Twenty years ago, we didn’t have social media. Ten years before then, we didn’t have the web. If you work in web programming, online marketing, or mobile apps development, your job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Who knows the kind of jobs that will exist, say, 20 years from now? The people out of work today will soon find jobs again. But the jobs we’ve had in the past will not be the same. How exactly does the future of work look like?
The future of work is transparent. We need to be competitive to stay relevant. In the past, productivity was difficult to measure. Businesses were wasting millions of dollars every year paying for employee downtime. Now, time and task tracking tools are revolutionizing productivity measurement. Today, the work of employees can be directly tied to either upper or lower productivity tier and the more productively they work, the more money they can make.
In his book, “Gender,” author Ivan Illich invented the term “shadow work” to designate the unrecognized and unpaid time an employee must spend preparatory to doing recognized or paid work. Quoting Illich in August 1997, Inquirer columnist Randy David wrote: “With the worsening of the traffic in Metro Manila, there is a corresponding lengthening of the shadow work of commuting. If such work were recognized and compensated, Illich says, ‘the industrial system would cease to function.’ For it will be shown that the sum total of shadow-work input will in fact be greater than wage labor itself. Even so, its recognition by society is a way of sensitizing us to the need to alleviate the ceaseless toil that is undertaken in the shadow of so-called productive work.” Illich was, of course, being hypothetical. But he was mistaken.
In the future, the workforce will no longer be tied to shadow work. The future of work is flat. No one is going to complain about their commute. If, in real estate, the mantra is location, location and location, at work, the mantra is communication, communication and communication. Work used to be considered a place, and the only options for communication were land-line phones or snail mail. Today, project teams are using sophisticated web tools to work together from anywhere in the world. Tools like Skype and Google Hangouts have made long-distance calling virtually free. With modern technological advancement, multinational corporations are now flat.
With the proliferation of BPO (business process outsourcing) firms and call centers in the Philippines today, this is not entirely a new concept. This has given us billions of dollars in revenues that form part of our national budget annually. In a flat world, however, outsourcing is dead! The term “offshore operations” is starting to lose its significance today. For, what does “offshore” really mean when you’re in Mumbai, your manager is in Austin, and your colleague is in Bucharest? Which shore—the Arabian coast of India or that of the Black Sea? In 2004, for instance, Jetblue started a revolution by allowing close to 1,000 of its customer service representatives to work from home with no central office.
Let’s illustrate this further. Let’s say, for example, you were born in a rural town in Quezon province, and went to college in Manila. When it comes time to look for a job, you realize there are tons of opportunities abroad but very few back home. Today, technology allows you to still live in your hometown and virtually work from anywhere in the world. The income you earn gets spent in your hometown, helping build the livelihood of other segments in your community. Employers love this, too, because they can recruit top talent regardless of location. Expand that to other rural towns all across the world and what you get is a distribution of job opportunities and wealth that never before existed. The new economy will find itself liberated from the shackles of the uneven distribution of wealth and opportunities.
Today, college education is increasingly being downgraded to “the new high school.” No one is going to pay an employee just by having a degree. More and more, sites like Pluralsight.com and Lynda.com are offering informal education, and there is no longer any excuse for not knowing. One needs to stand out and be competitive to stay employed. The terms “permanent jobs” and “contractual” are becoming a misnomer. No one is guaranteed a lifetime career and while the future presents to us a bunch of promises, we need to have an edge. We need to be competitive.
In the future, work will be transparent, flat and competitive. In a growing number of industries, who you are and where you come from will not matter. Most important will be what you know and the unique set of skills you bring to the table. Competition will be fierce because individuals in the knowledge economy are not geographically constrained. And in a flat world, every individual has the tools to compete. As technology continues to shrink the effective distance between every human on the planet, it’s melting away geographic barriers between coworkers and ushering in a new type of globally distributed workforce.
Are we prepared?
Joseph Jadway “JJ” Marasigan (joseph.marasigan@crossover.com) manages the marketplace of talent at Crossover for Work. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Crossover has embarked on an expedition to find and recruit top talent and pay competitive wages regardless of location.