With the world embracing its new norm of vastly accepting flexibility at the workplace, businesses are spearheaded toward changing work dynamics. The pandemic taught us to attain maximum productivity within four walls, and organizations have continued to succeed in this remote culture. Public Sector is not far behind. Government employees embraced digital tools to facilitate remote work when their offices reopened.
As rightly said, ‘The future is remote,’ with digitalization conquering the world along with Intelligent Automation (IA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the workforce now focuses on flexibility. With the pandemic, many businesses had to ensure all employees had every resource to work efficiently from home; although it was tedious, we all adapted well for two long years. The information the federal workers deal with is crucial and needs no additional flub; instead, a structured approach. A survey conducted by Accenture in early 2021 shows that the fastest shift to the road of effectiveness is digitization; even then, some agencies have not been able to adapt to this fully. The remote working culture has been thrilling and challenging. Remote work accompanied by next-gen technologies like AI and IA has its positives and negatives. Here are a few points of discussion:
Time management – While working from the office involves time on the commute, remote work helps to stay away from these distractions and saves time. This flexible future for government work can improve employee morale as it gives time to deal with other things. If allowed to be in a hybrid system, most federal workers could complete jobs faster, as automation takes care of the daily tasks, allowing federal workers to be flexible and more productive in less time.
Work-life balance – No doubt remote work opportunities can offer work-life balance opportunities. For example, a federal worker could acquire different skills or pursue a hobby while doing his or their job remotely; this keeps up his or their morale. The Office of the Revenue Commissioners in Ireland (Revenue) is a use case. Receiving a vast three million customer service calls a year, John Barron, CIO at Revenue, took this as an opportunity to integrate AI into his workforce. In just the first six weeks of initiation, 50-60% of calls were handled entirely by a voice bot. Employees not only got a chance to focus their efforts on tasks that can help them grow in and outside the workplace, rather than answering calls all day.
Increased employee loyalty – Federal workers are bound to be loyal, and there can be a decline in resignations if the work environment is wholesome. Although working from home can dampen an employee’s creativity as there is less human engagement. With some simple programming, the monotonous, repetitive tasks can be fully autonomous and can make employees happier when their day-to-day projects are intriguing. Why use human intelligence on redundant tasks when automation can take up this role?
Effective decision-making – Imagine a specific decision that needs to follow a traditional method, especially in the age of zoom meetings and digitized collaboration. Wouldn’t it be time-consuming? Of course, it will. Imagine an automated system set to specific rules that links data to decision-making, equipped with a feedback process that continuously self-learns and self-corrects. This system is IA at work. Having an artificial assistant inform you when it needs human revision for difficult judgment calls rather than pouring over volumes of issues by hand sounds nice, right?
Save Resources– Automating data storage processes is moving towards a green system. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the transfer of widely used software applications to the cloud would reduce energy usage by 87%. With remote working culture, all organizations encourage and support reducing the carbon footprint. Intelligent automation in the small world can help the agencies’ sustainability efforts.
Although there are some issues like security as a growing number of remote workers means a vastly distributed network with numerous access points, fortunately, zero trust architecture is a way forward that will vet every digital interaction. 2-way or 3-way authentication, i.e., can further enhance security. To avoid the human error that primarily causes the security breach, if more efforts can be put into training and changing workforce management, this issue can be dealt with efficiently.
According to a report by CISCO, as of July 2022, 58% of federal employees are working from home five days a week, and 52% are satisfied with the current remote work arrangement. In this technology-driven world, getting ahead and staying ahead, the benefits mentioned above can help us weigh both sides of the coin of evolution in the workplace. Remote or hybrid work certainly brings a lot more to the platter and can be improved from time to time with newer technologies. All this brings us to the conclusion that ‘The future is hybrid’ With so many job opportunities, it doesn’t matter which part of the earth you may be all you need is a set of skills, secured systems, and proper remote working structure to embark on this journey.
“Artificial Intelligence: Paving an Easier Path for Remote Working.” AI Paving the Way for Remote Work | IEEE Computer Society, www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/trends/remote-working-easier-with-ai.
“Automated Decision Making.” Oliver Wyman – Impact-Driven Strategy Advisors, www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2016/aug/automated-decision-making.html.
A Real Conversation Starter – Accenture. www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-96/accenture-hps-ira-creds-d5-final.pdf.
Truly Human Automation – Accenture. www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/accenture/redesign-assets/dotcom/documents/local/1/accenture-truly-human-automation-manchester-metropolitan-university.pdf.
“Uncovering the Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing.” Earth.Org, 30 Sept. 2021, earth.org/environmental-impact-of-cloud-computing/.
Cisco_Hybrid_Work_in_Government_Survey_Report_FINAL, Cisco, July,2022
