AI Training for HR & Leaders: A Recap of Our Successful Workshop

A recent report from IHE, commissioned by Hjärnfonden, reveals that a significant portion of brain diseases can be prevented through lifestyle changes. The report shows that low physical activity is the factor affecting the most brain diseases and can be linked to 13 percent of all diagnosed GAD, 9 percent of Alzheimer's disease, 8 percent of strokes, 7 percent of other dementias, and 7 percent of Parkinson's disease. For companies and HR departments, this represents a unique opportunity to invest in employee health. By promoting physical activity and building an inclusive work environment, we can not only improve individual well-being but also help reduce the extensive costs these diseases impose on society.

Three tips to get started:

1. Incorporate movement breaks! Take a detour to the coffee machine, choose the stairs instead of the elevator, and alternate between sitting and standing throughout your workday.
2. Invite colleagues to group workout sessions - exercising together is not only good for health but also strengthens team camaraderie. Perhaps the summer party could include a workout session?
3. Walk & talks - invite colleagues to walking meetings! One-on-one conversations are perfect for walking meetings - and why not take your mobile phone and headphones out for a walk during other digital meetings?

Does your workplace need help? Let’s create a healthier future together - contact us to learn more!

You can read more about the report here: Brain diseases can be prevented (hjarnfonden.se)

Further reading: There are many myths about the workplace. Here we debunk 5 myths about the perfect workplace.

If you do a quick search on the internet you will find countless articles on the workplace of the future. It is flooded with blogs on working remotely, AI impacting work, and working more data driven (I also wrote a few blogs on those).

So today I want to talk about something different, on how the workplace will look like if we are used to working remotely, working with AI, and working data driven. In this blog I will take a shot at the social impact of these evolutions and talk about future hierarchies and decision making, how working will be more intertwined with our personal lives, and how human contact and wellbeing will become more and more important in our work lives.  

Hierarchies and decisions

Currently decisions are still made in hierarchical structures where one person’s input might weigh heavier than another. Of course, there are differences in how steep hierarchical structures are, from very tall hierarchies (still mostly common in Asia and parts of America) to flat hierarchies (still mostly common in Europe).

In the workplace of the future, I believe that the hierarchical structures will not disappear, but change in form and appearance. In this sense the traditional manager will be replaced by groups and teams who check each other’s behaviour and performance. Driven by data and AI they will take decisions based upon crowd-based intelligence instead of hierarchical positions.

In a similar fashion, bonusses and salaries will not be a result of negotiations and charisma, but from data-based performance and team approval. There will be more transparency in why certain decisions will be made and more people will be involved in the decision-making structure. This will require a simplified model of decision making as more actors will be involved.

This will make for organisations that:  

• are more agile and can respond quicker to market trends;
• have less internal politics and bureaucracy, and;
• determine, plan and execute better decisions.

Want to find out more about our future hierarchies? Read this article from Collin Williams.

Work and personal life

If working remotely will be fully accepted and implemented in the future, then that will have an implication towards the division of work and personal life. I, and with me many others, believe that working remotely will be fully implemented in the future.

Beside the challenges and opportunities which that brings, this will also have an influence on the division between our work and personal life. Obvious things come to mind as the working day has no ‘solid’ start and finish anymore. So, you might pick up your laptop during the evening, do a laundry run between meetings, or go out for a coffee with the family when there is not a lot to do. This has the advantage that we can become more flexible in how and where we work, but I would argue that this can also result in a lot of new forms of stress.

Since we do not have a solid end of our working day, we will experience a constant ‘working-mode’ kind of pressure in our mind. I would therefore argue that in the workplace of the future there will be more emphasis on planning and the use of calendars to structure your workday, and that this will be required by employers to prevent needless amounts of stress.

What’s more is that I believe that retirement as we now know it, might be a thing of the past. We live in a time that the proportion of elderly population will become relatively larger and that they will live longer as well. It is technically and financially not possible anymore to maintain ‘early’ retirements anymore in the current system as most people stop working around the age of 65 (and often earlier).

This system worked when people lived up until the age of 80, but currently people are generally becoming older. What has also always baffled me is that people at the age of retirement immediately go down from a full week of working to absolutely nothing. I believe this to be a wrong way of retiring. Firstly, because stopping too early with working is detrimental for your cognitive ability (see this article). Secondly, because it drops a lot of people in a mental hole, often feeling social isolated and without a sense of purpose. Thirdly, because these people are often capable of working longer if we rethink our perception of retirement.

I believe that in the future we will go to a step-by-step retiring system, involving medical advice and personal preference. An example of this could be a long-term plan where somebody starts to work 75% at the age of 60, 50% at the age of 67, all the way down to 25% at the age of 75. Other ideas could involve different or less intense functions and shorter working days. Of course, there will be people who will read this with a bit of healthy scepticism and will say that it is physically or mentally not possible to work that long. To them I would say that their arguing is sound if they base those ideas on current-day working conditions. I would argue that future work will become less physical and mental intense due to atomization, robotization and the utilization of AI.

Human interaction and wellbeing

As technology and working methods advance towards working remotely, there will be a bigger future emphasis on human interaction and wellbeing. More and more people will look for ways to interact with colleagues as they make up a large part of their social life and life in general. We already start to see the first signs on the wall with the COVID-crisis: people start meeting up for lunch meetings again and are showing up at the office for a couple of days a week.

So, despite a global health crisis, we still long for human interaction. In the future this will mean that there will be more emphasis on events that promote human interaction despite the working-remotely working culture. Things you can think of are: regularly reoccurring teambuilding events (going from once a year to once every other week), lunch meetings, culture promoting events, working remotely in teams etcetera. The employer of the future will support this in the future as it is important to maintain the company culture and the loyalty of his or her employees.

In an ever-changing world more driven by data, we believe that more and more companies will take a vested interest in their employees’ health and wellbeing to keep them at the top of their performance. This might mean that future employers will get involved to help out their employees with personalized health programmes in accordance to how their employees sleep, eat, drink and feel. So, in this sense data will be collected at the future workplace to analyse how the employees are doing and in the same sense will personalized health plans be a part of the future workplace. You might think of personalized food plans, wellness and mindfulness programmes, and personalized ergonomic working stations.

In conclusion

In this blog I’ve tried to look beyond just stating the future ideas of working remotely, AI, and being data driven and gave a sense of the implications that these developments might have. I believe that the future workplace will be ruled by mass-intelligence, driven by data, and focussed on health, wellbeing and performance optimization of the employees.

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Within the world of business and fast-moving companies, there is one mantra that rings true for all of them “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Mark Fields, the former CEO of Ford, realized in 2006 already that culture is more important than strategy. His reasoning revolved around the customer and the fact that the modern organization should be agile and adaptive to the ever-changing needs and desires of its customer. This does not mean that Fields believed strategy to be unimportant, but it means that it does not matter how good your business strategy is, it will fail without a company culture that encourages and empowers your people to implement it (read more here). In other words, according to another great thinker; “Power to the People!” (John Lennon, 1971).

Freedom and Autonomy

Although it is strange to find CEOs and political peace activists to be of the same opinion, there is a truth in what they believe. But what does this mean in reality? According to me, that means that, over time, we have got more freedom and autonomy to make decisions, in our personal and professional lives – which is for the better. Globalization and the internet have opened a window of choice and opportunity. This has naturally only been enhanced by free market forces in our everyday personal lives, but also in our professional lives. The entrance of a new, generally higher educated, workforce in the market and the flattening out of traditional hierarchies within organizations over time, has propelled the advance of professional positions with more decision-making power. A company used to have one or a few bosses who called all the shots. Rigid hierarchical systems made for narrow and isolated decision-making processes, causing all kinds of problems from obvious biases, tunnel vision, and even blatant arrogance or naivety. More and more decisions are being made outside the board rooms and C-level suites.

Just think about the number of vacancies that have included some sort of requirement related to decision-making, e.g.: “excellent decision-making skills”, “ability to make sound and effective decisions”, “proven track record of effective decision-making”, and “excellent problem-solving skills”. All these requirements show some form of autonomy and decision-making power that is included in the position. More evidence can be found in the tech industry which is often a frontrunner for economic and societal trends nowadays. Within the software industry, we see a lot of these similar ideas and terms. Terms like “hive-mind decision-making” and “mob programming” indicate a similar trend and a better understanding of democratic decision-making.

Culture, Decision-making & Empowerment

So, you might wonder, how are culture and decision-making related? Simple. Empowerment is the bridge between culture and decision-making. Once you empower your employees to make their own decisions, they will need some sort of guide to lean back on. A guide that will help them to make decisions related to setting goals, making priorities, scheduling, time management etcetera. In other words, they need a sort of guiding set of principles that help them motivate and prioritize decisions. Do you feel where I am going with this? Exactly, they need a culture that helps them in their everyday work life. A good culture means that people can take more decentralized decisions. They are not reliant on leaders to show them how to act, prioritize or behave in relation to their work. This means that your organization becomes more agile and resilient as leaders can be busy or absent. Less dependency also means that it is easier for your organization to exchange actors if need be. Think about your company as a sports team. It is easy to exchange players from your team if the overarching system works and if the team spirit is good. Individual players know what to do (overarching structure) and how to do it (team spirit).

The strong case for a competent culture to create a resilient and adaptive organization does not exclude the fact that a good strategy is needed to achieve the goals of the business. That is also not the original point that Fields made. His point was that, if you must prioritize your time, your first priority should be your culture and your second priority should be your strategy. A company with a bad strategy but good culture might succeed because empowered individuals can overcome the lack of structure through their individual decisions. But a company with a good strategy and bad culture will almost definitely fail as the unempowered employees will or cannot implement the strategy in practice. That is the key difference. That is why culture eats strategy for breakfast if you want to create a sustainable business.  

Read more about how culture eats strategy for breakfast and how we can use culture as an organizational tool here.  

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