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JEBDE
3,2 Automation, digitalization and the
future of work: A critical review
Leslie Patrick Willcocks
Department of Management, LSE, London, UK
184
Abstract
Received 20 September 2023
Revised 25 November 2023 Purpose – The study aims to provide a critical review of the extent to which digital technologies are likely to
Accepted 3 January 2024 replace human labour, the exponential rise in the amount of work to be done and how far distinctively human
skills are future-proofed and therefore likely to be in short supply. It reviews the evidence for a permanent
switch to home and remote working enabled by emerging technologies. It assesses the business, digital and
labour strategies of work organisations and the promise and challenges from a dominant trend towards a
digitally enabled flexible labour model.
Design/methodology/approach – A critical review of 1020 plus case studies and the extant literature was
carried out.
Findings – The relationship between emerging technologies and work is widely misunderstood, and there are
major qualifiers to the idea of an overwhelming tsunami of technology drastically reducing headcounts
globally. Distinctive human skills remain valuable, the amount of work to be done is increasing exponentially
and automation is becoming more a coping than a labour replacement mechanism. Moves to a hybrid
digitalised flexible labour model are promising but not if short-term, and if the challenges they represent are not
managed well.
Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is that we are making projections into the future,
though we are drawing on a lot of different sources and evidence and past data projected into the future.
Practical implications – The problem is not labour displacement but large skills shortages that will slow
down the speed of technology adoption. Skills development is vital, as is the taking of long-term perspectives
towards the management of hybrid, flexible working based on human-machine interactions.
Social implications – Organisations need to revitalise their training and development and labour
management models. Governments and intermediary institutions need to manage transition states if the skills
required to gain economic growth are to be available, and to ensure that large labour pools do not get bypassed
from not having requisite skills.
Originality/value – The study offers a more subtle and complex perspective on the emerging evidence about
the future of technology and work.
Keywords Future of work, Digital transformation, Automation
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
There have been long-term fears of massive job loss globally from accelerating automation
and digitalisation of work. Recently, we have seen transitions towards remote and home
working induced by the Covid-19 pandemic. During 2022, a “great resignation” occurred,
where many people in the developed economies were giving up work and not taking up new
employment. Meanwhile, across 2023, organisations in the major economies regularly
reported staffing and skills shortages even in the face of conditions of deflated economic
growth. Building on this complex picture, during 2023, there was renewed interest in major
labour and technology questions, especially taking into consideration the global attention
being given to a new wave of artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT and generative AI.

© Leslie Patrick Willcocks. Published in Journal of Electronic Business & Digital Economics. Published
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Would new advanced technologies, harnessed to improve productivity and cut costs, finally Digitalisation
lead to large-scale job loss? How could skills shortages be ameliorated? Would extending the and the future
labour market ever further, virtually and globally, remedy labour problems? What policies
towards different forms of labour would be optimal? In this critical review, we find evidence-
of work
based answers to these questions, and point to both an emerging way forward – a digitalised
flexible labour model – and its inherent challenges. Taking the period to 2030, we investigate,
first, the extent to which digital technologies are likely to replace human labour, the
exponential rise in the amount of work to be done and how far distinctively human skills are 185
future-proofed, and therefore likely to be in short supply. The evidence is then assessed for a
permanent switch to home and remote working enabled by emerging technologies. The paper
then assesses the technology and labour strategies of work organisations and points to the
promise and challenges presented by a dominant trend towards a digitally enabled flexible
labour model that is heavily dependent on new technologies, contractual arrangements and
external labour.

The Willcocks thesis: automation does not mean job apocalypse

Since 2016, my research work has supported the view that automation and AI does not mean
the end of jobs for human workers. My thesis suggests eight major qualifiers to that
proposition. As I have pointed out many times, the misplaced notion of a jobs “robo-
apocalypse” has steered the future of work debate for a very long time (Willcocks, 2020a).
I use the terms “robo-apocalypse” here to refer to the thesis that automation will be rapid and
overwhelming in its global impact, in particular leading to massive net job loss. Looking at
the big picture, it is not easy to pick your way through the media representations of the
debate. Sources and multiple studies are, in fact, very variable in quality, evidence and rigour.
Media narratives appear to polarise around two storylines – hype and fear. “Hype” tells us
that it is largely going to be fine, and most of us are going to live in a well-run technologised
world – let us call it “automatopia” – with more than enough goods, services and leisure.
Meanwhile, the other, “fear” vision of “robo-apocalypse” is essentially dystopian. This
polarised narrative also assumes quick and pervasive adoption of the technology, but sees it
as displacing a huge number of physical and cognitive-based jobs across industries,
geographies and at most levels in the organisation.
Unsurprisingly, so-called artificial intelligence (AI) as job killer has been the focus of
disproportionate media attention. It is, in my view, a story too good to be false. Unfortunately,
an anchor study by Frey and Osborne (2013) is still used to support this narrative, with the
often-quoted headline figure of 47% of US jobs highly automatable. However, in that study,
the researchers did not try to specify the speed of technology development, nor a time period
for the loss of jobs. They do not attempt to predict the number of jobs lost, nor how many jobs
would be created through automation. The study also does not look at the key bottleneck of
how commercially feasible, viable and organisationally adoptable the emerging technologies
would be, that is, the long road to diffusion of innovation dilemma is ignored. These self-
confessed omissions are all but factored out in media representations of the findings.
The media have also been slow to pick up on later studies richer in data, and more fine-
tuned in their analysis. For example, Forrester Research (2017) suggested robots would take
24.7 million US jobs, but create 14.9 million new jobs by 2027, leading to a net loss of 9.8
million jobs, about 7% of the US workforce. An OECD study by Arntz, Gregory, and Zierahn
(2016) suggested that 9% of US individuals faced high job automatability, and, on average,
9% of OECD jobs (UK 10%) would become highly automated within a decade.
By 2019, the picture of high job loss had changed dramatically, though not necessarily in
the headlines. The World Economic Forum (2020), for 2018–2022, found automation
replacing 0.98 million jobs, while creating 1.74 million new ones. The Asian Development
JEBDE Bank (2018) came out as positive on net job creation from automation. Price Waterhouse
3,2 Coopers (2017) estimated that the net job effect of automation in the UK in the period
2017–2037 would be a slight gain of 168,000 jobs (7.176 million created, 7.008 million
displaced). MGI (2018a, b) suggested that: “overall, the adoption of AI may not have a
significant impact on net employment in the long term. . . Our average global scenario suggests
that total full-time equivalent employment may remain flat at best compared with today” (pages
44 and 45).
186 Then, Covid-19 was meant to see a wave of job-killing automation. But by end of 2023,
there was little evidence of this. In practice, OECD countries generally were experiencing an
abnormally large number of unfulfilled vacancies, even as near recessionary conditions
loomed. The rate of decline in the supposedly more easily automatable jobs actually slowed
during the pandemic. In mid-2023, The Economist was reporting that in the previous decade
the average rich-world unemployment rate had halved, and the share of working-age people
in employment was at an all-time high. Countries with the highest rates of automation and
robotics, such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore, had the least unemployment.
The Economist calculated that if more than 50% of jobs were automated or jobs were
eliminated as they were automated, this could mean a net loss of 15% of US jobs. But this,
The Economist suggested, was unlikely to happen, as historically job destruction happens far
more slowly (The Economist, 2023; see also Willcocks, 2020a).
What is startling here is that as time has gone by, the estimates for net job loss from
automation have been disappearing to the point of being negligible – though of course, the net
figures mask considerable disruption and skills shifts. There have to be serious qualifications
to the robo-apocalypse and job loss narrative.
In a comprehensive review, Willcocks (2020a) showed that many assumptions embedded
in the robo-apocalypse narrative are highly questionable: that automation creates few jobs
short or long term; that whole jobs can be automated; that the technology is perfectible; that
organisations can seamlessly and quickly deploy AI; that humans are machines that can be
replicated; that it is politically, socially and economically feasible to apply these technologies.
Then there are the macro factors. With ageing populations, productivity gaps and skills
shortages predicted across many G20 countries, the danger might be too little, rather than too
much labour. Thus there are eight major qualifiers to the proposition that automation will
lead to massive net job loss. Ironically, far from taking over, automation will be, most likely,
just helping organisations to cope.
Finally, let us return to the issue of speed of adoption of these technologies. The most
recent studies suggest that the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis will accelerate
automation and digitalisation. However, this does not mean that the eight qualifiers outlined
in Willcocks (2020a) suddenly become redundant. In particular, the third qualifier
(technology is never a fire-and-forget missile), the fourth qualifier (technology is never that
perfectible) and the fifth qualifier (distinctive human strengths are needed at work) present
considerable challenges to those embarking on accelerated digital and automation
programmes. Somewhere among these is a much under-rated factor – the limited
organisational capacity to change, adopt and institutionalise digital technologies.
In practice, organisations have a great deal of information technology legacy and are also
heavily siloed. In research into over 400 organisations, Willcocks, Hindle, Stanton, and Smith
(2023) found all too many enterprises lagging behind their automation intentions due to some
or all eight inhibiting siloes – structure, process, data, technology, culture, managerial
mindsets, strategy and skill sets.
As digital transformation efforts have demonstrated over the last 10 years, this is a
difficult series of challenges to navigate, at a time when many organisations have declining
absorptive capacity to innovate and do something new, in any major way. Moreover, after the
pandemic, many organisations will have to return to the basics – re-establish finances,
recover customers, refresh products and services, re-engage the workforce. For many, this Digitalisation
will distract them from big investments in technology for some time to come. McKinsey and and the future
Company (2020) surveyed major clients and found them suggesting that COVID-19 had
accelerated digitalisation on a number of fronts – notably remote working, migrating assets
of work
to the cloud, data security, responding to changing customer expectations and demand for
online purchasing and services and more advanced technology use in operations and
decision-making. A majority were convinced that remote working, online purchasing and
changed customer expectations were the most likely to persist after the pandemic. Our own 187
research suggests that only about 20% of enterprises lead in digital transformation. Indeed,
these are likely to move even faster, not least because they have a better starting point, the
experience and usually the better financial performances to do so. But this means that some
80% of organisations are not, and probably will not be, great performers on digital
transformation (Willcocks, 2021; Willcocks et al., 2023). All this is likely to slow job loss (and
gain) from automation and digitalisation, and slow skill changes as well.

Hidden in plain sight: the amount of work to be done

Willcocks (2020a) and Willcocks et al. (2023) reinforce immensely this contention by
identifying a critical factor neglected by all previous studies. Despite assumptions, and
hidden in plain sight, the amount of work to be done is not remaining stable; it is growing
across sectors, year on year, dramatically and inexorably. Work intensification would seem to
have been increasing, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. Organisations have sought
to increase productivity and the amount of work done by “sweating the assets” and
attempting to do more with less using the same labour base and partly through applying
digital technologies. This phenomenon is very under-researched. However, some studies are
indicative.
Thus, Felstead, Gallie, Green, and Inanc (2013) found that the percentage of UK jobs
needing hard work moved from 31.5% in 1992 to 45.3% in 2012 (Felstead et al., 2013). Since
2006, the speed of work has quickened, and the pressures of working to tight deadlines have
also risen to record highs. Korunka and Kubicek (2017) collected a range of research papers
recording work intensification over the last ten years across several economies. In our own
research, we very frequently found that, apart from the many other benefits, a major reason
for automation was a range of stakeholders experiencing a rising tide of work to be done
(Lacity & Willcocks, 2017, 2018; Lacity, Willcocks, & Gozman, 2021; Willcocks & Lacity,
2016; Willcocks, Hindle, & Lacity, 2019). The limits to working smarter and of high-
performance practices were being tested, and the practices often found wanting.
ServiceNow’s 2017 multi-country survey found 70% of some 1,874 corporate respondents
registering that the pace of work grew by at least 10% in 2016; nearly half said it grew by
20% or more (Service Now, 2017). It found that by 2018, 46% of companies were going to need
greater automation to handle the volume of tasks being generated. By 2020, without more
automation, 86% of organisations believed they would reach their break point soon, and
dealing with the volume of work would no longer be sustainable.
But where is this dramatic increase in the amount of work coming from? Almost all studies
to date routinely leave out three key factors. Willcocks et al. (2023) suggest that, combined,
these factors probably account for as much as a 10–12% annual growth in the amount of
work to be done, depending on sector and country.
The exponential data explosion. Service Now (2017) found, for example, that nearly 80% of
respondents reported that data from mobile devices and the Internet of Things were
accelerating the pace of work. Some estimates suggest that 90% of the world’s digital data
that we try to process were created in the last two years, and that the amount of digital data
grows by 50% a year. Ganz, Reinzel, and Rydning (2017) estimated that by 2025, there would
JEBDE be ten times the data generated in 2016. Even if these are only ball park figures, they still raise
3,2 the fundamental question: how are we going to collect, store, process, analyse and use data
arriving in such colossal volumes? It implies a massive explosion of work, especially as data
seem to create more data. Maybe we really do need more automation just to cope.
Cross-sectoral growth of audit, regulation and bureaucracy, amplified by the data explosion
and the application of modern information and communication technologies. We have been
creating, we would argue, a veritable witches brew of data, technology and bureaucracy.
188 Graeber (2015, 2018) had been one of the few to pinpoint the importance of this development
for the future of both work and the capitalist system itself (Graeber, 2015, 2018). But even he
probably understated the degree to which audit and regulation inevitably accompany high
levels of distrust, the likelihood of market failure and increased demands for transparency.
Such work may not be seen as particularly productive, but it is dramatically increasing across
government agencies, business sectors and economies almost everywhere. The Economist
(2023) adds to the picture by pointing out that generative AI could act as a drain on
productivity, being able to generate objections and counter-arguments to, for example,
planning applications, in minutes. In an AI-heavy world, lawyers and legal actions are likely
to multiply. Also most of the jobs at risk from AI are in heavily regulated sectors, often with
much state involvement such as education, healthcare, housing and policing. One can
envisage multiple ways in which audit, regulation and bureaucracy could slow down
productivity, enhancing impacts of automation, and indeed how automation could enhance
the ability to extend audit, regulation and bureaucracy even further, thus creating more work.
Technology: both solution and problem. A third source of more work is technology’s
double-edged capacity to provide solutions that also create additional problems. If you create
more data, that then is the work-creating problem of how to process, store, analyse and then
use it. Then, there are unanticipated work-making consequences. For example, the Internet
has created cybersecurity issues. The cost of cyberattacks was estimated at $445 billion in
2013, and continued to rise dramatically to beyond $600 billion into 2018. This has led to
further technology solutions, of course, with the cybersecurity market being $75 billion in
2015, and also growing much faster since then to reach $US 223.7 billion in 2023 and
potentially $US 338.84 billion in 2027 at a CAGR of 10.9% (Research & Markets, 2023) [1].
As another example, concerns about fake news through social media had, by 2019, led to
Facebook employing fact checkers in 20 countries.
There is also increasing evidence for the addictive properties of mobile devices, games, the
Internet, email and related technologies and applications (see, for example, Alter, 2017; Aiken,
2016). Much has been made of the productivity enhancing the potential of these and “AI”
technologies. But such technologies are often deliberately designed to support multitasking
and constant interruption at considerable cost to real productivity at work.
The emerging evidence is that task switching, being constantly interrupted and multi-
tasking result in substantial performance costs. For peak performance, the goal should be
sustained, focused and singular attention. But the modern worker is all too easily distracted
from task performance by irrelevant information and suffers interruption by attempting to
pursue simultaneous multiple goals, aided and abetted by technologies such as email, social
media, the Internet and mobile devices. These distractions and interruptions can come from
outside or be self-generated.
Modern technologies also allow a worker to easily elide work and non-work, while
ostensibly at work. A CareerBuilder survey found the smartphone, the Internet, social media
and email amongst are the five most cited workplace disrupters and productivity killers [2].
A 2018 Udemy survey found a third of Generation Z employees admitting to using their
smartphones for personal activities up to 2 hours in a work day [3].
Alter (2017) cites studies showing that 70% of office emails are read within six seconds of
arriving. This is hugely disruptive; on one estimate, it can take up to 25 minutes to become re-
immersed in an interrupted task. Gazzaley and Rosen (2016) found that multi-tasking and Digitalisation
task switching incur notable performance costs in disengaging from a task, focusing on the and the future
new task, then disengaging and re-entering the original work. A pre-smartphone study they
cite found that when office workers are interrupted as often as eleven times an hour, it cost the
of work
USA $558 billion a year in lost productivity. Wajcman and Rose (2011) found workers
spending only half their day on actual “work episodes”, with two thirds of interruptions self-
generated and most involving a mediated communication through a technological device.
Meanwhile, most workers have access to email and other communications networks, and 189
about 45% of the world’s population own a mobile phone (Gazzaley and Rosen, 2016).
In these ways, more technology is undoubtedly having complex, even contradictory,
effects, including a significant, if largely unresearched, adverse impact on productivity and
on the time required to accomplish work tasks. While more technology is the frequently
touted answer to personal, social and business problems, we can find ourselves on an endless
treadmill of technological solutions and the new problems they also generate.

The changing skills base

Recent research, by the author and others, suggests that dramatic skills shifts and shortages
will be the most impactful challenges to productivity, technology adoption and economic
growth through to 2030.
The dominant trend emerging from recent research is shown in Figure 1 (Willcocks, 2021;
Willcocks et al., 2023). There will be a move away from low skills – physical, repetitive, non-
technical, non-cognitive basic human skills – towards digital, technical cognitive,
distinctively human, medium/high skills. On several estimates, low-skilled workers will go
from 44% to 32% of the global workforce in the 2019–2030 period. By the early 2020s, the
global labour force probably had 95 million surplus low-skilled workers, but a 90 million
shortage in medium-/high-skilled workers (Willcocks et al., 2023).
These major skills gaps will widen without government, corporate and individual
intervention, and it is fairly obvious that the inequality divides arising from automation and
digitalisation will require labour market institutional changes. An overlooked aspect is that if

2019 Skills Gap 2030

Repe ve To Non-Repe ve
Physical To Digital
Non-technical To Technical (STEM)
Non-cogni ve To Cogni ve
2030 Basic human To Dis nc ve human
Low skills To Medium/high skills

1. Significant decline but not elimina on of skills on le side. Easy automa on targets
2. Emerging supply-demand gap and skills shortages developing at varying rates across sectors
3. Automa on technologies also moving into right side skills Figure 1.
The skills demand
shift, 2019–2030
Source(s): Author
JEBDE the requisite skills to support and complement automation and new technologies are not
3,2 forthcoming, the much touted technological changes will be further delayed.
An under-appreciated factor remains how limited the applicability of the technology
might be. The analysis here builds upon the work of MGI (2017), Lacity and Willcocks (2018),
Willcocks, 2021) and composite sources. MGI identified 18 generic sets of skills used in the
workplace (see Figure 2).
Looking ahead to 2030, it is likely that some eight skill sets will remain as largely human
190 capabilities in the workplace, three are dependent on choices or technological advances and
some seven skill sets are automatable (though that does not mean they will be). Distinctively
human skills like empathy, team-building, leadership, critical thinking, imagination are both
valuable in work organisations and exceedingly difficult to replicate or replace. Looking at
Figure 2, over the next 10 years, there will probably be large and small gains for human work
in some areas, and some large, new work gains for machines. This would suggest that the
Frey and Osborne (2013, 2017) study, together with Frey (2019), has considerably
overestimated the automatability of jobs and work to be done, at least for the 2019–2030
period.

The digitally enabled flexible labour organisation

How to makes sense of all these complex trends? How have employers been responding?
According to an MIT/Deloitte 2021 report, a pre-Covid and, we find, continuing trend is
“workforce eco-systems” – trying to find multiple sources of internal and external skills by
using various contractual arrangements, global markets and reward systems, and by
forming communities of connected and interdependent workforces and organisations. Not
only are organisations placing significant value on gaining ideas and skills from contributors
who do not work for the organisation, they intend to rely increasingly on external
participants and draw on online platforms to secure talent (Altman et al., 2021).
However, this approach has been insufficiently conceptualised and needs a lot more detail
if it is to be represented as a strategic approach. Research at the LSE together with
Knowledge Capital Partners shows most organisations are adopting key elements of a “core-
peripheries” model for organising labour, though they tend to do this on an ad-hoc basis,
mainly in response to short-term factors (Willcocks, 2023a). These include labour shortages,
need to keep costs low and attempts to harness digital technologies productively, for example
to support home working during the recent pandemic. Willcocks (2023b) found some 65% of

SKILLS* Machine vs Human** ACTIVITIES***

Sensory Perception Machine
Cognitive Capabilities Large new work gains for humans
• Retrieving information Machine+ • Applying expertise
• Recognizing known patterns/categories Machine + (18% automatable)
• Generating novel patterns/categories Human + • Interfacing with stakeholders
• Logical reasoning/problem solving Human+ • (20% automatable)
• Optimizing/planning Machine+ • Managing and developing people
• Creativity Human+ (9% automatable)
• Articulating/display output Machine
• Coordination with multiple agents Depends on agents
Small new work gains for humans
Natural Language Processing
• Unpredictable physical activities
• Generation Machine
(26% automatable)
• Understanding Depends on advances
Social and Emotional Capabilities
Large new work gains for machines
• Sensing Human++
• Processing data (69%)
• Reasoning (about socio-emotional states) Human++
• Collecting data (64%)
• Output (speech, body language) Human++
• Predictable physical activities (81%)
Physical Capabilities
Figure 2. • Fine motor skills/dexterity Human+
* MGI (2017)
Automatable and • Gross motor skills Mixed
• Navigation Depends on AI R&D ** LSE Analysis May 2019
human work skills, • Mobility Human *** Composite sources and MGI
2019–30
Source(s): Author
organisations surveyed in January 2023 adopting short-term tactical approaches to digital Digitalisation
investments, either “sweating the assets” in order to focus on cash flow, customer retention and the future
and cost cutting, or investing limitedly in digital technologies to “underpin today’s business”.
Some 35% of organisations had longer-term plans for digital investments and developing
of work
their business strategies, though over half of these were delaying strategy in order to respond
to 2023 economic conditions.
This is useful background for framing how different enterprises are following a major
trend towards the digitalised flexible labour organisation (see Figure 3). 191
As long ago as 1984, John Atkinson posited a core/periphery model to provide an
organisation with functional, numerical and financial flexibility. With the addition of much
more enabling technology, the model is uncannily representative of how businesses and
government agencies intend to utilise labour over the next two decades (Atkinson, 1984;
Willcocks, 2021). Overall, we will, in the author’s view, see accelerating, more strategic moves
towards what has already been done on this in the last 35 years.
The overall objective is to achieve responsiveness and agility through creating three types
of flexibility – functional, numerical and financial. The core workers represent the key skills,
and are viewed as long-stay employees with favourable terms and conditions in exchange for
which they will be functionally flexible, supported by training, development and new
technologies. The first peripheral group may also be full-time or part-time but do less key
work and tend to have less good terms and conditions.
Then there are multiple, other, more transactional relationships as the organisation draws
on agency workers, sub-contractors, outsourcing firms, self-employed workers, including the
technologically enabled “open talent” economy and “ghost workers” making high, medium
and/or low skills available globally depending on requirement, on more or less favourable
labour contracts (see Gray & Sun, 2019; Winsor & Paik, 2024). These relationships give some
functional flexibility, but mainly numerical and financial flexibility. In recent years, digital
technologies have given three more types of flexibility – locational (think remote working),
temporal (think 24 3 7) and labour replacement/enhancement flexibility (through automation
and online “robo-sourcing”.

Figure 3.
The digitalised flexible
labour organisation
JEBDE This means there will continue to be core full-time primary, internal workers who are integral to
3,2 the functionality of the organisation. These will be functionally flexible and difficult to replace,
due to high-level skills, knowledge and experience. These workers will have a big say in the
degree to which they move to remote working, and how digital technologies will be utilised in
their work. Meanwhile, there will be different types of peripheral workers. One (first peripheral)
group will be low skilled, often part-time and flexible. A second peripheral group will experience
a mix of short-term contracting, being public subsidy trainees, job sharing or be part-time.
192 Another group will comprise large volumes of agency staff, self-employed, outsourcing vendor
staff and subcontractors. We can already see many such external market-based workers
operating in traditional functions such as cleaning and catering, but also in the gig economy
and remote work contracting. Although not direct employees of the organisation, they are
important to its functioning. However, these and the first and second peripheral groups of
workers have little bargaining power, not least over whether technology will be controlling,
“informating” or displacing in their workplaces. Where it makes economic sense to the
organisation, managers will use remote working as the cheapest, optimal alternative for
harnessing these “peripheral” and market-based labour pools. In so doing, managers will have
to take into account some real challenges – on modes of control, security issues, motivational
challenges and also corporate social responsibility concerns.
A side note on home and remote working in this model. Working from home is a subset of
remote working – working potentially from any location. Will remote working become the
dominant mode, as many have suggested? Not surprisingly, we have seen a rising uptake in
both remote and home working over the last 10 years, not least because of improvements in
enabling technologies. MGI (2020b) noted that the potential for remote work is highly
concentrated in a handful of sectors, such as information and technology, finance and
insurance and management, and executives surveyed from those sectors show greater intent
to deploy their employees remotely. But the study also pointed out that more than 60% of
workers in the US economy, for example, cannot work remotely, particularly blue-collar
workers, but many “knowledge workers” as well. Their jobs require at least some physical
presence. In less developed economies, the share of workers unable to work remotely is even
higher. There is also the role of executive decision. McKinsey found some support for
allowing a minority of workers to work remotely for two days a week post Covid-19, but from
late 2022 across 2023, many executives became more cautious about the challenges and
economics, and productivity implications of managing home and remote working. (Forsdick,
2022; McKinsey, 2023).
Clearly home and remote working fit easily into the model represented in Figure 3, but
question marks are increasingly being raised about the productivity of virtual working. Apart
from distractions and social conditions at home, several studies showed that virtual
communication could curb ideas generation, and that firm-wide remote work caused the
collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between
disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an
increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects made it harder for employees
to acquire and share new information across the network (Brucks & Levav, 2022; Yang et al.,
2022). After the necessary remote working during the pandemic years, Forsdick (2022) found
that less attractive economic conditions raised concerns over remote worker productivity, and
restricting home working became a symptom of executives re-asserting control. McKinsey
(2023) estimated that 20–25% of workforces in advanced economies could work from home in
the range of three to five days a week (which would be four times more remote work than pre-
Covid-19). But not all work that can be done remotely should be, for example, negotiations,
brainstorming and giving sensitive feedback. This supports the broader point that Brown and
Duguid (2017) make about the social life of information – that we have to look beyond mere
information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it.
 Remote working is not just a practical but also an economic and social issue. We already Digitalisation
know that the net productivity from remote working has proven to be quite strong and is likely and the future
to be even better if done at greater scale. However, there is the chance that quite a lot of work will
be included that is not suitable for remote working, and there may be some fallout when
of work
unanticipated costs arise. This is where social and cultural factors kick in. These can be societal
(acceptable norms, social legislation), organisational (applicable to which kinds of workers,
impact on culture, does work need more interpersonal contact) or individual (worker
preferences, type of job, home situation) level. In the author’s view, post-pandemic, economic 193
factors are likely to win out, at least for a while, but remote working will only greatly accelerate
if the social factors are fully supportive (Willcocks, 2020b). The following will be two key issues:
Is it more productive? And does it cost less? One then has to add in some critical moderating
social factors, for example, specific employee circumstances, social responsibility and
legislation issues, childcare arrangements and impact on the firm’s wider culture.

Challenges and ways forward

So the challenges of home and remote working do add in some wrinkles into the story of the
digitalised flexible labour model. But there are some bigger issues inherent in this way of
managing work, people and technology. Thus, a 2021 study reported that over three quarters
of respondents were not sufficiently prepared to manage a workforce consisting mainly of
external participants. Our ongoing research (Willcocks et al., 2023) is more granular and is
discovering emerging, unanticipated challenges.
(1) If the model is assembled through a series of short-term responses, sooner rather than
later, organisations “run out of road”. There needs to be a strategic intent to look after
the sustainability of the business over a moving five-year time horizon.
(2) Core workers are key as they carry the culture, core skills and provide vital agility in
today’s volatile, uncertain environment. However, there are signs that the model in
practice is eroding organisational cultures, and also that not only employees do not
behave as core workers – too often they seek to leave the organisation in search of
career progression – but also employers do not treat their employees as core – thus the
renewed emphasis during 2023 on employee experience to right this trend.
(3) The peripheral arrangements tend to be transactional and contractual in character –
this does not breed key cultural values amongst these workers. Furthermore, as we
found when looking at outsourcing, the management and transaction costs of
operating contractually can be surprisingly high.
(4) The model needs to be operated as a strategic approach to labour utilisation, with a
core group responsible for ensuring that both core and peripheral workers are
properly treated and trained to do the tasks allocated to them. There are indications
that HR functions are not up to this task in most organisations. If not, then it is
definitely an area to be worked on.
(5) Does this mode of operating respond sufficiently to skills shortages? Clearly, it makes
labour utilisation more flexible, and can draw on a wider, even global talent base. It
can also harness the expanding possibilities of automating work, human-machine
work design and cloud-sourcing a digital workforce. In the best versions, core
workers will receive substantial training and development. But old habits of cutting
training budgets first die hard, especially when the organisation is struggling, or at
least acting early to lower costs, protect the balance sheet and spending more on
resilience, for example in cybersecurity and supply chains. Historically, “peripheral”
JEBDE workers have been left to fend much more for themselves, while “the war for talent”
3,2 has been less about training and development, and much more about competitive
hoovering up skills at the market price. That tends to create winners and losers, not
skills surpluses.
There are some constructive ways forward. One view amongst our research respondents is
that retaining and building the core workforce has to be the priority target. There has to be
194 strategic clarity around that objective. One part is defining a core worker in the light of
strategy and changing contexts. This is, in practice, by no means easy to do if organisations
do not have great clarity about their purpose, operating model and values. And our recent
research suggests that all too many lack such clarity (Willcocks et al., 2023).
Internal labour markets and high-velocity horizontal fast-tracks can do much to
encourage and develop core workforce members. This was a big practice amongst major
Japanese companies in the 1980s, when they were at the height of their success.
There is a lot of evidence that organising into small cross-functional teams and being
given discretion on how to achieve measurable goals and performance are productive uses of
core labour, and indeed some other peripheral workforce members.
Peripheral workers need to be drawn closer into the main organisation and its culture. For
example, adopting across the organisation principles of economic integrity, societal equity
and environmental integrity and fair reward might help here. One of the important findings
on remote workers is that they experience work-home interference, poor communication
procrastination and loneliness. Closer monitoring and intensifying the work load tend to
undermine rather than make such workers more productive. Meanwhile, much more social
support, including some 1–2 days in the work office, seems to have the most beneficial effects.
These are just some observations. Dramatic skills shifts require major actions and
interventions by governments, educational systems, businesses and workers themselves,
sustained over time. But how the flexible labour organisation is managed will have a lot of
consequences for labour attraction, retention, building the skills base, the utilisation of
technology and the levels of productivity achieved.

Research directions
This paper has put forward a review of the existing research to suggest where the
technologies are leading, and what their work and skills impacts, and management
implications, could be to 2030. But in an age of fast history, and uncertain, volatile business
environments, the judgements made can only be provisional. Future research needs to
continually revisit what emerging technologies are likely, for example 5G, quantum
computing, generative AI, their speed of deployment and their likely impact on organisations
and labour markets. Fortunately, a range of pertinent macro studies are regularly produced
by academics, research arms of management consultancies, technology companies and
banks (e.g. McKinsey, Infosys, Asian Development Bank), national governments and global
institutions (e.g. World Economic Forum, OECD, the World Bank. However, their findings
need to be critiqued and synthesised as they regularly use different methods and databases
and exhibit different levels of research rigour.
Secondly, the Willcocks thesis that there are eight qualifiers to the assumption that
automation and digital technologies will be deployed rapidly with massive impact on how
work is done, job numbers and skills needs to be continually re-tested. A part of this is
whether these eight qualifiers will be equally influential into the future. Also, whether other
factors are emerging that might accelerate or slow the pace of technological change. It is also
possible that the thesis only applies to early phases of technology adoption, and that a middle
period will see much faster deployment as the technology “crosses the chasm”. Research here
could proceed by looking at the possibility that there are stages of growth for emerging
technologies. One could see researchers looking at each technology/application, for example Digitalisation
generative AI, and plotting the likely growth path, and then seeing whether such a growth and the future
path was common, or not, for all emerging digital technologies.
Thirdly, this paper has suggested a novel thesis that virtually nearly every study
of work
predicting large-scale job loss as a result of the adoption of digital technologies assumes that
the amount of work to be done remains stable. This paper has argued, based on the
exponential growth of data, the increases in audit, regulation and bureaucracy, and the
challenges these digital technologies are creating (e.g. cybersecurity, generative AI and 195
intellectual property issues), that, in fact, the amount of work to be done globally increases
annually by at least 10–12%, depending on the sector. Future research could usefully find the
evidence for whether this is a valid conclusion, going forward, and if so, what difference
making this assumption would make to the statistics regularly being produced on the future
of technology and work.
Fourthly, there has been a long-standing conflation conceptually between the impacts of
automation (robotic process automation, cognitive, intelligent automation, AI) and the impacts
of other emerging technologies, for example, social media, digital fabrication, Internet of
Things, augmented reality and blockchain. Further confusion arises where increasingly these
technologies are being combined. Conceptual confusion does not help understanding or
research efforts. Future research could helpfully carry out more disaggregated studies so that
the impacts of each technology, and technologies in combination, are actually having.
Fifthly, this paper has put forward an emerging digitalised flexible organisation model
which will shape how technologies are adopted, shape organisations and interact with the
future of tasks, skills and job types. This paper has also challenged the potential effectiveness
of this model as a mode of management. Future research could usefully investigate the
applicability of the model – is this really happening in this way? Research will also be needed
to verify whether the posited challenges actually emerge, and whether the model is an
effective way of managing future organisations effectively.

Conclusion
On a broader front, Willcocks (2020d) aimed to provide the evidence that, beyond the
“hype-fear” polarisation in media headlines and passing also into some academic studies,
a much more complex and nuanced set of changes were underway under the headings of
automation and “AI”. Following Willcocks, Oshri, and Kotlarsky (2024), the paper suggests
eight major qualifiers to the notion that automation will be rapid and global in impact, and
will result in massive net job loss. The qualifiers are:
(1) Tasks and activities in jobs will be automated, rather than whole jobs.
(2) Many studies predicting job losses ignore job creation from automation.
(3) Organisations choosing automation technologies experience many development,
implementation and use challenges.
(4) Automation technologies are never born perfect.
(5) Distinctive human skills and strengths remain necessary for many work-based
activities.
(6) Ageing populations and lower birthrates impact adversely the workforce available.
(7) There are existing and predicted skills and productivity shortfalls.
(8) There are and will continue to be exponential increases in the amount of work to be
done.
JEBDE On the last point, we conclude that there may well be, from now to 2030, an exponential
3,2 annual growth of 10–12% in the amount of work to be done, depending on sector and country.
The growth arises from dealing with the exponential growth in data, increases in audit,
regulation and bureaucracy, and from the challenges digital technologies bring with them.
One such challenge is the dramatic skills shifts required with digital technologies, not least
to support their development and operation. But one conclusion here is that though the shift
will be towards more cognitive, digital, non-repetitive kinds of tasks, distinctive human skills
196 will continue to be valuable in the workplace.
Looking at the future leveraging of technology and labour, we conclude that, either for
short term or strategic reasons, managers are moving towards adopting a digitalised flexible
labour model that utilises the flexibilities of labour and technology using a core-periphery for
of organising. We predict that managers enacting such a model will encounter at least five
major challenges they need to deal with for the model to be truly productive.
Overall, the conclusion is that we need to move on from the rhetoric and reality of “robo-
apocalypse”. Willcocks (2020a) suggested that “robo-apocalypse” was neither likely, cancelled
nor postponed, but a misdirected narrative framing. Robot myths form a persistent way of
thinking about anxieties and machines very relevant to our rising dependence on information
and communication technologies. From this perspective, it is interesting that automation as
robotics and the automation of knowledge work have been conflated throughout the debate
with the much bigger phenomenon of digitalisation, involving at least ten sets of major digital
technologies. Robots represent a narrative, symbol and repository for our anxieties, fears and
hopes when it comes to relating to our self-created machines (Willcocks, 2020c). As the
technology becomes more virtual, opaque and less visible, so humans feel the need to make
sense of the machines by rendering them in physical form. This appears to be a deep-set, human
psychological need, not easily circumvented or substituted for. In the author’s view, it is
misleading to think in this way, and dangerous to allow such beliefs to inform policies. Covid-19
has clarified that there are much bigger anxieties to be had concerning the future of work, to
which technology may contribute, but also help reduce.
The practical implications of this paper are that we should be focusing not on job loss but
on the dramatic skills shifts needed in the next few years if the major economies are to exploit
the potential of emerging technologies and improve on the likely serious shortfalls in
productivity and economic growth. This has also training implications for governments,
educational institutions, corporations and also for individual personal development and life-
long learning. The paper has also suggested that while organisations tend to be moving in the
direction of deploying a digitalised flexible labour model to take advantage of the flexibilities
that emerging technologies can offer, they would be wise to deal with five inherent challenges
if the model is applied as a series of short-term fixes, rather than in a strategic manner.

Notes
1. Bank of America Merrill Lynch report detailed in Cybersecurity Investing News, 9th September
2015. Other figures from composite news sources. As another example, concerns about fake news
through social media have led to Facebook employing fact checkers in 20 countries.
2. Chad Brooks in Business News Daily, 16th April 2015.
3. David Shimkus in HR Technologist.com downloaded 6th April 2018.

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Corresponding author
Leslie Patrick Willcocks can be contacted at: [email protected]

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