Productivity and the good life

In this new world of work, tasks will divide into home and office activities. The CBD will become a place for dealmaking, learning, socialising, and celebrating.In short, the city centre will transform into a fun place that hybrid workers look forward to visiting.

When I started work at a consulting firm in 1985, we used Express Post to send reports to clients in other states. Within a year the fax machine had arrived; it transformed our business model. Clients wanted their reports faxed instantly.

We speculated that this surely spelt the end of the courier business. Three decades later, the fax machine has died, but the courier business is stronger than ever thanks to online shopping!

This was always going to happen because online shopping is simply more convenient, right? True, but my story speaks to an even bigger shift that has been amplified by the pandemic. Australians are in hot pursuit of seamlessness in pretty much everything they do.

The rise of ride-share apps enables frictionless movement. When there’s a task to do at home, there’s an app for that—booking a cinema ticket, a restaurant, an airline ticket can be done, instantly.

In work, we’ll see a mentality shift toward “there’s an app for that” tasks, dividing everyday process-driven work into seamless digital work that flows and more focus toward experiential engagements.

A process-driven task like getting from A to B (for a person or a report) is being outsourced to a digital world that tracks, traces, and then delivers a seamless and predictable outcome. The experiential world requires a personal interaction like, say, the process of buying a fashion item.

I will point out that it was the rise of email that killed off the fax machine because, well, pressing the Send button is easier than feeding a report into a fax machine.

Sitting behind all this isn’t so much a conspiracy of machines to take over our lives. Rather, it’s a deep-seated yearning by humanity to be ever more productive, to outsource the mundane, to free up time for purpose-filled pursuits deemed far more important.

And it is achieved by digitising and/or by automating a series of tasks known as a workflow, a term first used in a railway journal a century ago.

In the early days, simple workflow improvement came about via innovations like the assembly line and the specialisation of labour. Today, assembly line work is increasingly done by robots programmed to complete a sequence of tasks delivering a known outcome.

Workflow improvement never stops. And in the process it frees humanity from the drudgery of repetitive work.

In the post-COVID world, the great challenge isn’t so much managing and learning to navigate the digital world (although that is part of the future). Rather, it’s the issue of building trust in a very different world.

And here again is where the lessons of the pandemic will come to the fore. Trust is a sensitive issue to Australians whose faith—literally—has been shaken by the revelations of royal commissions over the last decade.

And yet amid the pandemic there was a strengthening of community trust as neighbourhoods connected, and we relied upon each other to do the right thing, in order to get to the other side.

Part of this better version of our future lives involves shedding the bits that weren’t working and that rebuild trust, that deliver seamlessness, that give back time into our busy lives.

At the very core of this process of continuous improvement there lies the concept of workflow working away diligently, digitally, doing the mundane, the repetitive, the stuff that reassures us, that supports us, that delivers efficiencies. In turn, this enables humanity to do what humanity does best and that is to create, to care, to interact, to lead meaningful lives.

When the dust finally settles from this pandemic, that’s not such a bad place to be.