change, and what are the structural implications of it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Susan Van Klink, CRO of the health benefits hub League, sees the silver lining in the rush to move services online. \u201cIn the accelerated move to the cloud, companies are looking for consumer-centric, personalized, engaging solutions that employees will use.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In League\u2019s field, virtual health care, the pandemic has accelerated that shift \u201cby about a decade,\u201d Van Klink says, \u201cin terms of access to mental health care, access to physical health care, and access to third party solutions that will help people manage their health better. We see all of this as a great thing \u2013 but it\u2019s really exposed the need for companies to have a digital footprint and an infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Technological Change Drives Organizational Change<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A dispersed workforce, cloud-based tools, and online customer service affect not just the way individuals do their jobs, but also the ways entire organizations operate. One of the first demands this shift placed on businesses was for drastically improved agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Van Klink says, \u201cCOVID has revealed a lot of gaps in the current system, as it relates to accessibility, lack of data, direct correlation to business continuity, and having a healthy workforce to drive your business forward.\u201d Each of those gaps represents an opportunity for businesses to embrace new ways of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prakash concurs. \u201cIt opened up the world for us. Leadership sometimes didn\u2019t have exposure to remote working or virtual environments, and that was constraining their thinking. And suddenly it was like, \u2018Oh, now I can actually work in different time zones, I can work out of different cities, I can work out of different talent clusters.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That decentralization has translated into deeper changes to managerial structure. Whereas business strategy once came from the top down, a decentralized workforce armed with the correct collaboration tools can generate strategic insights at every level. The result is improved talent enablement, similar to the Japanese concept of <em>kaizen<\/em>, where business activities are continuously improved by all employees.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cTalent enablement means helping your [people] lead and drive business strategy to produce outcomes,\u201d Prakash explains. \u201cIt\u2019s a collective, democratized way of ensuring your talent understands how the work is done and what it requires to get work done.\u201d While this was often outsourced to consulting firms in the past, a more decentralized, democratized workforce means that \u201ceverybody in the organization should be responsible for doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Human Problems Require Human-Centered Solutions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Businesses are, after all, made up of people. But while the problems WFH poses for business are different from the ones we face as individuals, digital tools offer ways to help us adapt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A major pitfall of working from home is the loss of community \u2013 those chance encounters that not only give rise to unexpected opportunities for collaboration, but are also integral to employee\u2019s mental well-being.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere was an organic ability to connect the dots over water coolers and during restroom breaks and in corridors,\u201d Prakash notes. \u201cThere was a time when people would meet in the cafeteria and talk about their kids and dogs. Suddenly, that\u2019s losing out, because we don\u2019t bump into each other on a digital platform.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At League, Van Klink says, they\u2019ve turned to digital tools like Donut to stimulate serendipitous conversation, replicating what happens organically in an office. \u201cThe tricky part is maintaining that social connection,\u201d she says. This was especially true in the case of new hires. \u201cWe had to create a whole new process around virtual recruiting and onboarding that would help convey the culture of the company without the face-to-face component available to us.\u201d Even social media platforms like Instagram are useful in maintaining visibility to employees and customers alike.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When it comes to recruitment efforts at Microsoft, Sheridan says, \u201cWe\u2019ve had good success with things like breakout rooms. Instead of a traditional hackathon that you\u2019d do in person in a large room, we set up breakout rooms and send people into smaller group interactions to get that same feel of how they\u2019re interacting together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maintaining a sense of community online \u2013 a trend well underway even before the pandemic \u2013 is one thing. Addressing the mental strain unique to remote working is quite another. As Sheridan explains, \u201cYour brain actually processes differently as you\u2019re participating in a video call than it would if you were on a conference call or sitting in a meeting room. Technology overload is definitely taking its toll in different ways.\u201d Microsoft Teams has responded by allowing people to sync their teleconferencing backgrounds, \u201cto make the meeting a little bit more engaging, make it feel a little bit more natural, and try to bring down that fatigue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another contributor to fatigue for the WFH set is the gradual blurring of work and home. Counterintuitively, doing away the morning and evening commute hasn\u2019t improved mental well-being; it\u2019s only allowed the stresses of work to bleed into home life. In response, Sheridan\u2019s team has been toying with a virtual commute, \u201cto create that demarcation between the work environment and the home environment\u201d and allow people to shift gears, decompress, and compartmentalize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ultimately, our experts are optimistic that we will collectively learn how to regain the benefits of the physical office \u2013 the separation of work and home, the sense of community, the ability to collaborate and find spontaneous connections \u2013 without losing any of the advantages that remote working offers \u2013 like access to a broader talent pool, opportunities to relocate, improved agility, and more input from across a company\u2019s org chart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Interested in learning more about how to lead through disruption? Check out BrainStation&#8217;s new&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/course\/online\/digital-leadership\">Digital Leadership &amp; Innovation Certificate Course<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tech Defining the Future of Work \u2013 the latest panel in BrainStation\u2019s Digital Leadership Event Series \u2013 took [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":12145,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[644,84,1276],"tags":[430,1020,1292],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v18.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Technology Is Defining The Future of Work | BrainStation\u00ae Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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