The fragmented future of work
The pandemic gave us a glimpse into a fragmented, fluid future of work.
Marty McFly had a DeLorean and Dr. Who had a Tardis. These were seriously cool ways to get acquainted with the future. Unfortunately most of us don’t have access to such swish machinery. But we did have a pandemic.
A pandemic has never — to my knowledge — been recommended as an agent of time travel. However here we are in “good old 2020”, as Dr. Emmet Brown would have referred to it, and we’re getting glimpses of the future of work.
What does this future look like? Well, it looks kind of fragmented. Not broken per se, but definitely broken up. We work in places we wouldn’t previously have considered work spaces. The home office; the couch; the bed. Or, the side of the bed that our partner isn’t occupying. We work more fluidly in pockets of time rather than in a fixed 9–5 schedule. We don’t have the reliable monotony of the commute to separate our ‘work’ and ‘home’ domains. It’s all blurred and everything feels kind of…blurry.
It’s possible to see some positives in this future. We can see that we can work remotely, fairly effectively. We don’t need to be tethered to a desk in a building that requires a security lanyard to access. We can do our work whilst removed from these designated workplaces and at a distance from other humans. We might even be more productive away from these environments; corridor conversations aren’t slowing us down and we’re able to focus fully on our tasks. To frame this really positively, we’re free to work anywhere and maybe we feel freer than before. If you have a laptop and an internet connection, work is now an ‘anywhere and anytime’ activity. When we pan out, we can also see work becoming more blended into our lives, in a good way. Work is less like something we step out of ourselves to do and more like something in step with the lives we live. Work is no longer necessarily uniform and monotonous; it is flexible, fluid and reflective of the possibilities provided to us by the digital age.
However, it’s not all upside. The glimpses we’re getting of the future of work are also revealing some negative dynamics and outcomes. These represent big challenges for us to collectively overcome at both a human level and an organisational level. Here are three particularly big ones for starters:
Number 1: Human disconnection
We’ll start with the obvious. We’re working away from our colleagues, we’re working to some degree in isolation and we’re feeling a sense of disconnection. Let’s acknowledge here that Zoom/ Teams/FaceTime (delete as appropriate in line with your company’s IT policy) do not represent a panacea when it comes to connection and collaboration. They are merely things that keep us ticking over before something better comes along. Staring at people on a screen and taking turns to speak has revealed itself to be a fairly crappy alternative to a proper in-person conversation. The fatigue is real and disconnect is rising. We are seeing that people really need to be around people.
If the future of work is to involve being physically distant from our fellow humans, one of the top priorities must be to resolve our sense of connectedness. Without it, we’re missing a good part of what makes us human: our ability to understand others, empathise and cooperate.
Number 2: Struggle for stimulation
Working remotely has been advantageous for many in creating the conditions to ‘get things done’. (Caveat: let’s not forget many are dealing with chaotic households where working conditions are more challenging, not less.) We can see that working remotely — to schedules that are less likely to be interrupted by others — can aid productivity. Getting through the daily task list has become a little easier. However when we zoom in a little more closely, what we actually see is that the task list has become more prominent in our work lives. We are becoming more task-fixated; without the stimulation of accidental corridor conversations and without variance in the dynamics of our days, we’re left to focus on our tasks and getting things done.
To some this might look like efficiency, which might be heralded as a positive. But squint a little and it looks more like a step backwards to the factory floor and operating like automatons. We can’t afford to let this happen. Not because a backward step is pejorative per se, but because with A.I. and algorithms on the horizon, we will be laying the grounds for our own obsolescence. The more we operate like robots, the more likely it is we will be replaced by robots. We must rediscover the stimulation that encourages us to be creative.
“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”
— Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists
Number 3. Organisational fragmentation
In a future where we work more remotely, feel more disconnected and struggle for stimulation, we see a further challenge: how to keep large organisations together.
With remote work, workers may not only become only disconnected from each other and fixated on their individual tasks, but also detached from the companies they work in service of. A sense of collective purpose becomes difficult to encourage at arms-length. A sense of culture as a binding agent for all becomes elusive. A sense of connectedness across business units becomes hard to facilitate. A sense of togetherness and belonging at an all-of-organisational level becomes nigh-on-impossible to instil and maintain.
What lies ahead, then? We can’t be sure, but one thing we have seen over the course of 2020 is that workers have found greater connection than before within their immediate ranks. Culture and collective purpose is more alive and kicking than ever at a teams level. Perhaps this provides a clue to how organisations might still prosper. The fragmentation ahead might be less an unavoidable break-up and more a managed breaking-up of culture, hierarchy and authority. From centralised control to autonomous self-managed teams. As Aaron Dignan posited in his excellent thesis, ‘Brave New Work’, the successful organisations of tomorrow will shift power and emphasis to their ‘edges’:
“We are operating in a complex and rapidly-changing world where centralized control is too slow and disconnected from reality. Push authority to the edge of the organization — where the information is — so teams and can adapt and steer continuously.”
— Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work
This emphasis on teams isn’t new. Spotify are famous for having implemented (or not, according to insiders like Jeremiah Lee) a matrix-like org. structure oriented around teams. Agile practices are all about tight-knit teamwork, often within larger organisational structures. This has been bubbling for a while but perhaps it’s about to be blown completely open and truly adopted by the corporate mainstream.
These are interesting times. There are positives and negatives but above all, there are clear indicators as to how we must move forward. Let’s be more connected, much less disconnected; let’s find ways to keep our eyes up and focused on the big picture rather than fixated on our task lists; and let’s emphasise the importance of teams within organisations, as the new centres of gravity for culture, collective purpose and action.
