Ongoing transformation in the workplace has put a focus on reformed, sometimes niche roles to account for the varied experiences we're now seeing between working in the office, at home. The Chief Marketing Technology Officer, for example, is a role designed to help CMOs understand new marketing technologies at play.
Many similar roles are being created to facilitate the hybrid workplace. It's necessary to support a generation of digital natives, who are now joining and heavily populating the workforce, and also questioning core assumptions or ideals about what it means to be "employed."
Key Features of the Workplace of the Future
With new opportunities to find talent, and access to much wider skillsets in the talent pool, there will be fierce competition between employers to not only acquire it but retain it, as well. How do you keep those extremely skilled and valuable personnel satisfied and loyal?
Naturally, those with the best skills — and experience — will propose in-demand requests for supportive benefits, policies, amenities, and work from home perks much more. Companies that want access to their talent will comply.
Concurrently, while the rest of this is going on, automation will become the gold standard for many operations, but not why you might expect it. The idea isn't to replace manual labor or shore up those roles, but instead to support them.
Only about 50% of current work activities are technically automatable by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. What's more, 6 out of 10 current occupations have more than 30% of technically automatable activities.
The Impact of the Hybrid Workplace
In the future of work, workers will be transitioning between so many different types of work environments, including the office, home, headquarters, remote locations, and more. So, there will be many new jobs implemented to support them. A core element of that will be sustaining and improving employee engagement.
The same situation is happening with customer experience, as well. New roles are increasingly needed to support hybrid CX programs, remote service opportunities, and beyond.
Even employers that are choosing not to embrace hybrid work experiences and offer remote opportunities are being forced to change in one way or another. Almost daily, one OP-ED or news article after another lays out new reasons why people just aren't keen on coming back to work in an office full time. Sooner or later, employers that choose to ignore the problem are going to be staring it right in the face.
We need to learn how to manage things more effectively across disparate end users. The pandemic has already forced companies to adopt new behaviors, technologies, and expectations to meet a sudden paradigm shift, but many of those changes are already being called into question — and COVID isn't even behind us.
All of this happening at once, including current events, is changing the trajectory of the common workplace and its many roles. We are saying a revolutionary wave, which stretches far beyond the digital transformation we've been so busy talking about for years. New roles, new teams, new processes, and entirely new foundational elements are taking root in transformative workplaces.
New Job Roles In the Workplace
According to LinkedIn's Jobs on the Rise in 2021 report, 150 million technology-related jobs are expected to be added globally over the next five years. What kinds of roles are being created as part of that movement, though? Well they may be more niche than you might expect...
To get a feel for where things are headed, here are some of the more common roles that are starting to manifest:
Holistic Roles
- Workplace Experience Manager or Specialist
- Employee Engagement Specialist
- Workplace Wellness Consultant
- Workplace Health and Safety Compliance Officer
Marketing and Communications
- Digital Content Producer
- Mobile App Specialist
- Work-from-Home Strategist
- Experiential Consultant
- Employee Experience Liaison
Technology Track
- Mobile App Evangelist
- Workplace Ecosystem Coordinator
- Machine Learning Analyst
- Automation Expert or Producer
- Hoteling, Desk, and Spaces Manager
Customer-Focused
- Virtual Experience Coordinator
- Virtual Tour Docent
- Digital Content Producer
Leadership Functions
- Chief Marketing Technology Officer
- Digital Transformation Director
- Remote Operations Manager
Transformational Organizational Structure
Of course, the pressing question is what can we glean from this new workplace direction and these new roles? What does it mean for the future?
From the top-down, noise aside, experiences are a driving factor for all decisions both customer and employee-facing. Will improving this station, or adding a new support role, translate to a better experience for the customers? Will it make the operation more efficient, or improve employee satisfaction behind the scenes?
What it means to be at work, and what that looks like, have changed irrevocably. Health, happiness, satisfaction, these are all major issues on every employer's mind and requires functional alignment across diverse roles to truly address it.
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