The report signaled a new age in how work gets done, focusing on the rise of the non-employee workforce as a harbinger of things to come in the business world. It’s 2018 now, and the very notion of the Future of Work sparks a discussion of numerous attributes of this new world of work, from technology and innovation to brand new approaches to talent acquisition and workforce management.
A cursory search under the #FutureOfWork hashtag on Twitter or LinkedIn only makes things that much more complex, bringing in conversations related to digital transformation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain. Combine these discussions with talent-led concepts, such as design thinking and soft skills, and the dialogue around the Future of Work becomes truly intricate.
The Future of Work Compendium was written with several goals in mind, including helping today’s businesses:
- Identify the current barriers to optimizing how work is done.
- Understand how talent fits into the Future of Work.
- Develop the necessary roadmap for digital transformation, and;
- Leverage Ardent’s new Future of Work Model as a means of truly understanding how the Future of Work needs to be addressed.
At the end of the day, we should be asking one critical question: “How does work get done?” The Future of Work itself is a movement, not a single technology or strategy or approach. The Future of Work beholds the idea that the global business world can be digitized, automated, intelligent, and, of course, dependent on the talent behind how work is actually done.
The Future of Work, for many organizations, can be a mythical and nebulous set of business standards that can be too confounding to truly grasp, yet, at its core, the main goal is simplistic enough: that all businesses should buy into the transformation of work, talent, and technology. And, as businesses continue their drive for business agility and work optimization, my hope is that the Future of Work Compendium serves as a blueprint for their journey.
