Essay on the Future of Work
The “Future of Work” has become a popular concept for a few years and I must admit that I am part of those who use it a lot. How can we define this concept? Why is it becoming so topical? How to adapt to the Future of Work?
Here is my take on the topic.
The article was first published for the French Media Maddyness under the name “Le Future of Work expliqué à vos grand-parents.” (The Future of Work explained to your grandparents.)
I don’t think the Future Of Work is trying to guess what work will look like in 5 years, 10 years or 50 years from now. It would be very imprecise and would be a very personal vision, but there is a very concrete dimension to the Future Of Work.
On the contrary, to define it I would say that we use the expression Future of Work to describe the best practices, methods, and trends of a minority of individuals who are “ahead of their time” and whom we consider “in the future”. The Future Of Work is already a reality for some people and we will talk about their work as “ the future” until it is adopted by a majority of people.
A new perception of work
If a few people at first, soon joined by others, explore new ways of working, it is because they are no longer satisfied with work as we currently do it. At the origin of the freelancing revolution, the renewed interest in craftsmanship and managerial innovation, there is a deep desire to find meaning in one’s work. That is to say, at the end of the working day, we want to be satisfied with what we have achieved and how we have achieved it. This may mean more freedom, better recognition, less drudgery, in any case, the expectations are significant improvements in well-being at work and performance.
Behind these aspirations lies the idea that work is not just a way of earning a living, but that it allows us to fulfill ourselves, to blossom and, above all, that it is not meaningless. There is nothing worse when I go to bed than the feeling that I don’t know what the eight hours of my day devoted to work have been used for.
In her book Du labeur à l’ouvrage, Laëtitia Vitaud explains how this need for meaning has increased over the last decades. The security that salaried jobs offered in exchange for the subordinate relationship and fragmented work were well accepted as long as the “package” obtained at the price of social struggles was sufficiently substantial; stable and growing income, job security and the promise of a better situation for one’s children, paid holidays … In short, the worker had good social protection in exchange for his labor. However, this promise of salaried jobs has gradually faded away with the globalization and financialization of the economy and the decline of trade unions. As a result, salaried jobs became less appealing as they used to. More and more people are inventing new ways of working to escape this path, which was once almost unique, and those who remain attached to it are now seeking self-fulfillment in the way they work.
So when we talk about the Future Of Work, it is above all, a new conception of work that we have in mind and that we would like to make happen.
The Future Of Work is an adaptation
More than ever, adaptability is one of the best skills you could have.
The economy has always been cyclical. Joseph Schumpeter described the process of creative destruction in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in 1942 as the disappearance of certain sectors of economic activity together with the creation of new sectors of economic activity as a result of innovation. These changes can be frightening for those who fail to adapt. This explains the fears that new technologies, and artificial intelligence in particular, can create.
In the 19th century, very close to my home, in Croix-Rousse (a district in Lyon), the Canuts (silk craftsmen) revolted against progress by destroying the machines that would soon replace their work. It was futile since technical progress had been made in the textile industry and new trades had appeared. Sooner or later and with more or less resistance, innovation eventually spread. Our societies are based on a deep belief in progress and optimism about our ability to improve our daily lives. You should read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
Every revolution, every paradigm shift, is both a threat to those who fail to adapt and an opportunity for those who do.
Today, technical progress makes skills out of date so quickly that the need for training and adaptation is constant. It is no longer relevant to learn a job in early adulthood and to practice it until the end of one’s life. For the Future Of Work to happen, we need to rethink training. In web development, new languages are being invented every year, and being interested in new ones and mastering them is essential to remain attractive on the market. In marketing the algorithms change, in photography the material evolves … All jobs require a great capacity for adaptation.
The education sector is undergoing major changes with the development of MOOCs and the rise of players such as General Assembly or OpenClassrooms which help with lifelong training.
The Future Of Work is based on new tools
Technological progress has not only led to a process of creative destruction, it has enabled the creation of new tools that are radically changing the way we work and interact with those around us.
The GSuite, Slack, Basecamp, Dropbox, Gitlab, Trello, Zoom, Calendly … There are so many tools that make remote teamwork as easy as if we were in the same room. With the development of open-source and the rise of collaborative work, the whole organization of work can be rethought. The barriers that used to be technological are now only human and pave the way to new jobs, new organizations and new ways of working. There is no longer a need to have offices in the center of the largest cities when you can collaborate with the top talents from all over the world. No more taking the subway during rush hour when you can work from home and commute during off-peak hours.
The Future Of Work is collaborative
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has around a thousand employees around the world in many timezones. The way they master new tools has enabled them to rethink workspaces. They have closed offices and accompanied this change by inciting their employees to go to coworking spaces and cafés with a dedicated grant of $250/month.
The whole management is then rethought, when you can no longer keep your employees under surveillance, you have to be project-focused and follow the right KPI. Then comes the time of management based on trust, which leaves much more room for the well-being of each person and gives meaning to work by making individuals responsible.
Remote work is one of the main themes of Future Of Work and rightly so, as it brings about profound transformations in the company and in the relationship between people and work. Not to mention the fact that it has become the norm for most jobs since the COVID crisis.
Some people even live these transformations more intensely than others by becoming digital nomads and experience on a daily basis the challenges of a way of working that we are only beginning to explore.
As workspace is been rethought with coworking and coliving spaces, human relations are transformed. In an increasingly individualistic society, the ones who experience the Future of Work are inventing new forms of solidarity through collectives and communities. These forms of organization do not obey any precise rules. They are all totally different and contribute to creating a new form of bond between individuals, a bond that is neither entirely personal nor entirely professional. The boundaries between both are blurred.
The Future Of Work is the rise of freelancers.
Through the rejection of salaried jobs or out of deep desire, more and more workers become freelancers and join the Gig Economy and the Talent Economy. Within the Talent Economy, the population I studied with the learning expedition “Going Freelance”, people are craving freedom and very often they also look for meaning in their work. Many of them have shared with me their career path and the way they “rediscovered their job” after moving from employee to freelancer.
For companies, the Future Of Work means adapting to Total Workforce Management. Their teams are no longer composed solely of employees. It is a real challenge to adapt the processes of organizations because the HR department has only been designed for one type of worker: employees. Today, more and more freelancers are disrupting compartmentalized companies and it is urgent to rethink processes in order to integrate them as well as possible. Within organizations, the Future Of Work is materialized by the collaboration of a hybrid workforce and strong internal mobility.
Freelancers are an essential part of the Future Of Work, a whole ecosystem has been designed around this population. Platforms, in particular, are rethinking the relationship to work as a whole. For those of the Talent Economy and Passion Economy, they highlight skills, singularity and create opportunities where supply and demand struggled to meet. On the other hand, Gig Economy platforms exacerbate competition between often precarious workers.
The Future Of Work, therefore, opens up a world of trial and error with these new economies which are laboratories for experimentation. This is why, it is necessary to invent new forms of protection and supervision.
The Future Of Work: the rise of craftsmen
For decades we forgot how appealing craftsman jobs are but now they are coming back into fashion. Nothing has changed in craftsmen’s daily life, however, they have become much more interesting since many executives and white-collar workers are fleeing bullshit jobs to find self-fulfillment through the recovery of the values of craftsmanship. Autonomy, choice of hours, choice of tools, impact on one’s work, closeness to the end customer: many of these components of work have been lost in the daily life of office workers.
There is a second population that we do not talk about and that represents a huge pool of future jobs: local services. A subject very well detailed by Laëtitia Vitaud, again in her book Du labeur à l’ouvrage. She explains that these jobs which are not standardized, automated or delocalized are a real challenge for tomorrow’s work. Again, there have become way more visible during the COVID crisis!
Perhaps one of the best practices of the Future Of Work would be to better recognize these naturally meaningful jobs and to value them. A subject that is unfortunately only rarely, and wrongly, addressed in employment speeches. What if the Future Of Work was to put the human aspect of work before any other consideration?
The Future Of Work is managerial innovation
Hopefully, for some people, the burning desire for a new way of working did not lead to leaving their jobs. They stayed and worked to transform the company to better suit their deepest aspirations. The company no longer has only an economic goal but aims at the well-being of its employees and a whole series of managerial innovations have been put in place: horizontal company, holacracy, shared governance, tribes … The book Reinventing Organizations by Fréderic Laloux, moreover, gives many hopes as to what tomorrow’s companies could be.
While excellent initiatives have been taken by ambitious workers in their organizations, these managerial innovations are far from being widespread. Moreover, when they are implemented by some companies, we can question the real purpose of such change. Or is it simply a new trick that capitalism has been capable of using to incorporate its critics and that Boltanski and Chiapello could have written about in The New Spirit of Capitalism?
Conclusion
I’m very optimistic about how the work will evolve, and how can I not be?
A few people already combine the Future Of Work with the present and pave the way to those who don’t do it yet. In doing so they are gradually making change happen and thanks to all these initiatives and good practices, one day The Future of Work will be the Present of Work for the majority. It is up to us to learn, test, improve and implement them on a larger scale!
The Future Of Work will be more human, flexible, unique, and collective.
Follow my work on Twitter and LinkedIn and learn more about my documentary: Work in Progress on social media : LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.
If you’re in Europe and you want to receive your invitation for the preview tour, leave your email here. We will only use it once: to send your invite.
If you want to receive regular updates on this project and you read French, subscribe to my personal newsletter.
