Office Worker? Wake up and Smell the Silicon! Evolve Now for Sustainable Career Success

Wake up and smell the silicon – the world is changing quickly and quietly whilst most of us are all busy working to just about get enough sleep and reset in between work. The irony is that much of that busy work is about to be transferred on to machines over the next 1-3 years. If part of a job involves looking up and cross-checking across different applications (e.g. having to open 4 different databases to change customer contact details) then it is unlikely that this task will still be done by humans in 2020. Why? It is a low-skilled task that does not require the innate power of a human brain.

A piece of ‘plug and play bot’ software is able to complete that task a thousand times faster than a human can because it is a rule-based routine that requires no depth or breadth of thought. If an office temp can pick it up by the first morning, so can a bot. So in the above scenario, the real skill of that human worker is the ability for that person to remain calm and focused under pressure whilst listening and responding to the other human on the line.

Our basic human need for trust has created an overwhelming desire for data as trading has become distant and virtual (receipts, purchase orders etc). This has created a mass of jobs that require the need to sift and organise that data. An HR team for a global insurance company saved the need for 20 temps this summer by having a chatbot that was able to handle the repeat employee requests surrounding the annual appraisal process. Minimal amount of cash as it was built using opensource software, but it saved thousands of pounds in human manual labour. It really is a no-brainer - if a task has rules and routines, you do not now need to pay for a human to do this.

Unlike previous organisational change that results in job loss, this will all be happening within the same timeframe and across every profession within the whole world. We will soon arrive at a point where we will run out of ‘same role different brand’. Hence the need to evolve and adapt to what it means to work. We don’t need to stockpile tinned peaches and bottle water just yet, but there wont be many head-office based people who will not be impacted by automation over the next 2-3 years.

Not all humans find sedentary work life-affirming work anyway. The utopia is that by automating these processes we can liberate millions of hours of screen-reading labour and unlock the potential to humanise that role. But like a newly released prisoner blinking in the sun, many of us may struggle to know what to do when we are given this chance to work freely and create our own path. A common challenge for a new freelancer upon leaving the institution of an employer is how to embrace the freedom but create the discipline to still produce. Like with any change in life, if it is planned and on your own terms, it feels better than being ‘done to’.

Here are some phrases that could be useful to know about:

RPA- robotic process automation: software (or ‘bots’) that will learn and replicate any routine, repetitive and rules-based tasks. In short: clever macros. How much of your day is spent copying and pasting, transferring data from one place to another? This is classic bot work that is unlikely to be performed by a human by 2020.

Digital employee – the bot is considered part of a team – given its own password and account and is managed on its performance along with the humans. A tech-advanced admin centre in 2017 may have 20 humans and 3 bots working collaboratively to serve the customer e.g. the chatbot is switched on at 2pm on a Saturday to cover the out-of-hours shift until Monday morning. These bots are licensed and cost as little as £10k a year and can only work. Other than a power outage they cannot not work. This will be the trend in 2018 onwards; so team leaders: get ready to line manage a bot.

Attended vs Unattended vs Autonomous Automation – the level of human involvement in undertaking the task. Just like our own conscious vs subconscious vs unconscious, there are tasks that humans will be able to see and adjust, and some that we wont know that are whirring away in the background. The cleanliness of the data (estimates from LSE research is only 15% of organisational data is clean and ready to use) will be a factor in the level and pace of automony possible.

Cognitive Automation – this is the big one. RPA is all about organising data without the need for human intervention. CA is about using that data to make decisions without human intervention. If the computer can say No based on what is has gathered via machine learning (ML), you no longer need a human to be at that computer.

Imagine a pyramid. The cloud and big data as the foundation (past 2 years) on top of which we have RPA and bots (next 2 years). Which provides the platform for CA (mainstream from 2020). Add in a bit of blockchain technology that provides an inherent audit trail on any transaction, and now we will have a whole new world that will have limited manual labour for anyone based in an office function.

My advice? Take a look at your current role and think about the elements that require you to really think and feel. Focus and sharpen your skills around these areas, for this is more likely to reflect your role in the future. The human value will shift form the doing to the being within a service chain.

We may not see major ’whole job’ losses in 2018 but there will almost certainly be a reduction in overtime and emergency office temp cover.

#BeMoreFox #EvolvetoThrive

Laura Thomson-Staveley is founder and leadership coach at Phenomenal Training and co-host of Secrets from A Coach podcast. For more information visit: phenomenaltraining.com and secretsfromacoach.com