People, Intelligence & Innovation Research: Preliminary Insights

In early 2020, Zarion and Trinity College Dublin embarked on an academic exploration of Intelligent technology and applications needed for new work practices within the financial services industry. We have gathered the opinions and views from Financial Services professionals across the globe covering Entry to Department managers within Operational and HR roles.

Now in the early stage of research, there are clear patterns and trends emerging from the data.

Theme 1: Healthy Work, Wellness & Societal Impact

Wellness in work contributes to a person’s overall health and the quality of their relationships with work colleagues, family, friends, and their community. ​

Respondents believe that workplace strategies addressing wellbeing have the power to increase job engagement, job satisfaction and productivity. ​

Wellness is not understood or expected to be yoga or something that happens in parallel to the ‘business of work’. Rather, it needs to be integrated in how work is designed and how workers experience their working day.

Theme 2: Productivity & Work

​Disorganised, fragmented, imbalanced, and unfair workloads can impact on worker productivity, engagement, and ‘the flow state’.​

Technology may not be the barrier here – when there is insufficient information and poor teamwork, productivity significantly decreases.

Theme 3: Performance

There is a clear link between trust and performance, especially in remote work and teamwork contexts. ​With the right technology and ‘intelligent support’, employees can monitor their own performance – as opposed to being monitored by others. ​

In this sense, ‘big brother monitoring’ equates to distrust. Increasing trust by allowing employees to both self-monitor and self-manage their own work, increases wellbeing along with enhancing performance. ​This in turn generates cost savings for the business.

Theme 4: Covid-19

The future of work involves remote work/collaboration. COVID-19 has not created this – it has accelerated an emerging trend. Performance/work management and workforce surveillance continue to be key human and ethical issues to be resolved in future work systems.​

Employers, workforces, and society are now experiencing the ‘future of work’ and need to have their say in terms of how remote work and the blended workforce is supported by intelligent work systems. ​The regulator has a role too – regulation needs to change with the changing work landscape.

Addressing Issues Arising from COVID-19

Zarion Intelligent Work addresses some of the human and business issues that are arising in the COVID-19 context which includes:

• Ethical and human response to challenges including teams working remotely, upskilling staff, work distribution and monitoring and wellness in the workplace.​
• Supports strategy of business adapting to change and being resilient.
• Supports positive customer experience