Uruguay is currently discussing the draft bill for the Social Security Reform Law in August 2022. It implies a 20-year transition regime. We ask ourselves, what will work be like at that time?
Who can predict it? No one. In the days before the pandemic, people woke up, showered, dressed, walked a long way, just to sit at a desk in a building to work. Despite this statement, we will present some hypotheses in this regard:
1. Profound changes in work as we know it today, accelerating its transformation process. Different employment situations will deepen, new forms of work outside traditional relationships, more expectations of employees and collaborators, asynchronous work, fewer workplaces, unified times and activities, discontinuous work careers, more connection of work with personal life, less predictable and static labor market, and blurring of boundaries between labor markets in each country.
2. The workplace everywhere. After the pandemic, many people in the world and in Uruguay (18-20%), exceptionally go to the office, despite working every day. Workers will demand more flexibility: being able to work from anywhere and at any time. Building an "everywhere" workplace (and by opposition NOT in the office) will be an essential human management strategy, and also a business growth strategy.
3. The average worker will suffer. Basic and average skills will qualify workers for only a small number of jobs in the future, which are shrinking rapidly, as a result of technology and disruption. Advice's Labor Monitor data show that they are shrinking year on year.
4. Mismatch between supply and demand. When companies cannot find employees and some workers cannot find jobs, it is called a mismatch between supply and demand of skills. In a world that is changing at high speed, all the time, the mismatch between supply and demand will become more acute, a product of the speed gap that exists between the labor market and formal education.
5. El trabajo como educacin y aprendizaje permanente. And a lot of attitude and proactivity. To find, change, grow, find purpose or earn more money. Learning, an irreplaceable skill! How much of what we know has already expired? Do we know how to unlearn? The first thing a worker will have to do will be to learn and stay employable.
6. The New Digital Worker - RPA. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) describes a program that can be configured to do work (in the same way a person would do it) with computer systems and applications. The "processes" are the work you want to perform, tasks that can be automated into repetitive activities, creating a job market of the future, where users can download Digital Workers from a website.
7. EX (Employee Experiencie) aligned to your user experience UX (User Experience). According to several studies about the tools used at work, today approx. 49% of employees feel frustrated by the technology provided by their organization to work, and 64% believe that the way they interact with technology influences their motivation. In the digital future of work, the digital experience will be key.
8. Digital migration of labor. The mismatches and inequalities that technology has generated between those who can benefit from it and those who are "left behind" will affect the availability of talent in the countries. Something similar to the rural-urban migration caused by industrialization, in which the rural world saw how it lost its people. A person, a sector of the population, a company or a country could be affected by this phenomenon, which will amplify and could widen the gap.
9. Wages and benefits less regulated, more influenced by supply and demand of skills. Do I pay you the same wherever you work? Don't the collective bargaining agreements of each country have an impact? And the currency? Pay per hour or per project? Working fewer days and getting paid the same? Based on individual productivity?
10. Inequality and governments. The increase in inequality as a result of these transformations will lead some governments to take palliative measures to avoid socioeconomic gaps with undesirable consequences and social unrest.
Some of these hypotheses may or may not come true. But what is certain is that in twenty years the world of work will have changed, a lot, at great speed and with diverse impacts.