We All Knew Tech Would Make Work Better
Has It?
After a revolution in the workplace spurred by technology, companies are finding that a balanced approach may be the most effective.

the numbers defining drastic changes in the modern workplace are striking and relentless: five generations all working together, the role of automation in replacing or enhancing physically repetitive tasks (up to 55 percent), and an increase in telecommuting (115 percent over the last decade). But how do these numbers reflect the way we actually work and how productive we really are?

Today, the answers are increasingly nuanced, characterized by a cycle of changes in the workplace — in large part catalyzed by tech — that provoke the anticipation of even more change. No longer is there a simple binary view of the old, traditional way of doing work typified by corner offices and strict dress codes, and the new, modern worker that does what they want, from wherever they are.

A more enlightened view of how work is evolving takes cues from more than a century of office culture, while also incorporating cutting-edge advances in collaboration. These forces may seem paradoxical, even oppositional, but they can also be complementary.

We’ll take a look at how some of the most drastic changes in the modern workplace have evolved to redefine what it means to work smarter.

Remote Control

01

Millennials may have believed the office was obsolete. But too much working from home has left them seeking structure and the benefits of mentorship.

mobile technology was going to untether workers from their work stations — eliminating long commutes and scotching many of the annoying distractions of office culture — all while facilitating new highs in productivity.

The truth is, except for a blip from 1995 to 2005, overall productivity in Western economies has been largely stagnant for the past 50 years. Workers may feel more free, but, at least according to traditional measures, they’re not producing much more.

And for many workers, separated from the interpersonal exchange of traditional offices, mobility has left them feeling disoriented. People want autonomy but, it turns out, they still crave structure and social interaction.

After IBM sold its PC manufacturing division, for example, it encouraged its employees to work from wherever they wanted. Eventually, those employees quipped that IBM stood for “I’m By Myself.” They wanted an office to go to — at least part of the time.

“That’s the surprise,” said Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina who has studied workforce dynamics for over 20 years. “It’s a tacit admission that human contact has value in building organizational culture.”

Ironically, the workers who most expect mobility — younger employees — are most adversely affected by it. One of the greatest causes of workplace anxiety, according to Malhotra, is a lack of mentorship.

“Around 2001,” Malhotra said, “I started to hear young employees saying, ‘I feel like my boss doesn’t know that I’m working on really good stuff’ and ‘I’m not getting the one-on-one time with my mentor.’”

On-the-job training is most intense in the early years of a career. Working from a cafe might result in great coffee options, but it robs young workers of crucial learning opportunities and mentorship when they need those most.

Albert H. Segars, Malhotra’s collaborator and the PNC Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina, said he believes, at least in the case of millennials, there’s a sociological factor involved: One of the things that make millennials different from other generations is a deeper level of parental involvement.

Moderation Is Key in Remote Work

Engagement among workers is at its lowest when employees aren’t given workplace flexibility. It’s highest among those who work remotely three to four days a week.

Source: Gallup

“Parents were deeply engaged with their well-being: the things millennials did or did not do growing up,” Segars said. “When they can’t get that at work, they get frustrated and think nobody is interested in them. When they do get it, it’s amazing what they can do. But they need some of the structure and feedback found in traditional workplaces.”

Newer collaboration technology, however, can enable the very feedback loops young workers are missing, said Lisette Sutherland, an expert on working remotely and the author of the upcoming book “Work Together Anywhere.”

“You have to make communicating with each other so easy that it’s like talking to someone right next to you,” Sutherland said. “It sounds really simple, but most multinational workers don’t even have headsets. Another big part of it is turning the video on. People don’t realize how much team building you can do just by turning on the screen.”

Sutherland said that the richer, real-time interface provided by a new wave of technological advances will help quell the isolation people feel when working at home. Robotic cameras that move through the halls of an office and pivot to look around a conference room will help remote workers feel more connected. “What we’re trying to do is replicate the human experience as much as possible,” she said.

At a minimum, companies should supplement face-to-face leadership by teaming younger workers with digital mentors — someone in the organization with whom they can chat regularly for guidance and support — to eliminate anxiety fueled by greater mobility.

The Demographic Blender

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Five generations are working together for the first time in history and turning to tech to bridge the generational gaps.

increased mobility magnified another phenomenon unique to today’s workforce: For the first time, there are five generations working together — from the youngest of the Greatest Generation to the oldest of Gen Z.

The arrival of millennials and other digital natives in the workforce over 15 years ago triggered some anxiety among older generations — how could they ever catch up? — but simultaneously generated high expectations.

Indeed, 15 years ago young people entering the workforce had their own ideas about the future of work. They assumed their fluency with mobile devices and remote communications would free them to work on meaningful projects at their own discretion.

In fact, the democratization of data — and their familiarity with how to access it — did allow younger employers to fuel their ambitions with information. Prior to digitalization, the ability to access information signaled power; in the new workforce, it signals ability.

The Workforce Is More Millennial Than Ever

As early as 2015, millennials made up the majority of the global workforce, a trend expected to continue beyond 2025. Generation Z (not included in this graphic because of limited data available) will grow to become the demographic shaping the workplace.

2015

Source: Pew Research Center

But as young workers forged new pathways, older managers struggled to evaluate their performance. The younger employees’ autonomous, remote work demanded new schemes for effective monitoring. Historically, much of how work got done depended on who knew whom in the organizational hierarchy, Malhotra said. But new ways of working meant managers had to promote group performance while also recognizing individual rewards — a dynamic most companies still struggle with.

Younger workers clearly suffer from the waning of traditional monitoring and management. In a recent Gallup poll, only 21 percent of employees strongly agreed that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Today, companies are finding that collaborative and sharing technology allows older workers to act as interpreters, applying their deeper experience to explain causes and implications for the patterns their younger colleagues unearth in data. The key is in providing better, more seamless communication tools. Electronic communication takes away two crucial elements in interpersonal interaction: voice tone and body language. Even today, many people working from home have slow internet speeds or patchy video-conferencing capabilities.

Also, technology that allows people to share information with exactly the co-workers they want to — eliminating the endless CC’ed email chains, for instance — builds confidence in virtual communications. Providing intuitive, clear, seamless sharing tools helps workers of all ages become more comfortable in the way they interact. This allows firms to create teams of multigenerational workers, optimizing the skill sets of each generation and forging a functional melting pot for the ages.

Automating Routine

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In the next wave of automation, robots will take on the routine, freeing humans to handle only the exceptions.

since the luddites of the early 19th century sledgehammered machines they feared were taking away high-paying weaving jobs, little has created as much workplace anxiety as the specter of automation.

But new weaving machines did not condemn England’s textile workers to massive unemployment — any more than ATMs mothballed bank tellers in the 1980s. (In spite of ubiquitous robotic cash dispensers, there are more human bank tellers today than ever.)

“For 200 years, there has been the fear the machine will replace people,” said Harry Holzer, the LaFarge SJ Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “It’s never happened because the economy always has ways of generating new jobs to replace the ones that go away.”

The benefits of automation are underestimated in the public imagination, Holzer said, while the negatives are generally overblown.

“This prediction of doom and gloom, the fear of artificial intelligence that can do vastly more than machines in the past, so far we see very little evidence of this happening,” Holzer said. “Machines will do some of the tasks that workers did. That might free people up to be more complementary to machines than they used to be.”

Automation Leaves More Time for Complex Tasks

Historically, automation has replaced physically repetitive jobs, particularly in manufacturing. New automation featuring machine learning will affect different employee skills sets, augmenting many. Future workers will need to cultivate more social, emotional, creative and logical capabilities to work productively alongside machines.

Net change in work hours due to automation

Source: McKinsey

The next wave of automation will do even more routine tasks, allowing workers to pay attention to exceptional tasks. Machines, for instance, may soon read test results and diagnose a pathology as accurately as a doctor. Freed from that diagnostic work, doctors would be able to consider a patient’s personal factors — family or financial circumstances, say — to customize treatment options.

“The problems, the projects, the things people are working on today have become much more complex,” Segars said.

He and other experts agree that increased complexity is best addressed with even better technology. In the future workplace, winners and losers will be determined by the ability of companies to identify and adopt technologies that facilitate digital leadership and mentorship to enable seamless feedback.

“The technology that enables us to fulfill our capacity as individuals and then fulfill our role on a team is of maximum value,” Segars said.


Photography by Andrew B. Myers

The news and editorial staff of The New York Times had no role in this post’s creation.