The traditional way we work will be in the minority by 2030, according to a new report on the future of work by
CBRE Workplace Strategy .
Technology is changing the way we work and companies need to change alongside. According to the CBRE report, traditional companies are finding that their “one size fits all” policies are turning into “one size fits nobody” approach. This has paved the way for workspace solutions and what CBRE call the “high performance workplaces” that are just now forming, but will be fully integrated into the workforce by 2030. Members of the millennial workforce were able to clearly articulate concepts for future workplaces that would help them perform better. These concepts, along with the key competitive advantages of working in 2030, are what will drive the way we work in the future.
Attraction and Retention of Talent
In 2030, the search for talent will ‘increasingly be for people outside your organisation as within’, according to the report. This is why the number one competitive advantage in 2030 will be the attraction and retention of top talent. In the future workforce, you will still have traditional full-time employees, but there will be a shift towards a more contingent workforce who won’t work directly for you but will opt to work with you, according to the report. By 2030, the contingent workforce will have spread dramatically, with big implications for the workforce beyond 2030.
Innovation
According to the report, innovation will be the second most important advantage in 2030. By 2030, the workforce will break down into what CBRE describes as small teams, where “anyone can be an ‘intrapreneur’, allowing young workers to be creative and have a degree of autonomy within an organization. In many companies, this process is already happening. Frustrated by traditional organizational structures of the workplace, the millennial workforce are breaking the “unwritten rules of hierarchy’’. They are also losing verbal skills (probably due to the increasing use of technological platforms), but have the “ability to maintain large networks, absorb information and filter out irrelevant material,” according to the report. What this means, is that by 2030, the workforce will work in smaller groups, be more tech savvy and prefer casual non traditional work environments over more traditional ones.
The Traditional Workplace Will Die
The traditional workplace is over, and by 2030 it will look and feel totally different. According to CBRE, workplaces solutions will help workers with productivity, with an increased emphasis on communal workspaces. More notably, when the research participants were told to give a detailed picture of the future workplace, a majority said they would prefer some “quiet retreat” with “collaborative settings” and the flexibility to choose a setting that is best for their current work project. Some of the future workplaces could even be based around the mood of a person, or group, according to the report. You should expect to see these as integral parts of the future workforce. “It’s not that these old workplaces won’t be effective any more,” said one research participant “It’s that the old kind of work won’t exist anymore. Period!”.
Technology Will Dominate
This is a no-brainer. Technology will play a pivotal role in the workforce of 2030. What’s interesting though is that CBRE actually discovered that an increasing number of jobs in 2030 will require a combination of creative intelligence and social intelligence as well as an ability to leverage artificial intelligence . According to the report, artificial intelligence. will be used as a “tool to undertake tasks of a scale and complexity that were once unimaginable,” although they don’t say what they actually are. However, if you believe a report by Pew Research, advances in technology will displace certain jobs and workers will need to adapt to these changes by “inventing new types of work.” Get ready for more positions filled by robots.
Forecasting the future is not an exact science. Nothing close to it. There are some technological advances that we can feel fairly certain are coming down the pipe: Driverless cars, increased automation and more data analytics, to name a few, but the impact of these cannot be fully predicted. Automation has been changing the way we work for the past 200 years and society has constantly adapted in unforeseen ways. What is certain is that the age of what we consider to be the traditional workplace is almost over, if it’s not already. Technology has made old practices redundant and introduced new ways of working that are more flexible and suited to the modern work environment. The millennial workforce welcome these changes and companies need to be aware of this and implement workspace solutions so that they are not left behind.
