The ‘future of work’
Peter Thomas, director of FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with development partners Pete Cohen, Jane Howie, Sally McNamara, Inder Singh and Kate Spencer — on the ‘future of work’.
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche.
It seems like no topic is more on the minds of policymakers, economists, academics, futurists, corporate leaders — and commentators on business, technology, people and culture — than the ‘future of work’.
As we have all observed, the pandemic has created a wave of change over the work that we do by, amongst other things, transforming homes into workspaces — and all that entailed.
But it has also unleashed a wave of thinking about what we might like work to be by demonstrating that the things we formerly thought were necessary to be productive are optional — or in some cases, dispensable.
Those interested in the ‘future of work’ tell us that if we could foresight what’s coming next for the thing we spend most of our waking moments doing, we could solve a whole range of problems. These include how to close skills gaps (and avoid them in the future); how to reconfigure workforces to cope with the advance of new technologies; how to reimagine workplaces; how to attract better talent; or how to build training systems that are effective in getting people into productive jobs and careers.
But unless you are a fervent eschatologist, the future is essentially unknowable. As the old joke/aphorism (originally from a Danish source but attributed to anyone from Niels Bohr to Sam Goldwyn) goes, “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”.
This is why, perhaps, most of the ‘future of work’ predictions are not much in the future at all — they’re here already. They are just minor extrapolations of the present, such as ‘work will rebalance to make more room for our personal and family lives’, ‘offices will evolve into spaces where a different kind of work gets done’, or ‘as work evolves, new regulations will appear to define what ‘work’ is’.
Maybe, as Nietzsche implies, interrogating the future is not helpful because there is an inevitability in our inability to know about the future. In any case (in another Nietzschian concept), maybe we are all in an ‘eternal return’ in which everything repeats, over and over and, ouroboros-like, we consume ourselves. (Not that this is hard evidence, but the experience of being in a Zoom meeting is the same as being in a face to face meeting: even if you can go and make coffee, like Hotel California, you are only temporarily checking out on mute/camera off but never leaving).
As Michael Priddis of Faethm, AI and data-driven SaaS platform that analyses workforce data, says:
We stopped saying future of work ages ago. We say the evolution of work…that makes this a much more tangible and practical issue. When you say ‘future of’ to somebody, you’re asking them to cast their mind forward to a date in five or 10 years’ time. And if you think this is happening sometime in the future, then you’ve missed something. It’s happening right now.”
So what should we make of the ‘future of work’?
While it can be fun and interesting to speculate about the next five, ten, or twenty years, maybe the whole thing is fundamentally fruitless.
We are held hostage in the present to a future we have no control over. Even if, as writers like Nick Montford say, the future is something to be made, not predicted, recent events have shown us just how little future-making we can do: all the backcasting from desired futures to current actions comes to bits pretty rapidly when a pandemic hits.
And, of course, to speak of one ‘future’ is to flatten out complexity. As Luke Munn, when deconstructing ‘automation’ (which, in his book Automation is a Myth, he calls a “long-running fable about the future of work”), says:
“…there will be multiple futures. From nation to nation, region to region, and even city to city, technological development and adoption will play out in fundamentally different ways and at different speeds.”
Yet it would seem sensible to prepare ourselves for what might come next even if just to reduce, in Toffler’s term, the “future shock” of accelerated change; or, as Jane McGonigal in her book Imaginable proposes, to train our minds to “think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable”. So while we might not be able to know the future of work, at least we can encounter it when and as it is happening with a degree of equanimity.
Maybe we should focus on causality rather than speculative futures — and spend less time thinking about the ‘future of work’ futuristically conventionally. Instead, perhaps we should pose questions about the now of work — and how the past led us to that now — and think about those instead.
So here are some questions that might help us dig into how we experience work that might help us see how our destiny exercises its influence over us — even when we have no idea what that destiny might be.
These questions are just a start to the exploration, not the end, and are not (obviously) definitive statements about the future.
They are #WhatWork, #WhereWork, #WhenWork, #HowWork, #WhoWork and #WhyWork.
Their value is in prompting questioning and debate.
#WhatWork
There is no doubt that the what of work — the work we do — is changing.
The kinds of occupations available to us are changing — from those that are now obsolete, such as the telephone operator, or that have emerged, such as the conversation designer.
The World Economic Forum says:
“in many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialities did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”
In this same report, ‘The Future of Jobs’, WEF surveyed 371, mostly CHROs, of the 100 largest global employers across industry sectors. They conclude:
“Overall, there is a modestly positive outlook for employment across most industries, with jobs growth expected in several sectors. However, it is also clear that this need for more talent in certain job categories is accompanied by high skills instability across all job categories. Combined together, net job growth and skills instability result in most businesses currently facing major recruitment challenges and talent shortages, a pattern already evident in the results and set to get worse over the next five years.”
It’s hard not to conclude that this is just Nietzsche’s eternal return in action — job growth, job shrinkage, recruitment challenges, talent shortages — a pattern repeated over and over as technology changes, value chains morph, cultural attitudes shift, demographics change and geopolitical relationships evolve.
But the very fabric of what ‘work’ is is changing too.
The work of everyone from the graphic designer to the educator has been irretrievably changed by digitalisation. And so, as you will never see Letraset again (more’s the pity), very soon, it's likely there will be very few printed textbooks. (These ‘material culture artefacts, interesting studies in themselves, represent complex changes in how work is done — anything from neckties and briefcases to corner offices and workpods).
But, as we will talk about later, perhaps a view of work as just being made up of discrete tasks or skills is changing too. We are repeatedly told that it’s ‘soft skills’ or ‘durable skills’ or ‘power skills’ that define the future of work. We are also told we should focus on these skills as people need to be more adaptive and resilient in the face of change.
While being a skilled negotiator, collaborator, analytical thinker, or relationship-builder is undoubtedly a good thing, maybe the more interesting #WhatWork question doesn’t so much concern ‘technical skills’ vs ‘durable skills’ or what balance of them makes up the future of work, but to examine some of the present contexts of work to see what we can make of it.
The pandemic has demonstrated that the work we do can fuel a sense of belonging that is as and maybe more important than a salary or a career path. Arguably, hustle culture ‘toil glamour’ may have imploded with the rise and spectacular fall of WeWork (as documented in WeCrashed), but what remains is the need to work with great people and do work you love — or perhaps, as Erin Griffin asks in Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? , make yourself believe you love it.
As McKinsey says, “It’s not about the office, it’s about belonging”. Their recent Great Attrition survey says that more than half of employees who left their job in the past six months did not feel valued by their organisation or manager, or they lacked a sense of belonging, and 46 per cent of those surveyed cited the desire to work with people who trust and care for each other as another reason to quit. “Employees want stronger relationships, a sense of connection, and to be seen”, they conclude.
As Steve Jobs said, “the only way to do great work is to love what you do”, and maybe one of the essential parts of #WhatWork is not about the material details of the work we do but about understanding how to love our work.
Easier said than done if you are a neurosurgeon rather than waiting tables; nevertheless, a sense of belonging is one of the essential aspects of work and can be experienced in the hustle of Katz’s Deli just as much as in the operating suite.
As Noreen Malone, writing in the New York Times about “the age of anti-ambition”, says, maybe it’s about how the “hard facts of the economy interact with our emotions”.
#WhereWork
Perhaps the topic that has been on everyone’s minds through the enforced lockdowns of the pandemic — and now again, as we emerge into a world that has changed in that work continued wherever people were — is where work gets done.
According to Pew, among Americans who are working from home all or most of the time, about three-quarters say it has been easy to find the technology and space to create a workspace, meet deadlines and complete projects on time, to get their work done without interruptions, and feel motivated to do their work.
So where is ‘work’?
For those who work in aircraft maintenance (for example), the answer is obvious — the maintenance hangar. For those whose work is more cerebral, it’s less obvious.
We are becoming accustomed to work being everywhere and anywhere — from the ‘third place’ offered by Starbucks that became the office-non-office with caramel macchiato on tap to the CBD collaborative workspace or the ‘secure borderless workspaces’ of companies like TCS that aim to provide access to skilled workers anywhere. While the facilities managers of office spaces in corporate headquarters may be acronymically itching to get back to BAU, we’re WFA.
Hybrid work is here, we are told, and it looks like it’s here to stay. According to a February 2022 Gallup study, about four in 10 workers are either hybrid or working entirely from home. Nearly seven in 10 workers say they would prefer to be fully remote or hybrid.
This, of course, is causing all kinds of headaches as people, teams, and organisations struggle with managing flexible work arrangements and creating new, unfamiliar cultures, all the while striving for effective team collaboration and maintaining meaningful relationships — what Lynda Gratton calls “extraordinary Petri dishes of experiments”.
Engagement is right in the middle of the leadership dashboard. As managers struggle with maintaining engagement and motivation (not, it has to be said, a new problem), the discussions about place and the way hybrid working will play out take on a new dimension.
Recently AirBnB’s Brian Chesky posted a Twitter thread in which he announced Airbnb’s approach to ‘design for working’, which noted:
Two decades ago, Silicon Valley startups popularized open floor plans and on-site perks. Today’s startups have embraced flexibility and remote work. I think this will become the predominant way companies work 10 years from now
Companies will be at a significant disadvantage if they limit their talent pool to a commuting radius around their offices. The best people live everywhere
But there’s a tension. The most meaningful connections happen in person. Zoom is great for maintaining relationships, but it’s not the best way to deepen them. And some creative work is best done in the same room
The right solution should combine the efficiency of Zoom with the meaningful human connection that happens when people come together. Our design attempts to combine the best of both worlds.
But perhaps the whole hybrid working thing isn’t where the action is.
Maybe place isn't relevant in the ways we thought it was, and #WhatWork and #WhereWork are intertwined in ways we didn’t completely understand before the pandemic explained it to us.
Maybe we need to go beyond discussions about days in the office, return to work, schedules and hours per week, and look at #WhereWork differently.
The term ‘placemaking’ is usually used to refer to the planning, design and management of public spaces. The aim is to create spaces that promote health, happiness, belonging and well-being through co-creation and identification of shared purpose.
If work is changing as we think it is, perhaps we need to apply some of the thinking characteristic of the placemaking movement to #WhereWork — what Arup calls ‘workplacemaking’. They say:
“If workplace design has traditionally been about creating productive corporate environments, and placemaking has traditionally been about the making of attractive and engaging public spaces, we propose a new typology of space that sits somewhere in the middle…Workplacemaking is about making places that are equally productive and enjoyable for all; places that drive economies by bringing people into shared environments that make them feel comfortable, happy, and healthy, so that they may learn, innovate, and grow together.”
If a sense of belonging is essential, then perhaps there is no better way to create it than to make opportunities to encounter people with different skills and experiences that can help fuel personal and professional growth.
What is important about place is that it is not just somewhere where ‘work’ gets done but also provides opportunities for informal, tacit learning.
The research done by Arup suggests that 79% of office-based employees believe that there are professional benefits to sharing a physical environment, and 52% of under-35 employees felt their opportunities for career progression and learning suffered during the coronavirus lockdowns. During lockdowns, the opportunities for tacit learning had to be mined out, and #WhereWork is about doing the same as we enter an era of hybrid working and an environment in which we need new ways to attract and retain skilled workers.
Arup is a built environment design, engineering, architecture, planning and advisory company and is concerned with large-scale projects — building big things — so what they say has to be seen through this lens. They have created a ‘spatial typology’ of place, which are “the building blocks of workplacemaking […] which describe how people’s new working and living needs can be met by space.” Buildings and campuses can have spaces like watering holes (places that attract people to linger), street classrooms (where people can change knowledge), cultural canvases (places that can be shaped), mind labs (places where people gather to solve problems) and mind gardens (places for restorative thinking processes).
Importantly, these typologies don't just mean they are entirely physical: it is possible to create a cultural canvas or a mind lab that seamlessly blends various digital and virtual, physical and place-based elements.
And workplacemaking can happen at other levels than the large-scale. There is an opportunity to workplacemake in the small by rethinking the meanings of space and place for individuals, teams and groups.
Committed to a vision of ‘excellence from anywhere’ in a larger organisation — RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia — that has embraced hybrid-by-default, we have recast our physical space as part of our team’s, and our organisation’s, reconciliation journey and not just an ‘office space’ or ‘work space’.
We have done this by embedding in it original artwork — canvases and murals, and furniture created by first nations people and organisations. For example, alongside an artwork by Yorta Yorta man Troy Firebrace that explores history and engagement in the journey towards reconciliation sits an 85" Microsoft Surface Hub used for hybrid meetings and interacting with collaborative Miro workspaces. Next to each artwork is a link to an extensive media archive of the artist at work and talking about the work, all connected thematically to our projects and the bigger context in which our organisation sits.
We, and those who visit us — in real or virtual modes — are invited to experience and reflect on both, providing an opportunity for the tacit, informal learning that is essential to consider as we rethink place.
And finally, we are seeing a new phenomenon emerging — the ‘supercommuter’ who comes back to the office for a couple of days and stays at a hotel. As this story by Debra Kamin (Hotels Roll Out the Welcome Mat to ‘Super Commuters’) in The New York Times describes, employees who moved to the suburbs or beyond are becoming fixtures at city hotels that have created new packages for them: the Conrad New York Midtown in New York, for example, has ‘Clock In at Conrad’ that allows up to eight colleagues to co-work in a sky suite with catered breakfast and lunch, fitness-centre access and sessions with a wellness coach. James Bailey, a leadership professor at George Washington University, quoted in the story, calls this a “reverse diaspora” of people who moved into the suburbs, or exburbs, and now need to be back in the office.
#WhenWork
The 9–5 is gone, we are told.
With all of its disruptions, the pandemic has proven to be a success for companies who saw record profits, much of which was on the back of employees who, pajama’d in their home offices, were unable to stop themselves from working. Some of this might have been about the instability that the pandemic occasioned, and some of it our lack of ability to manage unaccustomed thresholds, but productivity soared.
Non-work timeouts disappeared — the train ride home, the coffee run or the walk-and-talk between meetings — and we have realised that these were where people get their renewal and restore balance. Productivity may be good for the bottom line but less so for those who contribute to it. Maybe more people are experiencing “the loneliness of the hybrid worker” than we think.
It seems an irony that now we are surrounded by technologies that allow us either to automate what we do, or at least make it much easier to communicate — take a quick call, draft some emails or playback the recording of that Teams meeting — we are working more, not less. Microsoft, Apple, Evernote and Slack are happy to conspire with us in our thirst for work.
But, of course, 9–5 wasn’t ever really 9–5, at least for many people.
Commuting, the urgent project that needs an hour of work on Saturday morning, the I’ll catch up with my email to get ahead for Monday all meant that 9–5, five days a week was at best a theoretical concept. Back in 2019, The Australia Institute found that the average Australian employee puts in 6 hours per week of unpaid overtime — an increase from 2020 and a substantial increase from 2019.
Yet, apart from a few of us that hop between timezones, work-as-usual is morning until evening and, excepting the bit of work to do at the weekend, sorry, mostly M-F. The 9–5, 40 hours workweek — an industrial revolution relic intended for factory workers to recover from manual work — is something we find it hard to let go of organizationally, culturally, economically and personally. You can read The Four Hour Workweek as many times as you like, but you have to do what you have to do when there’s a team meeting at 10 am Monday that was the result of a diary scramble between six people, Sarah is off on leave from Tuesday, and steerco needs the report by COB.
Nevertheless, we are finding new approaches to #WhenWork. The technologies that are co-conspirators in our blurred home and work boundaries can, given some thought and effort, be our friends. We are seeing new features appearing in products and services like Do Not Disturb, more selective notifications and in the case of Slack, a slew of granular controls on messages, channels and status notifications. The idea is to give us some relief from the incessant flood of emails and allow us to do some deep work.
But no matter how we fiddle with notifications, there is progress to be made, especially in teams and organisations, to establish effective Ways of Working, stick to them and renew them when they are not working anymore. We have come to realise that #WhenWork is as much about setting expectations as changing settings, and to do that requires us to have conversations about it.
As our Team WoW says:
“what’s on our minds is not where we work or when we work but the foundational and persistent themes that underlie all work — collaboration, transparency and trust. These existed long before hybrid working, will be a part of whatever comes next, and underlie and transcend processes and tools.”
And as we will discuss next, there are technologies, and approaches to work, that have far-reaching implications for both #WhenWork, and, next, #HowWork.
#HowWork
It’s hard to find an occupation that hasn’t been transformed by technology.
Whether that’s industrial automation or the mundane business meeting translated into a Zoom window, we have been transformed — and the now-arrived AI tsunami promises to continue that transformation and create new occupations and entirely new industries.
#HowWork and #WhatWork are intimately connected, but there is no doubt that — even setting aside emerging occupations and industries — how we do what we do is changing.
Perhaps the most profound #HowWork phenomenon is how our relationships are being reconfigured.
We’re not just employees now — we’re freelancers, gig-economy workers, self-employed, portfolio workers or part of formal or informal collectives.
There might be as many as a billion gig-economy workers on the planet (depending on who and what you count) — a rising number as, due to economic necessity or personal choice, people opt to pursue occupations and careers that don’t involve working for one employer. (And the pandemic has reportedly led to a resurgence in moonlighting: according to a survey by ResumeBuilder, 69% of remote workers are working a second job, 37% of remote workers have a second full-time job and 32% have a side hustle). Some traditional occupations are also morphing — and drawing the attention of regulators — such as a new generation of ‘finfluencers’ who offer financial advice on TikTok or Instagram.
Yet even if we are in an organisation, maybe one of the core pillars of work — teamwork — may also be changing.
In an article for HBR, ‘Do We Still Need Teams?’ Constance Noonan Hadley and Mark Mortensen argue that teams — when they work well — can generate creative solutions to complex problems as well as rewarding experiences of camaraderie and challenge for employees.
But even high-performing teams are stressed, and maybe its time to start thinking about alternative team-like structures in the form of “co-acting groups”, which are:
“loose confederations of employees who dip in and out of collaborative interactions as a project or initiative unfolds. In this configuration, there is still plenty of coordination work to do — perhaps even more so. Yet the process becomes more streamlined and controllable. For example, rather than orchestrating team meetings on a daily or weekly basis, managers can focus on touching base with each group member individually. Because one-on-one interactions require the combination of just two calendars and are easier to accomplish both synchronously and asynchronously, they’re likely to result in a reduction in coordination costs as compared to hybrid teams.”
In our case at FORWARD, we are a floating hybrid of ‘true team’ (a shared mindset, a compelling joint mission, defined roles, stable membership, high interdependence, and clear norms) and co-acting group (a high degree of autonomy and self-directness, yet interdependent, a co-created mindset, flex roles and a core membership but a range of time-bound or mission-occasioned collaborators).
But perhaps there is more: as Stowe Boyd suggests in The ecology of work: growing resilient, growing wilder, maybe there is a case for letting go of some of the fundamental assumptions that, until now, have characterised organisations and work— one of which is seeing an organisation (especially when it reaches a significant size) as a set of linear processes to be optimised for speed and cost.
Instead, Boyd suggests, we might think about organisations, and work, as a resilient ecosystem based on “many weak ties linking the participants, as opposed to a fewer number of strong ties in non-resilient ecosystems.” Organisations should ‘rewild’ and create “looser, wider connections across the company, and an intentional diminishing of downward control”.
This means that organisations, and work, take on more of the character of a city — governed by relatively lightweight laws and regulations but within which individuals, groups, and businesses are allowed to make their own choices. According to Boyd:
“businesses need to actively seek to be wilder, less controlled, less focused on reliability, and more to make efforts to set the stage for resilience in-depth, seeking to accept the need for strategic renewal instead of resisting it.”
Of the many forces that are changing the how of work — including digitalisation as an enabler of the gig economy, new organisational structures and the restructuring of entire industries in the wake of the pandemic — perhaps the one that promises the most profound change is the emergence of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation or DAO, based on a blockchain infrastructure that provides the basic plumbing to make DAOs work.
It’s hard to avoid falling over references to DAOs, Web3.0 and NFTs, widely touted as, collectively or individually, The Next Big Thing. NFTs will provide an entirely new way to earn a living, we are told, by enabling creators to monetise their work digitally; Web3.0 holds the promise of putting people, not Web2.0 corporations like Meta or Google, in charge; and DAOs provide the foundation for building new kinds of ‘communities of value’ — anything from projects, products, social enterprises to entire organisations.
Leaving aside the technology — which is widely misunderstood or not understood at all — what DAOs do is to change the relationships in #HowWork — the relationship between worker and employer, between individuals in teams, and between individuals who are part of collectives, informal or formal, whether based on shared interests or shared commercial goals.
All of this looks pretty abstract — not helped by the insidereish language and culture of Web3.0 — but a simple example is this (taken from David Hoffman’s The Future of Work): a decentralised organisation (a community of people, anywhere) wants to build a website. Typically, an organisation would find an agency or do it themselves if the available talent exists to build it. If the organisation can find members willing to do it, they can be rewarded with tokens — digital assets held on the blockchain — that encode some kind of value. Tokens are usually thought of as cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, but they can be anything. Importantly, tokens can have rules (often called a smart contract) that dictate what you can do with them.
Because DAOs are based around communities of shared interest, members will likely contribute because of a commitment to building, maintaining and nurturing the organisation and demonstrating to the community that you are investing in it. In contrast, unless you find a web design agency fully committed to the organisation, motivating them to do the work without a fee would be hard.
As David Hoffman says:
“…if the DAO is working towards something that people intrinsically believe in, the people interested in seeing that vision achieved will naturally find themselves gravitating towards the DO, and are also willing to help the DO get what it wants. They might work for the DO for free, in order to win social capital (aka Kudos) from the other DO members and rise the ranks of DO social clout. Maybe they’re also willing to gamble that the DO will award them tokens for their labor in the future, and by showing their commitments to the DO, they will be in a good position to receive future compensation.”
This vision of organisations built from the ground up by committed, engaged individuals coming together under a shared goal of producing something that the group wants collectively seems, on face value, utopian. But of course, we have those organisations already — anything from charities to raise funds for research into diseases, the local historical society that preserves a property of architectural interest to, on a large scale, unions.
Take the example of Mirror, which describes itself as “a crypto-native publishing platform and a creative suite for communities and DAOs”.
In contrast to Medium, where this story is published, Mirror is Web3.0 rather than Web2.0. In Medium, writers create stories, and Medium publishes them. In Mirror, contributors can build their own DAOs, and publish stories about them (called ‘entries’ in Mirror), but can also embed in each entry crowdfunding, the ability to create or buy an NFT, to reward a publication’s backers with NFTs, or auction NFTs and split the proceeds in any way they like.
Because Mirror is tokenised, these tokens can be used to help build the platform in ways that reflect the cultural and economic stakes of those who contribute to it. As is everyone else who publishes on Mirror, you are a co-owner of the platform.
For example, Mirror’s $WRITE token, granted to those part of the platform, can be used in the $WRITE RACE, a showdown between writers who want to join Mirror. In the showdown, the community votes for writers they wish to join the platform. At the end of each week, the top 10 writers are awarded one $WRITE token, which they can redeem for a publication on Mirror.
As Mirror say:
“It’s an effort to replace the traditional invite system used by Web 2.0 platforms like Clubhouse, Superhuman and Gmail circa 2004–2007 with a crypto game. We’re talking token governance, staking and airdrops. It’s an effort to ensure the Mirror community gets to decide who it’s composed of and, accordingly, what it wants to be. It’s an effort to guarantee that our path towards a truly community-owned platform — where writers are the arbiters of the network and economy — begins on the right foot. Nepotism and scarcity take a backseat to hive mind and reward. It’s simultaneously a collective rally behind the best writers and a way to discover them. It’s the crowdfunding of a profile. It’s a campaign. And, most of all, it’s fun.”
The blockchain technology behind DAOs allows these types of organisations — bound together by a common purpose and shared value — to realise that value more effectively without the intervention of venture funders, an organisational hierarchy or shareholder capital. The technology enables the organisation to create value and achieve success, not just extract value on behalf of shareholders.
A DAO is not based on an employment contract typical of many organisations. Instead of contracting for 36 hours a week, 45 weeks a year (or variants of it) for one employer, you can move between and be a part of many DAOs. Because you are contributing skills to achieve outcomes, contracts are not useful. If work is about belonging and purpose, this type of organisation may well be the way to deliver it.
And this too has its roots in the now: the ‘creator economy’ of vloggers, bloggers, podcasters, and TikTokkers is thriving and generating sizeable incomes for many.
As a recent HBR article on DAOs says:
“DAOs will give people more freedom to choose projects whose mission and vision truly resonate with them, jobs that align with their strengths, and values-aligned people to work with. This could also help to mitigate the work-life conflicts, excessive workloads, lack of autonomy, and office politics that drive workplace stress.”
DAOs aren’t in the future — they are here and now and include media organisations, venture funds and grant programs, social networks, video games and financial and tech platforms.
There’s much, much more to discover about how DAOs will impact #HowWork, some of which we are exploring in our projects in FORWARD, but a final implication worth mentioning is how incredibly important transparency is and how it is baked into a DAO: those who are part of DAOs are visible — whether it's on GitHub or Twitter or activities in the DAO itself — so they have a public track record of doing and contributing that can be assessed by anyone. So, finally, DAOs may be the end of traditional resumes (which, as almost everyone knows, are semi-fictitious histories rewritten for a job opening) and may mean that, in Morgan Beller’s phrase, “Web3 Hiring Is Unique.”
#WhoWork
Just as the what, where, when and how of work is transforming, so is the who of work.
Workforces are more diverse and increasingly more diverse than they have ever been. The workforce landscape has broader demographics, a changing international and global composition, many ethnicities and gender balance; it encompasses a much wider range of skills — not just technical but in terms of life skills gained from different experiences. For example, our team has a spread of ages, cultures, industry backgrounds, educational experiences, portfolio careers, and varied personal, professional, and life goals.
The signs are that workforces are becoming more diverse in terms of age: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, until 2010, almost all labour-force growth was driven by ages 25–64, but between 2020–2030 workers 65 and over will account for more than 60% of labour-force growth. It’s now perhaps the time to start talking about post-60 career paths as life spans extend towards a century. We are beginning to work out how to create the conditions for workforces that encourage and support people to work into their later years.
Many organisations display incredible diversity — some of it because of intentional practices, and some of it because new generations are becoming more diverse. For example, Baby Boomers, according to this chart from CNN, are homogenous, but successive generations show a much greater ethnic diversity.
In terms of gender, organisations are more diverse, even though, for example, there are still significant challenges in terms of women’s representation, especially at the most senior levels. Recent research by McKinsey says that while women’s representation has increased across the pipeline, women — especially women of colour — remain significantly underrepresented in leadership and women “continue to face a broken rung at the first step up to manager: for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 86 women are promoted.”
And now, of course, we have a much great degree of intersectionality: gender, orientation, ethnicity and any other number of dimensions of who we are, all interact. These “multiple identities of marginalization”, in the words of Jennifer Kim, mean that:
“being an advocate for workplace equity requires compassion, curiosity, and continual introspection. DEI is also an invitation to hear and learn more about others’ experiences and systematically examine the workings of our society, even if it feels pretty uncomfortable sometimes. Furthermore, it’s an ongoing conversation with yourself in understanding how your own multiple identities fit into the broader work towards progress.”
The benefits of having a diverse workforce have been repeatedly identified: more effective and multidimensional decision-making; the ability to attract a much wider talent pool of candidates (Glassdoor says that 76% of employees and job seekers think a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating job offers, something especially true for Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ+ job seekers and employees); an improved capacity to innovate because diversity fosters creativity — one study revealed that pro-diversity policies (whether the Chief Executive Officer is a woman, women or minorities are promoted to key positions, minority groups and women are represented on the board, benefits aimed at work-life balance, hiring programs aimed at disabled workers, progressive policies toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees) are positively related to the number of new product announcements per R&D dollar spent.
The who of work is just one part of a massive landscape of tectonic plates, all shifting — sometimes in concert and sometimes rubbing up against each other and against the what, when, where and how of work.
For example, consider how the WFH lockdowns of COVID-19 affected different people in different ways. Underrepresented ethnic minorities, parents, new hires, neurodiverse people and those with physical limitations were negatively impacted, as were women who— even if they had full-time jobs, a partner and children — reported spending a combined 71 hours a week on child care, elder care, and household chores compared with 51 hours for men.
One area of #WhoWork which is in focus right now is neurodiversity. Many people with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia are often marginalised and excluded from precisely those jobs where their extraordinary skills would see them, the teams they would work in, and the companies they would work for, thrive.
As this HBR piece notes:
“the neurodiverse population remains a largely untapped talent pool. Unemployment runs as high as 80% (this figure includes people with more-severe disorders, who are not candidates for neurodiversity programs). When they are working, even highly capable neurodiverse people are often underemployed.”
And the reason? A narrow set of expectations and a set of rigid processes in organisations into which the behaviours of neurodiverse people — that run counter to the usual ideas of what effective work looks like (communication skills, emotional intelligence, the presentation of self, networking skills, the ability to be flexible and accommodating) — just don’t fit.
But if organisations are to continue to innovate, it's precisely those people who are ‘at the edges’ that they need. The challenge is to build leadership and management practices that maximise their contribution and build an acceptance of neurodiversity as a way of life, allowing a more significant percentage of the neurodiverse population to become valuable members of the working community.
#WhyWork
The much-discussed Great Resignation (or Great Re-Evaluation or Great Reset) is perhaps not just a labour mobility issue (as people move between employers trading up for a bigger salary, a signing bonus or greater WFH flexibility), as much as a fundamental rethinking of what work is for us — or, more accurately, what the true cost and benefit of work is to us.
Of the many things that the pandemic delivered to us was an experience of what happens when something other than work organises our working lives.
Yes, there was that Zoom meeting at 10, a slew of emails to respond to and that report to write, but we had just a little taste of what it might be like to be freed of (at least some of) the social imperative to work. Of course, the super-rich or the wealthy (or thrifty) retiree doesn’t have to work. They are free to watch TV, hang out at Starbucks, play golf, kitesurf, nap, take care of the grandkids or volunteer for a project that excites them. But for everyone else, work is a daily reality, whether in a Zoom window or the corporate office.
And more than work, maybe it’s the work ethic that is meaningful in #WhyWork. As Jamie McCallum says in a piece called The Tyranny of Work:
“One reason the work ethic idea has such a hold on us is that it’s typically seen not only as a social good but as a primordial ideology, an idea so essential and pervasive that it has no outside root and no historical precedent. An industrious spirit is typically considered to be a natural component of our cultural DNA, an inherited trait from ancestral Protestants. Or, as the handmaiden of capitalism, it has built a sturdy foundation in our national character. From this perspective, long hours make sense.”
As McCallum argues, the work ethic is also based on the need to “prove ourselves as worthy citizens in capitalist society”. That is, you are worthy of benefits, rights and privileges because you do legitimate paid work. Those who do not, or maybe have never done, paid work are undeserving in almost every sense of the word.
Whether it’s in the form of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, written in 1890, in which there is no private property, no industrialisation, no money and no capitalist system, or universal basic income (UBI) in the form of work or activity test-free payments that allow people to meet their basic needs, the idea of asking the question ‘why work at all?’ has previously been pushed to the fringes of policy debate. It is now back in focus because, according to some commentators, technology will destroy many jobs that can be done more effectively by it.
Apart from questions about the cost, economic and political sustainability, and social acceptability of UBI, it is not clear that the job losses that have been predicted will happen. More likely is that new technologies will change the skills needed for work, so rather than UBI, maybe the answer is to invest in the design of meaningful work that permits autonomy and demands problem-solving and in reskilling, upskilling and education so that everyone can take advantage of new opportunities as workforces transform through technology.
And maybe, just as the what, why, where and how of work is being deconstructed, perhaps the very idea of a ‘job’ or a ‘workers’ can be deconstructed too. As Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau argue in their book Work Without Jobs, perhaps we need a new “work operating system” created by dismantling the idea of the conventional job and worker. As they say, “the new world of work is one ‘beyond employment’”.
The future: the place we already are and changes who we are and what we do
So to return to the top of the story, what are we to make of the ‘future of work’?
Apart from anything else, these questions should indicate the complexity of the many intersecting aspects of what work is, where it is done, how it is done, who does it and why it is done at all.
Bold pronouncements about the future of work — as opposed to asking questions about the now of work — may not be helpful because those pronouncements gloss over the complexity of what work is and how the roots of work in the future are anchored in the present, and visa versa. Some futurists, of course, have a more nuanced view — such as Amy Webb, who says the job of a futurist is “about preparations, not predictions”, and those preparations are based on systematic methods to “track signals using statistics, deep research, and creative thinking to methodically analyses next-order outcomes” — but this is rare.
There’s an often-quoted comment made in the 1970s by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who reportedly said when asked about the impact of the French Revolution that it was “too early to say”.
The quote has been used to portray China as a far-thinking civilisation. But it turns out that the comment referred to the 1968 student riots in Paris, not to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. It was, according to Chas Freeman, a retired foreign service officer, “a misunderstanding that was too delicious to invite correction.”
But maybe there is something in the idea that the past and present are in a state of messy volatility with each other, and for some things, perhaps it’s just too early to say.
As William Gibson, science fiction writer (Neuromancer, The Difference Engine, Pattern Recognition), said: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet”.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
