Robots have already made their way in the manufacturing industry, where they are programmed in a way that they know exactly what they have to do, while the human presence is only there to control and monitor the automated processes. In order for this to work smoothly, the processes and materials to be processed have to be of exactly the same kind. In other words, they must be standardized. Only then, the 'colleague' robot can build the same part in the same place on a production line for e.g. a vehicle.

Staff in the banking and financial services (FS) industry are three times more likely to follow processes “rigorously” than government workers, according to new research surveying senior decision-makers by Digital Intelligence company ABBYY. In fact, almost half (46%) of banking and FS workers rigorously follow the rules, compared to just 15% in government.

Although we’ve seen numerous office epitaphs in recent weeks, we believe the pre-pandemic workspace isn’t going away anytime soon. Why?Organizational life is founded on relationships. Sure, the current remote work experiment has demonstrated that more jobs can be done virtually than many managers previously assumed. But jobs are comprised of tasks; organizations are comprised of relationships. And relationships require ongoing – and often unintended – interactions.