 Welcome to The Advocate, where thought-provoking topics are discussed with no-holds barred here on PlusCV Africa. We basically call a spade by its name. Today, I'm talking about the future of works in Nigeria and how productivity will matter more than hours put into works. Raymond speaks on time management and attention management. Ruth will be talking about black tax and the increasing struggles of millenials to save. Why Felix runs up this conversation with advocacy on good governance. Sit back and relax after this break. We'll be here to dissect it or stay with us. The future of work. If there's one thing we should have picked in 2020 from COVID-19, it's how we must increase our flexibility and adaptability, especially with the way we work. We have seen several companies adopt the remote working structure. Why a few traditional companies are struggling to keep up? I personally think that work has gone beyond 9 to 5. That is, resuming at 9 am and closing at 5 pm. In the coming years, employer time will no longer matter as the workplace will be driven solely on productivity and not amount of hours put in the work. Prospective job seekers will begin to seek for companies that are flexible with their working system. What is the implication for CEOs and HR experts? We must now develop a new performance metric system that measures productivity, and not by how many times I showed up in the office. Companies who do not quickly pivot into the realities of the future of work may soon begin to lose their greatest assets, which is our people. Wow. It's interesting. The dynamics are changing, and each time there is a revolution, either by a pandemic or by a human thinking. I don't want to use the word that word, because there are a lot of controversies around this. But the long and short of everything is that we should try to evolve times of change when the industrial revolution... That's a point. The industrial revolution is going from manual automation to remote automation. It started from human efforts to manual automation, where you have to go through techniques of doing things to reduce efforts. But now it's even going beyond that one, to remote automation. That means you can be somewhere and you'll be controlling something somewhere. So you don't have to be in a physical location. The idea of the advance of science and technology and especially internet technology has broken the barrier of connectivity of human resource. Sometimes you have to fly an expatriate down to your localities to do something. But in this era, you don't even have to do that. Somebody can be somewhere and correcting something. Exactly. Ruth, what are you saying? Just as what he said, I remember some firms in Nigeria had issues with millennials asking for opportunities to work from home. Now that COVID-19 happened and everyone was forced to work from home, and it seemed that productivity really did not even drop. In fact, what you can find is that it increased. So there's now the struggle of... In fact, most of these firms don't want to ask their staff to return back to the office. Because they're sending a lot of money. Exactly. Operating costs in that entire aspect has been removed. So all they just have to be concerned is how to ensure that the staff deliver. And one thing I always tell people is that millennials, they like to own their jobs. True. They really like to own their jobs. They like to ensure that no one comes and tells them that they're not pulling their weight. And because of that sense of responsibility, everyone is able to work from home. And these days, you find people applying for jobs in the U.S. and living here in Nigeria. I know some people that are working for companies in the U.K. and the U.S. and they are here in Nigeria, earning dollars, earning foreign currencies, and still able to deliver. So work has changed. COVID-19 has changed the way we do our work. And I think companies that still work in the ways of the old would stand the risk of losing quality hands. Because I understand some tech people in the past, and they're like, if you tell me to come to the office, you know that I'm not going to work for you again. And they're not the only ones I've met like that. So let's take Raymond, what do you think about this? Just chiming your thoughts on that. Yeah, so I think that the future of work, in talking about the future of work, I think it's important for people to understand that it's important to stay ahead of change. So what's happening now is that change is happening. I heard when you mentioned about people that have been swept off by the situation. That's because they are not able to stay ahead of change. You mentioned about measuring new metrics for measuring productivity. In the most sense, some people are still very traditional about how their work is being done. They want to see you do it. They want to ensure you are standing up and sitting down when they want you to do it without knowing that the world has completely, completely changed. But I also understand why these traditional thinkers have those challenges. Let's also take away the fact that there is also this issue of competence. There's this issue of competence against discipline and accountability. So you also want to look at these three things. Someone is competent, but the person is not disciplined enough to keep to time. So you have to keep struggling. You have to keep calling the person on phone. Most times they just go offline completely and they are not in touch as at when you need them and they also don't get to produce those results as when you need them and it becomes a very big challenge with traditional thinkers. They also have to make do with the fact that change is here. No matter how much you don't want to accept it, if you want to, it's like pregnancy. The more you want to keep it, surely by nine months something has to happen. So we need to start changing our mindset on how we accept the future work to know that we can actually do more by the best way it was done originally. Thank you so much. So change is here and we've got to find new ways to really focus on productivity and then increase our metrics on how we measure actual work as opposed to just hours of work. So up next is Raymond. Please do stay with us.