Three Tips to Promote Well-being and Prevent Brain Diseases at Work Through Physical Activity

AI is a broad term of all forms of demonstrated intelligence by machines. It encapsulates everything from simple customer-service queries to sophisticated deep learning networks. It has been around since the 1940’s and has become a real hype in the last ten to twenty years. The problem with AI is, is that it is something like the internet in the 1980’s: everybody is talking about it, little people actually know what they are talking about, and even less people are getting business value out of it. Today we find AI in: self-driving cars, chat-bots answering questions, email spam filters and more. In this blog I will try and make an attempt to belong to the second category and show you where AI stands right now in HR and where I believe it will go to.  

Firstly, let’s start off with a quick note for sceptics towards AI and their idea that robots will take over the world, as Hollywood shows us in movies like ‘I, Robot’, ‘Terminator’, and ‘The Matrix’. Experts themselves have no idea when we can achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as in the movie robots, and are guessing somewhere near the end of this century or even after that. Furthermore, they argue that it is simply impossible for us to create beings which think like us because of one simple reason: we know very little our own brain. In other words; we almost know nothing about our brains, let alone reproducing them. Now that’s out of the way, let’s see where we are today in HR.  

Where we are today

Today AI is being used within HR on a limited scale, let’s start of by looking at recruitment. There are already algorithms who help recruiters source the right candidates and there are also applications which can scan resumes and search for certain key words and sentences indicating that he or she has the right profile. Another feature of AI which is currently being used is in the first stages of contact with a candidate. You can think of automated messaging, scheduling interviews, providing ongoing feedback about the recruitment process and answering their questions in a chat function. The main idea behind these simple tasks is to reduce bias and save recruiters time which they can spend on more important tasks, such as: assessing cultural fit, holding technical interviews and finding qualified referrals.  

AI is also being used within HR as a chatbot for general HR-related inquiries (such as Una from Unilever). These bots function as first-line HR support for all your employees. Another interesting development is the use of VR (Virtual Reality) within HR. It is being used to simulate real-life scenarios and test, measure and improve behaviour. VR is and will be an integral part of training for real-life situations and how your employees will handle them. The idea behind these developments is to, yet again, relieve your HR employees from simple tasks, assignments, and recorded training sessions and let them focus on the harder tasks, such as talent development and culture building.

Finally, there are also early signs of applications which analyse the data and computer activity of employees to predict who is thinking about leaving the company and when. The idea behind it is that with big data analysis you can see which digital office behaviour indicates that somebody is thinking about quitting the company. This will allow your HR employees to take up contact with the individual to see if there is anything that can be done to change the individuals mind or if you need to think about a mutual agreement on ending the employment and start looking for a replacement. In this sense it is important because these early signs can let you be ahead of the curve so you can have a smooth transition from one employee leaving and a new one taking his or her place.  

Want to find more on where AI stands in HR today? Have a look at this article from the HR Exchange Network.  

Where we will go in the future

In the short term the abovementioned methods will become more sophisticated. So automated sourcing, resume scanning, messaging, chatbots, VR training and employee data analysis will be able to direct you towards more specific answers. We all know the frustration of a chatbot which just keeps you sending to the same general page on the topic from the FAQ, while the info you really need is somewhere else. Just as anything in real life, that on its own will take time. The AI will need time learning from the input that we give it.  

More interestingly, I believe that AI will also have a place in face-to-face contact with the first interviews. I think that companies like Future Robotics will also introduce their life-like customer service robots in the realm of HR. This can be via a digital setup or even in person. The robot will deal with the basic questions which get asked in a first interview. Algorithms will then analyse the answers given to see which candidate made the best first impression. Additionally, I also think that VR sessions can be used to test candidates on their capabilities into handling different situations. The upside here is that it takes out all personal bias from a recruiter’s perspective towards the candidate.  

Another thing that AI will bring HR is new jobs. Up until now I have only described AI as a possibility of downsizing activities and how it might replace jobs in the future. On the other hand, it opens up opportunities for HR to be a real tool to increase the productivity of your company. The future of HR will be more focussed towards behaviour, culture, ethics and values and how these can be pointed in the direction which makes sense for your business. Those areas of focus are, not unimportantly, also the main reasons of motivation on how you motivate somebody to JOIN and STAY in your company, so therefore it should be the main focus of your HR department.  

Want to find out more about present and upcoming trends of AI in HR? Have a look at this article from Forbes.  

In conclusion

For now, I am not ready to board the hype train about scientific robots who think and act like humans. I do think however that AI will clear up routine tasks for us which will leave us in HR time to deal with more important issues, such as creating the right culture, stimulating and describing right behaviour and increasing productivity. Do you not want to wait ten to twenty years until AI clears up your HR department’s time for these issues? Contact us and see how we can help you to develop the right culture, motivate right behaviour and increase productivity.

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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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In the 21st century we have come a long way from the original working conditions of ‘free workers’ in the industrial revolution. Over time we have created working places which protect, motivate and empower employees. Employers are always looking to improve the workplace to increase productivity and wellbeing of their employees. We look up to tech giants such as Spotify, Google and Facebook and their creative working environments and see those as the current example of how the perfect workplace should look like, even the term ‘perfect workplace’ is clouded with mystery. In this blog we will take a closer look at 5 common myths about the perfect workplace and show you the reality behind them.  

Myth 1: Working 8 hours guarantees productivity.  

The longer you work, the more work you get done. That seems the premises behind this myth that has been around since Henry Ford introduced the eight-hour workday to his factory workers. Experiments here in Sweden with six-hour workdays show that the opposite is true and that 8 hours does not lead to more productivity. They argue that a lot of the eight hours spent at the office are spent inefficiently and that the six hours put down a healthy amount of pressure on their employees. Furthermore, they argue that their employees are happier to show up and leave the office and are in general less exhausted. While we are not arguing that all companies should switch to six hours of work per day, we are arguing that the normal nine-to-five working days should be a thing of the past as they are simply exhausting your workforce. Try to rethink what makes your employees productive and try to tap into their needs. Perhaps working from home is a viable (better) alternative, or shortened working days with shortened breaks. As always, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.  

Reality 1: Working 8 hours does not guarantee productivity.

Myth 2: The closer the relationship within teams, the less errors will be made.  

When you think about it, it makes sense right? If you have a good connection with your colleagues and your manager and if you got your relationship and work down to a routine, then there should be less room for errors. Nothing is less true. A study by Amy Edmondson shows that employees and managers with a close relationship reported significantly more errors than the test subjects who do not have a close relationship. So why is that? The answer is quite simply: the employees felt more certain to their managers to report errors because of their good relationship. This is important to note because failure is a part of progress. As an employer you need to know where mistakes are made so you can improve your business, therefore it is your responsibility to create the safe environment to be able to report these errors. You should focus on continuous improvement rather than perfection.  

Reality 2: The closer the relationship within teams, the more errors will be reported and the faster they improve.

Myth 3: Like-minded people work better together.  

On the surface this one seems to make sense. The more you are on the same line with your colleagues the faster you take decisions and the better results you will get, right? Wrong. A study by Kathrine Philips, Katie Liljenquist and Margaret Neale disproves this and argues that homogenous teams indeed take faster decisions, but do not make better decisions. The heterogenous teams performed best in terms of decisions as they kept questioning and challenging their partners to come to better results.  

Reality 3: Homogenous teams deliver speed, heterogenous teams deliver results.

Myth 4: Additional perks make for happy employees.  

We have all seen the examples of Google, Twitter and Facebook. Cafeteria filled with food and beverages (sometimes even entire meals), doggy day care services and even cleaning services are all perks which are supposed to make your employees happy. Although nobody ever got sad from a free meal, it is not a guarantee for happy employees. These perks will only be perceived as offerings and add-ons to their job if the working culture is healthy. If you are encouraged to work through your lunchbreak, but in exchange you do get a free lunch, that might feel more as a bribe than an actual perk. It is therefore important that you get a healthy culture first which empower your employees. Only after that fundament is established, can you think about adding additional perks. If you want to learn more from Google, read my blog on the 7 most important lessons here or if you want to find out what truly motivates employees in this day and ages, read this blog.  

Reality 4: Only if you have the fundamentals right, then additional perks will contribute to happiness.

Myth 5: Doing what you love is the best way to achieve the most out of your work life.

We all heard the conventional wisdom that you should strive to work with what you love to get the most out of yourself. This string of wisdom argues that your passion motivates you do great things and make a difference in the world. There is evidence which disproves this self-centred motivation. A study done by O.C. Tanner in 2015 shows that great work or results are not so much achieved by doing something we love but, according to 88% of the participants, it is more focussed on making a difference that other people love. That is where true productivity and great accomplishments lie. This is not to say that you should not try to find job wherein you can do what you already love to do, it is just a way of saying that it is not necessarily the best way of the most out of your work life or achieving great things.

Reality 5: Achieving greatness often begins with trying to make a difference that other people love.

Are you interested in finding out more? Get in touch with us to see how we can help you to:

• Increase productivity
• Open up to errors and improvement
• Create heterogenous teams that deliver results
• Establish a healthy culture which makes for happy employees
• Achieve great results with the right people

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