As the Covid-19 pandemic drives a social and organizational shift, organizations must realign themselves, implement innovative and creative solutions.

Embracing Possibility

• COVID-19 has challenged business leaders to do three things at once: stage the return to work, understand and leverage the advancements they enacted during the crisis, and chart a new path forward.
• Focusing on the return to work alone is not a viable option, as it will not allow organizations to capitalize on all that they have experienced and learned over the past few months.
• In the context of COVID- 19, organization need to leverage the opportunity to return to work by designing the future of work, employing the lessons, practices, and goodwill they built during their accelerated crisis response.

Digital Transformation

• Shifting work trends in the pandemic era reflect a clear acceleration of certain forces, a disruptive and disrupted trend in others — and the emergence of totally new drivers of change.
• New Digital Trends such as robots, AI in the workplace, dispersed workforces, with people working from anywhere, anytime, and the constant need of employees to learn new skills are just part of what the future of work could entail.

The change from an employer to an applicant market, new platforms, alternative approaches to attracting and retaining employees, and the prevailing shortage of skilled workers are all increasing.

Profound shifts that are radically changing work and employment expectations

Rethink Employment Models· Technological Shift- Enabling automation and Artificial Intelligence adoption within the organization to transform the business strategy.

Generational Shift- Embracing an era of Gen Z and Millennials taking reins in management, bringing digital-savvy and independent cohort to work.

• Social Shift- Leveraging evolving employment models like gig work, remote work and change organizational processes to manage technology-driven workflows.Future of work is NOW: Embracing the Augmented WorkforceWorkforce composition is changing rapidly. Beyond human factors such as demographics and the rise of the gig economy, digital automation is transforming organizations' workflows and processes – and the nature of work itself.

Creating an automated future Digital automation in its many forms will increasingly contribute to workplace productivity. The current question is not whether automation will affect the workforce, but how, to what degree, and at what point will we reach the equilibrium between human and robotic workers.How embracing the augmented workforce can power the nature of work?

• Unlike traditional manual jobs, the augmented workforce has the ability to drive great efficiency. According to a recent report from Deloitte, cognitive technologies and open talent economy are paradigm- shifting forces that will reshape the workforce in the near future.
• Already, a majority of companies have implemented these shifting forces, as the report found, 41 percent of companies have fully deployed or have made significant progress in adopting cognitive and AI technologies within their workforce.
• Today, as the workplaces are evolving to a flexible workforce driven by technology advances, software, automation, IoT, robotics, and artificial intelligence, among others, almost every job in every discipline is being revived.

Attaining Greater Value from Augmented Workforce

• By integrating human capability with AI, companies will be able to enhance productivity, while increasing safety and minimizing equipment downtime.
• The transition to a workforce empowered by technology and talent from the labour force equipped with traditional systems is one of the effective approaches for businesses, but this poses some challenges to human capital trends.

7 New realities of work

1. Technology, Talent & Transformation

With the inception of digital transformation, organization will witness a dramatic change in work, workers, and workplaces. The contingent nature of jobs will change. Trends such as robots, AI in the workplace, dispersed workforces, with people working from anywhere, anytime, and the constant need of employees to learn new skills are just part of what the future of work could entail. Companies must adapt, regardless of functional, geographic or business boundaries.

2. Rise of Exponential Organization

The speed of disruption is fast, as new companies emerge leveraging Big Data, New technologies and Algorithm. As the organization stage the return to work, they have the opportunity to leverage the power of AI to build a culture of actionable knowledge-sharing and knowledge creation that strengthens organizational connectivity and affords the organization resilience to be able to withstand, and even to thrive in, environments of disruption, uncertainty, and change.

3. Unleashed Workforce

The ‘Augmented’ Workforce requires a new talent mix. The strategy to develop an agile workforce is to encompass traditional employees with AI, crowd sourced talent, robot and contractors, thus creating a pool of talent. Organizations should evolve their thinking about technology from taking a purely substitution view (replacing humans with technology) to using technology as an augmentation or collaboration strategy. The latter view can allow organizations to not only streamline costs, but to also create value and ultimately, provide meaning to the workforce as a whole.

4. Lifelong Reinvention

The lengthening of the productive years and the need for lifelong learning have led to the new reality of lifelong reinvention. Longer lifespans seem to be challenging traditional ideas about careers, retirement, and work-life balance, and these changes in mind-set are starting to affect the way people work. Lengthening worker careers could complicate operational and resource management. The effectiveness with which organizations can manage quadri-generational workforces may affect business efficiency and productivity, investment decisions, and resource retention.

5. Ethics of Work & Society

The companies in the dynamic work culture are constantly monitored to streamline their culture and values to develop the codes of conduct and ethics as per the government and regulator’s public policy. The reality that organizations seem to be held to an increasingly high ethical standard is manifesting itself in a variety of ways, as organizations strive to balance shareholder needs with those of their broader constituents such as employees and their local communities.

6. The Nimble Enterprise

With more and more senior professionals progressing towards “startups”, this becomes the harbinger of change leveraging competency, skills, and extensive network. Proliferation of Gig Workers in the workforce is giving rise creation of nimble enterprise. Smaller, nimble enterprises are leveraging larger organizations’ solutions, such as cloud computing and online payment services. Compared to traditional small firms, nimble enterprises tend to have better brand identity, vision, expertise, international networks, and intangible assets. Their cost structure is lean and flexible, allowing them to survive through economic cycles while continuing to generate cash to support their business.

7. Regulated Innovation

The regulations don’t always evolve as quickly as technological change. Organizations innovate to gain competitive advantages and thrive. For innovation to flourish despite legal and regulatory obstacles, organization must address innovation barriers head-on. Organizations responding to this increased activity with both dialogue and research—

perhaps, for instance, conducting artificial intelligence research on artificial neural networks to help explain automated choices or recommendations. Regulation will continue to evolve as governments, organizations, and individual workers grapple with the complex trade- offs the future of work demands.

Adapting the new realties of work

Capturing the inherent value within each of these new realities could require many changes. It could involve reengineering work to take advantage of technological advances. It may require transforming workplaces to welcome and accommodate a continuum of talent needs. Almost inevitably, today’s organizational leaders will need much courage to upend their existing models of work to usher in a more nimble and diverse enterprise.