When there is no more stress at work — A Smart Workload on Autopilot

An automatically customized workload for each employer is the new leadership for the post-AI generation.

Published in

Predict

5 min readNov 3, 2020

Halos by Featherwax and Eliott Johnson on Behance

“There is no substitute for hard work”, said T. Edison. Soon, however, the workforce management will not come from the egocentric and target-oriented senior and mid-managers, nor from the individual estimation, but will be passed to an algorithm that will analyze, process, and predict our emotional state and capacity in realtime. Previously, we were supervised by people with checklists and performance data sheets — now, our mental condition is measured via sensors and contextual data, and the workload reflects them.

No matter how we feel, every morning most of us need to get up, to dress up and to show up at work to process tasks, but now the workload will be a dynamic extension connected with our emotional and physical condition. Sensors in our daily life at home, commute, and work, paired with machine learning, will transform how we progress with our tasks at work so we can do it more effectively and successfully by enjoying it.

We already see changes in our contracts¹. But, in the next few years, to stay competitive, the employers will transition to empathic contracts that reflect in realtime on our performance. And the employees themself will not have any problems with that. In fact, we will experience our contract as partners and coaches as it might know more about us than anyone else.

The “empathic” contract is, in fact, a technological environment that collects data from bio-medical signals with different wearables. Such data can come from the heart rate, the blood pressure, the respiration, the movements of the joints, the body temperature, the sleeping hours, the presence/concentration of saline, oxygen, and contamination of water and other biological fluids. Mixed with external data, such as air pollution and weather forecast, and even with data provided by external services that you use every day like the favourite coffee shop or gym.

The result of collecting these insights about everyone and processing them with the help of machine learning and AI assessment is allowing our contracts to understand the different changes in our emotions.

For example, if I am stressed, this could be measured by the algorithm as changes in my blood pressure, and the algorithm could give me a smaller task for a more proper deadline. Or, it could suggest me to go outside for a walk or to arrange a private space for me in the meditation room for an hour.

Reciprocity? For sure. If there are some signs, for example, that I slept well during the night, I was staying home instead of going to a party, and the weather in London is sunny, then the algorithm can compensate for my non-productive hours before and overload me with new work until the sensors show that I am reaching again a point where my individual attention and engagement are lower again.

The office environment can also be adapted to play a supporting role for better performance. Sounds levels, temperature, lighting, wall colours and patterns, spaces and desks, catering, etc. will be designed to change dynamically according to the emotional state of the individual or the team to increase the chances to reach their targets and goals.

We will likely see prompts that the suggested additional working hours are filtered by the algorithm based on the mixture of our current health condition and the data collected from our financial services regarding our short and longterm investment behaviour patterns.

Additional recommendations could happen. The algorithm could take the age of the team member, what makes him happy and what he posses, and combine it together with the retail market prices. That way, it could, for example, recommend to a 24 y.o. junior developer to settle down in a minimalist apartment in downtown.

After intensive researches and significant leaps in the development of the sensor technologies, technology companies like Eight Sleep² can track many factors related to your sleep thanks to their smart beds. In the morning, they can calculate your unique SleepIQ score and send it to any connected device or service of your choice. To improve health, this smart bed supports manual, targeted configurations for each of the main areas of your body: head, shoulders, lumbar, hips, and legs. The bed keeps a memory of how you want to be comfortable and will adjust while you are sleeping to always ensure that your pre-chosen comfort level is met.

We will see the Fortune 500 companies supply their employees with advanced home and office technologies to improve and track their health conditions. We can not imagine Apple’s medical clinics³ without a new type of medical records based on constantly tracked personal data from sensors paired with machine learning.

We can’t imagine the new corporate headquarters like Amazons’ HQ2 ⁴ not to be equipped with brand new technologies like smart toilets⁵ that follows health condition by measuring the levels of important chemicals or augmented mirrors⁶ that can detect your skin condition and analyze data from our eyes for any sign of heart disease.

We will see smart fabrics from nanomaterials and responsive polymers to redefine corporate fashion and interaction between employees⁷. Their sensors will contribute to personal data accuracy.

Privacy, data protection, and information security risk management should be established globally. Ensuring the security and the privacy of the users’ personal information and data will be the key to the automated workload. The access, collection, sharing, disclosure, and further use of users’ personal information shall be limited to meeting legitimate business purposes and not violate human identity, human integrity, human rights, privacy, or individual or public liberties. Government regulations and policies like the EU’s GDPR and California’s Privacy Act should evolve and expand globally to protect our personal data in a decentralized world.

As Generation-Z enters the labour market and becomes the main workforce we will be already living in a world where business and leisure are mixing together. The amount of our work will change and adapt to our emotional state. It will impact the way we work and we will see increased productivity and efficiency.