Tag: employment

Beating the robot takeover

The future of work may lie in the fact humans aren’t particularly reliable

Which jobs can’t be done by robots asks a blog post on the World Economic Forum website.

Among the occupations discussed in the post that might be less susceptible to automation include occupational therapists, surgeons, choreographers and pre-school teachers. None of those fields are exactly large fields or accessible to the average worker.

More concerning, the report the blog post is based upon was written in 2013. Advances in automation and artificial intelligence mean the effects of technological change are almost certainly being understated.

Regardless of how automation proof individual occupations are a simple challenge for humans competing against machines is the biggest problem employers report is finding reliable and punctual workers.

Maybe we’re all putting ourselves out of jobs.

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Thinking through the effects of autonomous vehicles

Driverless cars and autonomous vehicles are going to change the economy and workplace. Where will the jobs come from?

The defining technology of the Twentieth Century was the automobile. While there were many advancements – antibiotics, mains electricity and mass communications to name just three – nothing changed society to the same extent as the motor car.

A hundred years ago it was impossible for a pundit to appreciate how the motor car was about to change communities, the population’s increased mobility saw the suburbanisation of cities, the creation of the consumerist society and the rise of industries such as supermarkets and drive in theatres, none of which were foreseeable fifty years earlier.

Change didn’t happen in isolation, those new industries were the result of a number of changes in technology alongside the motor car, for instance the supermarket couldn’t have happened without refrigerators becoming household items along with radio and television developing new markets through the advertising industry.

Economic drivers

The biggest driving force was economic, once motor cars became affordable for the typical worker – just before World War II in the US and in the mid 1950s in most of rest of the Western world – the cost of travelling fell dramatically.

With the cost of moving around falling, workers had the opportunity to move out of the dirty, grimy inner city to new and clean suburbs where they could commute to their jobs in offices and factories. At the same time it also meant families could travel further to buy their groceries, forcing the end of the cornershop and the milkman.

Autonomous vehicles change those economics again, as Uber founder Travis Kalanick pointed out last year, the most expensive item in a taxi or Uber fare is the driver.

During his interview at the Code Conference Kalanick went on to describe how eliminating the driver changes the economics.

“When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”

Changing ownership

The assumption in today’s discussions about autonomous vehicles is that car ownership will become and thing of the past, something that fits into Travis Kalanick’s view.

Should that be the case then a whole range of new industries open up. Who owns the cars, who dispatches the cars, who plans for peak and normal usage are just a few questions and opportunities that open for savvy entrepreneurs.

A changing concept of ownership doesn’t come without problems, not least who owns the code controlling the vehicles and the data being generated which in turn raises privacy issues.

Loss of jobs

The obvious other question with driverless vehicles is what happens to all the taxi drivers, couriers and long haul truckers as automobiles no longer require operators.

With truck driving being the dominant occupation in most US states, employing 1.8 million workers according to the Bureau of Labor Studies, this is a serious question. Interestingly the BLS forecasts employment to grow five percent per annum over the rest of the decade.

That scale of  job losses hasn’t been unusual over the last century. The agricultural industry itself has seen a massive fall in employment in that time period with the proportion of Americans working in agriculture falling from half the population to a tenth of that.

Creating new industries

Obviously half the US working population didn’t end up being unemployed, with the many of those displaced by the motor vehicle – either in the agricultural sector or in those fields catering for the pre-motor car market – finding work in other fields.

That the economy adapted to the loss of jobs in what were traditional fields in 1915 gives us a clue to where the jobs and industries of the future are going to come from as the changing nature of the economy means new businesses are created.

As the economics of these industries change, we see the need for workers move further up the value chain. We also see those reduced costs open opportunities for new ideas, just as the supermarket concept took hold in the 1950s as the economics of household shopping changed.

This is where the greatest opportunity lies for today’s entrepreneurs lies, in figuring out how those reduced costs will change the way consumers and society use transportation. In turn that will drive the next wave of employment growth.

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Attracting the world’s startups

Attracting young workers and entrepreneurs will be the key for prosperous countries remaining rich.

While San Francisco and Silicon Valley remain the biggest magnet for tech startups, many other countries are trying to attract entrepreneurs with preferential visa arrangements and subsidies. Successfully doing this will define the rich nations of the 21st Century.

Israel is the latest country to join the competition with the Israeli Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Interior and the office of Chief Scientist will launch the program in the next few months which will allow entrepreneurs from around the world to come to the startup city of Tel Aviv for 24 months in order to develop innovative projects.

Entrepreneurs who wish to stay in Israel and open a startup company will be granted a specialist visa. Aryeh Deri, the nation’s Economic Minister said, “tThe Startup Visa will enable foreign entrepreneurs from around the world to develop new ideas in Israel, that will aid the development of the Israeli market”.

Israel’s Startup Visa programs joins Tel Aviv’s city-to-city-collaborations with Paris and Berlin, which allows entrepreneurs from the cities to receive a soft landing package including desks at co-working spaces, advice on visas, regulations and legal issues around starting up companies, as well as one-on-one mentoring assistance and access to the ecosystem in each town.

Just as Israel, France and Germany are opening up, it appears the UK government is tightening up its visa requirements much to the anger of their startup community.

The tech startup community is only a small part of the bigger economy, the challenges facing all these countries is the fight to win the global race for talent and young workers.

For almost all the developed world facing stagnant growth rates and ageing workforces, winning that race will define their prosperity for the rest of the 21st Century.

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Learning from the workforce of the past

A Deloitte study of past workforce changes gives us clues, but not answers on how the future of work will look

One of the constant questions posed to anyone reporting on the technologies changing the workforce is “where are the jobs coming from?”

A paper by Deloitte UK economists Ian Stewart, Debapratim De and Alex Cole titled Technology and people: The great job-creating machine looks at how technological change has affected the British workforce over the past 170 years.

While the study itself seems somewhat hard to get hold of, The Guardian earlier this week reported on what the economists found when they examined employment patterns through the rapidly changing economy of the last 150 years.

One clear shift the collapse in manual jobs, particularly farm labourers whose numbers fell from a peak of 950,000 in 1881 – 7% of the workforce – to less than 50,000 or 0.02% in 2012.

UK-agriculture-labour-employment

The decline in the employment of farm labourers shouldn’t be surprising – in 1871 the proportion of the British workforce employed in agriculture was 15% while today it is less than 1%. A graph from the UK Census office illustrates that shift.

UK-employment-infographic

It’s notable comparing the UK to the US in this respect; at the beginning of the Twentieth Century nearly half the US workforce was still working in agriculture while the Britain had been a predominantly service economy for nearly fifty years.

Even today nearly 3% of American workers are employed on farms, a number not seen in Britain since the mid 1930s.

In both countries, the late Twentieth Century saw a shift to a service economy, something illustrated in the Deloitte survey by the rise of the British barman where the proportion of workers in the liquor industry tripled from 0.2% of the workforce between 1961 and today.

UK-barstaff-workforce-proportion

That British bar employment tripled in the post World War II years probably illustrates best the rise of the consumerist culture during the late 20th Century.

What should be flagged is those transitions away from agriculture to consumerism weren’t painless, much of Britain’s economy was racked by recessions through the Twentieth Century and many of the nation’s regions were devastated by the shift away from manufacturing in the 1970s and 80s.

In the US, the transition away from an agricultural economy in the 1920s was particularly painful, Steinbeck’s book the Grapes of Wrath tells of the human costs to families displaced from their mid-west farms during that time.

That technological and economic factors have driven massive changes over the centuries isn’t new, but the fact the vast majority of today’s workforce are in jobs which couldn’t have been imagined a hundred years ago should encourage us about the prospects for the future workforce.

However, assuming the future will look like today and that employment will be largely in consumer service industries may be as mistaken of the beliefs among 1960s policy makers that manufacturing would be the future.

Even more pressing for today’s policy makers and leaders is to prepare for the pain of transition. If we are seeing a workforce shifting to new business models then there will be high community and personal costs. We need to be preparing for the pain of the shift as much as we anticipate the benefits.

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Diversifying South East Queensland

Is being designated a ‘smart region’ enough to diversify South East Queensland’s economy?

Australia is one of the world’s most urbanised countries with the bulk of the nation’s population clustering in half a dozen centres mainly strung along the east coast of the continent.

The northernmost of Australia’s population centres is South East Queensland, a sprawling collection of suburbs extending from the upper class enclave of Noosa Heads down to the Gold Coast and the New South Wales state border.

Cisco believe this sprawling region of three million people can become a ‘Smart Region’ with the use of technologies such as intelligent lighting and parking, citizen applications, and smart power metering could add up to 30,000 jobs and $10 billion of value to the community over coming years.

“The residents of South East Queensland told us they want to experience greater convenience and integration of public transport, greater digital engagement and intimacy in their cities, more reliable local government services, and new digital ways to further reduce the cost of red tape,” said Cisco Australia & New Zealand Vice President Ken Boal in releasing the South East Queensland: A Smart Region report.

Local civic leaders in the cities making up the South East Queensland conurbation see this as an opportunity to grow their economies.  “The future of cities and regions and their ability to create enduring employment opportunities are entirely linked to their digital capabilities,” says Sunshine Coast Mayor Cr Mark Jamieson while Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale said Ipswich was already preparing for a strong future as a digital city.

“We have recognized that building and taking advantage of digital highways now will set Ipswich on a secure and successful path to capitalise on the ballooning digital economy,” said Cr Pisasale.

For South East Queensland, the challenge in creating new industries and jobs is becoming acute. The Australian miracle economy has left the region – like most of the nation – hopelessly uncompetitive and the bulk of employment is in domestically facing service industries underpinned by property prices.

In fact, the residential construction industry has been the mainstay of the SE Queensland economy and the region remains probably the most economically volatile of the Australian conurbations given its high dependence upon the building sector.

The digital economy does hold out hope for diversifying South East Queensland’s economy from building and domestic tourism, but the work is just beginning. Cisco’s smart region initiative is a first step, but there’s much more work to be done by business and civic leaders.

Brisbane image, “Brisbane CBDandSB” by Stuart Edwards. – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brisbane_CBDandSB.jpg#/media/File:Brisbane_CBDandSB.jpg

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The three S’s of employee engagement

How do we engage with an always on, connected workforce?

We need to rethink how we measure performance in the workplace says Andrew Lafontaine, Senior Director Human Capital Managemet Strategy & Transformation at Oracle Australia.

As business adapts to a changing society and mobile technologies, one of the questions facing managers is the mismatch between the Millennial generation and those GenX and Boomers who make up most of the executive suite, Lafontaine sees this as been in how the younger cohort approaches authority.

“There certainly can be a disconnect between Millennials and boomers. Millennials don’t see hierarchy the way boomers see it as important,” says Lafontaine. “Boomers have ingrained view of the way they have come through the workforce.”

Breaking the old rules

Unfortunately for those older managers, their world was based on a formalised, ‘straight line’ hierarchy dating back to the days ships’ captains used flags and voice tubes to communicate.

That rigid military style worked well for nearly two hundred years of business with mail and then the telephone only reinforcing that management model. Now newer collaboration tools mean different ways of working becoming possible.

A problem with those different ways of working in teams is how performance is measured warns Lafontaine.  “What they are not measuring at the moment are what I call ‘network performance’. How workers they helping their colleagues, collaborating and working together.”

Separating home and office

With mobile technologies becoming ubiquitous it becomes harder to separate work from home life, “we working now from home and on the tram. You don’t need a nine to five workforce nad companies have to deal with and embrace the technology,” says Lafontaine.

In the context of babyboomers and GenX workers, that technology meant longer hours in the office but Lafontaine suggests things are now changing. “There other areas to measure. How are they looking after themselves? The days of babyboomers working 12 or 14 hours a day and neglecting their health or outside life are over.”

For the future company, the key to success lies in engaging their employees Lafontaine says. “A more highly engaged workforce delivers better outcomes. Engagement is the three S’s: Stay, Say and Strive”

Those S’s come down to three questions for the worker; should I stay? What should I say? and How should I strive to do a better job?

For managers the challenge is engage all workers regardless of age, the task of finding what engages and motivates workers of the computer generation is only just beginning.

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Uber becomes a US Presidential issue

Uber brings the changing workforce into the political spotlight

As services like Uber change the definition of employment, the company finds it has become an issue for the US Presidential race.

The New York Times reports how the Democratic candidates, led by Hilary Clinton, and the Republicans are carving out their positions on the sharing and on-demand economies.

Notable in the current discussion is low little support there is for the incumbent taxi companies and their drivers which shows how in most states and cities the medallion and licensing regulations have been used to stifle competition and discourage service.

For cab drivers that characterisation is somewhat unfair given cabbies themselves in many cities are exploited and are as much the victims of a bad systems as the passengers.

That the future of work and the structure of these services is now in the political spotlight, the issues raised by the new business models are going to get more examination and – hopefully – some ideas on addressing the changes needed to deal with a very different workforce in the 21st Century.

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