The Workplace Impact With New Technologies Like the Apple Watch

The future of work will be a workplace where workers are remote, project teams are created to work on a project and then dismantled for another project and technology will be unifier. The skills workers of the future will need will be adaptability, flexibility, increased desire to provide customized solutions for each other and for customers.

With the soon to be launch of the new Apple Watch there is another advance in how technology can be leveraged to improve our lives and work.

With the Apple Watch you can read emails, summon Siri, receive calls and track fitness goals on your watch. Facebook alerts, WeChat messages and Twitter trends can also be beamed your wrist without pulling out your smartphone.

Apple’s first wearable gadget beams messages, Facebook updates and simplified apps to our wrists, eliminating the all-too-common need to take out our devices to constantly check notifications. So how does increasingly simple technology improve how we interact with each other? We will communicate with more ease AND will need to increase people connection skills.

How quickly technology has changed and impacted the workplace over the past few years. It was just two years ago that IT departments were struggling with the BYOD (bring your own device) challenge. At one time companies could dictate the type of technology that the employees could use and now employees are dictating to companies and IT departments the devices they WANT to use based on personal preference and productivity.

The future of work research I have done over the past years has confirmed  the reality that companies will cater to employees technology choices. What will the impact be of increasing technology innovation on the workplace?

Well, according to Faith Popcorn the famed futurist, the next decade will create workers who because of technology innovation will work  even more remotely than now. She goes on to say that by the year 2025 robots will be doing the bulk of work for repetitive task like jobs. The opportunity for humans as workers is to increase abilities to connect with each other human to human, to leverage the unique skill set of being human to provide deeper solutions that are customized to employees and customers.

A workplace where everyone has the Apple Watch for example would increase the speed of communication, with instant information and instant hands free communication. This is good news from a productivity standpoint AND there still would be the need for enhanced communication skills as the focus shifts to greater and greater synergy among teams and greater collaboration.

We have the opportunity to look at technological innovation as an opportunity to create the future workplaces today. Technology does not replace the human functions – technology is forcing the transformation of how we work. In an ideal workplace technology eradicates the current silos and departments and brings together project teams that rotate and create new products and services together.

The new workplace requires flexibility, agility, speed of adaptability and the upgrading of the leadership/human operating system. I see the impact as positive AND to get to a place of integration of human skills/interaction with technology the biggest hurdle ahead is adapting to the massive changes that technology innovation are creating.

In my new book, “The Art of Change Leadership- Driving Transformation In a Fast Paced World” I provide tools and strategies on how individuals can be uber adaptors and leaders of change in this technology revolution we are all in.