Hablar del trabajo del futuro es abrir la puerta a sueños y pesadillas: desde la imagen del profesional independiente con móvil, portátil y vistas a la playa; hasta la del repartidor incapaz de cumplir con sus algoritmos, sin paro, baja médica ni jubilación. La forma que finalmente tenga ese futuro dependerá del país, la formación y el género, por nombrar solo tres de las muchas variables que hacen imposible una predicción exacta. Pero donde termina la profecía empieza el análisis de las fuerzas que ya hoy están modelando las nuevas maneras de trabajar. Ese es el objetivo de este reportaje.

Teleworking is not just for office workers

They call it Twin Model (twin model, in English) and one of the sectors that uses it most is hydrocarbons.In this industry it is usually a digital replica of the oil plant that allows you to control it at a distance.Thanks to the sensors installed on the ground, its twin on the computer screen informs the user in real time, wherever it is, on the maintenance levels, the capacity of the tanks, or any other data necessary for an operation that,In part, you can also execute remotely.

According to Prithwiraj Choudhury, business administration professor at Harvard Business School, advances such as Twin Model are those that will take teleworking to their next border: the industry and many services that have so far required the physical presence of their participants, ““as the hospital operating room ".Choudhury believes that the possibility of working at a popularized distance during the pandemic will mean a leap forward for employees and employers of the near future.

For the former, because it will allow them to move to more pleasant areas, closer to their loved ones, or cheaper, "which increases the purchasing power of their salaries".Another advantage that in his opinion will especially benefit women is the possibility of facing a family moving without any of the spouses, therefore giving up their employment."In the last 30 years, women have lost many opportunities when they were offered jobs or promotions that demanded to move and their partner refused to change the city," he explains.

Choudhury has been investigating the distance work for seven years and is among those responsible for an experiment in the United States patent registry, where they began giving permission to some employees to work from home and ended up authorizing them to do so from anywhere in the world.The study demonstrated notable improvements in productivity and at the level of retention of employees, in addition to the evident advantages due to savings in office rental.

But will we be equally creative without coffee talks?And how will we do when we want to be seen and taken into account for possible promotions?According to Choudhury, the work from outside the office does not have to be a lift for that.“In the investigations that the MIT has been making the subject since 1977 it is demonstrated that these informal office interactions only happen on a very limited radius of 25 meters, with the probability falling dramatically when there is a wall between the two employees, and becoming practically impossibleWhen they work in two different buildings from the same campus, ”he says.

In his studies, the work of the future may compensate for the lack of interaction in situ with what he calls "virtual water dispensers", referring to that moment of rest to drink.Unlike Happy Hour by Zoom that some companies organize as a distension mechanism, in these virtual water dispensers, groups of randomly selected employees would participate, but guaranteeing a good mixture of hierarchical ranges."In an experiment we did with a study group and another control, we found that the fellows who participated in the dispensers with senior managers served better in the following weeks and increased their probability that they were offered a position".

But the office is also one of our main places of socialization, something that according to Choudhury will not be lost as long as we keep periodic meetings in the office, with 80% remote work and 20% face -to -face, or the percentages that each company chooses."The offices will be used as a place for social interaction and that means that we will have to reimagine space, throw cubicles and walls, and create social places, a community kitchen, a music room, meeting rooms, collaboration, etc.".

A future that seems utopian except for possible risks for employees.Many companies will prefer to save rigidities and social security contributions by making their work mass into external suppliers, when not to eliminate it completely hiring the services of people in countries with the lowest labor cost.Not to mention the pressure for overtime and not paid, as has already been demonstrated during this health crisis.For the first part, there is no other solution to improve the rights and protection of workers.And to avoid excesses in the time load, says Choudhury, we will have to go from measuring the performance for time dedicated to measuring it by production obtained."In some tasks it is more difficult to measure productivity, but there is always some variable to do so, such as customer response.".

The Centennial Century

According to a study by the World Economic Forum, if children born in 1947 had an 85 -year life expectancy, for those born in 2007, the expected will be to celebrate the first centenary, something that will necessarily have consequences in the world of work.As the Diana Wu David consultant wrote in her book Future Proof: Reinventing Works (future proof: work reinvention), "Having longer lives will mean a greater need for capital accumulation".

The growing participation of the highest in the labor market is already a fact.According to Wu David, in the United States, less than 13% of those over 65 were employed in 2000, a percentage that in 2016 jumped to almost 19%.In Spain, a June Manpower study confirms this trend: employees with more than 45 and less than 66 went from representing 39% of the active population in 2010 to become 47% only nine years later.

Faced with this panorama, Wu David believes that the delay on the retirement date will be as inevitable as positive.Having longer work lives, he says, there will not be so much pressure to progress rapid.

But who will pay those learning periods?And who will ensure the income of so many centenarians?According to Wu David, who lives in Hong Kong, the world could go to the Singapore model with its Lifelong Learning and Lifelong Inome Scheme programs.The first subsidizes education throughout its citizens' life.The second makes the pension collection more flexible, voluntarily postponing the date on which it begins to be charged and, in case of death before planned, guaranteeing the return to the relatives of the not delivered part.

In motion towards gender equality

The machines are not going to stay with all the jobs.As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee have been writing from their book The Second Machine Age, in creative tasks such as art and science, in tasks that put emotional intelligence at stake, and in tasks that need some delicacy for the manipulation of objects we are going tocontinue having advantage over them.A good opportunity for women's employment, says the IMF economist was Dabla-Norris, for being the most represented in human interaction work such as those of the health sector, those of attention to children and the elderly, and those of a commercial type.

According to Dabla-Norris, who in 2019 published with Mariya Brussevich and Salma Khalid a study on the effect of technology on the labor equality of genders, it is not the only possible advance.In his opinion, "the probability that women occupy managerial positions is today greater than in the past".There are still many differences, he says, but there is also a growing income of women in scientific, technological and mathematics careers.

But with that it is not enough to break a glass roof that in many cases still looks like steel.According to Dabla-Norris, to end it, the path opened by the countries of northern Europe will have to be followed, where more progress has been made to legislate against the so-called motherhood fine.Equateing the father's and mother's paternity permits and putting the nursery service within reach of all pockets is a demonstrated efficacy solution that in the future could be extended to other countries with a welfare state.Another measure that, in his opinion, could be extended to other places is to eliminate the discouragedesire to work.

Race against the machine

In the reports on the technological possibilities of the future that banks and consultants are not usually touched on, but the truth is that many people will not reach that idyllic scenario without going through the purgatory of unemployment of unemployment.And they are not just truck drivers threatened by autonomous vehicles.Lawyers specialized in looking for jurisprudence or credit risk evaluators, to cite only two, they also face that gigantic competitor called artificial intelligence.

According to Brynjolfsson, the workforce must leave as soon as possible the tasks that machines do better than us to go to creative areas and emotional intelligence.A responsibility that, in his opinion, corresponds to citizens, who must begin to train in these new skills;to companies, which must be advanced with investments in the future sectors, and to governments, which must review their tax structure."In most countries, the replacement of employees for machines is being favor because the taxes that companies pay for capital are lower than those paid for workers," he says.

Brynjolfsson is not the first to realize that lag or understand how difficult it is to increase taxes to capital in a globalized world where many companies choose their location according to taxes.Therefore, to reduce loads associated with employee hiring proposes to increase other taxes."They could be taxes on pollution, the emission of carbon dioxide, congestion, or even indirect taxes to added value, increase the collection without penalizing directly to capital or work".

In any case, says Brynjolfsson, our main duty is to keep in mind that we will be those who decide what space will occupy technology at work.In his own words, he is in our hand to decide "if we use it to create more shared prosperity or if we use it to increase the concentration of wealth".

The same, he explains, with those technologies that measure and control the performance of employees."It is in our power to decide what level of surveillance we are willing to tolerate," he explains.“I am not an optimistic to say that everything will be fine;In fact, I think we should worry a lot, and that we should make the right decisions to reach a scenario that could be truly good, but of course we have to worry, will we be able to use technology to increase prosperity and freedom?Or not?It is not something automatic ".

The extension of the work concept

The latest questions about the future of work are, perhaps, the most difficult to answer.Will employees be protected from possible dismissals or diseases?Are we going to a world of temporary contracts?Or will we all become external suppliers without employment relationship?

The British economist Guy Standing has been talking about the rise of the precarious, a class that in its definition does not include the previous generation of employees even with the right to things like retirement or pay by motherhood."The precarious not only suffers the inconveniences of unstable and temporary labor relations, but their salaries are falling into real terms, in addition to the loss of rights, such as vacations paid, medical leave or pension," he says.

This precariate is the young people who chain a temporary contract after another, and the distributors, drivers, replenishing and a long etcetera of people who obey an algorithm under the fiction that it is a treatment of equal to equal to the same between businessmen.In standing's opinion, the solution of the future is to incorporate in the word work activities that have so far been left out, “like all the things to do in the house or as the care to give to the children and the parentsseniors".

That recognition is not enough.In the future of standing, the introduction of a universal basic income is key that gives people the freedom to devote themselves to those unpaid works and that uploads the bar of the working conditions that companies must guarantee to obtain employees.

Although the idea of basic universal income is not new, standing ensures that its well -world organization (world network for basic income) has received more consultations than ever, with thousands of people joining this year, with thousands of people joining the Asociation."There are currently 80 universal basic income experiments working worldwide," he says.

Among the findings of experiments held in high, medium and low income countries, Standing stands out with 6.000 people from India.According to their data, they improved health, schooling, nutrition and women's situation."Inequality was reduced, there was more work, no less, and the same happened with those we did in Africa and Canada," he says.“If we want to be able to adapt to pandemics, if we want to be able to adapt to economic shocks, we need people to have security, otherwise that work of the future will not arrive in which we all do more creative things, inThe one who spent more time occupying the people we want and in which we face the ecological work we have to face ”.