Digital disruption, artificial intelligence and automation are transforming the workplace. Professor Mark Griffin talks about the future of work and whether robots will take our jobs.
Digital disruption, AI, automation and changing views about work-life balance are going to transform our workplaces. A Deloitte Access Economics report forecasts that four out of five jobs created between now and 2030 will be for ‘knowledge workers’.
In this episode, Jess and David are joined by Professor Mark Griffin, Director of the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University, to discuss how our workplaces are going to change.
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You can read the full transcript for the episode here.
Jess: This is the future of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better. I'm Jessica Morrison
David: and I'm David Blayney.
Jess: Today we're talking with Professor Mark Griffin, who leads the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University, about the future of jobs for humans.
Jess: Digital disruption, AI, automation and changing views about work life balance are going to transform our workplaces. Professor Griffin, is 'technological unemployment' something we should be worried about?
Professor Mark Griffin: Thanks Jessica and David. Short answer to the question is yes, but perhaps not for the reasons you're saying. Not because no one will have a job and because we'll be replaced by robots, but because there will be a lot of jobs, and many of them will be different to the jobs we have today and they will require not only somewhat different skills, but fairly adaptable skills where we might have to change what our skills look like across a job or a career. So, yes, we should worry about those things, but perhaps in a different way the question suggests.
Jess: So, we should look at it more as an opportunity? We should be worried about maybe the things we need to be doing to keep up with that pace of change?
Professor Mark Griffin: I think one of the really big questions at the moment, given so much anxiety, is how do we start looking at what the opportunities are, because it's pretty easy to hear some very negative stories about what might happen and what could happen – and no doubt some of them are possible if we go down and unplanned track – so asking, "What are the opportunities and how are we actually going to take hold of them?" is a really big question.
Jess: I suppose if you're someone in their 50s you've still got maybe two decades left of work, we don't know when the retirement age may change. So I suppose for someone in that scope that would be kind of terrifying because you're thinking, well, the future's changing, I probably need to change, but I've been doing this for X amount of years.
Professor Mark Griffin: Yes, you've actually highlighted a group that from some perspectives is most at risk – perhaps people in that age group who've had a fairly traditional, stable job and are looking at what's next down the career-step. On the other hand, I have to highlight at our Institute we have quite a few people working on what is the aging workforce look like? What are the opportunities we're creating there – both for people themselves, but also how are organisations thinking about the skills of their older workforce? And we could sometimes turn that question around and ask, what are companies doing? what are governments doing to recognise people in these roles have a wealth of experience, but are extending their career frames, but really asking, what will I do next? how will I get there? We're going to find a lot is put back on us as individuals, but as an institute, we're trying to understand that, but also create some frameworks or approaches so that organisations can offer more practical support for people, for example, older people, staying in the workforce.
Jess: What do you think the biggest difference would be between today's workplace and the workplace of 2030?
Professor Mark Griffin: I think if we extrapolate from some of the things happening at the moment, we'll see the pace of change and how fast technology is able to embed itself in things we're doing, will change quite rapidly. At the moment, I think we're finding the impact of some of the AI-type technology and assistance, for most people in ordinary jobs, is a mixed bag of things that do and don't work, and some things are great and some aren't. But it's moving pretty fast and the capacity for a chat-bot to understand what you're looking for and to help you to take over some of your tasks will really change quite a lot. 2030 will have much more automated processes within the work.
David: Is this going to be more of an adversarial relationship or a cooperative relationship with our 'robot overlords' or is it going to be a mix between the two?
Professor Mark Griffin: We really have to work towards preventing the robot-overlord world. One of the concepts that's been used a lot at the moment in some places, but I think we'll grow a lot, is the idea of a human–machine teaming. We definitely don't want to be controlled by our technology. There are many reasons why we might be, and I think we need to be aware of that, but what we need to be heading towards is, how are we working with technology in a team sense? Whether your team member might be a robot or some kind of decision-making machine, but part of a team who is a respected member or a contributor, but only at that level.
Now, what does that look like? The military, for example, has done a lot of work on how might a combat team, for example, be coordinating with lots of information coming through sensors, technology, but helping that team to function as a coherent unit. It's also happening in other workplaces as well. So teams with machines, not overlords.
Jess: If we can go back to something we were talking about earlier, around the maybe the anxiety of certain groups in the current workforce, around what they might need to do to upskill and to be ready for the next 20 years of their working life (the retirement age is probably going to only increase). How can they, or is it more up to the organisations they work for, help them to upskill and reskill.
Professor Mark Griffin: Universities and all educational institutions are really grappling with this problem at the moment. Skill development and improving your capacity to get a job is not something that happens at the end of high school or at university; it's going to happen across the lifespan. There's an anxiety, both the people in an older age group and in age groups all across.
One of the anxieties in the older age group that I understand but have been surprised how strong it is, is concern about their own children: "What jobs will my kids have in the future?" I have teenage children; I know that's a big concern, and I know it concerns them as well, and they're actively engaging with this problem and asking, "What's the best thing for me to be doing now? what are the opportunities I have?"
Jess: And how lucky they have a father who's looking at the future of work to help them along that journey! What should people be looking at when they're looking to study or upskill or reskill?
Professor Mark Griffin: One of the big things people are looking for both as a student, as a young employee and as an employer, is experience. And I think there's good reasons for that. The experience gives you insight and capacity to deal with changes, stresses and events that you just can't get from reading about it in a book. But the challenge with experience is, you can only get it through experience. That's obvious, but it has huge implications for how we develop lifelong learning. There's only so much that can be done through standard knowledge-learning. So the skills people will need, there are still basic skills in mathematics, science, English that are important, but it's less possible to do a specific career line – like journalism, law, engineering – and see that as a straight line into a sequence of jobs and careers. Those knowledge base that you learn through those disciplines could be applied in such diverse ways.
Lawyers are employed in all kinds of work, as are journalists. The hard part is, not so much what core discipline you might develop your skills in, but where do you apply that experience and build up your experience? So universities and most higher education institutions are providing more experience integrating with the workplace. But I think it's a challenge for anyone at the moment. You can learn through all kinds of media and develop your skills, but to move across careers and develop a career, you also need to be doing different things. And where do you get that experience? Formal education can give some, job placements can give another, but I think more in the future we're just going to have to engage with doing different things and creating the opportunities.
David: We hear a lot about soft skills, that's what employers are looking for. They want people who know how to ... actually, what exactly are soft skills?
Professor Mark Griffin: That's a good question. I'm not a particular fan of the term 'soft skills'. They're pretty hard skills actually. They're hard in the sense that they are difficult to learn and do. One of the things we do at the Institute is, spend some time trying to describe in more hard, realistic terms what are these 'soft skills'. One of them is this ability to work in a complex team that might have a robot or some kind of non-human participant and some pretty diverse other members.
Just today in the paper, I'm reading about a law firm that's appointed an engineer and a different profession to their partnership because of the complex teams and jobs that law firms are now doing. So the soft skill of being able to work in that network, conduct a project, deliver on time to lots of stakeholders, is actually quite a hard skill. And we're calling it a kind of 'network skill' in that you have to know how to work with different experts, understand where they're coming from, bring them to some kind of negotiated alignment, and maybe use some artificial intelligence in that process. That's one of the kind of hard skills that people talk about them as soft skills. We're doing what we can to articulate and define ways of learning those skills.
Jess: It sounds similar to how the gig economy is actually in today's workplaces. They're hiring people on shorter term stints, niche experts in their field to help organisations with a particular project or task.
Professor Mark Griffin: Yeah, that's a really interesting one. And the gig or platform economy is something that gets raised; I guess, next to 'robot overlords', it's perhaps the other way of working that may completely take over. Again, we don't see that as taking over everything, but certainly playing a big part in making skills available and allowing people to bring their skills into a bigger market. At the moment, that kind of bartering gig economy can be viewed in a very positive or a very negative way. We're still in an early stage of what that might look like in the future. And some of the problems are becoming more evident at the moment.
Jess: A lot of policy/IRR policy issues spring to mind for the gig economy. Has that even happened or we even touched on that in this country yet?
David: Or particularly given that 'giggers', for the lack of a better term, giggers are technically not employees. They're usually contracted, and that of means that, well there's been issues for them not being able to build up their retirement savings or not having the requisite insurance and such.
Professor Mark Griffin: And I think our governments and other policy bodies are starting to look at that much more closely at the moment, because it clearly is that kind of taxation, employment-contract level at which some of these things are happening. So, looking at the digital platform inquiry around Facebook and those others is also opening up how does privacy work, how do contracts work under this new economy?
We're also interested in what work looks like under these, and I think you've highlighted these really extreme possibilities that we have. Under one, we're doing one kind of single skill that we market to, all around the world or virtually to people – it becomes a very narrowing experience. Or, alternatively, does it open up a world of participation in projects that is complex and builds our skills? I think we're at an interesting but anxiety-provoking time where those two extremes are both quite imaginable.
It's easy to imagine both extremes, and that creates anxiety because we're not sure how to get to the better ones and avoid the worst ones. But as you raised earlier, it's an opportunity we have to be looking at.
Jess: Obviously the work that the Institute does, in terms of looking at the future of work, would be quite difficult I imagine. Because, as you said, we've got two extremes we've raised in this conversation alone. So, what will that future of work really look like?
Professor Mark Griffin: Yes, I think we have set a difficult task to look at ...
Jess: Yet challenging and interesting.
Professor Mark Griffin: ... and full of opportunities, I have to say. But you're right, because the future of work is not going to depend on any one kind of platform or one kind of skill. It's not just the individual – it's companies and organisations; it's governments and policies; it's different forms of work.
We do a lot of work with volunteer organisations – there's that aspect to it. But it also cuts across computer science and engineering, who are creating amazing new medical technologies, 3D printing – which will change all kinds of work – to the kind of things we've been talking about, how people might work in the gig economy.
We can't know the future of work without looking at government policies and company design of how they do work and we can't understand them without spanning across what will the technology be, how will we use it, who makes those decisions? I think one of the questions you've led me to is, who is making these decisions about what the future of work will look like?
Jess: Well, who is?
Professor Mark Griffin: At the Institute, we focus a lot on what employers can do. It's difficult because we're working in harder economic times, but employers can really take on board a lot of the issues about aging workforce, how we might make jobs more meaningful for people. And there usually isn't a downside for those things – making jobs more meaningful, employing a more diverse workforce generally and almost definitely leads to better outcomes for organisations. But it takes some rethinking.
You mentioned in government policy. I think there's a lot of serious thinking that needs to be done. And there are some inquiries going on now, but the implications of how contracts are developed, how we define work ... it's going to change. Can governments keep up with the pace of how that's changing?and another big decision-maker are the education institutions. Universities, high schools, primary schools as systems also make decisions about what people will be learning, how they're preparing for the future, and all we can do at the moment is encourage those groups to be engaged in the decision making and have some sense of what a good decision would look like.
Our message is at the end of it, people need to have meaningful work. That is we see a fundamental aspect of being a human. Now it doesn't mean you have to have a 9-to-5 paid job; there's all kinds of different ways of doing meaningful work, but we see that as a really fundamental experience that all decision-makers should be thinking about.
David: That brings me onto my next question actually. What is the 'thrive at work' initiative at the Future of Work Institute?
Professor Mark Griffin: It is one of our foundation ideas driving what we think work should look like in the future. But in practical terms, it started as a response to mental health concerns at work. We work with the Mental Health Commission here in Western Australia, through our Centre for Transformative Work Design, to look at how organisations are responding to mental health; for example, issues of suicide in the FIFO sector, but in all other aspects of work. And as a starting point, that's really important – the awareness of mental health. We take thriving to mean a few other steps beyond that. So not just dealing with bad things that happen to people at work, but how are we create a more positive workplace? How can we set up tasks and roles that help people to feel healthier?
Also, how can we actually make a more innovative workplace where people thrive? Although it started with mental health, and that's still important, it's not a kind of 'fix mental health'; it's the opposite end of that: How do we create a really innovative, thriving workplace? And honestly, I don't think the future of work in Australia, or generally, can be positive and meaningful if we don't really focus on that out there.
David: Other than money to pay for rent and Skittles and other such necessities, what do people want and need from their workplace to thrive? What do they need from work?
Professor Mark Griffin: Well, after maybe 30 years of research in this area, I'm a little surprised to say there's probably some fairly simple things that we've known for a long time. People need to feel that they're doing something useful and meaningful; that what they're doing is not just at the end of the day doesn't matter, or has just helped one person or one company, but that it has a significance, and that they're good at doing that. That's a fundamental need. Another one is to connect with people. Feeling connected with others is really fundamental, and if our jobs don't that, we know from long research that you will be less healthy, less energised about your work, we even have some evidence now that you'll be less smart.
Jess: Really?!
Professor Mark Griffin: The way you work over an extended period of time has an impact on your intelligence, your ability to think. Not huge amounts, but it depends on the kind of job and the experience. So what you do longterm is really important. The ability to achieve things, to have some control over what you do and connect with others ... they're kind of fundamentals and should be front of mind every time where you create a job for someone.
Of course we want a job that people want, we want it to pay, or have some reward that enables people to meet their needs, live, feed their famil – all those fundamental things. But we also want that job to be meaningful and connect with others. It doesn't mean you're connected all the time, but it's an important part of work. We have researchers who work specifically in that area of, how do you create what it is that people are looking for from work? We have just released a 'smart work design' tool to help organisations know if their work they're giving to people is smart work, or is it likely to be causing long-term health implications?
Jess: And that can be found on the Institute's website if they want to get in touch to find out more.
Professor Mark Griffin: Yes.
Jess: So I suppose, the future of work and for the humans jobs for humans ... we will have jobs, it's just hard to say what that might look like.
Professor Mark Griffin: It is hard in some ways and we're exploring some of those possibilities. What will a doctor of the future look like? We know in surgery people are using some amazing technology, both remotely and with robots to do things. How will that change surgeons, doctors? How will remote health change the capacity to deliver health services in other areas? I have heard of a legal aid group providing remote services – tele-presence kind of technology. So we can start to think of what some of those jobs will look like. Some of the jobs we don't really know what they will look like. In areas of cybersecurity, people are really becoming more aware that our vulnerabilities are increased as we become more digital. So there's whole areas of work around understanding security, teaching others about security that are opening up, that we didn't about 10 years ago.
Jess: Very interesting to think about, isn't it?
David: And that's it for today's show. Once again, you've been listening to The Future Of – a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about the topic covered in today's episode, make sure to drop us a line by following the links in today's show notes. With that, I'm David ...
Jess: ... and I'm Jess. Thank you very much for joining us today Professor Griffin.
David: And thank you for listening. Bye.