How the Digital Workforce is Changing
Plenty of tech pundits have written how the pandemic forced companies to adapt to moving their workforces in the knowledge and service sectors to working from home. Much emphasis has been placed on the technical challenges and even shifting from management to leadership. I’m not going to get into that. Instead, I take a look at what I’ve seen through ethnographic studies during the pandemic and what changes I’m seeing in the digital workforce itself.
While the concept of the digital workforce really goes back to the 90’s when companies started giving employees desktops, laptops and connecting things together and then more devices became part of the digital workforce; smartphones, tablets. Today, thanks to the pandemic, the term digital workforce has come to mean employees, contractors, suppliers, all being distributed, working mostly, entirely or in a hybrid of home and office. Many companies are moving towards a hybrid model of home/office time. No matter what business you’re in though, it is humans that are at the centre.
The only jobs digital tools do it to move and store information and some help to process it. The value creation is done by humans. Artificial Intelligence and advanced analytics can help through processing, but at the end of it all, humans make the decisions. But as a workforce becomes more digital things start to change. And the pandemic has driven unprecedented change where even those who are incredibly change resistant, had to change. Or lose their job, fast.
Key Changes in the Digital Workforce
Here are some of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the past year and they are likely to stay. For any senior management team that thinks they can simply revert to the old models and negate these cultural, societal and behavioural shifts, well, they’re in for a rude awakening.
The Spatial/Temporal Shift: Prior to the pandemic, our work was guided through spatial elements; workplace and home. You went to the office and back again. In between, most were either on a train, bus or a car. That too, is a space. The role of time was around the activities we conducted in the spaces we navigated. Spaces drove our sense of work and home life. Now, home takes on a different meaning when we work there as well. Almost all our work interactions are in digital spaces, which affects our sense of time. Some people started work earlier in the day, finishing earlier while some did the opposite. Employees now think more temporally than spatially. This will impact productivity and leaders will need to rethink the typical 8 hours a day, 40 or hours a week.
Leadership vs. Management: Knowledge workers are very smart. They have ideas and they want to be more involved. From product development teams to claims form processors doing data entry or supply chain and purchasing departments. They’re processing, creating and adding value to the organisation. They want to help design the tools for better customer experiences and to make their own work less painful. They’re also shaping corporate culture and if executive management thinks they can define the culture, they’ll struggle to keep a digital workforce engaged.
Interoperability and the Digital Workspace: Employees need better productivity tools and they want things more unified and also more interconnected. Before, they might be able to walk down to shipping or over to accounting. If they can’t do that physically, they need to do it digitally. Unifying the management of the workspace and workflows will be critical.
Many companies added different new digital tools for project management, project planning and more. This is unhelpful. The digital workspace can be cluttered and result in intellectual property getting outside the organisation. Audit the external tools that were added and find ways to bring things back inside the walls.
Re-Defining the Culture: In a digital workforce, the culture is defined in digital spaces, from tools like email, Teams or Slack, that’s where they’re talking and exchanging more than just work information. Managers need to become leaders and guide the culture. This is quantifiable through the use of metrics, qualitative observations and constant feedback. Now is the time to stop annual or quarterly reviews and instead go with constant feedback loops and look at ways to help one another. As progress is seen, nurture it if you’re a leader.
These are some of the key factors impacting the digital workspace. The most important being culture and how the management leads the digital workforce post-pandemic.
