The new work playbook: 4 changes redefining the way we work by 2025

Many moons on, students of history will probably look back at 2020 as a real tipping point, where the world and the way we work for good. Europe is debating making a 4-day work week the norm, the world has realized that a vast majority of jobs can be done from the confines and comfort of our home. Simply put, this is the time for us to shape our future, carpe diem, rather than wait for it to swing by us. This, as the World Economic Forum puts it, is the beginning of a new epoch.

As the world awaits a vaccine not just for the virus that has beset all our lives, but for a global economy in stupor, we must build back better. Just one of the many ways our lives will change over the next half decade will be in the manner of our work; how we do so, and where.

Rise of the remote economy

At the outset of 2020, less than 5% of workers did their jobs remotely. Now, more than half of knowledge workers work remotely.

Peruse the infographic below, and note how even sectors where remote work would have been considered impossible, such as mining and manufacturing, are now getting with the program, for it is the only way forward.

 

As an increasing number of companies firm up their remote work policies, a new set of skills and challenges will start to come to the fore. Collaboration by remote teams will of course be the order of the day, but as teams start to get scattered, softer skills such as communication, empathy, and flexibility will start to become even more valued in the virtual workplace.

As employees start to feel burnt out (studies show that remote employees work longer hours and are more productive than in-office counterparts), we must learn to reduce that feeling of isolation and despondency that could arise from much-reduced human contact. Additionally, as locations become irrelevant, offices can and will hire remote staff in far-off regions or even disabled parts of the populace that might have been out of the consideration set earlier. HR’s challenges just got a lot more vexing in 2020.

The flipside of going green

As the world looks to go green, this will create new business opportunities and redundancies as new ways of business emerge. While automation and a paring back of carbon fuel dependency will eliminate some traditional jobs, the emphasis on sustainable policies and strategies will also create unforeseen roles that need stepping into.

Tech is now firmly at the center of the workplace, and this combination of being tech-savvy and environmentally friendly will be a new-age intersection that every business will find themselves at.

Rise and rise of the gig economy

The emergence of on-demand platforms had sparked the gig economy into life over the last few years. While it might have been an outlier earlier, 2020’s events coupled with a wholesale embracing of tech have brought it firmly into the mainstream, and this includes freelancing of white collar jobs that were previously out of bounds –  like marketing, management, engineering, or finance.

Where freelancers were once considered nomadic floaters, drifting from one job to the other, 2021 will see even the best of talent betting on themselves and making the most of the flexibility we are now finding to be commonplace at work.

Automation and AI

For all the talk of machines usurping our jobs in the years to come, the truth is that there are some jobs that robots, automation, and AI simply cannot replace. While the vast majority of tasks will be augmented by machines, tasks that are heavily dependent on creativity will still bank on human ingenuity. And while some jobs will be rendered moot by the rise of the machines, there are a great many more it will create or enrich in ways we never envisaged.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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