When I, Robot meets You, Robot

I THINK about robots a lot these days. On my laptop, I have stuck a four-point Post-it labelled "2017 Austerity Now" to prevent excessive online shopping, and prevention point 4 states: "You may lose your job to a robot". In recent weeks, though, I've come to a more optimistic view of the technological revolution. I've decided that we have been held back by corporate drones for a very long time, and a reboot is overdue.

Economist Tim Harford put it politely when he said many distinctively human skills are "not at the high end". In theory, the computers are meant to deal with the routine, repetitive tasks, allowing humans to tackle problems thorough strokes of creativity and adaptability. But many people in the corporate world have been reduced to more irritable versions of robots - cogs powering rigid organisational structures that have been created in the last few decades.

One classic example here sticks out. It is said that a large employer in Singapore does not allow its staff to address high-ranking managers in the pronoun, "you", in emails. Maybe the intention is to confer respect to the title rather than the person, but the implementation implicitly widens the gulf between pay scales. It discourages dialogue.

This also comes as a survey this month showed Singapore office workers are the least productive when compared to 10 other developed markets including the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The study by an enterprise software firm, Unit4, showed Singapore workers spend only 60 per cent of their time on their main work duties, compared with the average of 72 per cent. About two months of the working year are spent on completing administrative or repetitive tasks. That loss of productivity costs the Singapore service industry more than S$36.5 billion a year, and goes some way to explain the paltry productivity growth here.

Harford has further pointed out that it isn't the fancy high-end technology such as artificial intelligence that will spark massive change for humanity. Before the smartphone, unglamorous forms of innovation such as paper and shipping containers have transformed the globalisation of ideas and products.

History has many other examples. Before the late 1800s, aluminium was more expensive than gold until scientists found a cheap way to separate aluminium from minerals. Wives should have more time for themselves today because husbands can operate ovens, washing machines, and robotic vacuum cleaners.

No doubt, the big invention of our time, the Internet, has also brought about great distractions at work, with the scourge of emails discouraging deep thinking. But what is getting in the way of simple, yet productive innovation is not mindless behaviour alone, but that combined with bad leadership, and dubious applications of human ingenuity.

Take the low productivity growth in the building industry. Anyone who has worked with a contractor here will remember special moments of rage, as the contractor misplaces instructions written on pieces of scrap paper - while a dusty desktop computer hums in the background - when he misses appointments, and shows up when you are never at home.

It is hard to forget the moment my contractor's staff stuck two towel rings on side-by-side shelves as if they were Chinese door knockers - instead of having one in each toilet. Responding to my ire, the boss blinked, and in a valiant attempt at leadership, asked: "Can we leave them in?"

Imagine if contractors used simple digital tools such as spreadsheets and a calendar. To be sure, many interior design firms, that mainly exist to manage contractors, may go out of business. That could sum up the feared hollowing-out of middle-end jobs, but it is justifiable if the specialists - like the designers who are going beyond basic Photoshop - triumph.

What is always worth noting, is that creative practices on Wall Street led to the crippling global financial crisis, and what worsened the problem was the complex, opaque organisational structures of global banks.

But there is change in the air.

French tyre-maker Michelin is giving power back to its factory workers by pushing managers into coaching roles. This responsibilisation experiment, which has boosted productivity numbers at one Michelin plant, rolls back a crippling bureaucracy which made it taboo to install a new coat hook in the toilets if it was not in the job profile. The Singapore employer that eschews the "you" may take lessons from Michelin, which has stopped employees from varying ranks from referring to one another by the formal pronoun of "vous", replacing it with the less formal "tu".

Closer to home, one executive is awarding staff who question legacy processes, while another spends 10 minutes before most meetings to discuss if instructions make sense.

All these seem rudimentary. But amid the fourth Industrial Revolution and threats to jobs, corporate drones are awakening. The people have paused to think, for we can no longer put off the question we should have begun with: What is our purpose?