The Future of Work Relies on One Thing.

In one word…collaboration. We’ve all heard about the threat of robots taking all our jobs.

Let me offer you a different perspective —

We need robots because we simply won’t have enough people to do the jobs our global economy demands.

To be specific, I’m referring to highly skilled jobs. According to McKinsey, the world will be short roughly 38M-40M highly skilled workers, or 13% of demand, by 2020. In this case, highly skilled equates to anyone with college or post grad degrees.

When most people balk at robots taking jobs like in the above gif, it typically relates to lower skilled labor. And it’s true in this space; we’ll have a surplus of 90M low skilled workers (those without college training in advanced economies or without even secondary education in developing economies) according to the same McKinsey article.

That brings me to my argument:

Until we’re able to effectively retrain our global workforce, the highly skilled workers that exist today need to collaborate more than ever to meet the demands of the global economy.

In case you glossed over it earlier, these labor predictions are supposed to occur by NEXT YEAR. So until we’re able to retrain a big percentage of our workforce, how do we make sure our companies hit Wall Street estimates next quarter, serve our customers, and continue to grow? We have to do more with less.

Collaboration is all about working together to achieve more. On the factory floor, you’d have different workers responsible for different functions. In the office now, you have the same.

86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures. — Source

One collaboration activity that fundamentally hasn’t, and won’t change for us are meetings. Meetings may take different forms with in person, calls, town halls, video, etc. but regardless, the UX designer alone can’t build a functional, revenue producing product without the help of engineering, sales, etc.

Collaboration often times amounts to activities like alignment, decision making, trouble shooting, tracking data, reporting, and even airing concerns and providing praise. Where do these things occur? Meetings.

So what are some examples of meeting best practices that you have seen or experienced? Throw them in the comments below!

If you’re curious about how we took a different approach to make meetings productive and enjoyable, go to www.tika.ai to learn more!