Why Automation: How Market Change Mandates Change in Way of Working
By: Christoph Kim
Tags: Productivity, Automation, Future Of Work, AI, Remote Work

As a startup, how the future will turn out is one of the major topics that we keep thinking about all the time. At Yottabyte, we always try to imagine how the way of working would look like in the future. It’s important to keep thinking about it because our world is always changing faster and more drastically than we are.

Here, we would like to share a few important directional changes that could define the future way of working. Please note that the content in this post is mainly our own view about the future, vastly based on our generic observation and guess. Any of our thoughts can always turn out wrong or even too obsolete.

The world will change even faster. Are we ready?

Technology has disrupted traditional, non-tech industries for years, and has multiplied the pace of change for the rest of the world. As the result, people in every non-tech industry are now facing their business environment changing much faster and getting much more complicated gradually.

To see what technology has done to other industries, let’s take retail as an example. By 19th century, humans could buy goods and grocery only from local markets and over-the-counter grocers. World’s first modern department store opened in late 19th century, and the ‘supercenter’ format of hypermarkets that we are familiar with first appeared in the 1960’s. It was only by 1980’s when humans became able to buy stuff at home via TV home shopping.

Compared to that, the pace of change in tech industry is at another level. In mid-1990’s, after the internet became more available to the public, we started to see the first-generation of e-commerce websites, such as Amazon and eBay. Around ten years later, almost every retailer in the world was operating its own storefronts online. There was also a countless number of individual online shops. Ten more years later, many people of the globe were shopping on their mobile devices, thanks to smartphones and mobile payment by 2015. Five years later, we are living in the world where same-day-delivery is not amazing enough, which is enabled by real-time analytics of order and logistics data.

Looking at how much has changed in the past 25 years, we can imagine that the pace of change for the next 25 years will probably be even faster. This will happen everywhere, because adopting tech is inevitable in any industry; it is otherwise impossible to keep up with that pace. However, we cannot afford a developer in every position where tech is required. Instead, we need non-tech individuals to become capable of operating technical tools more easily, so that each individual can process a lot more day-to-day information and get a lot more things done.

Tech is making human labor and expertise obsolete. What do we do?

The lower barrier to knowledge and information has made us rely less on ‘expertise’ in every aspect of the society. Today, we can find almost everything from the internet. A lot of complex problems that would have required costly advices from experts can now be answered at the very low cost.

On the other side of technologies, AI is quickly disproving the ‘domain of humans’ — thinking, creativity, judgment and so on — and introducing tools that could complement or substitute us. Today, AI outperforms humans in some domains, and we will certainly see more of those cases in the broader scope in the near future. As the result, humans will be able to get much more output at much better quality, with less human efforts and expertise than the past.

Easier access to information and advanced AI have dramatically lowered the cost of trial-and-error for good, and this trend will continue along with the ever-increasing velocity and complexity of businesses. This means that every size of business in every industry will need to become more agile, and work more like startups. It’s a fundamental change from ‘heavy’ start with a lot of resource and preparation, such as research, analysis, or strategizing, to the ‘light’ approach that is driven by hypothesis. Naturally, tasks like primary and secondary research, document creation, and reporting will become less relevant whereas the more crucial part of human contribution will be 1) prioritizing which problems are more important ones to solve first, 2) building high-quality hypotheses on them, and 3) executing experiment and improvement quickly.

Now, let’s be honest. In today’s working mode, are we spending most of our time on those activities? We need to get ready for the new norm where human contribution must be concentrated in the core activities. The first thing we got for this change is to stop using manpower to get done stuff that machines can do better.

Remote work is here to stay. How do we make communication effective?

Remote work has become a thing of the now. Actually, it might continue to spread even further. It was not a one-time phenomenon that popped up after COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, the geographic boundary was becoming less and less relevant in the job markets, thanks to advances in technology. Global tech giants were already competing over software engineers regardless locations, and letting them work in any location of their choice as necessary. This trend is likely to spread beyond hiring software engineers. Nowadays, companies are facing the steeper complexity curve in every aspect of their businesses. To deal with it, they are now looking for candidates that match more specifically with their skills and experience requirements in any function. This means that recruiting can no longer be limited to geography if you want to find the right talents.

As the geographic spectrum of general recruiting gets broader, we will continue to see more companies and people adopt remote work, even after we get over COVID-19. Predictably, the more dispersed and fragmented nature of remote work will bring the challenge of how we should keep remote workers engaged and stay in the communication loop.

The communication challenge is twofold. The first is the time-zone difference. When team members are spread in different time zones, real-time chats (or ‘synchronous’ communication, in other words) become more challenging. The other one is the lack of face-to-face touch base. As physical meetings and dropping by other colleagues’ seats become virtual, the chance of having casual chats decrease significantly. We miss out a lot because of this, as casual chats are very effective for creating the feeling of engagement, and stimulating creativity and new ideas within teams.

We used to deal with those challenges by creating local branches, so that the face-to-face and real-time conventions can be replicated in each location. Things have changed now, though. Global recruiting became common. Overhead cost of local branches is rising. Agile teaming and kick-off are becoming more important. We need to change the communication itself, not organization.

It is absolutely obvious that we will rely more on ‘asynchronous’ communication modes — comments, feeds, or emails — as we bring more remote workers in. Hence, the first and most likely impactful area is how to make async communication more engaging and easier to follow. Today, we just have too many of those coming in every other minute from multiple channels, all of which have different level of importance or urgency. We need to reinforce the current async communication tools with the better capability to help us prioritize and keep track of updates.

Like it or not, we all will do more ‘gigs’

Today, we like to take back ownership of our own time and life, instead of being tied to the stiff company rules and culture. That’s how the concept of gig work gets traction. The most generally known kinds of gig works of today are perhaps ride hailing or food delivery. However, we will see it spread to a lot more types of businesses pretty soon, because freelancing became easier than ever in many areas, thanks to more tools like Zoom or Figma, and everyday there are new tech platforms showing up who want to become the Uber, Airbnb, or Teachable of their own domains.

Labor flexibility is also important to the employers. In the world where agile trial-and-error is the new ‘normal’ business standard, companies face the inevitable demand to start lean and terminate quickly whenever necessary. In order to remain agile, companies in many domains will have to rely more on the gig workers than the past. The recent discussions on the new legal and societal approaches to better protect gig workers — shared benefits across gig employers, or potential new form of 401k — also imply how the gig work is likely to expand further.

While the benefits of gig work are obvious, there are concerns. Some of them are relevant, such as collaboration becoming more challenging, or quality of outcome getting inconsistent. The others are not necessarily: risk of unfished work during long-term projects, lack of commitment, or information leakage, to name a few. These are not the right concerns, because all of these are something that may happen if you try to bring gig work into the long-term, ongoing, day-to-day operations which shouldn’t be done by gig workers. Gig work should be leveraged to get done short-term works with specialized skills requirements, because that’s what’s the nature of gig; the spontaneous and temporary collaboration session or performance of professionals. Think about a gig performed by a jazz band — is undone work or lack of commitment a relevant problem?

“How to manage gig workers like own employees” is not the right question for companies in the future. Instead, the more relevant one to think about should be this: “How can we increase productivity and quality of every individual gig worker so that we can expand the use of gig economy to do more stuff?” Of course, we should also figure out the better ways of collaboration and quality management for gig works.

So what?

The world is changing faster than us, and we are worried about it. While today’s technology has unlocked a great deal of productivity that has never been achieved in human history, the way we work is something that has been established over the long period of time, and has not yet adopted many tools and tricks of technology that are available to us.

At Yottabyte, we believe we can change the way people work and enable them to do more, by making work automation approachable for everyone. It is certainly a big challenge, because no company has made a significant success in this. What is so difficult? We will discuss more about that in the other post.

If you’re interested to join our challenge, please reach out to us at recruiting@ytbt.io.

You can also find this article in our blog!