Future of work - the state of play

Reviewing The Situation

“A lot of the conversation (on the future of work) feels super played out”.

Dave Cairns said this in a LinkedIN post and it really resonated with me.

There was a while when I could sit down to write this and there’d be a whole lot of debate I could tuck into and give my ‘hot take’ on. There’d be competing views, new data, lots of guessing .. er, I mean, predicting the future. But now I feel like all that stuff is done.

The arguments still go back and forth but they are just repeating themselves. In some cases, they only continue because a group of vested interests just cannot accept the reality (I don’t know what they think will happen if they do, perhaps they’re worried their heads will explode?).

Many issues that were contended quite loudly are now settled. The direction of travel is now clear, even if we don’t know how far or how quickly we will travel or even how we’re going to move forward. Regardless of what opinions people held and espoused, they are responding to the reality they face - often reluctantly, but sometimes with enthusiasm because they see the opportunities.

It explains why I have found it a bit harder to write this every week, harder to get revved up about the future of work. The heat has gone out of the debate, the freshness has gone.

I don’t like repeating myself too much (I have a shortish attention span and it bores me, let alone you poor sods) but I think it’s worth reviewing the situation. What’s been settled, what is still up for grabs and where I think smart organisations will go (the rest, well, they’ll have to take their chances. I don’t rate them that highly, tbh).

Word Up

So here are some previously ‘hot topics’ that are no longer open to debate, in my view.

The office is dead

Well, the office as we knew it is certainly dead. Turns out it was pretty sickly before COVID came along and wiped it out. There will be offices in the future but they are going to be fewer and very different to the ‘bog standard’ desk factory of the past.

If you still need proof, the Corporate Real Estate market is collapsing. No-one is building new offices, organisations are dumping office space in City Business Districts, a major debt default crisis is looming as owners have to refinance in a higher-interest environment.

The commute is dead

The idea that we would travel everyday to go and sit in a building to do our work less effectively than we could in our own homes now looks entirely nuts, doesn’t it? The savings in time, costs and, perhaps more crucially, energy are highly valued by people and having discovered these during COVID, they are not willing to give them up.

Hybrid is here to stay

The old default was that you went to an office some distance away from home to do your job, every day. The new default is that you go there for some of the week and work from or near home the rest of the time. That’s the model that employees want, even if they don’t all have it right now, or if the balance isn’t where they’d want it to be.

Return To Office mandates have pretty much failed. The only way to get people in more often than they want to be there is through coercion. Generally, employees want to come in fewer days than the execs want them in. Employees are winning here.

I don’t think ‘hybrid’ is where we’ll end up but it’s definitely where we are right now.

We’re moving towards a multitude of solutions

In reality, there were many different ways of working going on before COVID. Global corporates were already working in a distributed and flexible way. However, the dominant paradigm was of ‘office work’ being a certain way, of there being a large amount of commonality across organisations and industries.

Already we are seeing a lot of divergent developments and many different approaches being brought in. This is a symptom of the change we are seeing, which is causing a lot of innovation and experimentation. The turnkey, cookie-cutter solutions peddled by Big Con just won’t work in this dynamic environment. Each organisation will have to find their own way forward, one that suits their unique context.

This is exciting, people !

We’re not going back to ‘normal’

Which is good news because it turns out that the old ‘normal’ was a bit crap, as we can all now see.

Land Of Confusion

So what’s still up for grabs?

The ‘new normal’

Will ever be one, I mean, not what it’s going to be like. We’ve come out of a 70 year period of unusual stability and conformity that has given us the false impression that there is a ‘normal’. As well as much greater diversity within organisations, we face multiple crises and a much more volatile world. Perhaps things will settle down one day but it won’t be soon and, to be honest, I think we’re better off assuming that it won’t.

Offices

Yes, I know I said the office is dead but there will still be offices. The questions are how many, where, what for and what will they look like. Right now the smarter organisations are playing around with different concepts, seeing what works for them.

Offices are being reconfigured for collaboration, relationship-building, client entertainment and learning - the things that we need to come together for. (I think ways of doing these virtually will emerge and some exist already, but take up will be slow in the foreseeable future). There needs to be a small amount of ‘conventional’ desk-based capacity for those who prefer to come in to work.

Less but better is the direction of travel here.

Coworking

There are as many different interpretations of this word as there are of ‘hybrid’, from community focused spaces to We Work-alike corporate overspill. What’s clear is that employees are keen to use spaces that are local to them and coworking can provide some of those pieces of the jigsaw.

Organisations are moving to shorter and more flexible arrangements (as evidenced by the growing FLEX market) that provide more hospitality-style services, so they can quickly adjust their space as their needs change. I’m putting FLEX in the same box as coworking because it’s a rapidly growing and evolving area where we’re going to see a lot more innovation and new categories will emerge.

Organisations are still figuring out how to engage with this area, with regards to how much of the organisation they should have in this type of space, what type of units (divisions, teams, individuals?) and how it impacts those intangibles of culture, collaboration and innovation (the answer is it depends on how you do it).

Still quite a lot of argy-bargy around this.

Technology

Much to everyone’s surprise, it seemed, we actually had the technology for people to be able to ‘Work From Home’ when we needed it! Who knew? I mean, laptops, networks, collaboration tools and video-conferencing had only been around for, er, decades…

All right, it was a bit shit to begin with but it rapidly improved (Teams is almost usable today - unless you’re external to the organisation) and we now have the basics in place to run organisations in a distributed way.

However, we’re really just the start of creating the technological infrastructure and platforms that will really make a difference going forward. What we see now is still about working synchronously in a virtual way. We need tools that support new ways of working and especially asynchronous working to really squeeze the juice out of this change. We need to be untethered from time as well as location.

Oh, and AI. Of course. I think that can remove a lot of friction and the clunkiness of the current platforms.

Hierarchies

Hierarchical, command-and-control power structures remain the default and predominant organisational model. Whilst they seemingly brought great advantages over the past several decades, they have increasingly become dysfunctional and unsuited to the modern environment.

Although there are many attempts to move away from them, they persist for structural and psychological reasons. However, the changes we have seen, the move to distributed and asynchronous working and the adoption of the new ways of working, have put them under increasing strain.

I have no doubt that some will persist. The Status Quo will protect and sustain itself. They bring great power to a few and they are not going to let that go. However, it could be that they impose a cost dis-benefit on themselves. Newer forms of organisation will be more agile, adaptable, sustainable and profitable. Will they simply be out-competed?

Tomorrow Never Dies

So, where are we going?

Well why the hell should I know!!! I’m just making it up as I go along like everyone else!

But I can say where I think we should be going.

The future of work has to be about realising the potential of people, of enabling them to have well-lived lives. It has to be about sustaining the planet and improving the lot of all of humankind. It has to be about Decrapifying Work. (No surprises there!).

Some of what’s happened so far has helped to do that. Hybrid working has undoubtedly improved the quality of life for many and there’s plenty of evidence that people are happier and healthier as a result.

A big part of this is the autonomy people now have over their time and their work schedules.

Organisations should move towards giving their employees greater autonomy and the agency to take action on what they see as the priorities and the problems. This is what my friend Geoff Marlow would call “having sense-making, decision-making and action-taking closely coupled at all levels of the organisation” and I would say, specifically, at the actual workface. It’s the only way organisations can have the responsiveness and innovation they need too succeed today.

I think many successful organisations of the future will have largely dismantled hierarchy and its power structures and consist of small, autonomous, self-organising teams that are networked together on powerful technology platforms, serviced by a small core of support functions. The technology will allow these teams to access the resources and functions they need, whilst maintaining the necessary regulatory and financial overview. The key difference is that the power will reside in the teams who will self-direct, and through them the organisation’s direction will emerge.

There are already examples of this sort of organisation (Haier is a well-advanced, well-known and successful one, although it’s emphasis is on entrepreneurialism rather than being people-centric). There are challenges in bridging between these organisational forms and existing financial and regulatory structures, not to mention common perceptions of what an organisation is. These organisations will have fairly porous boundaries, with individuals and businesses having a changing relationship with the ‘ecosystem’ and the core entity. Someone could be an employee, a contractor, a consultant and run a company that’s a supplier, all as part of one ‘career’ in the organisational ecosystem, for example.

Everyone’s career will be more fluid and they will change status, employer, industry and even career with much more frequency. Again, autonomy and life satisfaction will be driving this and organisations will welcome it. There will need to be changes in how governments view this for employment, tax and benefit reasons but I think there will be pressure from many quarters for them to do this - as well as their self-interest in delivering a functioning economy (which some of them still see as part of their responsibility).

So that’s where I think we are on the Future Of Work. The conversation needs to move on now, or rather it needs to expand, to be about the Future Of Living. After all, we’re all going to be working 15 hours a week soon, aren’t we? (In 1930 John Maynard Keynes opined that by 2030 people would work only 15 hours per week.)

It’s about time we started to think about what we’re going to do for the rest of the week, isn’t it?