2022: A WORKPLACE ODYSSEY

The year was 1968, and a futuristic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, pitted man vs. machine in a battle for domination. Today, the massive HAL 9000 might be the size of a tablet computer, but fears of technology taking over are nothing new. Many pundits and prognosticators have imagined a machine-run society where superpowerful robots either enslave humans or give us lives of leisure. Technology is advancing quickly--consider, for instance, how much mobile phones have changed in just the past five years--but the future workplace isn't all about technology. Companies are looking for ways to bring the future to the present using teamwork. Human teamwork. People management practitioners, researchers and consultants Workforce interviewed predict that over the next 10 years organizations also will likely turn more to nontraditional sources of labor, tap "crowdsourcing" for performance management and use brain scans to optimize the way they assign tasks.