Why Humans Still Have an Edge over Robots
We’ve come a long way from the control and command working styles of the past. Now, success at work requires collaboration and empathy.
According to Business Insider, the top jobs of the future will be in technology and healthcare. Either way, success will require empathy.
Imagine you’re part of a team designing a technology solution to help stop the spread of infectious diseases in hospitals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that two million patients get an infection while in the hospital each year, and 99,000 of them die as a result, so your job could have a serious impact!
A human-centric approach
For Daniel Duarte, Head of the Innovation and Customer Experience Center at SAP Labs Latin America, this is a real task.
“MGS have 187 cleaners in just one hospital. One of their biggest challenges is monitoring the whereabouts of the staff and the beds. Often patients are wheeled out of their rooms in their beds and are taken across the hospital for examinations or treatment. The staff don’t know if they pass through areas that have not yet been cleaned on that day.”
He goes on to explain that in spite of strict standards, in many hospitals common procedures for cleaning beds and rooms fail to eliminate bacteria. Highly resistant microorganisms survive on surfaces even after they have been cleaned. Detecting these organisms requires ATP testing, a process of measuring live microorganisms through detection of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
“First we sent our team to the hospital to observe exactly how the cleaners, administrators and hospital staff interact. Being on site helps employees develop empathy for the end users,” says Daniel. “Then the hospital sent their people to our location so we could work together to find the right solution using design thinking techniques.”
The result is an app, still in prototype phase, that runs on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Beds, badges and other objects are tagged with beacons that track the status of the rooms, staff and resources. Cleaners are equipped with ATP Clean Trace devices which collect surface samples during the cleaning process and measure the level of bacteria and microorganisms. Inspection is no longer just a visual check, and patients are less exposed to bacteria that can cause infections.
Good design requires empathy, meaning the ability to understand and act upon the feelings and experiences of other people. Empathy is at the heart of Design Thinking, a design process based on the principle that in order to create meaningful innovations, you need to know and care about the lives of the people your products and solutions will impact. That’s what really causes change.
As the 2016 Empathy Index demonstrates, empathy is more important to success in the business world than ever before. It correlates directly to growth, productivity, and earnings per employee. The report rates empathy based on the following categories: ethics, leadership, company culture, brand perception, and public messaging through social media.
More than anything company culture is shaped by the way people work and how they engage with customers. At SAP, collaboration has been central to the working model from the very beginning, and agile methods and design thinking were introduced during the last decade to help anchor the collaborative mindset.
“Today, customers like Daimler partner with SAP on design thinking projects, changing their own company culture along the way. Mercedes-AMG, for example, asked SAP to help them completely reimagine their car manufacturing planning process using design thinking,” says Andreas Hauser, senior vice president and global head of the SAP AppHaus organization.
One of the main objectives of this team is to connect IT specialists, business experts, and end-users to design solutions together. “In the past we worked with stacks of lengthy technical documents and specifications. Today, we work with drawings. Everyone understands pictures. Understanding is essential, since our customers are just as complex as we are! Together, we observe the people who will use the solutions. Whether they are doctors or truck drivers, they keep us on track,” explains Hauser.
Co-innovation projects like these and others driven by SAP teams all over the world depend heavily on sending people out into the field to watch real people doing real work, and this is a skill no robot has yet acquired.
So whatever your job is today or tomorrow, a collaborative mindset and deep empathy for your customers will surely help you maintain an edge over man or machine.
Follow Judith on Twitter at @magyarj.
