Sunday, February 11, 2018
Robotics transformation: the time for HR
Technological transformation is generating a flood of innovative, disruptive products and services. This surge is unsettling, raises questions, and often frightens us. We see this today with the arrival of "active" robotics—autonomous, often mobile, and interacting with humans and their environment—whose deployment is accelerating across all sorts of sectors (medicine, logistics, maintenance, surveillance, exploration, etc.). The global systemic and existential questions are significant. In France, we tend to respond with dystopia, emphasizing the negative aspects. Yet, there are so many alternative futures. To explore them, we must now place sociology and ecology at the heart of the objectives for technological applications. We must launch more open, forward-looking debates within the humanities and social sciences, from which new, meaningful visions will emerge. At the same time, we must also prepare ourselves to experience a transformation process that will last 10 to 20 years. Nearly 50% of the jobs held by the 603,000 employees in the logistics sector in France are at high risk of automation within the next five years, according to a Senate report. HR and continuing education departments must therefore begin now to guide these employees toward the maintenance, management, and control of AGVs (autonomous guided vehicles), for example. However, establishing a strategy is more difficult when the timeframe is further away and the technology is emerging. Nevertheless, several concrete and pragmatic HR actions can already be implemented: staying closely informed about these technologies to better understand them; distinguishing between tasks that require human added value and those that can be automated (should customer relations be high-volume and productive, in which case a chatbot might suffice, or personalized and social, therefore human?); and integrating robotics as a project, including all stakeholders without functional or hierarchical silos. Finally, it would undoubtedly be necessary for the HR and innovation departments, as well as those responsible for CSR, to work together so that the implementation of Schumpeter's famous principle of creative destruction is more creative than destructive. "Making ONE'S 'Schumpeterian' a success" is perhaps the overarching strategic objective that can guarantee the company's success in its transformation.