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Wipro's 21 predictions for 2021

As we bid farewell to 2020, a truly unprecedented year, we surveyed Wipro leaders and our broader community for insights about what we can expect in 2021.

What we learned was inspiring, surprising, and thought-provoking. Enjoy!

Leadership & Vision

"As the global community navigates this disruption, agility and resilience have become critical not only to survive, but to thrive. Moving forward, 'fast and adaptive' will overtake 'slow and steadfast'."

Rajan Kohli • President – Integrated Digital, Engineering and Application Services, Wipro

Leadership & Vision

"Leaders know disruptions happen and they will happen again. How you choose to act, how you choose to set-up your workforce strategy so that you are dynamic in your very fabric is a crucial step so many organizations will think, plan, and act on in 2021."

Michael Morris • CEO, Topcoder

Leadership & Vision

"Having a planned vision for remote work, remote collaboration, and a blended workforce strategy now is a must. Leaders in this young decade will focus on organizations' ability to both tap outside talent and make it simple for their FTEs to do it in a way that the organization is very comfortable with. A lot of productivity is riding on getting this right."

David Messinger • CTO, Topcoder

Leadership & Vision

"As international and domestic borders slammed shut thanks to the pandemic, opportunities for freelancers opened up online. The way the world thinks about ‘work’ has fundamentally shifted; there is greater empathy stemming from shared experiences, and an openness to new ways of doing things. The time for freelance creators is now — the world is waiting."

Patrick Llewellyn • CEO 99designs • Excerpt from 99designs annual creative freelancer survey "The Freelance (R)Evolution”

Science & Technology

"The chatbot market will take off and meet projected growth numbers of 29.7% annually between 2019 and 2024."

Shantha Bai • Solutions and Innovation Head, Microsoft Practice at Wipro

Science & Technology

"Adaptive supply chains become the norm as enterprises seek to minimize future disruptions."

Sayyaf Masood • Principal Consultant, Intelligent Business Re-Imagination at Wipro Digital

Emal Rustemi • Global Business Manager at Wipro

Science & Technology

"Governments and regulators are adjusting to facilitate collaborative infrastructure development projects, which oftentimes involve complex partnerships and relationships spanning countries and even groups of countries."

Viswanathan Ramaswamy • Vice President — Communication Service Providers, Wipro

Science & Technology

"As fake news inundates people through various social-media sources, machine learning based on Genetic Algorithms will empower companies and consumers to effectively filter-out information based on authenticity and reliability."

Dr. Magesh Kasthuri • Principal Consultant, Cloud Applications and Platforms, Wipro Digital

Work Culture & Diversity

"2020 saw an extraordinary change in the culture of work, and how future-of-work tools and processes catalyzed 10 years of progress in less than a year.
In 2021, we'll see a continued expedition of this progress. We'll go from the disorganized chaos that inevitably occurs due to a massive disruption to a more organized effort to create truly networked organizations that can utilize the talents of everyone — from employees, contractors, and customers to the broader global crowd of passionate people."

John Winsor • Executive-in-Residence, Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH)

Work Culture & Diversity

"Employers and educators of the future will prioritize lifelong credentials and ability over educational scores, academic pedigree, and standardized testing outcomes."

Venkatraman Srinivasan • Director of Higher Education, Wipro

Work Culture & Diversity

"Other-awareness will become paramount. A focus on D&I will force leaders to learn to harness real differences in thoughts and perspectives rather than pretending to welcome them."

Carin Isabel-Knoop • Executive Director at Harvard Business School

Employee Health & Wellness

"Self-awareness will be key in 2021. Work-from-home flexibility will bring productivity only if you are self-aware enough to self-manage your mental and physical health."

Carin Isabel-Knoop • Executive Director at Harvard Business School

Employee Health & Wellness

"Skilling and re-skilling for the future will be crucial to ensuring life-long employability going forward. While there has been great emphasis on tech skills driven by COVID and the rise in remote working across many sectors, we see a growing need for soft skills to be paired with hard.
These include healthy psychological traits such as resilience, empathy, stress tolerance, and flexibility. Workers and leaders who embody this combination will be better equipped to navigate the future of work."

Cynthia Hansen • Head of Adecco Group Foundation and Social Innovation

Employee Health & Wellness

"2021 will accelerate the demise of cubicle life and rise of remote workers and agile teams in a gig-based global economy. Professionals will become more self-sufficient and think more independently — from home building office environments to learning the nuances of freelance life like managing 1099 taxes and working with your cat in your lap. Workers with cats in their laps are ostensibly happier, healthier, and more productive in the long term."

James Thompson • Author, The Cubicle Survival Guide

Open Talent Platforms

"Open talent platforms will add value to customers with more streamlined matching, credentialing, and provisioning while adding value to their talent community with more opportunities to upskill in new and more effective approaches (pairing learning/earning, mentor matching/support, learning by doing, etc.)."

Steve Rader • Deputy Director for the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at NASA

Open Talent Platforms

"On-demand/open talent workforce models will explode to facilitate a more adaptable/flexible approach to managing talent organization-wide; companies that optimize the use of platforms (like Communo) to operationalize this talent will win — competitively and financially."

JL Schmidt • COO, Communo

Open Talent Platforms

"Sourcing models will start to be disrupted by digital talent and innovation platforms — enterprises and global systems integrators will start to use digital talent platforms to access global, on-demand expertise at scale."

Barry Matthews • Managing Director, Re-source

Remote Team Dynamics

"The future of work in 2021 will be hybrid — humans and digital workers, in-office and remote, from inside and outside the enterprise. Orchestrating this successfully will become a core competency for successful organizations."

Eleanor Matthews • Director, Re-source

Remote Team Dynamics

"Managers will grapple with hybrid remote/co-located teams in 2021, at least in places with sufficient vaccine access, as much of the workforce will remain fully or partially remote."

Chris Stanton • Marvin Bower Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

Remote Team Dynamics

"HR teams will shift focus from remote hiring to remote onboarding. New candidates make their decision whether or not to stay with a company within 45 days of joining."

Stephanie L. Thomas • Principal Consultant, North America Talent & Change Practice at Wipro Digital

Remote Team Dynamics

"The acceleration of blended teams — full-timers with on-demand, gig talent, will accelerate further. The pandemic removed barriers to ‘new work’ models and once the blinders were off and the enhanced productivity realized, it became impossible to see ‘getting back to normal’ as a smart move. Forget the ‘new normal’ it's just what's next."

Clinton Bonner • VP of Marketing, Topcoder

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Abhigna Kashyap
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