The Covid-19 pandemic we’ve all endured over the last few years has upended almost all aspects of our social lives and has perhaps permanently altered how we gather with friends and family, educate our children, and celebrate life’s milestones. By serving as the most significant disruption to our lives in several generations, the pandemic has forced a sort of “new normal,” as it’s been called, that dictates how we interact with others.
The pandemic has also had a startling effect on technology and tech-driven spaces. As the pandemic dragged on over years, the disruption that was caused had a different effect on tech. Innovation and technological advancements have lowered the barriers to digital disruption, actually creating faster and more efficient transformations in the tech arena. Where other industries struggled mightily during the pandemic, technological advancements flourished at an even faster rate than before. Entrepreneur and futurologist Peter Diamandis predicts more progress in the next decade than in the past 100 years. That’s an astounding prediction to consider.
These changes will no doubt have a significant effect on our workplaces and how we work even in the more immediate future. Companies poised to keep up and further advance these changes will position themselves to be leaders within their industries. Those left behind will simply be languishing.
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A new kind of employee monitoring
It’s well documented how the pandemic pushed workers out of their offices and into work from home, or remote working, situations. Many employees welcomed the change and anecdotally noted how much more productive they could be operating from home instead of the office. Many companies used the opportunity to save on costly real estate and building maintenance but still were concerned about their employees’ productivity.
Recognizing the need for this type of monitoring, companies like Aware have come up with a solution. Aware’s AI and natural language processing (NLP) models allow employers to perform deep behavioral trend analysis of their employees on an incredibly invasive scale. By monitoring communications over platforms like email and Slack, companies might feel like they can gain some control back over remote employees while gathering massive amounts of data on their employees’ feelings and thoughts.
This type of monitoring isn’t without controversy, however. It can be hard to blame employees who work under this level of surveillance for feeling as though they’re being spied on. And what might be constructive criticisms of managers or processes is much less likely to be discussed when it’s so closely monitored.
Changing workforces augmented with AI
Experts purport that we’re only seeing the very tip of the glacial iceberg that is AI at this point. Within the next decade, employees working in many existing fields will find AI being used to automate and handle the rote and repetitive parts of their job. This will, in theory, allow for humans to focus on the parts of their jobs that still require a needed human element, such as creativity, high-level decision making, planning, or reachin