How COVID-19 Has Affected the Future of Work
Written By RFF Managing Directors Nick Davis, Ben King, and Ben Murphy
How will we work in the future?
This has always been a difficult question to answer, in part because “the future” can be viewed across multiple horizons. Are we talking about five years down the road? Ten years? Fifty?
Anchoring in a specific context is necessary for clarity, but across all horizons, consensus is building that the future will involve robots and artificial intelligence (AI) augmenting human work. It remains to be seen exactly how humans and machines will work together, and the extent to which robots will displace humans. If you ask Elon Musk, we’re headed toward a future where robots move faster than our human eyes can detect and AI threatens the existence of the human race.
Whether or not our future resembles the plot of The Terminator, one thing we’ve seen already is that machines (especially those powered by AI) are better than humans at certain tasks. A hundred years ago, Henry Ford employed humans on his assembly line in positions that robots now occupy. Today, AI can perform tasks like auditing financial transactions at speeds human auditors will never reach.
For the past decade, companies have experimented around the edges with new technologies that will help ease them into a human-led, machine-augmented future.
As a result, the workforce looks different now than it did a couple decades ago.
In the past five years, the number of people working remotely grew 44%. Many of those workers are contractors or freelancers. Major companies are also scrambling to upskill and reskill workers as robots, AI, and automation become the norm. A McKinsey survey showed 62% of executives believe they’ll need to reskill more than 25% of the workforce between now and 2023.
Robot augmentation, decentralized workers, and a major shift in the skills economy—this was the context before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted business in ways we’ve never seen before. The vision we had for the future of work has been fundamentally changed.
Some parts of that vision will accelerate while others will likely slow down. New technologies and solutions will be critical to that vision, and for companies working on those critical pieces, new challenges will arise that must be addressed head-on in order to move forward.
Before we address what comes next, we must first examine the ways in which COVID-19 has altered the future of work. Starting there gives us a better idea of where we go from here.
An Unexpected Forcing Function
In our analysis of the future of work, we anticipated that the forcing function for the unbundling of jobs and companies would be the need for greater efficiency and profitability. COVID-19 has changed that forcing function to safety. Changes that were being deployed over the course of years in a controlled manner had to be deployed in weeks to keep billions of people safe.
The outcomes we’d been aiming for—improved efficiency and profitability—shifted to keeping people safe. This is an understandable and expected pivot in light of a global pandemic.
The issue is that we don’t have mature tools or practices established to live in this future right now. The tools we do have weren’t being leveraged by many companies, and almost every tool wasn’t ready to scale at the rate seen by acceleration from COVID-19. Zoom had to deal with crashes and multiple security issues from 10x usage, while Oculus and its competitors face supply chain issues that experts predict will cause headset shipments to fall 24% in Q2.
We’re being forced to work in ways not all of us were prepared for or equipped to handle. Every market vertical has experienced acceleration of their future plans or faced necessary change and has been forced to adopt quickly. The companies that survive this disruption will be the ones that already had the work streams and tools in place to enable their teams to adapt to this new paradigm, or the companies that moved quickly to adapt their tools or adopt new ones.
A new form of optimization will be prioritized due to this forcing function. Over-indexing toward short-term profitability has been the norm (as evidenced by stock buy-backs), along with aiming for systems that were primarily optimized for personnel and supply chains. Now, that balance will begin to shift more toward optimizing for safety and resilience. It will vary based on industry and a company’s market share, but a larger emphasis will be placed on systems having redundancies and safeguards in place, and being optimized for risk management.
A focus on safety also impacts the future of where we work. Previously, remote work was seen as a preference of the worker or a way to tap into a larger talent pool. COVID-19 has opened the public’s eyes to the fact that gathering together in offices can be unsafe, and that working remotely is possible for themselves and their company. Remote work will likely be the new norm for millions of workers who’d previously never considered safety in relation to their jobs.
As the innovation leader at one global firm said, “It really comes down to the type of work being done. If you’re a programmer, for example, there’s no need to go into an office. You might enjoy going into the office for the interaction or the collaboration, but if your job doesn’t require you to be in the same room as your colleagues, the new ‘face-to-face’ for you will be on Zoom.”
Finally, there’s an important question that executives must answer now, rather than a decade from now: Is this an opportunity to replace a subset of our workforce with automation?
In almost every workplace, there exists an unnecessary overlap of skills between departments, which reduces efficiency and leads to higher costs. When that work is pushed into automated workflows, it frees up human capital to focus on the tasks humans are innately better at: design, collaboration, building relationships, and more. Meanwhile, machines handle tasks they’re best suited for, like analyzing mountains of data millions of times faster than humans can.
Will there be a backlash against this initial vision for the future of work? It’s possible, given the forced adoption we’ve all experienced and the accelerating pace of incorporating automation.
The Evolution of AI and Virtual Environments
Now that we understand the context, let’s examine how our technology needs will shift in light of COVID-19. Two technologies will be critical as we push into this new vision for the future of work: AI (and the machine learning and big data elements that support it), and AR/VR.
Let’s start with AI. We’re still in the early days of where we think this technology can go. The developments we see on the horizon—such as autonomous cars and completely automated factories—depend on AI, but also machine vision technology, which enables computers to see, identify and process visual images. The ability to manipulate objects and interpret real-world data is critical for that automation to continue.
Datasets are an essential element to the acceleration of machine vision technology. Rather than testing self-driving cars on the roads, virtual environments can be created where millions of simulations can be run, thereby producing training data from which the AI can learn. This data is being produced in the real world already, but not in a way that AI can learn from it. VR training grounds allow for a variety, velocity, and diversity of datasets that put no one at risk.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, shelf stockers have risked their health to keep our grocery stores fully stocked. Imagine a future in which that risk is no longer necessary because robots are capable of stocking shelves, not just scanning them to look for low inventory items.
In addition to datasets generated in VR environments, real-world data can be harvested through the internet of things (IoT). Companies looking to automate more of their processes should look to install sensors, cameras, and microphones to capture data from their actual retail settings.
AI, when used with a camera, can automatically add an item to a shopper’s cart, eliminating the need for checkout. Cameras with AI are being used in Amazon Go stores, but the technology is not being widely deployed despite the vast array of possibilities for application.
AR and VR aren’t just helpful for generating datasets, though. Among the many things we’ve realized during this pandemic, the drawbacks of disconnected, remote work stand out. We’re safe at home, which is the priority right now, but by not being together, we’re missing out with regards to collaboration, creativity, optimization, and just our basic human need to connect.
That brings us to Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), which we see as the display paradigm of the future. The days of using flat screens to do our jobs are numbered. In the future, virtual spaces will allow us to share the same workspace as our colleagues without needing to be in the same room as them.
We have tools like Zoom for this interim period, but as experts have pointed out, our brains don’t react well to staring at someone’s enlarged face for hours on end. Forcing a 2D experience onto a 3D creature is jarring for our body's nature reactions, which is why 3D environments and the avatars that stand in for people’s bodies will be a more conducive environment for working.
This technology isn’t just useful for office work—it can be used for life-saving purposes, as well. As 5G comes online around the globe, doctors will be able to put on a headset and lead another doctor through a surgery, no matter where in the world they are. Or, a robot with the patient will be able to mimic the doctor’s exact movements during the surgery. For undeveloped countries where adequate medical care is sorely lacking, the implications of AR/VR are massive.
Global Supply Chains Have Been Hit Hard
As we’ve seen, COVID-19 has sped up the adoption of new technologies and tools. Companies have been forced to quickly prototype new workflows and find new ways to form teams.
In a sense, this is the greatest A/B test in human history when it comes to work.
Never before has a figurative switch been flipped that forced the entire world to go from in-person, shared environments to full workforces working remotely. The tools needed to prototype new solutions have seen a massive increase in demand (e.g. cloud services.)
There are implications the other way, too. With the roadblocks posed by this pandemic, some elements of global business are at risk of slowing down—namely supply chains. This goes back to the point that was raised earlier: companies have historically optimized their systems (i.e. their supply chains) for speed and profitability, not redundancy or consistency.
When COVID-19 hit, supply chain managers were caught flat-footed. In an eye-opening article in Harvard Business Review, a survey conducted by Resilinc showed that 70% of respondents were still in data collection and assessment mode in late January and early February, manually trying to identify which of their suppliers had a site in the locked-down regions of China.
There’s been a push in recent decades toward comprehensive supply mapping, which is an effort to map your supply chain from resource extraction to last-mile delivery. However, this pandemic has illuminated just how far behind most companies are with these efforts.
Without a complete understanding of their supply chain and real-time data to tell them where the risks and vulnerabilities are, a company’s business risk at a time like this is insanely high.
Rarely will any one link in a supply chain warn the others it’s about to collapse. Why? Because it’s not in their business interest to warn everyone else about a collapse until it happens.
When that failure happens, there is a daisy-chain effect where the failure moves through the rest of the chain until it reaches the public-facing company and impacts the consumer.
That’s what happened in China. Just in the month of February, the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade issue over 3,300 legal “exemption” certificates worth a combined $38.5 billion. This stat illustrates just how many vulnerable supply chains and systems collapsed the moment this virus began affecting China’s human workforce.
Supply chains that produce physical products have been and will continue to be impacted by this pandemic, especially when it comes to physical products. (Remember the shortage of toilet paper in the U.S. early in March?) One major change that will come out of this disruption is the acceleration of the physical-to-digital transition in order to stay competitive in the marketplace.
Video games are a great example. This is a product that can be easily digitized, as evidenced by the lack of hardware needed for mobile games and the fact that, as of 2017, 83% of PC games were digitally downloaded (that number is likely in the 90th percentile by now).
And yet, major gaming consoles still rely on sales of physical copies of games. In 2019, Sony announced that digital game sales had overtaken physical sales for the first time—but it wasn’t by much, as just 53% of sales were digital. What that means is Sony (and other console makers like Microsoft and Nintendo) are vulnerable due to their dependence on the supply chains that produce the physical games that make up such a large chunk of their revenue.
This poses a problem, as game sales have gone through the roof during the pandemic as people are stuck at home with more time for leisure activities like gaming. On the flip side, any sector that is already primarily digital or can be digitized quickly will see massive profits.
Hardware and Software Options for AR/VR
Knowing that AR/VR are going to be a critical piece of the future of work, what are some options for companies looking to explore these technologies? Options and prices run the gamut.
On the low end with VR, you have the popular Oculus Quest, which costs approximately $400 for the standalone piece of hardware. On the high end, you have the Valve Index, which will cost around $1,000 for the headset and between $1,000 and $1,500 for the computer to run it. The difference between $400 and $2,500 as this technology is scaled across a workforce represents a major investment, so this is a decision leaders will need to weigh carefully.
The differences between the headsets is a factor. On the Valve, you’re getting a reduction in VR sickness because of the enhanced visual displays, as well as a better control system with their finger mapping. However, with the Oculus, it's a self-contained system. The computer is built into the device, so to equip your employees, you just need to ship them one box.
If you want to go AR instead of VR, the only option worth recommending is the Microsoft HoloLens 2, which costs approximately $3,500. The reason to go AR over VR is if you need the display overlaid on the real world. If you’re just looking to collaborate in a digital 3D space, you should probably take advantage of the lesser price point on the VR side of the house.
That’s the hardware element; let’s look at the software side now. One company worth noting here is Spatial, which creates VR and AR environments that contain multiple rooms and allow users to have permanent displays put up, be it sticky notes or whiteboards. This is a great tool for teams looking to collaborate better, as both the AR and VR offerings are exceptional.
If you’re the type of company that needs to build something, it’s not an intuitive experience when performed on a flat screen, something anyone that has used a CAD program can attest to. For a better experience, we recommend the Nvidia Holodeck, which creates a shared space where you can actually start building prototypes together. NASA and Toyota are both using the Holodeck system in order to build concepts for the prototyping of physical objects. After the initial collaboration stage using the Holodeck, they build 3D prototypes in the real world.
AR and VR can also be used for interacting with large amounts of information. Humans struggle with interpreting large datasets, so we need the ability to translate those datasets into things that the human eye and brain are good at understanding. One way to do that is to interpret them in VR across many different display paradigms and methods of displaying information.
One company that’s doing this very well is 3Data, which offers a virtual command center to monitor the current status of your entire network. With work-from-home requirements still in place, companies can’t access the “dozen monitor” setups housed at their facilities. This solution saves money, creates greater efficiency, and can be accessed anywhere.
Returning to our earlier point: supply chains for these devices could collapse tomorrow, so companies must move quickly to secure this hardware and not get left behind. There are some exciting collaborations on the horizon between big-name companies, but the future of those efforts are in doubt. Instead of waiting, we recommend adopting the existing options.
Don’t Move Forward Without a Strategy in Place
Even before COVID-19, the future of work was a hot topic. Now, the timelines have accelerated and we’re all moving into this future earlier and faster than we anticipated. The world might have changed, but no organization should move into this future without a documented, shared, and agreed upon strategy in place. Action without strategy is setting efforts up to fail.
You should also establish an agreed upon destination—an ideal future that you’re trying to build, and when you expect to reach it. If you believe that the future of work is human augmented with machines, and that future should come true by 2035, you can work backwards from that point to determine what you and your organization need to do to make that future happen.
Here are five things you’ll need to consider as you embark on this journey.
#1: Be Flexible on Your Timeline
First, set a destination, but be open to changing your speed on how fast you get there. We can all predict the future we want to make, but we can’t predict what it will take to get there, how soon it will come, and what hurdles we will hit along the way.
Have a set, shared, and clear vision of that future and be unwavering. But, create a nimble system to allow for off ramps, speed traps, and acceleration when things open up.
#2: Sensing is a Valuable Skill
Accelerating technological advancement has become the normal state of things, but how does one separate the noise from the signal? Seeing the latest, understanding it in context, and being able to react to it quickly is critical. You have to have an active radar. So, when things like COVID-19 vastly accelerate the future of work, you can be ready to take the leap.
#3: You Must Get Your People Ready
Nothing happens without getting your people Future Ready.
After all, it would be hard to set a destination and chart a course if all of your people are not ready to make the journey. The world is changing under our feet. You need to get yourself and your people to that vast approaching future faster.
#4: Strive for More than a New Normal
The phrase “new normal” has been thrown around so much during this pandemic that it’s lost all meaning. In the midst of our collective apathy toward this idea, we’re missing a vital point:
Our responsibility is not to establish a new normal. It’s to establish a “better normal.”
This crisis has given us a great opportunity to dump the old, embrace the new, and use this as a learning opportunity. We can authentically bring our whole selves to work. Balance our personal lives and work. Focus on health and safely. Build a culture that is Future Ready and better.
#5: Better Technology and Better Lives
If you believe the future of work will be machine augmented, don’t just build the technology needed for that future—build a better world for the humans leveraging the technology.
The future of work will be filled with opportunities for us to design how, when, and where we work to best benefit us. Moving our offices home, and homes to our office. Blending our lives together in seamless ways to navigate the world around us in easier, healthier ways.
Yes, the technology is exciting to think about. But don’t forget about the human side.
We’re Here to Help
At Reaching the Future Faster, we’ve been thinking about these problems since our inception. We exist to teach other major companies and government organizations how to survive during crises like this one by taking advantage of the tools and technology that are available.
If you’d like more information about the future of work, you can check out our new book, Future Ready: A Changemaker's Guide to the Exponential Revolution, which is available for sale.
We also offer a comprehensive suite of services to get organizations Future Ready. You can visit the Services page of our website or schedule a free consultation to see if we’d be a good fit for your needs.