Employees and their workstations.

 

Change is inevitable and change is always required for the need of improvement.

     In many service sector, employees work in a jailed environment. The reason why I use the term jailed environment is because an employee is alone at his workstation with less interaction with humans and spending more time on their computing machines. In such conditions the bonding between an employee and his workstation grows. And as time passes by, an employee will start finding more comfort and joy at his desk or work station. And as the saying goes…“ whether you own a small size house or big size house it doesn’t matter, you will find comfort and peace at your home rather than others.” The same ergonomic logic can be applied here to define the relationship between an employee and his workstation.

     It is often found that in service sector especially in IT & consultancy sector; employees are made to swap their workstation frequently based upon the projects the company engages in. This is because of the fact that a project team may require composition of different competent people to come together, however it is always found that, often employees who are not involved in projects like people involved in support services are also made to change their workstation for project employees. Such a frequent changes of workstation of support staffs are often considered to be employees harassment at workplace, leading to a situation wherein employees feel they are been treated as a third class employee whose values are of no importance to organization.


     These matters may sound lightly but are of great concerns and are sensitive which may or may not be expressed by employees due to its own good reasons. However organization should look into such issues, this is because when an when an employee don’t feel affectionate to his workstation due to frequent changes, the loyalty of employees towards the organization also reduces simultaneously. An employee’s affection to his workstation is one in many other factors which holds back an employee to stay in the organization rather than leaving it.

     As mentioned earlier change is inevitable and is always required to coup up with changing business environment. And organization needs to engage in different projects one after the other for its sustainability. However taking small steps of actions such as creating workstations of similar kind, without grade differences & seeking employee’s permission for workstation swapping will increase the morale and corporation from employees rather than resistance and losing employees loyalty towards the organization.

- Francis Lazar.

Will "Artificial Intelligence" pose threat to new job opputunities?

 

 

 

As the average age of the world is declining, except India and china, in such situation organizations around the world will have to hire people from other labor markets or will have to outsource their project to countries with surplus human resource. Recently outsourcing has been the trend of companies to deal with such deficiency in human resource. But however insufficient number of competent human resource or political pressure would force the business organization to find alternate ways to sustain.

Just as,  in western countries  automation or semi-automated production lines in manufacturing sector was introduced  due to their own good reason like to deal with deficit number of labor availability. Similar adoption of production system was introduced in countries like India wherein labor supply was high, but due to poor trade union & employer relation, which later resulted in rise of unemployment to skilled labors in India.

Similarly in the run to find alternate ways to sustain business due to unavailability of competent human resource in service sector has given rise to introduction of artificial intelligence services (AI’s)

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using the rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions), and self-correction. Particular applications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision.

Recently driver less car, which uses artificial intelligence, replacing intelligence of human driver were seen successful in their test operations. And it won’t be late that in next 4-5 years we can expect such cars running in our roads.   

One of the major jobs which is trending high and has recently seen an increase demand in such job openings in service sector is the “job of business analyst” ( include-financial analyst, market analyst etc.)  Is the one which is going to be affected with the introduction artificial intelligence. Therefore I argue that job opportunities for business analyst would be limited in the long run.

This is because the role of business analyst include long procedure from sourcing to interpreting the data collected but however in this era where we have system which automatically collect and interpret the data, sourcing is the only difficult job as such.

Secondly the internet service providers extract and saves all our information in big data plants, and will serve as provider of information such as our taste & preference etc. for commercial purpose to companies who is in need of such information. The term cyber security & privacy is only limited to the fact that internet providers can’t reveal one’s personal details such as bank pin number etc.  But that doesn’t restrict them to share our other information to companies for commercial purpose.

The role of the analyst is often disconnected from the day-to-day machinations of the business and market, because the career path for an analyst doesn’t generally include several years in the frontline sales, marketing, operations and finance roles that give people the experience, context and perspective to generate actionable insights from data. And while current human analysts may be sourcing, organizing, grouping and mapping data to search for underlying trends and patterns, these are all tasks that can now be effectively undertaken by an AI. Now only time will show the intensity and what more areas will  be affected in coming years with introduction of artificial intelligence.

- Francis Lazar.