“The Remote Work Experiment” continued: arriving in the future of work
The year 2020 made many of us guinea pigs in a global “work from home” experiment. We have seen all the embarrassing episodes that were to be expected from barely dressed house mates zoom-bombing our team meetings to ministers doing TV interviews in their underwear (and some even more disturbing stories). And we have seen the downsides of working from home (especially under the conditions of nationwide lockdowns) such as isolation and stress.
But we have also seen that it is possible to run teams and even whole companies from our attic desk or our kitchen table — and some may have even felt a deeper connection to their co-workers and a new sense of solidarity and community over virtual cocktail classes and quiz nights.
Whatever your personal experience was, the last year was a period of improvisation, experimentation and learning. Over the past months, I have tried to make sense of what this experiment means for how we will work and live in the future by compiling a curated reading list on Medium which collected some of the best articles, podcasts and reports that I came across.
Arriving in the future
Given all that we know today, this year’s headline will not be “back to normal”. Instead, we will reflect on our experience as remote workers and will start to permanently adjust the way we work — both as individuals and in organisations.
As we change the meaning of “work”, our societies will change as well just because so much of our society is a reflection of how we organise work. We will see that the fabric of our cities changes, that second and third tier cities will rise to the top and that new forms of employment will emerge.
In this spirit, it is also time to adjust how I observe these changes. In 2020, it was all about seeing, reading, experimenting and learning. This year will be all about implementation — about actually arriving in the future.
Our societies reflect our meaning of work
Instead of curating a reading list that supports the journey of discovery that we all embarked on last year, my goal for this year is to focus on what has actually proven to make us more creative, resilient and happier at work and to focus on the big ideas that help companies, individuals and us as societies to adapt and, recover and grow.
Each post will focus on a particular theme and address a particular level, from the individual to the organisational and finally the societal level:
PRODUCTIVITY: Productivity will be essential for the economic recovery after the pandemic. Posts in this section will focus on individual productivity hacks as well as systems designed to increase productivity on an organisational level.
INNOVATION: One common theme in the past few months was a fear that a socially distant environment may have a negative impact on innovation. Posts in this section will discuss how innovation can be sustained and supported in a remote first world and include methods for personal creativity and team brainstormings as well as strategies to organise for innovation on a large scale.
BEHAVIOUR AND CULTURE: Corporate culture is even more essential in the post-COVID world of work where we can no longer rely on a clear chain of command and where individual contributors need to understand a company’s direction to make decisions in the interest of the wider company. Posts in this section will showcase companies that have mastered remote work culture.
SOCIETY: Change is almost always disruptive, especially when it’s related to work. The changing world of work will create new societal conflicts and redistribute power and wealth. Posts in this section will look at the impact of the changing world of work on the workforce, cities and suburban areas as well as on our education system and the way we run our communities.
Emerging conflicts
I am not an expert at all on most of these issues but I hope I will meet lots of them on my journey and share what I have learned from them. Some of the texts here will be based on articles, books and podcasts and I will continue to update my Notion document to collect interesting articles I came across. Other texts will be conversations (or recollections of conversations I overheard at Clubhouse :-) and some will just be random thoughts.
My next post will discuss some of the emerging conflict lines that I believe will shape how we will speak about work, business and our communities in the years to come, whether it’s imbalances in the labour market, gender imbalances or the impact of remote work on inner cities.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to the blog, follow me on Twitter, share this post with a friend or send me your story — I am looking forward to hearing from you.
The Future of Work has finally arrived — so let’s make it work!
