Clean

The Future of Work

Published May 9, 2022, 10:00 AM

The last couple of years have been hard, but they've also pushed businesses to adapt quickly and innovate. We look at the technologies that power work.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you today? I want to talk about how small businesses are leveraging tech and how the intersection of small business and tech is shaping the future of work. But before we jump into that, let's talk a bit about the recent past. And we all know that COVID nineteen caused a level of disruption that your typical Silicon Valley startup founder would only dream of. We use that word in tech a lot, disruption, and and typically it's shorthand for we're doing this thing that's been done by other companies for ages, only we're doing it different and better. But COVID nineteen wasn't entirely different level of disruption. By the summer of twenty twenty, of small businesses had closed due to the pandemic, and some of them would never reopen. More would close over the following months, and a lot of small businesses happen to be ones that are disproportionately affected by requirements like social distancing. I'm talking about your restaurants, your nail salons, your barbershops, your tattoo parlors, and what have you. But we also saw communities rally around local small businesses that we saw an outpouring of support that buoyed businesses that otherwise would have been struggling to remain open. And we saw innovation. In fact, we saw tons of innovation. And I'm sure you have all heard the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. And if you need any proof that that saying is absolutely true, just look at the massive trends we saw over the last two years. Companies embraced digitization. Even companies that happened so much as dipped their corporate toe into the digital landscape found ways to pivot and to adapt. I can't even tell you how many stories I heard about how companies found ways to keep doing business and what I would call beyond difficult circumstances. But let me share my own experience, and I realized anecdotal evidence isn't really evidence, but I think like it's a it's a use case kind of. So obviously I podcast for I Heart Radio well before the pandemic. The way that worked is I would go into our office in Atlanta. I would book one of our studios we have four of them in the office, and I would record one or more episodes sitting in a sound booth while my producer Tari sat outside the sound booth monitoring the recording in real time, marking down all the little moments where I made a flub so that she could edit them out later. Some episodes had a lot of those markups in them. And then March twenty happened. That was a Friday, the thirteenth. Fittingly enough, that was the last day our office was open before we went into lockdown. Now, I know that because for the longest time, all the desk calendars in our office, the ones that require someone to you know, physically change them. Anyone who had a desk calendar, it was stuck on March thirteenth. I know that because on rare occasions, I had to go to the office pretty infrequently. But it did happen, so our whole operation had to shift to remote work. Now my show publishes daily, so there was no real gap in publication. We secured microphones for all the hosts. We established cloud storage solutions to upload all the audio files because you know, we're no longer recording them directly to studio computers. Our producers adapted to edit and publish shows offsite while they were working remotely. The whole operation changed from this centralized arrangement to a distributed one. March thirteenth, we're in the office. March six we're recording from home. And here's the amazing thing. Nearly every show on the network did this without an interruption in production. Now, there were kinks that had to be ironed out. Of course, not everything worked perfectly out of the box, but we adapted. To this day, our office tends to be pretty quiet. Even as things have opened up. People have adapted their work styles. We use digital collaborative project management solutions to work together. We use online video conferencing services in order to have meetings. We even have web based studio solutions to record episodes with multiple hosts. You know, when we first started, everyone was recording natively on their own devices, and a producer had to mix it all together. Now we're actually using tools that allow us to do like a studio recording, but it's a virtual one. Uh Me. I don't have to worry about that very often because I'm a solo host, but you know, I've got it. I do use it whenever I do interviews and things like that. Now, the way we do work in our office has fundamentally changed, and I believe at least some of that change is permanent. I think I'll see people in the office more regularly in the future. But I really do believe that a hybrid approach is how will work from here on out for most of us. And that's true for tons of other businesses as well, even for those businesses that cannot adopt a hybrid approach. We've seen some massive moves toward digitizing work processes, whether it's adopting online payment strategies or instituting digitized payroll services. Small businesses have evolved more in the past two years than they had in the previous decade. Now there is a lot of technology that has made all of this possible. I've been in the workforce for a long time, so I've seen some big changes in tech. When I first started in the workforce, which was not at how Stuff Works or Stuff Media or I Heart Radio, it was in a consulting firm. Well, when I first started, your average employee workstation was a desktop computer, typically a tower that was connected to a big old monitor. I'm talking about the CRT monitors, not exactly a portable solution. That's where your workstation was, That's where you had to do your work. If COVID nineteen had hit back in those days, I'm honestly not certain how or even if companies could have adapted in the wake of it, at least not without potentially putting their employees in danger. But today we have portable solutions. Lightweight laptops are commonplace. In fact, in our office pretty much everyone has one, and improvements in battery technology and more to the point, power management with laptops, I mean that a laptop can last a lot longer on a battery, even if you know you don't have an outlet to plug into at the moment. They can last a lot longer than the clunky, heavy things I used to work on back in my college days. Uh way back then, I remember having a laptop, although I wouldn't call it a laptop because if you were to put on your lap you would crush your legs. It was a portable computer that was like a very heavy suitcase. I almost think of it as like like one of those things you would see in a spy movie, except not as cool. Now, modern laptops make it possible for you to do your work from anywhere, right, I mean, that's their purpose. And before the pandemic, anywhere usually meant wherever I was traveling for work, like if I was going to c E s or to eat three or something, I would bring my laptop with me. But today it really does mean anywhere, and as things open up, working from anywhere can actually be really nice. For a couple of years, anywhere really just meant my office in my house, like it's actually a spared room. It's a guest room that we turned into an office slash studio for me. But now now that things are opening up, anywhere can also include stuff like the patio at a local coffee shop if I want to go there to research and write an episode. Patio culture in Atlanta is serious business. We love al fresco dining during that sweet spot in the spring just before the weather gets too hot. We're starting to creep toward the too hot right now, so get those patio days in why you can at Lantern's. Now. On top of that, in the old days, the computer was really where all the power was like your computer was where all the power was. And by that I meant we had to depend upon our PC to provide all the processing and all the storage that we were relying upon. Some companies had their own servers that would let you save documents to a company network drive, so you were saving your files to a server rather than your work computer. But you know, your computer was really your enabler and also the limiting factor on what you could do. But the emergence of cloud and edge computing services have completely changed that as well. Cloud services, whether it's storage, or it's compute, or it's a mixture of the two, mean that businesses can partner with providers in order to handle all that heavy lifting, and the businesses can then rely upon more nimble computer systems for employees. That is an enormous change. It creates value bull options. In some businesses, it might make sense to secure powerful laptops or other computers for employees, but in many businesses that kind of computer just isn't necessary as long as the employee has a reliable Internet connection, and we've seen a huge surgeon small businesses taking advantage of the cloud. The circumstances of the pandemic really necessitated it. But beyond that, the cloud has created new ways for businesses to you know, do business. In many cases, it has expanded businesses ability to reach new customers, sometimes customers that they never would have encountered without the migration to the cloud. And of course we're still seeing cases in which businesses are keeping everything on premises or on prem as they say in the biz, and then some of them are going with a hybrid approach where they're keeping some servers on premises and they're relying also on the cloud. And in those cases, you're typically seeing businesses really keep mission critical, high security applications and storage on premises and then offloading everything else to the cloud. And it really expands your options. When we come back, i'll talk about some other technologies that have really enabled small businesses to continue working through the last two years and ways that it's going to create new opportunities moving forward. But first let's take a quick break. We're back now getting back to connectivity. That's something that also has changed dramatically since I began working. Not only have we seen broadband access increase, we've seen data throughput capabilities explode. You know what, we considered a fast back when I first started working in the workforce, wouldn't even qualify as slow. Today we would think of it as excruciating lee slow plus. Now we're seeing more options for connectivity than ever before, whether it's a fiber connection or a five G wireless solution, or you know, even satellite Internet services for people in remote locations. There are businesses I have gone to that aren't served by hardlined UH Internet connections, or they're not really in a place where they can get reliable five G service, so they use satellites. Well, satellite services even improved, so the connectivity component for small businesses has enabled new ways to reach and serve customers. Businesses that in the past relied entirely upon you know, in person UH interactions have had to adapt to this, and a lot of them have done it incredibly well. Now. I mentioned earlier that businesses can make use of servers for in house networks, and another big change we've seen since I started working is the cost and the availability of servers. I remember, like when I started that consulting firm in the nineties, it was the first time I had ever interacted with servers outside of an academic setting, and for a while only larger companies were really able to afford servers or even have a need for them. But today servers are much more affordable and they offer businesses some incredibly useful and powerful tools. For example, employees connected to the in house server can collaborate directly, they can share files, they can share other resources with each other without having to send that information over some other network like the Internet for example, where seeing lots of businesses adopt these kinds of strate geez. Now, ideally you've got yourself a dedicated server, maybe you augment it with a VPN or virtual private network, and this becomes not just the nexus of collaboration, it also becomes a key component to companies security. So one of the ugly trends we've seen over the last two years is a serious uptick in cybercrime. We saw everything from widespread phishing campaigns that sought to trick people into handing over important information or sometimes even control of a machine or even a network, all the way up to massive state backed campaigns that targeted some of the most influential companies and agencies around the world. And this meant there was a big bright spotlight on the challenges of I T security in a distributed work setting. Well, I hate to say it, but there is no such thing as a perfect security system. However, one thing that is an important tool is a server. If employees are logging into a server, if they're logging into a company machine before they then do further explorations out into the Internet for their work. For example, I do a lot of research. So having that as a stop is important because a business owner can employ security tools to protect the business and the business's assets. On the server side, a firewall is a really good start. A firewall helps protect against unwanted traffic into a company's servers. A tool that can detect and prevent intrusion attempts and other threats can really mean the difference between business as usual and going into full on damage control. So for a lot of small businesses, incorporating a server into the business makes a ton of sense. Though we do also have to acknowledge that any security strategy also has to include employee training and understanding. Anecdotally, I have seen an uptick of phishing attempts targeting me recently. Most of those are going to my phone via text messages or to my personal email account, which suggests to me that my information is probably part of a massive database that's being traded around on the dark web somewhere. That's tons of fun. That's something you obviously want to avoid if you can, and it's certainly something that businesses want to avoid. You don't want people exploiting information at your expense, so good security practices help a lot in those cases. Something I find really fascinating is how small businesses are starting to leverage high tech solutions like machine learning and artificial intelligence and data analytics. I often get a bit narrow minded when it comes to certain things in technology. I make assumptions such as the only companies that are really engaging in those kinds of technologies are the really big ones, you know, the companies that are known for pioneering AI and machine learning. That somehow this is all confined to laboratories and people in white coats with formula. But that's really missing the point entirely, isn't it. I mean, I get it like that is like that is the most primitive way of looking at those disciplines, because why are these companies even pursuing these technologies? What is the purpose of doing all this R and D work well. Ultimately, it's to offer a product up to customers, and customers can include small businesses. So small businesses, while not necessarily at the forefront of developing the next powerful AI, are certainly taking advantage of those technologies, and more of those small businesses are doing it every day. In fact, many analysts suggest that small businesses are actually adopting these technologies faster than the bigger companies because the small businesses are more nimble, they're able to respond more quickly than the big companies are. But then, what are they using these technologies to do well. Sometimes it's for stuff that might seem kind of mundane, such as automatic transcriptions for phone calls, but that service can get really sophisticated. I'm sure some of you have had experiences in which you were using some sort of audio conferencing over the Internet, or maybe some sort of speech to text application, and you probably saw that depending on what you said, you might have some interesting options pop up. For example, I've used the notation program to remind myself of upcoming appointments and then saw that the program actually created an option for me to actively add the notation as an appointment to my calendar that automatically said, oh, I understand you want to be reminded of this event at this time on this day. How about we just add that to your calendar. And it's the AI component of this transcription service that is able to contextualize what I was saying and quote unquote understand that it meant I needed to put something on my calendar. That is phenomenal. It's something that a lot of us kind of take for granted, even after the first time we see it. But that was a huge, huge breakthrough. And that's just a simple example. I was actually on a conference call just the other day and during the call, I mentioned that I needed to email someone on our team, and during the call, a little notification popped up in the service I was using that said do you want to add this to your to do list? And it was email so and so, And it was just amazing to me. And we're seeing these kinds of services offer up even more utility as time goes on. Imagine that business gets on the phone with a supplier and that because of the phone service that they're using, it automatically ends up creating a transcription of the phone call. You have an AI component that's doing speech to text. The AI might make note of specific components of the conversation, such as any orders or sales, prices of items, or inventory or supply schedules, all that sort of stuff. We're seeing AI solutions automate many of the processes that in the old days would have to be tracked by human beings who would then input various data points manually into spreadsheets and stuff. Now a lot of that can be done automatically, and we're seeing technology enable automated solutions that any business can take advantage of. Typically it just includes securing a business license for a specific product. There are limitless scenarios where machine learning and AI are making transformative changes in how businesses operate, freeing up people in the business to focus on things other than tracking points of data. In the era of big data, a critical component is data analysis. That was something that was clear from the very beginning, but for a while, data analysis capabilities were trailing behind data gathering capabilities. We were gathering terra bytes worth of information at of a frightening speed, really, and the ability to sort through it was kind of lagging behind. Well, information is not valuable if you can't figure out what is in that information if you can't separate the signal from the noise. Fortunately, very smart programmer came up with incredible algorithms that started us on the process of being able to sort through all this information and find the meaning within it. Machine learning sped that process up significantly, and data analysis is critical, whether it's getting a better understanding of what customers want and expect, or it's for managing supply chains. Data analysis is a key component for pretty much any small business. It might not always be obvious, it might not even be formally acknowledged, it might be done more like by feel and intuition, but it's always there. It's rare for a business to be successful without some element of data analysis coming into play, and tech really makes that possible on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago. But now we're seeing powerful systems, often driven by machine learning, that can find real meaning in all the data that we've collected, and this can end up being useful to small businesses as well. Not that every small business has to comb through terabytes of data to get things done, but what might have seemed abstract in the past is now a concrete reality and businesses are using these technologies to get a better understanding of their business strategy, what works, what doesn't work. They also get a better understanding of their customers and how to do things better at lower costs with higher revenues. Now, not all the changes from the past couple of years are rosy small businesses based challenges. As ever, some of those challenges have emerged over the last decade or so. For example, pivoting to a digitized strategy brings new consequences. A big one would be the rise of the aggregators. So these are companies that collect and curate other companies. They act as a sort of clearing house or a centralized way for customers to find what they're looking for. And there are massive online stores that do this. They are numerous ones. They give small businesses a chance to reach customers UH using the internet, and they can rely on this enormous online store as their platform. But this can come at a cost. The customer may not ever associate the product with that small business. They might instead associate the product with the overall huge online store. And we've seen this a lot over the last two years. UH food delivery services in particular have really contributed to this. Restaurants can find it challenging to connect with customers directly as these delivery services become a literal go between for the restaurant and the customer. I suspect we're going to see a lot of innovation in this space as well, as small businesses find new ways to reach customers, possibly adopting hybrid approaches to do so so, in other words, maintaining a place on these larger online platforms, but also keeping their own space as well so that customers can go directly there. Maybe they'll find ways to attract customers to those owned and operated stores. I imagine we're going to see a lot more use of things like online newsletters and such in order to do that, because it kind of hearkens back to going to small individual stores rather than a mall. Right, Like you're shopping locally in locally owned stores, rather than going to a giant box store or a shopping mall filled with you know, franchised stores. I feel like that's where we're at right now, where small businesses are finding ways where they can make those connections with their customers and to perhaps not rely so heavily on aggregators or maybe we'll see aggregators shift a bit and how they operate so that there isn't this disconnect between customer and business. Finally, I wanted to mention that technology has enabled more people to pursue an entrepreneurial dream than ever before. That, to me, is something that we can't lose sight of. Technology has reached a level of affordability and utility that allows people who had a dream but no means to pursue it, to suddenly flip that switch. And this is a global phenomenon. We're seeing people who traditionally have been drastically underrepresented in small businesses chase their dreams. Technology is what is powering that. Whether it's someone in Atlanta spearheading a service that brings rashly grown produce right off the far to customers in the city, or it's a school for the deaf in El Salvador adapting to remote instruction and subsequently expanding, which meant they could accept more students, and that is an incredible benefit both to the school and to the students themselves. Tech is a foundational pillar for the future of work in general and small businesses in particular. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions for future topics that I should cover in this podcast, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite jumps come

In 1 playlist(s)

  1. TechStuff

    2,435 clip(s)

TechStuff

TechStuff is getting a system update. Everything you love about TechStuff now twice the bandwidth wi 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,432 clip(s)