By Emerson Csorba and Eric Termuende

As per Moore’s Lawn, roughly every 18 months, technology doubles in power and shrinks in size—while its price often halves. Noted early on in the history of computing, its impact has been pervasive, global and increasingly disruptive. The Internet alone has put entire industries out of business, while forcing others to radically adapt their business models.

Automation, Adversity and Opportunity
Automation is changing the way we work. Other industries and routine jobs, in banking, insurance, medicine and law will gradually move in the same direction. Ernest Hemingway famously asked how a person goes bankrupt. The answer? “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” This has been the case in many industries, and yet is still hard to imagine the scale of change we will see in the coming years.

All of this makes it key for human resources professional to explore just how technology is transforming how industry works—now.  While not every new technology need be pursued, there is a danger in failing to grasp the advances in machine learning, automation and other forms of technological change taking place in knowledge centres such as Boston, San Francisco, Cambridge, England and Waterloo. After all, within these advances, the potential for innovation is a constant.

Of Horse Labour and Humans at Work
In The Second Machine Age, MIT professors Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (B&M), write that innovation as it happens today is characterized by three key traits, being: a) exponential, b) digital and c) combinatorial.

Along the same lines, Entrepreneur First CEO Matt Clifford’s Huffington Post article “Five Things I Learned from the Second Machine Age” serves as a useful summary. Clifford writes, for instance, that “‘Combinatorial innovation means there are more ideas than ever, but finding the good ones is challenging,” an important point raised by B&M.

However, according to Clifford some scenarios are much less optimistic. Responding to B&M’s point that once-valuable inputs to production such as “whale oil to horse labour” are no longer needed, even at zero price, he writes as follows: “This is the scary stuff. Horse labour plummeted in the first two decades of the 20th century; human labour might in the 21st.”

Scenario Sets Key Role for HR
While It is not clear whether human labour will suffer the same fate as horse power in the century prior, the possibility alone requires that HR steps forward as a strong strategic player in business. On this front, Canada lags behind the United States and United Kingdom, where competition for talent is fiercer in cities with higher concentrations of people and educational institutions.

A fundamental rethink in human resources is required. When engagement is viewed under the microscope, it is clear that it can’t be viewed as a binary topic. Though employees can be ‘engaged’ or ‘disengaged’, we must look at deeper drivers such as abilities for mentorship, cross-generational communication and opportunities for personal growth—that is, ensuring that a company helps bring a person’s “best self” to work as discussed in the work of Boston-based Rhodes Scholar and advisor on millennial women issues, Christie Hunter Arscott.

Questions for the Future Present
More importantly, however, the human resources function as it is commonly understood needs to be re-imagined. As several examples of what this entails, we encourage that companies consider the following questions:

• How does a company think through the relationship between humans and machines?
• What trends at a global scale are shaping the future of a particular industry? For instance, the electric car company Tesla, as well as startups such as Uber, will shape the automotive industry as we know it—a reality that will affect workplace culture in the traditional oil and gas sector.
• What skills do employees have that either facilitate or hinder interaction with machines?
• To what extent do human resources teams consider technological competency when hiring for new employees?
• How will companies attract and retain employees based less on the prestige, brand or compensation, and more on deeper motivators that contribute to “fit” between the company’s shared purpose and individual’s values?

HR Change Champions Required
The proverbial “End of Work” has been trumpeted over the past centuries with no end in sight; however, there is a real possibility that we will transition into a world where machines—with their superior algorithms and sophistication in solving technical problems, in fields as diverse as medicine, law and engineering—will either complement or replace people.

This means that traditional human resources will no longer suffice; what will be required are powerful people leaders with experience and appreciation for learning across sectors. Combinatorial innovation, as discussed by Clifford and B&M, will lead to counterintuitive and unexpected changes in industries, and therefore, in the ways in which their people are engaged.

It is for this reason that HR leadership at all levels is imperative. The companies that relentlessly recruit and develop curious and driven people—with strong endorsement and oversight from senior management—will lead the way in a future where the scale and pace of change are historically unprecedented.

Emerson Csorba and Eric Termuende are Directors and Co-Founders of Gen Y Inc., a workplace culture group focused on the future of work and cross-generational engagement.

(PeopleTalk Winter 2015)