An interesting story from our contemporaries in London about skill deficits appeared recently. It is about the intersection between the two biggest workplace issues of the past few years: remote work and AI.
The news, as I see it, is this: The belief among the leaders of many of the big consulting firms is that AI tools are—or perhaps will be soon—able to take over the more straightforward tasks of consulting. That might mean clients can do them without the help of consultants, although it turns out that the issue has been less about the client’s own skills and more about not having staff to do them. More likely, the clients will not want to pay as much for the work. We have already seen big clients arguing that their law firms should be cutting their rates because AI is taking over more of the work.
This issue is a double-whammy for any business billing by the hour. If AI can take over more work, then the firms get a whole lot more done in an hour and finish projects faster. That means less time the hourly advisor can bill. If the clients are also demanding cuts in the per-hour rates, that will certainly leave a big mark on their finances.
What the consulting firms are saying is that more of their future success will be based on what cannot be so easily automated or turned over to AI. Of course, that sounds right. Exactly what can’t be done by AI keeps changing, but their bet is that it will be based on interpersonal skills.
See also: AI isn’t replacing human decision-making at work just yet
Here’s where remote work comes up short
That is where the connection to remote working comes in. Their belief, which sounds right to me, is that new hires, in particular, learn interpersonal skills in face-to-face relationships. Learning doesn’t work well in virtual meetings, in part, because we simply cannot watch how others react. That assumes we are actually paying attention. In most meetings now, it seems that participants (and I use that term loosely) have their cameras off, or worse, just send their agent to take notes.
The idea is also that employees lose interpersonal skills when they don’t see each other, and new hires never develop them. Why might this be especially so for consulting firms? Because they have a business model based on learning-by-doing. New hires are given a task that their mentor/supervisor, who might only be a year or so ahead of them, knows how to do, and the new hire initially can watch to see how it is done. Then they do it. In other words, the company is not paying for training. What is expensive about training is mainly when employers pay for someone to sit in a classroom. These models are cheap because the learner is actually producing something useful as they learn, as with apprentice systems in the trades.
So, the solution is to bring employees together more often by reining in time spent working at home. That is unpopular with employees who have to come back but may well be necessary for the next generation: The employees who already have the skills and feel that they could do their work remotely are also the ones who need to be there so others can watch them.
The caveat is that one could make a reasonable case that interpersonal skills could be taught better and faster through training. One of the problems of learning by watching is to figure out what the right lessons actually are from what we see. Many people who have been managing employees for years or even decades are still really bad at it. If you are a new hire watching a supervisor for the first time, how can you tell what is good versus bad practice and what to copy? The worst behaviors that violate social norms are pretty obvious, but good supervisors sometimes make us do important things we don’t like and might therefore seem bad to us. So, how do we calibrate that?
One of the hidden benefits of remote work is that it may have made the value of interpersonal skills more obvious, and it appears that some of the big consulting firms are now providing training and coaching on it. Maybe we had to lose them to see why they were important.
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