A (slight) pause in the robot job takeover

Quick report for the last day of July from the robots are taking all the jobs frontier. It looks like, at least for now, one of the important, (and widely held) jobs that has seemed most vulnerable to eventual robot takeover may remain the province of humans a little bit longer.

The job is over the road truck driver, a job that has been in the news plenty lately, mostly in the context of pretty significant labor shortages. Shipping companies and manufacturers are having a hard time recruiting new truck drivers into what is a demanding profession, the existing supply of truckers are starting to age out of the workforce, and efforts to improve pay and conditions for truckers, (which in theory helps with recruiting and retention), have so far had mixed results.

These factors, combined with the seeming dozens of high tech companies actively working on self-driving transportation technologies have led many industry observers to predict that self-driving trucks and associated technologies would sooner than later begin to be introduced into the industry. It makes sense for sure, the combination of a human labor replacing opportunity, with a technology that has been in development for quite some time, and a clear economic need that continues to grow have created what most industry experts considered a kind of perfect storm for truck drivers. In fact, all the coverage and noise about how the profession of truck driving is doomed, (for people), probably is contributing to the current truck driver shortfall. Who wants to enter an industry where 5 or 10 years from now you'll be replaced with a self-driving truck?

But some news broke a couple of days ago that may give this entire narrative pause. Our pals at Uber, long-considered one of the leaders in developing self-driving trucks and technology is stepping back from their development efforts. From a piece covering the news in Venture Beat:

Uber is shifting resources away from the self-driving truck unit within its Advanced Technologies Group, the company announced today in an email to reporters. For the time being, it’s ceasing development on the autonomous freight platform it acquired from autonomous tech company Otto.

“We’ve decided to stop development on our self-driving truck program and move forward exclusively with cars,” Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, said in a statement. “We recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh, and as we look to continue that momentum, we believe having our entire team’s energy and expertise focused on this effort is the best path forward.”

It's a pretty interesting move by Uber, who has had a bunch of other problems to deal with over the last couple of years, but to shift their self-driving tech development and focus from trucking to cars probably indicates the trucking problem is much tougher to solve than they realized.

Truck drivers, as it has been reported, do plenty of other things besides keep the vehicle between the white lines on the freeway. Load inspection and balancing, monitoring vehicle performance, consideration of local weather and traffic conditions, and finally, negotiating the often tricky and challenging last miles of a delivery and plenty more. Uber likely has found that solving all of these problems and delivering true 'self-driving' trucking solutions has turned out to be harder than it seems.

And that is probably a lesson we can take in other domains as well. As robots and technolgy advance in capability, it can be easy to underestimate all the added value and unique value that humans bring to their work. It's not easy building a self-driving truck that can replace a human truck driver.

It's probably not going to be easy to build technology to replace you or me either. (Let's hope).

Have a great day!

Job Titles of the Future: Chief Non-alcohol Beverages Officer

A quick dispatch for a middle of Summer Friday from the often-imitated, easily duplicated Job Titles of the Future series. For the latest offering I submit a job title I've never seen before - 'Chief Non-alcohol Beverages Officer'. For details, see this piece from Fortune:

American beer drinkers keep shunning Bud, and Anheuser-Busch InBev is going to extreme measures to meet their changing tastes.

The brewer announced Thursday that revenues in the U.S. had slumped by 3.1% in the second quarter as sales of its major brands—Budweiser and Bud Light—continued to drop. U.S. beer sales dropped 5% by volume.

At the same time, it announced that it will create a new executive position—chief non-alcohol beverage officer—as a response to Millennials and “Generation Z” drinking less than their elders. Lucas Herscovici, currently global marketing VP of strategic functions, will fill the role. Nonalcoholic drinks constitute some 10% of AB InBev’s volumes, and it’s aiming to boost the proportion of low and no-alcohol sales to 20% of the total by 2025, reports theFinancial Times. But in the second quarter, the category fell a damaging 43%, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This announcement about the new C-Level job role from Anheuser-Busch InBev was interesting to me for three reasons:

1. It shows, at least at the surface, that the organization needs to react to changes in customer attitudes, tastes, and preferences with a significant and high-level talent/people strategy response. In the past, I guess forever, Anheuser-Busch InBev didn't need to consider this market and this role. Their business was selling beer. Now their business is changing to one that is more about meeting the customer's needs/desires for refreshment - a wider, deeper, (and maybe for them in the long run), a more lucrative market.

2. This shift in Anheuser-Busch InBev's business is another great example and reminder of the challenges that all kinds of legacy, established businesses have when trying to adapt to shifts in customer attitudes. The company knows that it needs to focus more on non-alcohol beverages moving forward, but at the same time has to try and protect and strengthen its core, legacy regular beer business. Becoming more nimble and agile to chase new markets while at the same time having to rely on declining core businesses for profits and cash flow is the classic big company challenge. I am a fan of many Anheuser-Busch InBev products, so I am hoping they navigate these challenges successfully.

3. It's the summer, it's just about the weekend, and an article about a beer company essentially just drew me in. Hope you have a great weekend, have a cold one if that's your thing, and Cheers! 

No more free lunch, at least for some tech workers

The on-site, catered, or in-house chef-prepared free lunch (and potentially even breakfast, dinner, and endless snacks and drinks) has long been a stable of high-tech companies all over the country, but is most typically centered on the Silicon Valley and San Francisco startup scenes.

Free meals and snacks have become so commonplace (and celebrated), that many companies see the benefit/perk as simply a cost of doing business in order to attract and retain the best talent, (and probably to keep them on-site and working longer hours, and less distracted throughout the day). Heck, most of us are too busy to do much more than have a sandwich and an Diet Dr. Pepper at out desks for lunch anyway - who has time to head out to a restaurant? So making that grab and go and devour lunch in 12 minutes routine much more satisfying by making the food both free and delicious at least gives many tech workers a benefit that the rest of us can only admire from afar.

Well if some Mountain View and San Francisco public officials get their way, the free lunch benefit may finally succumb to the old maxim 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.' Details of what these city leaders have in mind come from a recent piece on Business Insider - San Francisco Bay Area Cities are Cracking Down on Free Food at Facebook and Other Tech Companies:

It's no secret that Facebook employees love their office meals. On Instagram, there are countless photos of free meals — from sushi to tacos to coffee waffles — served at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California.

But come this fall, when the tech giant moves to a new Mountain View office complex called the Village, that perk will no longer exist.

That's because the city is prohibiting companies from fully subsidizing meals inside the Village, a rule that could spread to other Bay Area cities in the future. Free food is a popular perk at tech companies throughout San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

On Tuesday, San Francisco legislators proposed a similar ban, the San Francisco Examiner reports. If passed, it would adjust zoning laws to bar new construction of on-site workplace cafeterias. (The ban wouldn't be retroactive, however, so on-site food at companies like Google and Twitter would still be available.)

A quick look at the details of the rules in Mountain View and the proposal in San Francisco do show that there are or could be at least some decent-sized loopholes that companies can walk through in order to keep providing employees free lunch. Companies already providing the perk are exempt from the new rules, and the "fully subsidized" language in the rule seems to open up the opportunity for companies to at least heavily subsidize or discount food they bring into the office for employees.

But having said that, let's contemplate for a moment what might happen if these rules/bans actually do stick and new companies or new developments from existing companies discover that the on-site free lunch truly gets eliminated for their workers. 

Would there be some kind of a worker revolt? An "We Demand Our Avocado Toast and Cold Brew" march on City Hall? Would some workers actually leave or refuse to join a tech company that actually made employees leave the office and buy their own food? Might a tech company or two simply relocate or decide to build their new facility in a more "free food friendly" location?

Why am I asking so many questions about free lunch? Probably because I have not worked anywhere that offered such an awesome perk.

Because if I did, I'd probably still be working there. 

What do you think, should governments be regulating the perks that companies can offer their workers?

Sounds like a bit of an overreach to me. Now you will have to excuse me, I have to go make my own lunch.

Have a great day!

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 331 - Accountability, Culture, and Workplace Investigations

HR Happy Hour 331 - Accountability, Culture, and Workplace Investigations

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Dana Barbato, InvestiPro

Sponsorsed by Virgin Pulse - www.virginpulse.com

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, hosts Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane talk about workplace investigations with guest Dana Barbato, Founder and CEO of InvestiPro, a cloud-based employee relations platform that supports HR through employee incident reporting, automated workplace investigations, and timely prevention analytics. On the show we talked about the current climate of HR and workplace investigations, how it probably has never been a more important topic in HR, (think about Uber, Intel, Papa John, and so many more current examples), and how when done right - workplace investigations can strengthen an organization's culture, create accountability, and show employees how much the organization is committed to their values and mission.

Dana shared some of the most important things to remember when carrying out effective investigations, and how modern technologies can assist HR leaders in creating the consistency needed to undertake the investigative process, and reach the best and most fair outcomes.

Additionally, we had a heated debate on the merits or demerits of flavored or 'stunt' Oreo cookies and the importance of air conditioning in the summer.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, on your favorite podcast app, or by using the widget player below:

This was a really interesting show, thanks Dana for joining us.

Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show wherever you get your podcasts - just search for 'HR Happy Hour'.

From 20 Years Ago: 5 Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Over the weekend I found my way, (don't ask how), to the transcript of a 1998 talk given by the late author Neil Postman, ('Amusing Ourselves to Death, 'Technology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology' and others).

In the talk, titled 'Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change', Postman runs down how he saw advances in technology, (computers, cars, planes, medical devices, etc.), impacting people, society, work, and even technologies coming next. It is an incredibly interesting, and I think prescient, take on how technology disperses across the population, influences our behaviors, and changes, well, almost everything. And what was just as interesting to me was the fact that much of Postman's thinking and work about the impact of technological change was done between 20 and 30 years ago.

I definitely recommend reading the text of the full talk, (link here), but in case you don't have the time, here are the five main points Postman made on technological change (with a little bit of commentary and perhaps an update for 2018 from me).

Point 1 - Culture Always Pays a Price for Technology

In this point Postman was essentially stating that every technological advance is accompanied by some negative repercussions and impacts. He wanted us to make sure we did not only focus on a new technology's advantages and gave equal attention to its inherent disadvantages. Postman was specifically talking about computers here, but in 2018 the obvious example would be social media - Facebook, Instagram, etc. For all the benefits of these platforms the negative consequences have to also be considered.

Point 2 - There Are Always Winners and Losers in Technological Change

Postman states "The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all."

Everyone's experience with new technology is unique. And some technologies are going to harm or displace or even render non-essential people and jobs that a particular technology disrupts. And of course some people are going to benefit from that disruption. We are cognizant of this, just think about how many 'robots are going to take the jobs away' articles you see, but at the same time we're not sure how it will indeed play out.

Point 3 - Every Technology Has a Philosophy Which is Given Expression in How the Technology Makes People User Their Minds

There was actually a little more to this point, but you can read the entire talk for the additional context. But Postman was basically saying that every technology has a kind of predisposition, or that proponents of a given technology are often predisposed to think a certain way. For 'tech' people, every problem is one of data, analysis, algorithms, etc., and they can have a tendency to think about the world and its problems as simply data challenges. The drawback of this approach is to limit the importance and influence, (or to ignore altogether), human factors like emotion, judgment, even empathy. We have to always be mindful of how our chosen technologies shape and inform our thinking.

Point 4 - Technological Change is Not Additive, it is Ecological

This point is perhaps Postman's most intriguing idea about technological change. He makes the point using an analogy of placing a drop of red dye into a beaker of water. Soon, the entire beaker of water takes on a subtle shift from clear to light red. Every part of the water has been changed by the one drop of dye.

Extending the analogy to business-driven technology change, Postman suggests that the modern-day technology business innovators, (Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.), are effectively creating massive changes in how people and businesses interact with technology, and like the red dye doesn't care that is changing the entirety of the water, these tech leaders don't care about the massive changes their technologies are driving. Postman cautions us back in 1998 about this phenomenon and in 2018 I don't think we have to be reminded about the potential for negative effects in society of too much power and influence accruing to a small group of technology titans.

Point 5 - Technology Tends to Become 'Mythic'

By 'mythic' Postman means that once technologies achieve a level of adoption, we, (especially newer generations), forget that these technologies were actually invented by someone, and at a particular place and time. The internet did not always exist. Neither did texting or Tweeting or having GPS on our phones at all times. The caution of this mythic status, argues Postman, is that once these technologies become an essential and inherent element of our lives they are exceedingly difficult to change. Postman uses the example of television in his talk, but in 2018 we could easily think about how much people would revolt if changes were suggested to social media or mobile phones. What if Facebook decided to limit your time on the platform to 10 minutes a day? Most of us would be better off, probably, but we would never let it happen.

Really interesting observations, and probably perhaps a little ahead of their time as well. While in 1998 when this talk was given society had seen and was seeing some pretty dramatic advances in technology, and the rate of mainstream or widespread technology adoption was accelerating, it is probably safe to say that now, 20 years later, these kinds of advances are even more dramatic and important.

Have a great week!