Our Take on The Australian's Take on Future Work

A recent article in The Australian was an opinion piece regarding the future of work. Where will human skills would be used when machines become smart, when robots become the "normal" co-worker, and when travelling via human-controlled cars will be a thrill-ride rather than a commute?

The message that automation will soon take over your job and mine, is a bit scary particularly when there is no clear idea of what to do about it, or how to think about humans' roles in future work. Yes, I assume that humans will have roles to play in future work, and what those roles will look like is left to speculation. It's all very uncertain with a wide range of possibilities. Those of us in the Centre for Transformative Work Design are attempting to anticipate the most likely meaningful shifts in the nature of work and envision work design of the future. In this process, I've been eagerly consuming thoughts and musings from others regarding future work.

Nigel Dalton shared his ideas in the Australian, saying that there will be a few specific roles that he sees as very possible and probable for future work, meaning it's time to train 10 year olds in particular skill sets now. to be ready for the jobs of the future. Specifically he predicts there will be the following jobs:

• car-trekking instructor - Car's driven by humans will be a thing of the past, and so it's predicted that riding in a human-driven car or driving a car oneself will be an experience for thrill-seekers in the future. The proposed training needs listed in the Australian were: history, tour guide, patience of a zen buddhist master.

• personality stylist for robots - Robots interacting with humans will likely have programming that allows users to personalise the "traits" of robots. The proposed training needs listed in the Australian were: training: psychology, fashion designer, software engineering

• robot mechanic - Engineers and mechanics will be needed to fix robotics that will be increasingly part of human households. The proposed training needs listed in the Australian were: childcare, mediation mechanical engineering and origami

• human connectors - With shifting ratios tipping toward more human machine interaction and minimising human to human interaction, we may forget how to have a conversation and connect with fellow humans. There may be a job for people to help people to interact with people again, in a more basic way than relationship managers today. The proposed training needs listed in the Australian were: linguistics, speech pathology, improve teachers

• lifestream editor - There will be so much online content that people may want professional help to make their digital content about their lives more interesting. The proposed training needs listed in the Australian were: film school, social science

These are just 5 of many possible ways in which work of the future may shift. What other jobs do you foresee that don't exist today? How do you see work and life in 20 years? 30 years? 50 years?

Killer Apps: Or how technology may fundamentally change the work of teams

While Australia is known to house one the deadliest killers on this planet, the researchers from our centre are also interested in "killer technology" – more specifically, how it can be used to fundamentally change the nature of collaborative team work.

As part of a special issue in the journal Small Group Research (SGR), Buengeler, Klonek, Lehmann-Willenbrock, Morency, & Poppe (in press) discuss how "Killer Apps" could fundamentally improve the way that teams work together.

In contrast to the white shark killer that sometimes visits us here in Australia while we are trying to enjoy a bath along the coast, a killer app is "an extremely valuable or useful computer program; a computer application of such great value or popularity that it assures the success of the technology with which it is associated; a feature or component that in itself makes something worth having or using” (Merriam-Webster, 2016).

The article in the SGR-special issue presents how team work may benefit from "killer apps". To illustrate the implications, the authors focus on four areas of team work: Organizational meetings, surgical teams, HR team design, and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Organizational meetings could be optimized by killer apps to improve communication among team members. Killer apps may also optimize surgical team coordination and ultimately be beneficial for patient safety. Killer apps could help to improve team design and team composition in HR management systems and also online team collaboration in distributed massive open online courses (MOOCs).

While the authors develop several arguments how these “deadly” apps could help to bring forward team interactions, communication and coordination within these specific settings, they also stress that this type of technology can only be developed by extensive collaboration between different fields: In particular, they emphasize how mutual work efforts need to be integrated by "groupies" (i.e., social researchers, psychologists, management researchers), on the one hand, and "geeks" (i.e., computer scientists, programmers, technology researchers), on the other hand.

Since the author team were themselves composed almost fifty-fifty by geeks and groupies, they were the first ones to face the challenge but also the joy of interdisciplinary team work (another article in the SGR special issue provides more detail on the interdisciplinary challenges).

The authors also discuss potential consequences of killer apps for workers from a work design perspective. For example, killer apps may actually increase work demands, cognitive load, and job complexity of team leaders who "in addition to being involved in the meeting (...), would simultaneously need to monitor and process the information from the killer app" (p., 25).

Another question is whether the constant job feedback that these apps may provide for teams creates anxiety or withdrawal as team members may not want to be monitored constantly.

For more information on this topic, see our research project on the team pulse app.

You can find the online version of the article or feel free to contact one of our postdocs who was involved in this exciting collaboration.

Transforming workplace health through interventions

From the Financial Times, September 13, 2017

It has been recognized globally that illness is not merely an employee’s personal problem but also a problem that could bring huge costs for both companies and the society. Take UK as an example, it has been estimated that 137.3 million working days were lost due to sickness or injury in the UK in 2016, which is equivalent to 4.3 days per worker. The related costs, together with costs through lower productivity and increased healthcare spending, have undoubtedly harmed the economy. According to statistics from the OECD, the cost of mental illness alone has accounted for approximately 4.5 percent of UK’s GDP. Clearly, it is now of vital importance for the society and companies to take initiatives to protect employees’ health and well-being.

What would be the most effective initiatives or interventions that could help the society and companies achieve this goal? In a recent article published in the Health & Fitness column of the Financial Times, Sebastien Ash, Hannah Murphy and Hasan Chowdhury discussed about a wide range of initiatives or interventions that have been prevalently used by companies in UK, such as screening programs, healthy eating initiatives, physical fitness initiatives, and mental health interventions.

Interested to know how these interventions have been used and how they have been helping to promote workplace health? Click here to read the full article.