Time for a rethink

Careers, workplace isolation and rockets

The Long and Winding Road

Some time ago I came up with the concept of a ‘fluid’ career. It’s the idea that during the course of your working life, you move back and forth between different states of employment - the corporate gig with a salary, working as a contractor, being a consultant, freelancing, being in a start-up, running your own business, being in education (there are probably more options but these are the main ones). The point of the fluidity is that you move between these states continuously, particularly in and out of permanent employment. (Generally, once you’ve left permanent employment for a period, it’s hard to get back in without a considerable drop in position or having to start again. Just ask any Mum returning to the workplace.)

I’m not claiming it’s a particularly original idea, and some people already have careers like this. However, they are the exception and my point is that we need to make this the norm. The few who are able to be fluid in this way right now have a number of advantages (some earned, some not) but for the rest for most of us it’s a path that is fraught with difficulties.

These fall into three areas. How society is set up, the biases of employers and our own mental models.

Our societies and economies are set up on with the assumption of the traditional career paths. People have jobs that provide a regular income, or they run their own businesses (this binary is baked into tax and other government functions). If we look at people in managerial and professional roles, it is assumed they work continuously from entering the workplace (probably in their early twenties) until retirement and that they have steady or rising income over most of that period. Taxes, pensions and benefits are designed around this profile, as is the economy in terms of macro-economic policies. It is not designed to deal with discontinuities, fluctuations in income, periods of return to study and so on.

That’s not to say that there are no allowances to deal with these but that they have been bolted on and are meant to deal with exceptions, with the minority. However, as we have seen increasingly over the past few decades, these are becoming more common experiences for everyone. The limitations of these allowances are becoming apparent and are why more people feel the system is failing them, and that the system itself is heading for collapse (looming pensions crisis, anyone? No apparently not, it’s much easier to kick that can down the road. Along with the ageing population, rising health and care demands, declining working population and tax take, skills and training deficit, NEETS and so on.)

Secondly, employers still hire on the basis of compliance with the old career model. They now do a forensic analysis of CVs to detect any breaks in employment, which they will interrogate you about and probably view unfavourably. They look dimly on sideways movements, assuming they reflect a lack of focus, ambition or ability on your part. Career breaks, periods of study (unless these are adding to your credentials for your current career path) and changes in career direction are all likely to raise doubts in their mind. None of this is official policy but these biases may mean you are screened out in the evaluation process (probably by an AI trained on previous hiring practice), be negatively influencing the hiring manager and other interviewers, or rule you out of internal development programmes.

And lastly, the traditional model of the career path is imprinted on all of us, an unconscious norm that we feel we have to comply with. It has the advantage of being simple and seemingly predictable. We choose a career, get the necessary qualifications, start working in that field and progress over time until we retire with a comfortable pension. Our parents have modelled this for us, we see many others have trodden this path and we are told it’s why we need to study and work hard. We still believe in this even though the evidence of our own eyes tells us it’s a mirage, or at best an opportunity that is rapidly disappearing.

A ‘fluid’ career, on the other hand, is a leap into the unknown. By definition, we don’t know where it will lead, or what it will contain. We can tell ourselves it will allow us to be ourselves, follow our passion and find our true purpose (these may be valid or turnout to be illusions, I couldn’t comment. Well, not in less than 2000 words…) but they will not deliver us the stability that we have traditionally sought to build our lives upon. Living your purpose may be great but it won’t help you get a mortgage, provide the environment to raise a family, or help you save for a pension. As my dear old Dad used to say, “If they don’t accept it at Barclays, it’s not much use”.

Those of us who went into corporate careers accepted that there was something of a trade-off between the freedom to do what we truly wanted and the stability of a regular income and benefits that a corporate gig offered. We knew we’d have to accept restrictions on ourselves, do things we didn’t enjoy or want to do and fit into the corporate machine. However, that was a trade-off that we made because it was a good one and because the other party, our employer, acknowledged it too and made sure it was a fair one. At least, this was true in the 1980s when I started in corporate.

Since then, however, the trade-off has got worse because employers have made it worse. They have reneged on their side of the deal, salami-slicing away the benefits offered whilst simultaneously increasing demands for compliance and work. They have made the corporate role more precarious and unpredictable, whilst technology and organisational change has made it less likely that you will be able to work in the same area throughout your career, or stay in employment until your pension.

So now many of us end up having ‘fluid’ careers by default. Only they are not very fluid but more discontinuous chunks of activity that impoverish us financially, emotionally and intellectually, undermining our life and our mental health. In my case, a 20+ year corporate career followed a long period of flailing around trying to re-invent myself without much success, which is not an uncommon tale.

Gen Z have got this figured out. They are preparing for fluid careers, both mentally and practically. However, this seems to mean giving up on what many of would consider the basics of a good life - buying a home, having a family, building financial security - which can’t be a good thing for them or for society in the future. In fact, it’s a stark measure of societal failure.

We need to change how we think about careers and make adjustments to our tax and benefit systems and our social support structures to enable more fluidity in people’s careers. Employers need to shift their attitudes about career paths and individual life choices. And we need to think differently about work and how it shapes and fits into our lives.

Otherwise, the world of work will continue to fail people on a greater and greater scale until those who have a long and stable career will be the exceptions and the rest will be struggling to make sense of it all. That’s not a path to healthier society or economy, or greater thriving. It’s a road to nowhere.

All By Myself

Well, that turned into a longer peregrination than I intended, so I’ll just cover one other issue this week - workplace isolation.

This always strikes me as a surprising and anomalous problem. After all, work is where we gather with other people to, well, work. Yet it has been a growing problem for some time now. That was before we went through COVID and lockdowns and the rise of Working from Home (WfH).

I have addressed this before, citing a variety of causes:

• increased workloads that have squeezed out time for socialising

• Technology disintermediating us, with one-to-one conversations being replaced with a message or an update to a project app.

• People being tied to their desks, where their workload arrives digitally, reducing the opportunity for serendipitous conversation

• Removal of communal spaces such as staff restaurants and lounges as a cost-reduction measure

• Surveillance and tracking of employee activity and KPIs based on online presence

• A focus on efficiency, which deems unstructured conversations (i.e. chats) as time-wasting and so to be discouraged

• Distributed teams that means people are not working with the people in their immediate vicinity

All these are things have made it less likely that people will strike up relationships with work colleagues, and so they feel less connected to the people around them, and consequently have a lower sense of belonging. It’s easy see that in the extreme, this could lead to workplace isolation, where someone hardly ever interacts with anyone but just sits in front of their screen processing the workflow continuously served up to them. It’s not hard to see the damaging effect that will have on someone.

Well, the good news is … no, there isn’t any. This is a problem that is getting worse.

It is clear that whilst WfH is great in terms of autonomy and work/life balance on the whole, for some it leads to isolation and a lack of personal interactions and that is negatively impacting their mental health. It’s not just speaking to people you know that’s important, it’s the micro-interactions that we have, such as talking to the barrista, the shop assistant and others that we encounter when we go out and about.

For those on hybrid schedules, going into the office doesn’t necessarily solve the problem because none of their colleagues may be in on that day, or they may not be able to sit with them because they don’t have assigned desks together. Additionally, they may well find they spend much of the day on Zoom or Teams calls, and so are not able to talk to others around them.

Our working day is providing less and less opportunity for the human interaction that we need, whether that is deeper relationship building or the more superficial chit-chat of everyday life. Indeed, the latter is often the precursor to the former.

And guess what AI is doing? Yep, it’s taking the problem and making it worse.

In Stow Boyd’s ‘workplace.io‘ newsletter (which I highly recommend), he talks about how AI is destroying the fabric of work, highlighting a Business Insider piece by Ako Ito - ‘The Antisocial Workplace’.

In it, Ito points to studies that show that using AI is causing people to increasingly choose to work on their own, and that subsequently they trust their teams less.

That’s not the only problem.

‘The coaching platform BetterUp found that some workers are turning to AI for the kind of feedback they used to seek from mentors and managers. Those employees tended to report lower levels of team coordination, along with higher rates of burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs.’

Ito recounts how she herself is using AI to refine her work and consequently talking to her editor less, which she sees is weakening their (important!) relationship.

AI offers us opportunities to coordinate actions in a more efficient way, removing the friction and speeding up the process. However, as we have seen time and time again, being more efficient is not the same as being more effective. In fact, it’s often the opposite.

That friction is where the human interaction sits. It’s where we connect with our colleagues, get to know them and how they behave, get a feel for each other and develop relationships. That means that when problems or issues that could cause conflict arrive, we have the basis of familiarity to negotiate our way through them together.

It’s where we find connection and a sense of belonging, meeting two key needs for us that, in turn, increases our productivity, well-being and loyalty.

The real problem here is not AI or hybrid or WfH or technology, although none of these help. The root of the problem is that management does not value human connection and relationships and has allowed them to be squeezed out of the workplace by the factors I have listed above. Worse, the system has been designed to minimise the time and space for connection, in the name of efficiency.

The value of human interaction needs to be recognised and designed into the system, given the time and space and priority so that it is one of things that the system produces and is seen as a core measure of the system’s success.

People matter. Organisations that recognise this and organise accordingly will thrive, whereas those that continue to pretend they don’t matter will find out all too late how much they do.

Firework

One last thing… (I couldn’t help myself)

So Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire through the SpaceX IPO that is launching as I write this.

It’s a con, a Ponzi scheme. Don’t take my word for it, take Paul Krugman’s. (Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme).

It’s the latest point on the graph that began with Netscape’s massive valuation at IPO in 1994, the first example of bullshit achieving escape velocity. It was the first time that the puffery was more substantial than the business it was inflating. It set the pattern for hyping technology stocks that we’ve have seen grow to this apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view).

It’s the same people behind all of these. Andreessen, Horowitz, Thiel and the rest of the PayPal Mafia and, of course, Musk. That’s not the full cast of ghouls, just the first ones that came to mind. It’s the same venture capitalists, investment banks, funds and the whole Silicon Valley money-go-round that has driven this forward whist making them all unbelievably wealthy. Literally, they are the richest people in the world, ever.

But this is the big one. The biggest punt ever. Of course, it’s got AI in it. How could it not?

It’s hard to focus on the prosaic matters of making the workplace better against this backdrop of epic nonsense, when reality seems to have become detached from, well, reality. When the valuations have broken free of any underlying metrics, when the rewards for individuals bear no relation to their contribution and do not reflect any concept of worth. When everyone seems to have lost their minds and be in the grip of a cult. (And I’m not even thinking about the political realm here!)

I predict that the share price for SpaceX will take off like a rocket (see what I did there?). One of Musk’s. The one that suddenly went sideways and blew up over the Gulf of Mexico, raining toxic crap over a huge area and innocent bystanders.

Then we can all get back to arguing about WfH vs RTO, just like the good old days.