During the last week of every year, I scout business articles and professional journals for next year’s workplace trends (so you don’t have to). Here are the three I found most interesting for 2018:
More human interaction
Consider this a backlash/adjustment to the “remote working” trend. IBM stopped their program, bringing thousands of employees back to the office. Apple’s is redesigning their workspace to promote worker relationships, idea-sharing and collaboration. Google Cafés encourage interactions between employees across departments and teams. Companies find that when employees bump into each other in real life, it sparks creativity and relationship-building that leads to good things.
IMPLICATION: Nothing beats face-to-face communication. According to Harvard Business Review, researchers found that one face-to-face conversation is the equivalent to 34 emails.
Retraining current workers
There’s a focus on bringing manufacturing jobs back , but we actually don’t have a lack of jobs, we have a skills gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are currently 6.2 million unfilled job openings. Companies can’t find workers with the right skills. In addition, we not only lack the right set of skills, but those we do have are becoming less relevant quicker. Change is happening so fast that the half-life of a learned skill is only five years. And, this sentence blew my mind: “As our youngest Generation Z enters the workplace, they face an even greater skills gap, where 65% of the jobs they will need to fill don’t even exist yet.”
IMPLICATION: Companies are adapting and training. AT&T is investing 1 billion through their Workforce 2020 initiative, to help upskill their employee base. Develop your staff.
Artificial intelligence permeates the workplace
Almost every new device and service will contain AI in the coming years. Consider “chatbots” (programs like Siri that facilitate text/audio conversations), nearly 20% of companies have already deployed them using them as personal assistants, customer support, to mine data, to answer employee questions.
At Overstock, the HR chatbot called Mila (yes, there’s such a thing), notifies managers when employees are sick. At Intel, their HR virtual assistant answers questions about pay and benefits.
IMPLICATION: Almost half of all paid tasks are likely to be automated. This is expected to save companies over $79 million dollars yearly in salaries. But it doesn’t mean humans we’ll be shelved, some forecasters anticipate that humans will be “upskilled” to work alongside artificial intelligence, not simply be replaced by it.
Now, dazzle your friends with trivia and consider yourself “in the know”. Happy 2018!
Source: Forbes
©Copyright Eva Del Rio
Eva Del Rio is creator of HR Box™ – tools for small businesses and startups. Send questions to Eva@evadelrio.com
