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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password with me, Peter Warren, your monthly excursion into the technology world that is rapidly fusing with our real world. In this month’s program, the future of work. During the pandemic, remote working became the new normal forced by COVID to stay away from the office, the pub, the factory, and the farmyard, we found that strangely life went on. Indeed, we found that by adopting technologies that had been around for several decades, the work could go on. Skype, first launched in 2003, let people stay in touch, as did Zoom, a rival to Skype that came to the fore during the pandemic. Remote working A lifestyle concept that has been touted since the 1980s, once promoted by magazines in a similar way to caravanning, suddenly came of age as everyone dusted down the desk in the spare room and checked out their broadband. Moving that pile of books from the desk because of COVID has been a seismic moment because it meant that the institutional and managerial inertia that had prevented the adoption of remote working technologies was broken forever. Though, as we hear from Professor Sarah Perry a little later, COVID just accelerated a trend that was already cutting away at the bricks and mortar of the office and relocating it inside a server farm instead of the imposing buildings of the central business district. It has also coincided with the development of the metaverse, the rollout of robotics, and the coming of age of the AI technology that is increasingly making this new world possible. And that taught us to embrace these new technological developments. Don’t get too attached to that spare room desk, however, because soon it could be being moved to that metaverse, a much-hyped virtual model of the world that technology companies say will be where we will work in the future. One of the companies at the forefront of that is, not surprisingly, the computer graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia, which wants to create the omniverse, The digital virtual high street that will connect all virtual worlds. Here’s Richard Kerris, Vice President of Omniverse for NVIDIA.
Speaker B: Yeah, I think it’s going to be all of the things. I think there’ll be 3D virtual worlds that people can go in and out of and really explore foreign locations, or they can do things like go into a world and visualize what a factory might look like and walk around it. Or a building that they’re working on. There’s all sorts of types of worlds that we believe will be out there. Some will be 2D experiences off of your screen or your mobile device. Some will be full 3D rich experiences simulating reality. And the idea of what connects all of these things so that there’s some commonality, like what is up and down, what is colors, what is light, what is— all of these things need to have some common understanding in order for you to be able to go between these worlds. With some sort of continuity. And so that’s one of the things that we work on around Omniverse is to be the connector of those worlds.
Speaker A: Right. So what you’re saying is that this isn’t one whole model of the world. It’s a way to move between different data sets, different visualizations, different groups of data.
Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Different experiences, different types of, you know, through simulating reality or subjective reality. There’s all sorts of things that will be out there. You might go, like I said, the example of an architect and a designer walking through a virtual building that they’re looking at constructing and being able to experience it in all its richness, or an entertainment-based thing where you’re in a surreal environment and playing games, communicating with others, meeting new people, or, you know, there’s just all sorts of things. So there’ll be so much more of this, these worlds out there than what we’re used to experiencing in the real world.
Speaker A: According to Karys, in the metaverse, you will rehearse everything. It is a world where practice will make perfect and practicing will be working. Here’s Karys again.
Speaker B: It also works for things like factories. You know, we’ve showed a vision of the factory of the future where at our last GTC with BMW, where the entire factory was simulated in our Omniverse world. And why that’s important is when you’re producing 2.5 million cars a year as BMW does, every day matters. So when you’re changing the line for a new vehicle to be constructed, knowing where the machinery is going to go, knowing how the people are going to flow and how the parts are going to come in and go out and all of those things become a very costly exercise if you’re doing it in the physical world. And by simulating that in the digital world, you can make all of these decisions and you can use things like artificial intelligence to help train the robots and train and understand how layout is going to go and things like that. When you make the commitment in the physical world, you’ve actually done all of the testing and validation in the simulated world, which gives you a higher degree of cost savings than you would’ve ever had before. BMW says it’s saving them about 30% in their cost of just running the factory by having digital twins. It is going to be the next big thing for that.
Speaker A: Richard Keras of NVIDIA. Just how far this world has come can be judged by comments made by Martin Ware, the former keyboard player for the ’80s new wave band Heaven 17. Now the founder of virtual reality sound specialist company Illustrious, which creates metaverse soundscapes. Speaking in an earlier episode of Password in 2021, available from the Future Intelligence website on www.futureintelligence.co.uk, Wes said, it’s already happening at the very top end of like when we’re talking about international leaders summits for instance, or, you know, major CEOs talking to their heads of departments of multinational companies. There are plenty of bespoke systems out there where money is no object, basically, where you can sit in a boardroom, for instance, and you would have projections of the different participants from around the world appearing in the room with individual sound sources locating them accurately and the ability to interact in and share documents in a virtual space, for instance, on the screens. I mean, this is all happening now. A world, though, that is becoming increasingly dangerous. Because of its remoteness, it can be easily attacked. Get into Keres’ BMW factory and interfere with a few settings and you could create mayhem for the car giant. Scenarios that are also being modeled by cybersecurity companies. Putting systems in the metaverse means that they can become targets, not just for hackers seeking to extort money, but for people simply intent on vandalism or for political activism. Having virtual reality representations can also mean that computer criminals can steal your identity, an increasing problem since we started on this journey into the world of 21st century work. According to Yorick Gomez, the CEO of the cyber threat company EclecticIQ, and a cybersecurity prodigy who started working on government projects at the age of 15, deepfakes, virtual reality copies of people, are now stalking the corridors of the virtual world.
Speaker C: Now the cybersecurity of the device you’re using is different and the internet connection is different, but I think what’s really changing the game here with regards to kind of the deepfake usage we see now of voice, of video, of text, the AI that allows an interface to be in between people, in between processes that is getting more, let’s say, difficult to recognize. I think a whole new category of problem, which isn’t per se cybersecurity, although a part of that will definitely be and is already seen in terms of like getting a voice memo from your CFO asking you to do something in the exact voice of the CFO, but it’s not really the CFO and now you’re wiring money somewhere. That’s one that’s a problem, but just the relationship, I think, between employer and employee and the trust you have in terms of, you know, what work they do and when they do that work and if they do that work and if they’re really there and where they really are and how much they really work, I think. And the cohesion of a group of people that’s working towards a shared mission, I think, is a whole new challenge that even we see as a small organization and we’ll continue to see. But what’s mostly concerning from a cybersecurity perspective there is indeed the kind of the mechanisms by which we communicate together, let’s say email, the voice messages, video conference calls, and things like that are increasingly difficult to understand who’s on the other side. And now you’re getting the challenge of validating who is on the other side, given that although from a technical perspective, you can give people tools to have a lockdown device from the business and to use certain pieces of software or not, communication tools are often still WhatsApp or large Slack systems or Zoom or very public tools. And you’re starting to kind of see the first signs of misuse of those public tools with fake voice, fake video. We’ve even seen an example of a deepfake video conference participant in an important video conference on the government side where they recorded the whole thing, but they were not discovered because they look and sound exactly like the person who should be on the call. They’re not really participating, but they’re not easily kind of discovered in that way where what been the obvious way to discover them. So happy to kind of double-click on the technology side of things of, of like, how does it change cybersecurity on the edge of, of a network? But I think the much more interesting category is this weird world of what can you still trust in terms of the human APIs we have between each other? And what will that mean for, for the social side of security and the social side of, of risk in a business?
Speaker A: You’re at Gomez of EclecticIQ. And as all of those interviewed for this program pointed out, This world is here now. Indeed, many of us are already in the world of work in the metaverse due to homeworking, already creating virtual spaces with internet messaging services like Signal and WhatsApp and the virtual meeting software of Teams and Zoom. Without realizing it, we are adopting virtual spaces, attending meetings, and then mentally drifting back to our desk in the spare room instead. Instead of walking down the corridor, you wipe gommas again.
Speaker C: We already have tools where we can create kind of shared spaces and have shared functionality around which we do something, be it a meeting or be it a collection of information. And you see some of these concepts merge in the Microsoft world, for example, the space of information is the space of meeting is the space of— so they’re kind of merging these contexts to allow you to look at the same context from different perspective or to have different types of interactions, be it a work interaction and voice interaction, a video interaction, a collaboration interaction, a brainstorming interaction around the same, let’s say, construct. To me, the metaverse is something more like that, much less a place you transport yourself into and now you’re in some sort of 3D world where you’re kind of doing something, and much more there are shared contexts that you can now interact with in many different ways. And I think the virtual reality and augmented reality world is one way you can then interact with that shared reality. But if you don’t go to a physical space anymore to collaborate, you have to construct some sort of virtual space. But the modes of interaction with that virtual space, I think, are going to be much different than how we envision the metaverse now of like you put on glasses and then you transport yourself somewhere. I think the folder in your Word can interact with that same space and the Zoom call will be around the same space and you can augment reality or virtual reality your way into that same space as well and collaborate. I’m a skeptic in a way. I think we’re a a long way from a workplace that is in virtual reality. I think the interfaces are not there yet. Our brains aren’t made for it just yet.
Speaker A: Yep, Gomez of the cybersecurity company EclecticIQ. Gomez is not the only one who is skeptical. Many employers have vocally come out against the trend to remote working and are demanding staff return to the office. It’s a list of some of the biggest and best-known names in the business world. Elon Musk, Goldman Sachs, Disney, and Lord Alan Sugar have all expressed their distaste for the trend, with both Musk and Sugar forcefully stating that employees should get back to their real desks. It’s also a list that does not include one of the usual diehard suspects, Rupert Murdoch, because in October of last year he became a convert by officially applying to change his contract so he could work from his ranch in Montana. Towner. According to the New York Times, in May 2021, David Solomon, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, told workers to get ready to return the next month to encourage more in-person collaboration and shared culture. Elon Musk ended Twitter’s work-from-anywhere policy in his first email to employees after acquiring the company last year, saying he would require them to work at least 40 hours a week from the office. Bob Iger stopped short of an office mandate when returning to Disney as chief executive in November, but he reportedly told employees that “I worry long-term about the negative impact on people who have decided not to spend as much time at the office.” But the employer’s bluster would appear to have hit a brick wall, and employees are quite literally voting with their feet and staying at home. Perhaps the most practical reason that companies may hold on to remote work in a recession is that it’s difficult to revoke. Musk, slightly more than a week after demanding a return to the office, then said all that was required of employees who wanted to work remotely was an approval from a manager willing to take responsibility for ensuring Excellent work. According to Julia Pollak, the chief economist of ZipRecruiter, this was a recognition of reality. “Many, many companies in recent months have insisted that people come back to the office 5 days a week, only to reverse that mandate within about a week after hearing that they’d lose their best and brightest,” she said. The US companies are not alone. A survey by Gigabit Networks of over 3,000 employers and workers has shown that although 83% of businesses in the UK’s Midlands wanted their employees to be based within the office for at least 3 days per working week, only 20% of employees were prepared to do it. A whopping 41% of employees questioned stated they didn’t want to return to the office at all. It’s a battle that Dr. Jack Wiley, an award-winning organizational psychologist and author of the employee-centric manager, says that companies must confront.
Speaker D: We all understand the dynamics that went into the changes that have taken place, but we’re seeing resistance on the part of employees to do that. One indication is a recent study I saw that indicated that the number of job openings that allowed for remote work have declined in the United States. And what they’re getting is fewer applicants as a result. So prospective employees are looking at situations where remote work is not promoted, not allowed, or couldn’t be a significant part of their work week. And they’re saying no to those kinds of opportunities. And yet, as you indicated, employers, many are providing the opposite pressure. They also have significant office leases They’ve got empty space in their locations and headquarters, and they’re, they’re seeing a drain of money in that particular way. But more importantly, many of them believe that they get better productivity, better collaboration, better teamwork, and as a result, more innovation and improvements in technology if they have people face-to-face working together. So there’s a tension. It’s unresolved, and I don’t think it’s going to be resolved in the immediate future. I think this is a situation where the dust is going to have to settle. One of the things we do know from social science is that the number one source of dissatisfaction is really a negative relationship with their immediate boss. So I think a lot of organizations probably need to place more emphasis on how they’re preparing managers to be good managers. Oftentimes they aren’t provided with the tools and training they need to get the job done. I did a study a couple of years ago, for example, that showed that managers across the United States, 70% of them, had only received up to 4 hours of training as a people manager.
Speaker A: Dr. Jack Riley, it’s a new reality that Professor Suzanne Masterson of Cincinnati University’s Department of Management says that employers will have to confront. For Professor Masterson, the future, at least of office work, will be a hybrid model, half of the time in the office and half of the time working from home.
Speaker E: I think that we’ve developed new routines during the pandemic, and it’s going to be interesting and perhaps a little bit challenging to move the needle back a little bit more toward working in offices, especially for knowledge workers. So, which is why I say I’d say that I think hybrid is potentially a more likely future for a lot of knowledge workers, but I don’t think that we’re just going to see the future of work being everyone, or even most knowledge workers, working at home 5 days a week.
Speaker A: I mean, it is strange, isn’t it? Because if you think about the evolution of the office, the office started out being the building above the factory floor, and that was where the people moved the paper around. Now what we’re seeing is just yet another evolution of that. It moved from above the factory floor into the sort of the central business district, and now it’s moving out of that.
Speaker E: I think that’s an interesting perspective on it, and I do think it’s an evolution. I think that it’s hard to break those patterns when we’ve been in the central business district for so long. I think that with the development of suburbs and commuting. There’s certainly some advantages to being able to work at home a portion of the time. But I think there’s also been a recognition of what we lose when we work at home. Those incidental encounters with people in the office, the sharing of knowledge that we don’t intentionally share with someone. But when you pick up that tidbit from a coworker, when just chatting while warming up your lunch in the microwave, really makes the work more productive. And so I think that we’re going to need to find that right balance of how much we spend in the office so that we can have those interactions, as well as the deep work that we can do when we’re at home without those interruptions.
Speaker A: Do you think that there are certain personality types that benefit from being in an office and certain personality types that benefit from this hybrid working environment?
Speaker E: I think probably extroverts get a lot out of those encounters. It’s energizing, I think, for, for For a lot of extroverts, the pandemic was probably very painful and they had to seek out those opportunities to interact with folks. Where introverts who really get their energy from time spent alone and, and in deep thought and have to exert a lot of energy to interact with other people, the pandemic might not have been that painful because it enabled them to manage those relationships in the time they needed to energize in a better way for them.
Speaker A: Productivity is an issue that’s frequently mentioned, isn’t it? A lot of people are saying they want people back into the office because they’re claiming that their productivity has been impaired. Is that true? I mean, surely you can find out what somebody’s productivity is just by seeing what they produce, how many documents they write, etc.
Speaker E: Sure. And I think to some extent, a lot of people think that they’re more productive at home. And we can look at those kinds of measures. But I think that there’s also the personal satisfaction of feeling like you’re working in a way that works for your working style and that’s comfortable for you and that enables you to achieve the work-life balance that you’re trying to achieve. So for some people, working at home and giving more flexibility allows them to balance with their families better and to still achieve the level of productivity that they could achieve in the office. But for others, really the productivity comes from being in the office, having those relationships, interacting with other people, and getting the kind of information they need on a quick basis versus having to schedule a time to catch up with people over technology to get what they need.
Speaker A: So presumably you could use choosing your work environment as some sort of motivatory factor. You could say, hey, yeah, you like working from home, I’ll let you work from home because that’s as good as a pay rise.
Speaker E: This is going to be a perk, I think, for a lot of people, or, or a benefit that we look at for how to motivate and attract the best workers that you want. For some people, that’s going to be being in the office, having the things around them and the technology in the office they want. For others, it’s going to be having the flexibility to work at home, even in full-time or a certain percentage of the time. I think it’s going to be something that’s going to be a big negotiation point when people are accepting new jobs. I think we’ve got an imbalance right now in terms of managers and supervisors and organizational leaders really wanting people back in the office and a percentage of employees saying, I’m not going to do it. And if you try to force me to, I’ll find someone who will pay me to work at home. And I think that’s going to balance out over time, that people are going to find those opportunities. And the people who are hardcore, I am not going back into an office ever. If they’ve got the skills and the knowledge, they’re going to find people who will pay them for that.
Speaker A: Cincinnati University’s Professor Susan Masterson on the power that employees are demonstrating over their working conditions. Though oddly, the reaction by the employers over the decline of the office is outdated. The remote office has been steadily gaining ground for years, according to Masterson’s academic contemporary Sarah Perry, a management professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Speaker F: Well, I’ve been studying this for the past 15 years or so, and really there’s been a pretty robust literature on what we call remote work. But interestingly, it’s actually been hybrid work all along in many cases, what we study. This term hybrid is what people are saying is the the future of work, it’s really been going on for quite a while. So that’s, I think, important to note because we know quite a lot about it. The big difference now is the breadth of it and how many people are participating. So when we think about remote work, there are people, of course, who work remotely 100% and they have unique considerations. And there are more people doing that now. The majority of the workforce we see doing some version of hybrid. And in the past, we’ve always seen— some research has suggested that we’ve seen a plateau in satisfaction at about 2.5 days remote. So if we go to 2 to 3 days, that seemed to be the sweet spot before COVID And that’s the way that it seems to be going for the future.
Speaker A: I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it, because everybody’s talking about this as though this is such a new thing, but the technology’s been around for decades. A lot of people have been using this sort of technology that we’re using. It’s just it wasn’t as— you had to go and look for it. And, and in fact, I can remember there being magazines for people who were home working over 30 years ago.
Speaker F: Yes. Yes. They’ve been along, around all along. And, and a lot of professions have had the flexibility to choose. One of the criticisms actually, or the concerns, I should say, it’s a little less than criticism in the remote work literature has been it’s not really representing a broad enough range of employee types. So we, of course, have focused mainly on knowledge workers, white-collar workers. And then to some extent, less high-up workers like call centers. So like JetBlue years ago had already been doing 100% remote call centers. And I attended a presentation probably 10 years ago from their executives talking about how well that’s worked for them and how high their engagement was based on the practices that they’d adopted. It definitely has been around. It’s just more people are involved in more I think it’s good more types of jobs and workers are allowed the opportunity now. So now we’re just trying to figure out how do we coordinate when everyone’s doing it, and how do we coordinate who goes where and when and how things get done.
Speaker A: I mean, that’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because going to that point of how it almost used to be a sort of hobbyist activity where people would say, you know, here’s the shed at the end of my garden, and this is the patio that I’ve put in as well, so I can have a space that I can withdraw to, to do a bit of thinking. Those people were almost pre-designed for working from home. They had a job that allowed them to do it. They also had a vocation for doing it. As you say, because of the pandemic, suddenly that diversity that you’re talking about It came out of nowhere, didn’t it?
Speaker F: Yes, and one of the things that your comment alludes to is that those people that were doing it before did have a setup that probably allowed them to do it comfortably, where the people that came home during the pandemic all of a sudden were scrambling. You know, we couldn’t find webcams anywhere, and all of a sudden everything had to be on a webcam, whereas before people were quite comfortable with, well, we’re going to get on a telephone and call each other and not see each other. And all of a sudden now during the pandemic, there’s been an emphasis on video calls for everything that replaces phone calls. And that’s one of the areas that I think will correct over time as people have experienced the fatigue of just being on camera all the time. And that’s one of the things in the future I think they’ll be— that’ll balance out to some extent, hopefully, as I’ve talked to people I’ve talked about it as we don’t want to overcomplicate things. And so all these new people that came home have— are still learning to some extent, but have had to adjust and learn how to do this well.
Speaker A: There is this notion about work, though, isn’t there? The notion about work that some people seem to be expressing, particularly those people who are saying that they want people to go into work, is that There seems to be an underlying Presbyterianism about that. They say that to work, it’s necessary to do a certain amount of suffering, that you have to suffer the commute, that you have to be in this environment that is different from your normal environment. So therefore suffer. Work is about suffering.
Speaker F: Yeah, that’s, that is really interesting. There’s this part of it comes from a fear on the part of certain leaders and their leadership styles that people aren’t doing anything at home. And we have lots of data that refutes that. That is not true. You know, of course there are going to be individual differences and examples where things have gone badly. But yeah, the, the idea that I need to see you is one aspect here. Another one is, well, we’ve always done it this way, so there’s been a commute, we all come to the office, we are here I don’t really have a good reason to tell you why we’re doing that, but we have to do that because we’ve always done it. And that’s a simplistic way of putting it. But when you— I think a lot of leaders that are saying you have to come back, I don’t like remote work, it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of data that contradicts those leaders. So we know it can work. We know it can work well. And we don’t have to necessarily suffer to be working well. So that’s where this emphasis on Why are we doing things? What is it about the job and the team that requires working in certain ways at certain times? That’s a more efficient and productive way to look at the design of work for the future. That’s where really everyone that’s been studying this has been pointing to.
Speaker A: As Professor Perry points out, while we may have been working towards remote working for decades, there are still issues that need to be addressed. One of which is not knowing when to stop work and tell yourself it’s time to go home.
Speaker F: Yeah, and in the work-family literature, actually, we’ve studied that. We call it integration and segmentation. So we’ve known for, for ever since we’ve been studying it for decades that people have one of these two mindsets, or they’re somewhere on this continuum. And so the more people we do know, the more people can be flexible and adaptable. That’s kind of aligned with that integration mindset where you’re willing to jump back and forth between roles throughout the day and you’re adaptable. And they tend to do better in remote work. They tend to do better with change in general. People who like to be segmented do have a harder time, but there are ways to segment even working remotely. So those are the people that really need to practice the best practices that we have been put forth, like to have a separate working space to have a door on your office if possible. And if you don’t, for people who work in more tight urban areas or live in those areas, to have a space that is the workspace and put it away at the end of the day. But that is one of the biggest concerns with this ongoing integration. It’s more of an integration mindset that we’ve had throughout the pandemic, and that’s where we’re gonna see burnout. We are concerned about that. We don’t want people to think about work 24/7. Our brains need to rest and our bodies need to rest, of course. So we need to build that into our rhythms and expectations. One of the things from a research perspective we saw is everyone was talking about Zoom fatigue. There was one interesting study that showed that if you turn off your camera, it reduced Zoom fatigue. And so people were postulating that seeing all these things, seeing yourself so much is exhausting. So yes, I wanna see other people because I’m lonely, or I haven’t seen my colleagues and it’s good to see our faces, but we aren’t really making eye contact. So that was a concern. Are we really connecting? But then the fact that I’m seeing myself all the time is exhausting.
Speaker A: Professor Sarah Perry pointing out that in this remote world that we’ve begun to enter, that stress is now an important factor, doubly so because the computer criminals are seeking to exploit it. Hacking humans makes more sense than trying to tamper with the technology. If people are stressed, they may not pay as much attention to the fact that they are at work while at home. A point amplified by Frank Joshi, the managing director of Envine, a company that builds secure virtual spaces.
Speaker C: So it depends again on context of engagement. What is it that you’re doing? What information do you as the employee or worker have to access? And who are you engaging with? If you’re talking to your colleagues, then it’s quite easy nowadays to do what you used to do, which is to pick up the phone. You know the person at the other end, and therefore you transfer knowledge and information to them, and that could be knowledge information or it could be an instruction to do something. Security is by dint of you knowing the individual on the other end of the phone. When you’re then talking about customer engagement, that’s different. Are you talking to your customer? Are they who they say they are? Now, of course, if somebody is calling in with a product query or or when is something going to be available in stock, that’s a low-value exchange of information and therefore doesn’t require you to be assured of who is making that call. Maybe somebody is making a call for potential nuisance sake, but why would they want to do that, to waste your time? Because they’re wasting theirs. However, if it’s more of a financial nature where somebody is calling you, and vice versa, if they’re calling, if the company’s calling you, the individual, the consumer, Both parties need to know that each is who they say they are and representative of who they say they deem to be, because if it’s a financial transaction, you better make sure that somebody giving you an instruction to, to transfer £5,000 or to place an order for £5,000 worth of goods are again who they say they are supposed to be.
Speaker A: Frank Joshi of Envine. It’s a stress that also extends to the technology that we have at home. Home because often we’re expected to use our own personal computers, a point highlighted by the office equipment company Canon, which earlier this month released research that found that while 78% of employees said their company provided the right technology to help them do their jobs regardless of location, 1 in 5 people are still providing their own IT equipment and struggling to get remote support. Significantly, in one finding, 42% of employees reported difficulties with approval processes, meaning that 37% of them said that they had to visit the office to print, pick up, or sign documents in person. This issue with technology is a point that Baylor University’s Professor Perry says that companies will need to get to grips with because of the sudden appetite appetite for hybrid working.
Speaker F: And the employers that can equip their employees and workforce with that are a step ahead, really, in my opinion, in terms of providing the resources that employees need. Because if you’re scrambling for the things you need, that’s taking away from the resources you can devote to your work. And if you feel like your technology is subpar, that’s taking away from your resources devoted to your productivity. Your ability to think innovatively and creatively. And if you’re concerned that your technology is not working properly, I mean, that’s another stress, another demand on you that takes away from those things. So those are important for, I think, employers to address and just take it out of the way. A similar analogy for this is if you think about, we know kind of the hierarchy of needs. Maslow is one that’s cited a lot. But if you think about the basic needs, what we know in terms of motivation and satisfaction at work is that you need to pay people enough so that that’s not an issue. But pay in itself is not a motivator, but above and beyond, it’s not as big of a motivator as other things like connectedness and sense of purpose. And technology is one of those basic needs. So if employers are not equipping their employees with the things they need like that, then it becomes a hindrance. It promotes dissatisfaction, disengagement, etc. Burnout eventually.
Speaker A: It’s a point that Guiz Bulay, one of the pioneers of remote working and the CEO of WebGap, makes. His startup company has come up with a browser security technology that he hopes will solve one of the biggest remote working headaches: employees either unwittingly or knowingly going to unsafe websites that then infect their computers with software viruses. We’re in remote browser isolation, so a lot of the companies that we’re talking to have employees at home. You know, there’s every man and his dog at the moment is remote working or trying to go remote. That means what that looks like from a security perspective is a whole bunch of people more often than not using their own computers, using their own laptops, and accessing work resources, you know, work, the websites or the folders or whatever it may be that they use to conduct and do their jobs. And that can be a security risk. So many of our customers are finding it a quick fix solution to focus on the browser. All we really do— I work for a startup called Webgap— all we really do is browser isolation cybersecurity. We secure the browser. Now, within a remote work situation, we can secure the browser so that any website those remote workers use through our browser, well, that’s secure. Guy’s boulet of web gap. According to Gartner, organizations that isolate their internet browsers experience a 70% reduction in cyber attacks. It’s a statistic worth bearing in mind because That attack is relentless. A surge in cyber activity in the final 3 months of last year made 2022 the worst year on record for malicious online activity against UK businesses, according to research from the internet service provider Beaming. On average, UK companies experienced 687,489 online attempts to breach their systems in 2022. The equivalent of one attack every 46 seconds. It’s a stressful world that the organizational psychologist Dr. Jack Wiley says will only become more challenging because the change is coming fast to the factory as well as the office, with automation now biting right across the board.
Speaker D: The last 10 to 15 years, we’ve seen dramatic increases in the implementation of technology. We could also go to steel manufacturing. Massive plants with incredible capital investment are operated with what we would almost consider to be a skeletal crew of people who are well-informed about how to manage and operate that plant. It’s incredible what can be accomplished through those investments in technology.
Speaker A: In that old process system, the managers knew what they needed to do. They had this tick box, which was get this amount of stuff in, get this amount of stuff out, make sure this is done, make sure that is done. Now, in a sense, you’re asking them to be a lot more creative, aren’t you? Is that what you’re saying, is that they don’t have the training to do that? There also seems to be a cognitive issue here as well. That cognitive issue is a lot of people are wedded or even welded to their old process system, their old way of going into the office. They perceive that to be work, and they don’t understand that this change towards these hybrid systems is going to be that new way of work. We’ve also got a hangover infrastructure. As you say, there are the offices that people have committed to, but there are offices that people will never ever go back to. We seem to be watching the erosion of the central business district beginning to occur. And that seems to be creating some psychological issues because there are people who want the reality of what they perceive to be work in the past, and they’re finding it difficult to comprehend what work might be in the future.
Speaker D: I think that’s exactly right, particularly in the fields that we’ve been talking about that rely primarily on human resources that we might regard as knowledge workers. Workers, white-collar workers, office workers. But at the end of the day, while the actual implementation of the role of the manager is going to change because of that, there are still things that employees want from their immediate manager regardless of what the circumstances are. They want that immediate manager to show support and understanding of the employee. They certainly want to be treated with dignity and respect. They want clear performance expectations. They want to be recognized for their contributions.
Speaker A: Psychologist Dr. Jack Wiley. This new world of work then is generating new pressures. In response to the management issues employers feel they face, they’ve introduced surveillance and security systems to try to obtain the control that the old brick-and-mortar offices gave them. They’re also trying to bring in technologies that will mimic the atmosphere of of the office, particularly in the area of serendipity—chance encounters with people that might give you ideas or information. It’s an area picked out by Cincinnati University’s Masterson.
Speaker E: And I think early in the pandemic, we saw that a lot of organizations tried to really mimic being in the office as well as surveil their employees, checking to see if in technology, if you’re using something like Microsoft Teams, is your little light green that you’re available at all times? Are you responding to emails or chats immediately? And it became problematic for some, some employees to feel like they were under a much closer surveillance than they ever were when they were in the office.
Speaker A: Going to your point there about mimicking the office or trying to mimic the office, Surely you could mimic serendipity at some point in the future?
Speaker E: I think so. I think with instant messaging, with chatting, but there’s often got to be a little bit more intentionality to it. I think you just don’t have the same chance encounters. You have a circle of people that you tend to interact with in the organization, right? People who are at your same level, people who are doing the same type of work with you, people who are in in the same hallway. But when you’re in the elevator, when you’re walking into the building, when you’re going to the lunchroom, you encounter a whole different group of people that aren’t just in your immediate proximity in the office. And that’s where those really serendipitous moments can take place that it’s very hard to mimic through technology.
Speaker A: Professor Masterson’s concerns have been identified by Leslie Wilcox, one of the world’s leading authorities on automation and Professor of Technology, Work and Globalisation at the London School of Economics. He’s regarded by many as the last word on the evolution of work. I think the assumption about technology is that it’s going to be seamless, that we’re moving towards this technological nirvana. The truth is we’re creating highly connected systems very complex systems that are increasingly tightly coupled, and that is a recipe for systemic risk. So for all the seamlessness that we’re aiming for, we’re actually, while moving towards seamlessness, creating systemic risks. So we’re actually creating insecurities while trying to create this level of technological seamlessness. So things will fail unless we build resilience into them. Could that value of being in the office be developed by technology? Could you actually give people the feeling of being in an office? Some of the people that we’ve been interviewing have been suggesting there are programs coming along to make you feel as though you’re in an office. Yes, and I’ve witnessed some of that, and it’s very powerful. We’re trying to predict the future, and you can’t here because it’s so it’s so connected and so complex and uncertain. So I can only speculate here based on what our previous findings are and with a bit of a constructive imagination. I mean, the previous studies do show that there is great improvements in net productivity from remote working, and clearly that will be amplified if you can make it feel like you’re in an office. I think the gains are possibly equivalent to a full day’s work from home working. So some— many of the studies have shown in the past, and they’ve shown also employee attrition decreases by up to 50%. People who home work take shorter breaks, fewer sick days, take less time off. There’s reduced carbon emissions from fewer autos clogging up the morning commute. Companies save $2,000 to $5,000 per employee on rent by reducing the amount of HQ office space. So having a virtual office space is one way to go, and I’m sure that’s going to accelerate home working. But I still come back to this fact that the social consequences of home working are greatly underrated. And that there are, invariably in the past anyway, moves back to real social contexts. I don’t think that’s going to change. The London School of Economics Professor Leslie Wilcox pointing out some of the real benefits to carbon reduction and productivity that remote working could bring. Though one other cause for concern for of Professor Wilcox is the world of redundancy that automation could bring in for the workforce and the need to adopt different economic models to deal with that. It’s a concern shared by David Smith, the Chief Executive of Global Futures and Foresight and a former director at the Institute of Directors. Smith is concerned that the rapid pace of technological change now upon us is about to unleash a massive social dislocation as the role of work in our society is taken from us, leaving people struggling to find both money and meaning.
Speaker G: Human beings have a huge place, but you have to question two things: the speed at which we’re moving to this new era, i.e., it’s arrived now and is going to become significantly more impactful in the next just 3, 4, 5 years, not 50 years. This is here now and running. So what we’ll be good at doing is the thing that we’re good at, using our heart and our mind and our spirit, if you like, to make the world a better place. Oh, actually, that’s what most companies in their taglines actually say. So humans have a place, but not as many humans as quickly as they need to will necessarily inhabit this new era. So we’ve always found a new role for ourselves when we move from one era to another. But now there’s sort of nearly 8 billion of us, then it’s actually quite difficult to see that we can accommodate this change for most intelligent, smart people at the rate of change we need them to do. So there is a big issue, and of course there’s still people need to do physical work. So the manual labor type work is probably reasonably well preserved, although physical robots, exoskeletons, etc., make, make that much more labor intensive. But it’s actually the biggest challenge I’d say to you, Peter, is that it’s professional work that will be increasingly enabled and supported by smart technologies. And actually, ultimately, it’ll replace an awful lot of what they do.
Speaker A: Okay, so the US Business Roundtable said several years ago that now the primary function of a company wasn’t just to make money, it was to have a role in society, which a lot of people were very dismissive of or very cynical about. Is that what you’re saying? I mean, in this new world, people are not going to be as interested in money?
Speaker G: I don’t think it’s not interested. We need that unit of currency to keep everything moving around, don’t we? So it needs to spread around reasonably well. Well, let’s think about it. Human endeavor used to generate profit. One way or the other. And that’s still been pretty true up until the last decade. But actually, at the last decade, capital equipment and capital itself started generating money at a desperately higher rate than human beings. So machines were generating the money, and those who own the capital own the machines, if you like, and therefore need to distribute it. Well, here’s the challenge: if you tax a company to pieces, to distribute it to your citizens, they’re liable to move location because they can. So therefore, if you think the future is probably based more on philanthropy, so will companies be willing to share their wealth in new ways, not traditional tax and welfare ways, but distribute their wealth to employees and their network, but also others that they perceive to be part of their responsibility in ways they haven’t before. So I think philanthropy is part of of large corporate life.
Speaker A: A shockwave to our view of the world that Smith says has to mean huge changes to education, because many of the manual roles many in society have depended on will be eradicated as robots take over factories and building sites. A move Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hinted at with his commitment to educating everyone to maths A-level standards.
Speaker G: There is a role for us, but it isn’t the one that we traditionally had. It won’t be office work that we’ve distributed. That is just a phase in the process. In fact, we’ve made it easier to lose people because we’ve distributed them from offices, so it’s easier to cut them off, if you like.
Speaker A: But this will also mean that unfortunately we’re going to have to invest hugely in education because we’re going to have to to change the workforce. The traditional workforce, say the people who bricklay, the people who plaster— they’re already bricklaying robots that exist, they’re already plastering robots in the Far East. Those jobs are going to go with automation of transport. Those jobs for the lorry drivers are going to go. So the fashionable term is to call it upskilling, but I mean, essentially you’re going to say that a lot of the people who hitherto were very happy to do those manual jobs are actually going to have to do the thinking jobs that they, that they didn’t actually want to get involved in, that big investment in career that you’ve just talked about.
Speaker G: But the issue is this, is it’s not necessarily technology becoming good at doing what manual workers did— laying bricks, construction, putting scaffold up, etc. Actually, it’s using 3D fabrication means to build buildings. What, you know, we’re using old methods to build buildings and we need to think about changing that. And therefore you can put a 2,000 square foot home up in 48 hours and its crush strength is stronger than a traditional brick and concrete built house. So, and this is already happening in the US. I mean, Dubai, they’ve committed 25% of their new buildings to this and they’ve got a 6,700 square foot public building built with one machine being moved around the site by 4 people. So the point is that there’s very different types of new work. But I’m going to say this, there will be a level at which there are people who will not be able to move fast enough or be unwilling to move to this new intelligent era and deal with it. We’ve got a huge population and we’re relatively modest at 60-odd million. We’re fortunate in a way, but we will see quite a significant number of people who probably can’t make that stretch, but will still be making as much wealth in the country. So you could argue, do we need things like universal income? Can we get round the language barriers of sharing wealth generated by corporates with individuals? Entrepreneurism is a different thing. You can make your money in your niche when you can. But if you think about corporates producing vast amounts of wealth and increasing wealth with lower labor costs, which it theoretically should to do, then you could argue that some of that money probably needs to be shared with people who can’t make the cut.
Speaker A: That’s going to call for a whole new different politics rather than the whole new future for work.
Speaker G: Well, the one leads to the other. I mean, if we— let’s imagine if we can’t work. I mean, look at the pandemic. If we literally hadn’t been able to work, then there would have been massively increased costs and massively increased hardship.
Speaker A: For Smith, Smith, these changes will be profound, and he and many of those we interviewed argue that these changes are being ducked by politicians unwilling to meet the reality. Because there will, according to Smith, be a need to change the way that we perceive life, and there has to be a change to the way that we’ve done things for not decades but for centuries.
Speaker G: Only in one respect, we work and we get some income, and that gives us a livelihood. That’s the thing we’ve done traditionally. We haven’t worked in offices forever. We haven’t worked in factories forever. We haven’t worked on the land forever. There’s almost no one in Britain works on the land anymore. And that was a huge change. It took hundreds of years. The Industrial Revolution was very rapid, had a huge impact in Britain in particular, and is equally around the world. So that was relatively few years. And this is happening very rapidly indeed. We’re already in it. It’s not like it’s not visible. We know that technologies, they hit the press all the time because they’re now technologies. And you think about where they’re going. The compound of what’s happening in technology, as I said, across a number of types of technologies this decade will mean that our capabilities of doing what humans have very often done is going to be enormous in the next 4 or 5 years. It’s not 45 years away. It’s a few years away. It’s this decade. So if that’s true, then it’s time to start the discussion. About if you lay off staff, for example, do you retrain them? Do you have an obligation to retrain them? Are you going to support them for the next several years in their new career? Do you pay a levy to the government that comes back to those people for universal income for, for them forever? If we generate the same amount of wealth but use machines instead of humans, how do we share the wealth?
Speaker A: But there’s another issue here, isn’t there, which is that if I don’t have a job, then I can’t pay the the company to buy the services that the company produces.
Speaker G: No, but that’s my point. If the company— I mean, before the pandemic, there were 160 experiments around the world in universal income. So there is a, there is an idea that somehow if your economy generates the same amount of wealth but is needing 5 million less people, how do you feed those 5 million people? I mean, you need to give them money. Now, money Work gives us more than just income. It gives us status and a meaning and a purpose. So it isn’t— I’m not going to talk over that glibly, but let’s say we’re not in that world at that moment and we can’t be employed and we are in training, for example, or whatever. Then we need to share that money, maybe universal income, maybe in other ways with those people so they can go out and buy from the newsagent and from the supermarket and keep the economy going. So it’s only redistributing wealth on a slightly different basis. And by the way, I’m not a communist or anywhere near, you know, I’m very much an open market economist. But I would say that we have to think differently about how we share the increased wealth that we should generate using these machines if we’re clever.
Speaker A: David Smith, chief executive of Global Futures and Foresight, on the stark challenges that we face. Because of the profound changes about to occur in the world of work. To find out more about those changes and how to start a career in the world of the future, go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. To find out more about cybersecurity, go to www.csri.info, or order a copy of my latest book, AI on Trial: co-written with leading technology lawyer Mark Dean. You’ve been listening to Password on Resonance FM, presented and written by me, Peter Warren, and produced by Blue Buffery. Thanks for listening and goodbye.
