Questions about the future of work have rarely been as urgent as they are today. Digitalization on one side and talent shortages on the other are placing significant pressure on business. At first glance, the age of computerization should produce the opposite effect. Yet this is the paradox: automation often increases the demand for resources rather than reducing it.
Some positions disappear, but others take their place and require new knowledge and higher qualifications. It is similar to the myth of the Lernaean Hydra, where two or three new heads grew in place of each one that was cut off.
Once a company reaches a certain level of automation or information maturity, new horizons, markets, and opportunities become visible. Many of them were previously inaccessible or outside the company’s field of view. They require additional employees and resources.
At the same time, old projects and products often cannot be abandoned because they continue to finance the new ones. Developing the future therefore requires preserving the resources that sustain the present.
Effective cooperation between HR and IT should create the necessary balance between technology and employees. The trends and recommendations below sit at the intersection of their responsibilities.
The Main Trend Is the Acceleration of Trends
The life cycle of a trend has shortened as change itself has accelerated. In the past, a trend might take years to become reality. Today, the period between its appearance and widespread adoption can sometimes be measured in weeks.
When uncertainty becomes the new reality, flexibility becomes one of a company’s most important qualities. Employees and information systems must adapt to changes in the external environment with minimal losses and costs. The pandemic showed that in many companies, flexibility existed only in presentations.
Preparing for an Ageing Workforce
The average age of employees is increasing and, according to estimates cited in the original publication, could approach 50 by 2030. Companies therefore need to prepare for attracting and retaining older specialists.
This will require a deliberate strategy for communication between younger and older employees. Ageism has become a regular topic at professional conferences, yet it remains a psychological barrier in recruitment.
Overcoming that resistance is a serious challenge for HR. Ensuring that systems remain easy to use for different age groups is a challenge for IT.
Hybrid Work
Remote work may encourage employees to move into coworking spaces because not everyone can create a proper workplace at home.
Coworking spaces introduce information-security risks because a company cannot know who is sitting near an employee or what conversations may be overheard. One possible response is to create controlled workspaces distributed geographically—in effect, a network of micro-offices.
The New Roles of Employees and Managers
The employee is moving from the category of a “resource” to that of an “asset” that requires investment and development. The manager is gradually becoming a leader whose role is not only to control but also to help employees perform their work.
Given the expected shortage of talent, companies should prepare for shorter periods of employment within a single organization or position.
Borrowing from product-development thinking, the maximum reasonable time for launching an MVP is around six months. Within that period, a company may need to onboard an employee, obtain a useful result, prepare a replacement, and transfer the person’s responsibilities.
This will require reducing unnecessary role requirements, introducing “zero-learning” onboarding, and moving toward management by goals and values.
Faster Communication
Organizational flexibility also depends on the speed at which information moves through the company. Yet email remains the primary communication channel both within organizations and between them.
Email is better than exchanging paper letters, but it is still an indirect and delayed form of contact. A discussion can continue for weeks.
To communicate faster, people create small group chats in popular messaging services. This format is likely to become the next stage of corporate communication, gradually moving email into a secondary role.
The Age of Partners
In an era of platforms and technology giants, few companies can afford direct competition with every major player. Even large platforms look for ways to cooperate and use one another’s capabilities and resources.
A platform’s impact on a traditional business can be more destructive than an economic crisis because the rules are shaped not by external circumstances but by the interests of the platform’s owners.
When a company cannot create its own ecosystem or platform, integration with the major players in its field becomes essential.
Many companies ignore emerging channels as marketing platforms, even though those channels can reduce the distance between a business and its customers, employees, and partners. Today’s digital transformation often pursues a similar goal.
Innovation and Startups Inside the Organization
To retain valuable employees, especially younger talent, companies need to give them opportunities to build their own businesses inside the organization and in its interests.
When an employee wants to launch a product, the company can support the initiative and even absorb part of the cost. Success creates a new product, market, or line of business. Failure still provides a visible example of support for employee initiative, growth, and development.
The Growing Role of Freelancers
Freelancers are not simply remote employees or conventional subcontractors. They are a distinct type of contributor who works in a shared model for several companies at once.
The main difficulty is that a freelancer’s relationships with other organizations are almost impossible to monitor completely. Those organizations may include the company’s partners, customers, or competitors.
When hiring freelancers, companies therefore need to evaluate not only professional competence but also personal qualities and values.
The World as a Source of Talent
Remote work expands recruitment beyond individual cities and countries. Concentrating specialists in a small number of major centers is giving way to a distributed model in which companies can hire people where they already live and compete for them in a global market.
To make this work, internal processes, contractual models, information security, communication practices, and onboarding must all be ready for international distributed teams.
Geography alone will not solve a talent shortage. Employers will still need to offer competitive conditions, understandable processes, and a convenient working environment.
What This Means for the Company
Implementing these ideas will require a critical review of business processes and may require modern information systems.
The good news is that such systems have become more accessible, and some solutions are even available free of charge. The bad news is that a company must understand clearly which result it expects from implementation.
The future of a business will depend heavily on how effectively its employees are augmented by IT tools rather than replaced by them.