The Empathy Advantage

2Understand Your Workers' New Habits

Many things conspired over many years to transform the ways in which work gets done, but none more significant than the work itself. Technology increasingly consumed repetitive and sometimes dangerous labor, moving workers off shop floors to work behind computer terminals. Service and support roles relocated to call centers around the world. Knowledge workers were becoming increasingly detached from specific workplaces; a mobile phone and a laptop were the highly portable tools of the trade.

Digital transformation experts of all stripes had mapped a path to full automation that would extend well into the 2030s and beyond. Algorithms were taking over routine, predictable work tasks and advances in artificial cognition began to demonstrate that even more complex tasks such as writing and designing could be augmented with technology.

All of this was unfolding in the first two decades of the twenty‐first century. And then, these trend lines passed through the great accelerator that was the COVID‐19 pandemic.

The pace of technology adoption and implementation accelerated so quickly that consulting firm McKinsey & Company saw businesses leap forward five years in just the first 60 days after lockdown orders took effect around the world.¹

We Are No Longer Who We Were

Prior to the pandemic, business and society had experienced a 15‐year period of exponential technology‐driven growth. Every forward step today was twice the leap of the day before ...