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How to win friends – can using social tools really stimulate productivity at work?

Whether or not technology actually improves productivity has always been open to debate. In April this year US business research company Conference Board released a set of figures suggesting that despite our digital revolution of tools and services, economic productivity was not improving. It’s not the first time that a research study has reached this conclusion and yet counter studies, such as the Centre for Economics and Business Research report in 2013, claim the opposite. Technology, it says, has accounted for an 84 percent productivity per hour increase in office workers since the 1970s.

Fast forward six years and we are still getting mixed messages but perhaps the most significant impact is yet to come. As more businesses digitally transformation and change how they and their employees work, we could yet witness a significant productivity shift. Messaging and collaboration tools, such as Slack, Facebook Workplace and Microsoft’s Teams (there are others) are widely touted as essential ingredients in making this happen, and while they are still relatively new, they appear to be growing quickly in popularity.

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Three future of work myths that do more harm than good

“Globalisation is expanding the supply of labour, while automation and artificial intelligence simultaneously disrupt the demand for it,” said Amber Rudd, the UK’s Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions, speaking at the Recruitment and Employment Federation back in May.

It’s the sort of vanilla speech we’ve come to expect from politicians when contemplating the impact of new technology on the future of employment. It’s regurgitation. Ever since Oxford academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne’s landmark probability study in 2013, which warned that about 47 percent of US jobs were at high risk of being automated, the ‘robots killing jobs’ line has been something of a refrain.

While it does have some grounding, it has undoubtedly been blown up into mythical status. It’s the go-to theme for any future of employment debate and politicians love a popular theme. So, what should we be aware of when it comes to the terminology? Here are some possible myths to consider.

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Hired or fired? How data is helping to define the future of work

Speaking at The Economist Innovation Summit in London last month, Morag Watson, vice president and chief digital innovation officer at BP said that “AI will revolutionize the future employment market, creating jobs we won’t recognize and can’t even conceive of today.” This new breed of job, she continued, “risks creating its own form of skills shortage, with employees requiring retraining and upskilling.”

It’s the sort of view we have become accustomed to, ever since Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published their paper in 2013, on the most likely jobs to be lost to automation. There have been countless studies since, not least a recent OECD study, which diluted Frey and Osborne’s predictions that 47 percent of US jobs and 35 percent of UK jobs were “high risk”. The OECD put the US figure at 10 percent and the UK at 12 percent.

Clearly there is concern. This was exacerbated in the US recently when the Department of Labor released data showing that for the first time ever, US job openings exceeded US job seekers. It suggests something is very wrong with the skillset of the unemployed, despite US Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta saying that “this is a great time be a job seeker in the United States.”

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