The impact of automation of work on corporate staff

What will our work be like in the future?

Just after this avenue where we are, doubling the next corner to the left or right, whatever, we will face the future that awaits us. An increasingly technological future, full of new features, challenges, uncertainties and functionalities, some of which will not even be ready to their full potential to be used as soon as they are presented to us, but they will be there.

Will companies and we be ready to use so much technology, so much functionality, so much new stuff?

It depends.

In Brazil and in the world there are several realities, and we live in several, sometimes in one day. That this reality, of having several realities, be clear, clear and transparent for all of us, so that when it comes time to turn the corner and start using some of these new technologies, we may be aware of what reality we are in order to help who lives in other less technological and less favored realities than ours.

The business world becomes more and more competitive. There is no more space for those who are not prepared to think on a global level, although acting locally. It seems to be an impossible equation to solve, think globally and act locally; this type of behavior is required for all organizations that want to act as far as their presence reaches and take responsibility for their actions wherever their products, goods and services reach. The business organization needs to realize the repercussions of its attitudes on the whole - think globally - and ensure a strong and profitable presence - act locally. In other words, you have to think about your actions in relation to the world, but act to build a solid base from small acts.

One million manager positions have been eliminated in the last decade

Folha de São Paulo, in the February 4, 2018 issue, presents an interesting subject on how Brazilian companies sought to face successive economic crises, cut costs, adopt new information technologies and modernize their organizational structures: they eliminated more than one million of management and supervision vacancies over the last ten years. The data were obtained from the CAGED (General Register of Employed and Unemployed) and, among other information, show that this process accelerated between 2015 and 2017, a period in which the country experienced the greatest recession since the 1980s.

According to Folha de São Paulo, "among the 10 eliminated champions, five are in the so-called 'intermediate boss': supervisor and administrative manager, store manager and supermarket, commercial manager and sales manager. Most companies have pushed leaderships to the limit in recent years, "said Ricardo Basaglia, executive director of consulting Michael Page. "With the crisis, the consumer market has declined in size, and companies have adapted to this new scenario," he said in the same article.

Crises, the need for modernization, the reduction of the structure, the modernization of its operations, all of this, among other necessities, leads organizations to permanently adjust their structures.

Since the 1990s, however, they have sought to implement greater horizons in structures as a means of increasing and improving the participation of all in day-to-day operations. The lower the managerial levels, the better the structure, the leaner it is, the better to manage and operate.

Based on this need and through new information technologies, new organizational structures emerge. The most revolutionary, in my view, is the network structure.

Much has been said, written, discussed about the organizations known as networked structures, which, in most cases, are referenced by certain operational characteristics, called local productive arrangements (APLs), clusters, among other denominations, as structural- organizations to support the integrated production chain by micro, small and medium entrepreneurs, and these to large corporations.

What is network structure?

Network structure is the multidisciplinary and multifunctional grouping (latu sensu) of individuals with the objective of providing complementarity to all who participate directly or indirectly in it. In this way, we define any network structure regardless of whether the objectives that served to create it were commercial, cultural, merely social or even criminal. Given the diversity of nomenclature used by several authors, I assumed as task to find the common roots of the set of structural manifestations that serve by the name of network structure.

First, I want to stress that in the network structure there are no bosses in the sense of the word commonly used in hierarchically structured organizations. In the network structure its conformation is given through the existing knowledge within the organization. In other words, what matters, what matters, is the knowledge each employee, each employee has, and the responsibilities assigned to them.

So we can deduce that no one is more important than anyone within a networked organization. The president is as important as the cleaning lady; any director is as important as any telephone operator and so on. What differentiates each employee is the size of their responsibility. One can then deduce that jobs will not be closed in the same proposition and speed as they are in a hierarchical structure. Companies of the knowledge age already work structured in this way.

In a networked company, with an emphasis on the connections that exist in it in the structural links, hardly anyone will be dismissed, because there will be no employee idle, no function, no importance for operations, no use. Even though the bots are getting closer and closer to all of us.

What is a bot?

Bot is the abbreviation for robot, a robot in Portuguese, that we are using to designate the machines that (already) have the capacity to replace the human being in various functions, and that with each passing day take on more and more tasks, at home, in the car, in any type of leisure.

Do you remember the ARUs (Audible Response Units), the ARUs are precursors to the incredible robots that exist today. They are everywhere, in cars connected to IoT (internet of things, in Portuguese), and they are also in the houses that can be operated and managed at a distance. The bots are in a number of production processes through the RPAs (Robotic Process Automation), in various financial functions of any company, in various surveillance functions, in Portable Personal Device PPDs of all kinds.

Anyway, the robots arrived and will stay forever.

In fact, forecasts indicate that investment in IoT will reach $ 15 trillion of global GDP by 2030. It is up to companies, especially non-knowledge makers, to prepare to replace their human employees with automata. This has no Manichean meaning, it is only the pure realization of reality.

Conclusion: round the corner we will find the future. In it, there is a trinomial that must be understood, absorbed and accepted by corporations that want to exist in the future: knowledge, not organizational structures and information technologies.

This trinomial is already waiting for us as reality. An increasingly present and challenging reality for all of us.