Have you analysed your usual business day in the recent 2-3 years? I deliberately want to avoid the doomed discussions about the new order we are all living in today. Without prejudice and deep dive into any scientific or business research, the entire goal of economic growth has been the growth itself. Therefore, we considered tons of workload and business challenges as a gateway to the “promised land” of prosperity – objectives and key results (OKR). These OKRs are described in many ways and they tend to be ambiguous.
Since the previous industrial revolution during the 20th century the pipeline of education up to work or business placement has been aiming continuous increased productivity, efficiency, and operational excellence. What is “the why” behind it? We used to think that it is aimed at achieving more material value creation, increased tangible commonwealth, and progress to have more and more. Ideally it all should have brought development to humans who have been driving this vehicle for centuries now with a significant over speed in the recent two decades.
It seems that while we were driving this car two events occurred; the car became a more advanced mechanism, and the driver is not coping with the speed and does not fully understand the dashboard.
Because of these two reasons we were put into the passenger seat and allowed to observe as the speed and dashboard lights absorb our business and lives. The only pathway at this point to physically return to the steering wheel is to compete with the pace of the ongoingly upgrading F1 alike complex race car on the track, while sitting inside.
In a nutshell, economic growth taught us to master process with people and shift to alignment of those with technology. The human-centric design declaration relevant to those domains worked for a while until the point when the speed of the vehicle and proliferation of its systems did not go out of control. In fact, we are no longer capable of holistically controlling the gear box and the vector of movement. We have devalued the human element in the triangle of human-process-technology.
Human element these days is sitting in front of the screen addressing processes and tech issues, fixing the bugs, harmonising tech stack with procedures and policies or eventually the other way round. Apart from the economic pipeline – the preparatory system thereto struggles drastically. The 20th century education falls apart smashed by the flaws of its business model under the pressure of technology, vacuum of practical value and lacking vision into the future.
The crumbling elements of both education and workplace call us upon action and repurposing of the value and business models. This is impacting the current workforce, however C-leaders tend to draw attention to the flexibility and adaptability they have managed to achieve within the short period of time. There are experiences signaling the coming complete failure of the performance of employees in terms of motivation, beliefs, mental health, and performance as a consequence in the mid-long term (next 2-3 years).
So, this does touch upon the existing workforce making a deep dive into the imposed restrictive mode of economic collaboration “online only”. What if the ones who are ready for it come from the next generation? There are lots of surveys on the habits and preferences of the new generations, but most of them are factoring the very old criteria or are purely consumerism driven. The question is: what will change with the new generation’s massive access to work place and what is this workplace now and then?
Rolling up teams of new employees in the enterprise level organisations, creating new teams, aligning and bonding them with those who used to work previously and contact more in the physical world, even the procedural admin process of onboarding is becoming the “second wave” of impact on business in 2020 and further into 2021. These are all not high-flying areas as this is happening now in big and smaller organisations. What is definitely lacking is harmony in the triangle of human-process-tech.
