MSP150 [] Change 2020: Work

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To apply, visit dg.my.g0 digital. This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station, or welcome to Matt's Blingt. What year 2020 has been, or hasn't been, depending on your perspective, we're getting used to the rapid pace of change that technology is forcing us to adapt to.

But even within that frame of reference, this year has been unusual. And for the next few weeks, Matt's Blingt will look back at 2020 and try to make sense of at least some of what's happened this year. Joining me as ever is Matt Balmettage from culturepop.com. Hi Matt.

Hey Rich. Where do we even start with 2020 Matt? Well that's a really good question. When you look at the sheer catalog and volume of innovation that has defined 2020, it's actually been quite astonishing.

But then you take a look at the reasons underlying that innovation and it becomes quickly very sobering. So this year has been like that opening of a tale of two cities the best of times and the worst of times. It's one of the things that restores my faith in humanity that we have these incredible bursts of creativity and ingenuity during these dark periods. The last one to my mind at least was the 1970s.

That post-Second World War boom and that Arthur Glow was failing. Societies and industries were still very regimented and old-fashioned. There was recession, oil shocks, economics, stagnation. We were at that tipping point between the worlds of solid state and transistors and this revolution in microchips.

You had this explosion of technology and culture. You had movements like punk and funk and disco and heavy metal and electronica and hip-hop all styles of music and culture movements that were birthed in the 70s. You had nerds like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak selling home computers out of their garages. We've had other booms.

We've had cultural, technological and economic booms since then. But nothing like that explosion of the 1970s or what we've experienced this year. So my answer to that opening question, it's turned into a bit of a monologue. I was going to say that.

Yeah. But that's because at this time of year, we usually do those what I've learned type episodes to round up the things that have happened. But this year it seems a little bit shallow. So I think we have to take chunks or sections and look at what's happened this year.

All right. Where do you want to start? We've worked and locked out? Yeah.

And with people, I guess, it's pretty disappointing that we're seeing the second and third waves of the virus around the world, especially here in Malaysia, where we got to that point in July and August that it looked like the virus was under some kind of control. Now, I'm not going to debate the reasons for the resurgence of the virus and the restrictions that we've just largely been released from, mostly because it's irrelevant. It's a bit like climate change. There's no point constantly rehashing the why.

I think this show is coming out around the anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. So that is a useful analogy, because we need solutions, not hindsight and pre-virusation. The issue is what we're going to do to combat, whether it's the virus or climate change, it's what we're going to do to combat it now and to keep it under control in the future. Has it surprised you at all how well we've pivoted to this work from home model?

I think we have to qualify that a little bit. The first part is how well businesses have pivoted to that model. Now, I've said this a few times this year. I think what we've seen is the most radical experiment in business methodologies since the 1970s as well.

We've had to upend that model of putting people and resources in centralized locations, whether it's in nominal HQs or in these hub and spoke models. That model of business pretty much worked and transforming to another model. That requires significant investment. And that means that companies have to take on risk, which, as we know, most companies are quite risk-averse.

Even despite the trends we've seen towards digital nomads and road warriors and remote working? Well, digital nomads, and this isn't exclusively, but they have tended to be offering services or contract labor rather than full-time services, where we have seen companies agreeing to these models for people to remote work. It's often been granted on a case-by-case basis rather than having a system-wide or a company-wide policy. Interestingly, there was a recent piece in the New York Times, I think, about people who have embraced the Nomad model during lockdown.

A number of countries have been offering specific digital Nomad visas to make up from the lack of tourism that they've had this year. But some of those taking up these visas have found the experience to be less enticing than they anticipated, because they've reached these paradise spots by tropical beaches. And they've found that the towns have been largely shut down. They haven't been any restaurants or bars open, very few food stores and patchy internet access.

And of course, traveling between countries offering these visas is made tougher and more expensive by having to go through quarantine requirements every time you get to a national border. So you've had people swapping their box apartments, say New York, for box apartments, in empty tourist towns, at least back at home they had friends and services and some kind of support structure. So you've found that some of these Nomads at least have been coming back to these little boxes at home. Just before you were talking about our investment and risk.

Yes, I was saying that transforming to another model would require significant investment and that the companies take on risk. Those are the kind of capital outlays that most finance and technical directors are going to punt to the future if you give them a choice, maybe even in the hope that they'll end up being someone else's problem, especially as no one really knows how or if these new models will work. You know, think about it, you have to reorganize your team structures, especially if some of those workers are in different time zones. Is remote working going to be as effective or efficient as working together in an office?

And even if it is, what is that learning curve going to be? In the sense of having the discipline to work at home? That's certainly part of it. And it's not easy.

You know, I've been working remotely for a lot of years now from my own office spaces, from client offices, my home office, cafe, hotel rooms, sometimes even from the side of the road in my car. But getting into that mindset that your home or whatever your current location is, is your workspace isn't an actual one. You have to start building these divisions and you have to erode those habits that you already have in place. The biggest weakness for me working at home is the fridge.

For other people, it's the TV, it might be the PlayStation. Now I have to be very careful what's in the fridge so that I've reached for the right kind of snacks. You're often not tempted in the same way in an office because it's a shared space belonging to your employer. You don't put your feet up on the table, you don't engage in epic online battles or leave your dishes in the sink until after work's finished.

That's assuming that you even have the space and facilities to work from home. Or even a job that allows you to do that as well. You know, let's not forget that component. Especially when we see all these well-lit, lovingly framed and spacious homework, living spaces on our news feeds.

Not all of us live in social media friendly living spaces like that guy Lucas Gage, the US actor whose apartment was derided by a director during a Zoom audition. Although I do have to say, it's supposedly terrible and tiny place, look nicer than pretty much any place I lived in at that point in my life. But you know, most of us are just desperate to find a patch of wall that we can use as a backdrop for virtual meetings, one that doesn't have tracks or mould spots where kids or housemates aren't constantly walking into view. Or in my case, an elderly cat crying in the background as though he's being tortured, but really just wants me to go and give him a cuddle.

And those are just the good case scenarios. If your only workspace is a shelf at the end of your bed, or worse, a pillow for your laptop while you sit on your bed, then work from home is going to be a very unhealthy experience for you, both physically and mentally. I think you started to talk about some of the hardware and software. Yeah, to enable this to happen, the collaborative tools are going to have to be very flexible indeed, because for someone like me, I need to be able to access all my files from wherever I am and from whatever device that I'm using.

I need to be able to share and view information, whether I'm using a computer, a tablet or a phone, even when I'm in the car, but you know, obviously not when I'm driving. And I need that information to be easily convertible into whatever format or platform that my clients are using. But it's relatively easy for me. I have the time and the freedom to experiment with all the tools and the software.

The only disruption or interruption will be to myself. And my big tip, by the way, would be not Google Docs. I know a lot of people love it, but working in a browser simply isn't as efficient as standalone and more feature-rich applications. I constantly come up against the hard limits of services like Google Docs, especially when it comes to preparing presentations.

But like I said, I can mix and match and come up with a solution that works for me. Most companies want an enterprise solution where as many of the core functionalities they require are bundled into one product suite as possible. They also want redundant backups, they want mirror drives, and they want security that's rigorous enough to put off the hackers, but not so complex that staff can't use it remotely. And those things are very, very difficult to balance, and it's also very costly.

I have a system that's been up to the task so far. Well, there's that old cliche about necessity being the mother of invention. We're very fortunate that collaborative working tools started to get quite good rather than just being laggy and frustrating a couple of years ago. Otherwise, I think the economic impact and the layoffs might have been even higher for the number of companies that went to the wall simply because they couldn't operate.

For business consultants like me, 2020 has proven a lot of the models we've been pushing clients to experiment with for a lot of time. And it demonstrates that your teams can work creatively and flexibly. And also that their operating models should more closely resemble the digital world that they're doing business in, because that's been one critical issue doing business in the 21st century, but using 20th century working practices. All right, let's take a break.

And when we come back, how will we be working in 2021? You tuned into Matt's plane with me, Rich Bredbury, and of course, Matt Armitage from CulturePop.com here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Begin, fun moments. BFM 89.9, the Business Station.

BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bredbury. This is Matt's plane. I've got CulturePop's Matt Armitage on the phone line.

And Matt, aside from working at home, one of the most notable trends in 2020 has been the popularity of business automation tools. Yeah, it's interesting. In 2019, I wrote a series of 40 shorts for a BFM segment. Now, I'm not going to mention the client's name, but it was about 5G, Edge Computing, and Business Automation Services.

And it's hard to believe that that was only a year ago. But for a lot of the reasons that I identified before the break, Business Automation Services was still thought of as something of a novelty. And if they didn't require a hard sell, then it was still something that required education, especially for SMEs. Businesses have had to adapt to the new normal of 2020 as have their staff.

Ricks and mortar retailers, even if you're a mom and pop shop, have been scrambling to get onto e-shopping platforms like Lazada, Shopee, Amazon. But one of the issues that many businesses have faced is that the digital world doesn't respect office hours. If a customer wants to buy something at 10 o'clock at night, whether it's a bag of flour and you shirt or three tons of industrial grade food additives, few businesses can afford the risk of losing those sales. At the same time, while a few sectors have experienced an increase in demand this year, by and large, most businesses are worried about servicing existing overheads and debts.

So they're unlikely to expand their workforce to 24-hour operations in the case that a customer in Denmark might feel like buying something at 2am. So those tools that were hard sell are now flying off their cloud-based shelves? Well, we've seen an exponential global increase in demand for chatbot and automated customer service solutions, as well as those ordering and inventory management systems. Now, I made this comment on another podcast recently.

The leaps and bounds we've made in natural language processing over the past 12 to 24 months has made the best chatbots really hard to tell apart from human customer service reps to the point where you're often a little bit unsure who or what it is that you're talking to. And on that topic, we're going to talk more about the growth in AI services in a few weeks time when Rich and I will be demonstrating our own chatbots. But this isn't the only type of automation. Companies have been accelerating their plans to automate production lines, warehouses, depots, so that in the event that the coronavirus takes a while to be beaten back or a new zoonosis appears, they can still operate.

We've seen robots being introduced into multiple aspects of public life. Singapore has robot dogs and Tunisia has robot police, both looking for pandemic and social distancing violations. There are machines that take food and medicine to people in isolation, automated kitchens and food processing lines. An Indian robot called Metra has become part of the first response tools in Indian hospitals during the pandemic, and it's been assisting with taking vitals and doing consultations with patients with the virus.

And of course, there are the ultraviolet sterilizing robots that we've mentioned on the show before. What do you think of the long-term implications of all this automation? Well, we don't know that yet. What is certain is that all these investments by companies are not going to be reversed.

Hospitals aren't going to suddenly rehire janitors. Companies aren't going to hire back customer service reps if the chatbots are managing things just as effectively, or given the cost advantage, they might not mind if the machines aren't quite as good. We've heard a lot of debates about the new normal and the old normal, and should we trade one for the other. I said at the start of the show 2020 has been an unparalleled experiment in business methodologies.

Companies have been forced to make those investments and make those leaps and changes. They're not going to revert to the old methods simply because we have a vaccine now. The landscape has shifted, and the attitudes towards automation have shifted with them. Machines don't get sick, and they don't land your company with reputational damage if you have outbreaks or working conditions that lead to infection spreading amongst your employees.

Where's this but work us? We keep being told to watch out for the post-COVID economic pants for employment to pick up again. Aside from the thousands of businesses that have gone under worldwide, a chunk of these jobs are simply not going to come back. Businesses have figured out that if they can run their teams remotely, they can also reduce their overheads.

They can downsize business premises, they can reduce costs, and actually pass on some of their operating costs to their employees, who now have to pay for their own electricity, their heating or cooling, their computers and printers, even the snacks that used to be in the office pantry and of course are now in the fridge. It also gives companies more flexibility in their hiring decisions. If you're staff are all remote, it doesn't matter where they're from. You can hire foreign talent, not necessarily because it's cheaper, but because you don't have the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles, because those staff don't need to relocate, they don't need visas, so there are a lot of steps that you no longer have to do.

And the same goes for local workers who might live elsewhere in the country. Yeah, it massively increases the available talent pool, and a lot of companies like to locate themselves in urban and financial centres where living costs are higher and subsequently salary demands are higher. With remote teams, you don't need to pay those weighted salaries, even if it means gathering everyone together a few times a year in a hotel, for team building and that kind of stuff. Bigger companies, especially, are still likely to save overall.

The theme of the show is work in 2021. Is that a takeaway that there's no work in 2021? Well, no, hopefully economies will bounce back and we will see unemployment levels reduce, but we are in an unprecedented age. Technology has always led to the creation of more jobs than it replaces, or at least that's been our experience of the past.

That isn't the case now. The social media companies are a really good example. You can have billions of users, millions of customers, and only a relative handful of staff. Facebook manages a global empire with around 50,000 staff.

On top of that, of course, there are the outsource staff, but it's still a tiny number overall. I think the company Foxconn that manufactures a lot of Apple's products, at one point they had around a million staff. So you can see that enormous disparity of 50,000 versus a million. And companies will certainly trend towards the Facebook model, rather than the Foxconn one.

All right. So what do we need to do to ensure that there are jobs? Well, we've seen a lot of economic interventions this year, short-term stimulus packages, direct payments to people and businesses, tax credits, lending programs, debt forgiveness, and delayed repayment of debt, a lot of creative solutions to keep economies moving. What we haven't seen has been a commitment to the longer-term structural changes that the pandemic is likely to result in.

Again, something I recently covered on another podcast. We've talked before about the need for ongoing education, that the idea of training for a career at the ages of 18 to 21 and carrying on along that path for 40 years, that experience is over. If you'd asked me this time last year, when I thought we'd see those changes really starting to manifest, I would have said to you know, five to 10 years. But I think the impact that this year has had has accelerated those changes to right now.

What would you like to see governments doing? Well, I'm not going to get into my crack-up theories about the end of capitalism as we know it. You can all just message me a hot 100 emoji on social media when it turns out I was right and you were wrong. But all the stimulus in the world is irrelevant unless people have enough money in their pockets to live.

New deal type approaches, whether they're green or not green, I think are going to become both critical and commonplace. If we are to reorient towards new industries and economic sectors, we're going to need the infrastructure to support it. That would be one of the shorter-term measures that I think we both need and will probably see. I mentioned retraining.

As I think we've covered a few shows this year, we need a different attitude to work. For remote workers, I think companies should be compelled to pay an allowance to offset some of those infrastructure costs that are being shouldered by their employees. But beyond that, we can look at reducing overall employment costs, abolishing income and sales taxes, replacing them with corporation taxes, which, if a lot of the spare capacity in the jobs market is going to be picked up by expansions, whether they're direct or indirect of the public sector, it doesn't make much sense to pay people out of tax revenues and then tax them on what you're paying them out of that same money. That's just a bureaucratic cost that you don't really need.

And presumably our own attitudes will have to change as well. Yeah, I think this idea of finding our bliss and defining us by what we do is not something that's going to last. Employment is going to become a lot more casual. It's going to become short-term in general.

I think we're going to see an extension or an expansion of income support or basic income schemes becoming the primary income source for tens of millions of people. So we have to ask, what else can these people do to be of benefit to society? It doesn't necessarily mean sitting around playing the latest Final Fantasy all day unless you're in esports whizz, in which case you can inspire generation with your skills. And though I know people hate it when I use this word, I think we have to embrace the fact that the uncertainty that we've all felt this year is going to be the normal.

What we're going to need, wherever we live in the world, are guarantees that we will have some way of making a decent living, affordable quality housing, health care, education, public investment in infrastructure. We often tend to think of those benefits as free or charitable, but they're not. They're part of nation building their investments in everybody's future. And they're the kind of investments that led to that so-called golden age of rising prosperity and falling poverty in much of the world from the 1950s to pretty much the end of the 20th century.

Thanks for that, Matt. You have been tuned in and listening to Matt's plane. You can find Matt on Instagram. He's at CulturePop and at CultureMatt with two T's.

You can also head over to CulturePop.com where he's got transcripts of these shows and other articles that he's written. There you go. This has been Matt's plane here on BFM 89.9, The Business Station.