• Scenario Plan
Science
Workforce science is becoming a new method of hiring; big data is being utilized instead of traditional hiring methods in order to determine the best candidates for certain jobs. Firms now provide proprietary data science mining in order to score candidates to find out who will be the best hire. This provides instant numerical assessments of the skills and experience of a hiring candidate.
Technology
Technology is rapidly creating fewer positions for people that require a higher skill set; grunt work is being accomplished by machines and software that eliminate working-class jobs in the digital economy. This will have a dramatic effect on the middle class, as the jobs they are skilled enough to handle will be outsourced to hardware and software.
Environment
In terms of workspaces, modular environments will continue to become in vogue among technologically-advanced workplaces. Remote working technology will also allow more people to work from home, lessening the need for physical work spaces in the future. Workspaces will become more compartmentalized, and coworkers will be more geographically distant from one another. Workers will learn to adapt to these changes, and furniture and designs will be created to accommodate more technology-laden physical workspaces.
• Future Of Work or Body or Discussion – FOW alignment
• Will new technologies increase surveillance and control
New technologies will absolutely increase surveillance and control over workers in the next two to three decades. Employee monitoring will be much easier, particularly given the advent of social media – cases have already occurred where employees have been penalized in the workplace based on what they do on their social media profiles. This allows employers to keep tabs on their employees’ personal lives outside the office, and know more about their workers than ever before. This raises questions of privacy in the workplace, particularly e-mail surveillance and Internet browser history surveillance. Workers are beginning to distrust their employers and feel their privacy invaded even more given their greater access to technology that allows this kind of loss of control. Having unprecedented access to worker information, employers will be able to regulate their workers’ behavior even more in the coming years.
• Provide flexibility and choice to workers
While workers are given less privacy, technology will allow them to have greater choice as to their work environment. As previously mentioned, the advent of mobile workplaces will permit employees to work from home; by turning in work remotely, the worker has many different choices as to actual work space. More technology also means more resources, and greater accessibility to these resources; this will allow workers to do more with less, and thereby increase their options as to their preferred working style. Greater compatibility between technologies also allows workers the option to use their own technology when interfacing with their employers. This way, workers’ styles and ways of working are becoming more customized with their lifestyles, giving them greater choice in the long run.
• Neo-Liberalism
Neoliberalism as a practice will continue to spread in the next 20-30 years, given the advent of technology and the work space. Gender, racial and economic equality are social issues that social media and the increasing connectivity of our world through the Internet have encouraged in businesses and workers; to that end, neoliberal practices will dominate the economy. Instead of practicing unfettered capitalism, this desire for earning wealth will be mitigated by the social justice tenets of liberalism; workers will be granted greater equality through the mobility and equalizing nature of technology. At the same time, technology will be used and adopted as befits the neoliberal market forces of the developed world: in essence, what works best will be used most.
• Recommendation
• Science, Technology, the Environment
Given that our thesis is that the work place will become an even more restrictive environment through the increase in surveillance and control over workers, the goal is to change this negative outcome from occurring. From a scientific viewpoint, technology will allow hiring and firing to become a much more scientific process, which may bring about a loss of humanity and spontaneity in terms of bringing on workers. The solution to that is to emphasize in present work culture the importance of face-to-face, personalized hiring, with real people looking at resumes and evaluating them on their own terms instead of running them through algorithms. Technology will continue to advance, and to allow people to facilitate more mobile workplace environments; this is a good thing, but it must be tempered by ensuring that workers interface effectively with their native workplace environment, instead of working incompatibly with their colleagues. However, as technology becomes more compatible with each other, it appears as though the coming work environment will become more accommodating of these differing work styles and technologies, thereby creating a better overall work environment. Despite the potential problems that may occur with the coming technology of the next few decades, current trajectories ensure a more neoliberal and varied workforce that will not sacrifice productivity.
