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The World Economic Forum forecast suggests that we are in a state of high alert. According to the economist, Oxford University fellow and author of A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind, people have worried about losing their jobs to machines since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. These fears have never been realised. However, Susskind believes that “This time it's different.

“Every day we hear stories of technologies taking on tasks we thought, until recently, only human beings alone could ever do,” Susskind notes, giving examples including “making medical diagnoses and driving cars, drafting legal contracts and designing buildings, composing music and writing news reports.

“The systems are just so much more capable today than they were at other moments when people worried.”

Charles Towers-Clark shares this view. His anxiety comes, in part, from reading Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, a novel about a two-tier society brought about by automation. Towers-Clark is concerned about the same result in real life. “If we're not careful, we're going to have an ownership class and everybody else – and we've already started towards this way.” In this case the ownership class are not owning factories, “they're owning servers.”

Devolve or die: turning doers into thinkers

Towers-Clark and his company, Pod Group, are not planning on submitting to this skewed society. “My big idea is to prepare the workforce for automation by radically devolving power and decision-making down to employees,” says Charles, “and to do this we need to empower people by changing the work environment to use their human skills rather than them acting as robots.”

“We need people who can communicate and can be creative and can see how things could be done in a different way, rather than just saying ‘this is my job, and I'm going to stick within these parameters’.”

Overthrowing hierarchy

Devolving power and flattening hierarchies was crucial to Pod’s employees taking on more free-thinking roles. “The first goal was to stop people always going to their senior to ask what they should do,” explains Towers-Clark. “So, one of things we focused on was to get rid of this idea of department heads.”

Inevitably, there was some difficulty with this challenging cultural shift. “I stayed on as CEO when I was doing all of this change,” says Charles, “people started trying to work back towards a hierarchy and, at that point, I stepped in and said ‘no, you can't do it like that’. It was a very autocratic way of doing it.”

Though a "self-management" model is not new, Towers-Clark puts an interesting spin on what he wanted to achieve by using it. “When I started the process, I said [to my employees] ‘I want to make you unemployable by anybody else’, on the basis that they would be so creative that they wouldn't be able to work in a normal hierarchical situation.”

One of the hardest parts of the process undertaken by Pod was to adopt an approach of full transparency. “I didn't really understand why it was that only bosses have the information to make proper decisions,” says Towers-Clark.

Revealing salaries was the “bellwether” for this initiative, with, predictably, a lot of resistance to doing something that the British are notoriously squeamish about.

“There were times when we had to explain to people that maybe taking a 200 percent salary increase was a little bit too much. If they wanted to take the 200 percent, they could, but once they had heard that this isn't a normal thing you do, they were like, ‘Oh, okay. Sorry, no, I'll take it down.’ And there were other times when we had to say to people ‘you need to ask for a pay rise, you're not earning enough for what you're doing’.”

Perks of the job

Not only did Pod let staff set their own salaries, within reason, they gave out staff shares. The perks didn’t stop there. Staff could take as many holidays as they liked and could work from anywhere in the world provided, as Sangita Myska puts it, “they're getting the job done in terms of helping employees develop the kind of skills to fend off automation.”

The litmus test: what has been achieved

So, what was the upshot of flatter lines of command, more transparency and of more thinking roles than doing roles?

“What we found is that we've been able to automate things and people are able to spend more time on more interesting work,” says Towers-Clark, “doing more business analysis, looking at where we can create other efficiencies or talking to customers, and that's one of the things that often falls by the wayside.”

“We've continued to grow and there's no way we're going to be getting rid of staff due to automation. It will be the opposite.”

Listen to Positive Thinking: Keeping humans relevant at work.