Even finance is being affected by the onslaught of human vs. machine with a recent Deloitte survey revealing some startling stats.
The finance function is experiencing rapid change, and a recent Deloitte survey found that 73% percent of respondents are planning to implement technology to replace humans in their workforce this year—up from 58% a year ago.
While the finance workforce will grow smaller, companies need to adjust existing staff and bring in new skills that typically aren’t found in the finance department, according to a new Deloitte report.
Employees sort parcels with automated guided vehicles (AGVs) at a logistic centre of a postal service in China last November.
Manufacturing as we know it isn’t quite dead – but it will be soon. We’re at the cusp of a major transformation where the classic factory worker’s tasks will soon be digitized and managed by robots and intelligent software.
Human jobs have been sacrificed through every major industrial revolution and this change will be no different. Unfortunately, the speed at which this next displacement is taking place exceeds the speed at which people are being retrained for the new factory roles that are now required. In this environment, technology companies will have new responsibilities to reskill their workforce and the workforces impacted by their products.
Intrusive ‘wellness’ policies and rules on off-duty behavior are becoming widespread.
Nearly a decade after she stopped smoking, Mabel Battle still has the last pack of cigarettes she ever bought. She keeps it as a reminder of all the gray Ohio winter workdays she spent standing outside her office with the other shivering smokers getting a nicotine fix.
The cigarette pack is a testament to her willpower, she says: after countless failed attempts, she finally quit. However, her success at giving up is also a striking result of a contentious corporate experiment. What finally prodded her into her decision was a fear that her habit might threaten her employment. “I wanted to keep my job more than I wanted to smoke cigarettes,” says Battle.
The Cleveland Clinic, where Battle works as a health unit coordinator, has been a leader in corporate anti-smoking initiatives. It first banned smoking on its 170-acre campus in 2008, and followed that up with a new policy to chemically screen job applicants for nicotine and refuse employment to those who test positive. Workers such as Battle who were on staff before the ban would not be fired for smoking in their free time, but she could see the culture changing.
In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they’re making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.
In few sectors are the perils of automated management more apparent than at Amazon. Almost every aspect of management at the company’s warehouses is directed by software, from when people work to how fast they work to when they get fired for falling behind. Every worker has a “rate,” a certain number of items they have to process per hour, and if they fail to meet it, they can be automatically fired.
Automation is firmly established in the workplace, and many businesses have benefited greatly from this rapidly evolving technology. Tedious, repetitive tasks—such as data entry and scheduling—that once ate up valuable hours in an employee’s day can now be streamlined with the right automation processes.
Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has become, “What’s next?” The members of Forbes Technology Council are constantly looking out for new tech trends, and they believe the next jobs to be impacted by automation might not be the ones people expect.
The next generation of leaders are making headlines for their entrepreneurial attitude – are millennials driving a new startup revolution?
Millennials came of age in a world powered by the products of rockstar entrepreneurs – Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Alexis Ohanian. TV Shows like Shark Tank, highlighting the aspirations and potential success of entrepreneurs, drew audiences of over 6 million. Meanwhile, the 2008 recession threw the stability of traditional career paths into question. It’s no wonder, then, that millennials seem to look very favorably upon entrepreneurship. But is this younger generation actually more entrepreneurial than preceding generations? The data is split. In this final article in my series on how millennials are transforming the workforce, I explore what entrepreneurship really means to millennials.
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?
Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career.
Fear of losing your job to a robot is nothing new, but is it time the conversation shifted?
For as long as there have been robots, there have been fears they will take people’s jobs. The rise of the internet of things (IoT) echoes these concerns. An engineer no longer has to monitor a machine or switch on a bank of lights, IoT sensors can do it instead. Smart devices may not be an answer to the global talent shortage, but they’re starting to impact the work employees do.
The likes of heating, lighting and maintenance are already being automated, reducing routine tasks and eliminating others, in offices and factories around the globe. Demand for IoT is changing the role of facilities managers in a way that mirrors how self-service checkouts disrupted customer services in supermarkets or automatic doors and monitoring systems have affected guards and train drivers.
“The increased deployment of data-driven technologies is raising social, legal and ethical questions about the impact on people and their everyday lives. It’s vital that we find ways to engage with employees and the public, as well as identify the issues so they can be addressed,” says Julian David, chief executive of techUK.
Thought leaders are keen to highlight the strong demand for IoT isn’t going to lead to mass redundancies or answer post-Brexit talent shortages, an aging demographic or lead to less work for humans. Instead the focus is on IoT helping people do jobs better, with more productive and added-value tasks, empowered by data, redefining employment in the process.
It’s the latest bid by tech workers to gain more clout.
More tech company workers are unionizing in an attempt to improve their bargaining power. A group of 85 Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize, aligning themselves with a branch of the Office and Professional Employees International Union in New York. The staffers will use their collective bargaining power to push for equal pay, more inclusive hiring, greater transparency from management and more of a say in decisions.
Dozens of studies find remote workers happy and productive. Why not let them be?
It’s 2020: we finally live in the future! Or at least a future—one where broadband Internet connections and portable, reasonably high-powered computing tools are pervasive and widely accessible, even if they aren’t yet universal. Millions of workers, including all of us here at Ars, use those tools to do traditional “office jobs” from nontraditional home offices.
Tens of millions of jobs at all points of the income and skill spectrum are of course not suited to remote work. Doctors, dentists, and countless other healthcare workers of the world will always need to be hands-on with patients, just as teachers need to be in schools, construction workers need to be on building sites, scientists need to be in labs, wait staff need to be in restaurants, judges need to be in court, and hospitality employees need to be in hotels. All of that said, though, many more of the hundreds of different kinds of jobs Americans do can be done off-site than currently are.
When it comes to digital transformation, humans—believe it or not—play an integral role. In fact, companies that make strong use of the combined human/machine workforce have a far greater chance of success in digital transformation. Accenture calls these combined people/bot workspaces “future systems”—systems that seamlessly integrate humans and robots to create business goals that are limitless, agile, and “radically human.” I consider the companies that harness the power of humans and machines will be the ultimate winners of the future of work.
The good news: these systems are already happening. The bad news: only 8% of those surveyed by Accenture seem to be using them right now, despite the fact that revenue growth in future system companies is 50% higher than those in average or laggard adoptees.
If your company has not already implemented some type of combined human/machine workforce, it will be hard—in fact, nearly impossible—to catch up. That’s because the power of AI and machine learning amplifies the skills, insights, and capabilities of leading users to the nth degree.
Top insights and data from one of the largest remote work reports.
When some people think of the workplace of the future, they envision futuristic-style holograms having a meeting or robots cooking lunch for everyone in the office.
Increasingly, though, the workplace of the future is looking more simple — people having the flexibility to work remotely from home with teammates all around the world.
With that in mind, the question is no longer “is remote work here to stay?” It seems like remote work might even be the new normal.
The real question now is “what trends are growing across the remote work landscape?”
