The writer is an associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead
Until the start of this year, the future of work was the main focus of the academics, consultants and executives whose business it is to make profitable predictions. The century of management seemed past. Some lamented the lack of new management theories. Others observed that the bureaucracies of the 20th century, whose existence depended on managers, were giving way to tech platforms that had little use for them. Algorithms were better at coordinating those platforms’ loosely affiliated and widely distributed workers. The robots were slowly coming for managers’ offices. Only tech-savvy leaders would survive.
Then the virus came, and all that future seemed to arrive at once. The pandemic turned out to be a boon for that new breed of tech leaders and their platforms, turning them from disrupters to protectors of our working lives overnight. Zoom, Skype, Slack and their likes were there to bolster the productivity of people who can work from home, the very knowledge workers whose jobs tech was meant to threaten next.