UKG: Unsure about the future of work? Look to the past

The COVID-19 pandemic brought an astonishing level of disruption to our working lives.

It is common to use the word unprecedented to describe the challenges we are living through, but the reality is, this type of disruption was something “our ancestors would be totally familiar with”.

That was how David Olusoga, British historian and professor of public history at the University of Manchester, kicked off his keynote at UKG Connect in London.

The pandemic is “just another step in our ever changing, complicated evolving relationship with work and the workplace”, he shared.

What we can learn from the past on work

Speaking at the iconic Tower of London – a historic royal palace and prison – Olusoga noted that, rather than making us special, “the experience of having our lives absolutely torn apart by a vast global event is something that makes us in keeping with previous generations”.

He gave the example of world famous mathematician Isaac Newton, who, during a ‘lockdown’ linked with the plague of 1666, had a ‘Year of Wonders’ where he made his greatest discoveries.

While it will take decades “to understand the true consequences…of the pandemic”, there’s lots that we can learn from history as we build, rethink and evolve the workplace for the better in the future.

To understand where we need to go, we have to look back at where the ideas we held true about work come from – Olusoga is clear that the place to start is the Victoria era.

At this point in time, the Tower of London – where UKG Connect took place – was starting to become a tourist attraction.

One of the benefits of the Victoria era was that work empowered people of any class to better their circumstances, and “take control of their own destiny”, and this created more leisure time for visits to tourist attractions.

David Olusoga delivering his keynote at UKG Connect in London.

But it wasn’t all positive, for Olusoga, “we are still very much…escaping the shadow of these Victorian ideas”. We are in the beginning of a “great transition” away from this, and particularly the “idea that work and the office are synonymous”.

The office is actually a relatively recent invention – prior to that people primarily worked out of their homes.

Olusoga joked that to the Victorians, “the phrase working from home would have meant absolutely nothing, it would have seemed a strange tautological thing to say”.

Olusoga noted that the first office is believed to be the Admiralty Office of the Royal Navy in 1726, while the second was the East India Company – this “invented the idea of office culture” and shifted work from being about measuring outputs (what you produce) to the number of hours spent in the office.

“The challenge for us is that we lived through what was deemed to be a period of quite profound stability where work naturally took place in offices… but it gives us the opportunity… [to] reshape our society”, concluded Olusoga.

AI and the future of HR

In his keynote, Olusoga was clear that fundamental to the transformation of work towards in-person and the office in the Victoria era was the industrial revolution, and the technologies that were invented, namely electricity, the electric lift and the steam engine.

The steam engine, and ultimately “the railways made Britain the first industrial society” in all of human history – it introduced travel to ordinary people, but it also allowed for commuting to big cities for work.

The Victorians reacted to these new technologies with fear.

There was the Luddite movement, which was comprised of highly skilled textile workers protested the new mechanized looms that lower skilled workers could easily operate.

For Olusoga, we are in a similar inflection point with AI – this new technology “will almost inevitably render redundant other previously highly skilled, highly regarded professionals”, like lawyers and script writers.

But, just like in the Industrial Revolution, AI will simply change how people work.

Yes some jobs will disappear, but many will be transformed (hopefully for the better) – boring, repetitive manual tasks will become the purview of AI, while humans can focus on innovation, creativity and collaboration.

During a customer panel session at UKG Connect in London, Pip Trenaman, EMEA workforce transformation lead at Accenture, picked up this thread on AI.

She noted that while AI may be high on CEOs’ priority lists, currently just 12% of organizations are mature in their AI abilities.

This is because companies are sitting back and trying to understand the risks and rewards – they are particularly thinking about the message around the impact of generative AI on people’s jobs.

There’s a lot of work for organizations, and HR leaders, to share the message that AI will elevate jobs, not replace people.

Speaking on the same customer panel, Deborah Prosser, payroll manager at Numatic International, shared how the British manufacturer best known for making Henry vacuums is dealing with AI across its workforce that spans five generations.

Prosser stated that Numatic is bringing employees along the AI journey, and getting them excited about the potential for upskilling and reskilling as a result of automation.

“We want [them] to embrace it, and use it to its full potential”, but that requires the HR team being on hand to support them with any questions or concerns.

For UKG, the key to successful use of AI at work is prioritizing ethics and transparency.

In an exclusive interview with UNLEASH, Brian Reaves, chief belonging, equity and impact officer at UKG, notes: “There’s a lot of bad information out there”, and humans must always be in the loop whenever AI is being used.

Reaves concludes: “I love technology, it moves us forward”, but the key is using it in the right ways.

Quoting Martin Luther King, ‘the light will always penetrate the dark’, Reaves notes: “As long as we’re in the light, we will get to where we need to be.”