Towards Phygital Organizations: How robots can shape the future of work and how HR(M) can cope with their introduction

The digitalization of work and jobs is challenging the traditional contextual-based organizational practices. Employees and employers are facing changes in times, spaces and ways of working. The digital disruption is causing a crisis of the previous models (Riemer, Gal, Hamann, Gilchriest, & Teixeira, 2015). Phygital environments are one of the repercussions of this digital transformation. In this environment the digital and the physical dimensions of the space are hybridized. They are characterized by context awareness, embeddedness, and natural interaction (Gaggioli, 2017). Phygital concretely spreads in workplaces through artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and sensors; particularly, employees have to cope with the introduction of robots. In order to manage these hybrid teams, HRM should understand how organizational members could perceive the decision to implement these machines by management and employers and how to talk about robots introduction. This study aims to comprehend how online communications deal with robots implementations at work. It investigates Discourses conveyed through TED talk format, which is a kind of public speech that could be defined relevant to the co-construction of social representation (figured worlds). The purpose is to present some insights to support HRM in: 1) being aware of possible scenarios related to the use of robots in workplaces; 2) planning and sharing strategic communications that allow an effective implementation of robots. In this way, it could be possible to guarantee employees’ well-being and employers’ interests. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis, which is a technique of discourse analysis, was applied to analyze the corpus. It allows to develop evidence-based interpretations and to detect Discourses (Jones, 2012). Social Subjects use Discourses during interactions to spread figured worlds and ideologies (Gee, 2014). The corpus was made up by the TED Talk playlist “What happens when robots take our jobs”. The AntConc (Anthony, 2018) software was used. The analysis consisted of the following steps: 1) detection of keywords (reference corpus: BNC), sequential and non-sequential patterns; 2) identification of Discourses; 3) discussion of findings with other team members. This contribution could give practical hints to HRM in how managing first steps of human-robots coexistence at work, which introduces a new complexity factor in socio-technical systems.