Are we squandering the future of work gains made during the pandemic?

The future of work was just around the corner. It was so close we could almost touch it.

In those dizzy post-pandemic days people were choosing their own locations and hours (remember the four-day work week?), on the rare days anyone actually went to an office they were bringing all of their pets with them, guys were wearing shorts, and half your team were ‘quiet quitting’.

But then things got messy (okay, messier).

Inevitably the pendulum has started to swing back to find some kind of power stasis in the system. We’ve had a couple of years of headlines about which exec is demanding which workers to go back to which office and which punishment they’ll receive if they don’t, and these ‘back to office’ pushes don’t seem to show signs of letting up anytime soon.

As is often the case, the William Gibson quote ‘the future is here, it’s not just evenly distributed’, is relevant here.

I’ve been harping on for the last couple of years that the future of work is MUCH more interesting, and much broader than whether you’re working from an office or not. Here are a few of those other topics that are worth thinking about for the near-future of work.

Re-thinking retirement: The unusual suspects

A recent article in The Cut talked to people in their 20s taking ‘mini-retirements’.

Some of them are seeing it as a one-off experience, but others are considering taking every 5th, 7th, or some other cadence of years off. They plan to use the ‘in-between’ years to save for these breaks, making lifestyle changes to make this possible.

Some of these mini-retirements are a month or two, others are a year. Some people plan to do some work during these breaks, especially those who can freelance, others plan to use the time to start a side business, and others won’t work at all during their time off.

On the surface, this might just sound like the gen Z version of the FIRE subculture. But this is yet another sign of younger people having a much more personalised, DIY, and non-traditional way of thinking about the relationship they have with work. They’re thinking about how to make that relationship work over the longer term, especially as they’ll likely be working longer than other generations.

(I am here for that).

This does mean you might need to update your workforce planning assumptions if you only think that your older workers will be the ones retiring (although that’s also changing), and new parents will be the ones taking extended time off.

The great miscommunication

Two recent studies both point to a growing divide between managers and workers.

The first is research by gig work platform Upwork, which stated that AI has created significant additional stress on workers.

About 96% of execs report they now have higher productivity expectations from workers as a result of AI tools (although I would question whether those same execs have actually invested in the training and systems that people need to make the most of AI).

However, the same report shows 77% of workers report AI tools are actually adding to their workload, largely because of the learning, reviewing, and re-work required. And 47% of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect.

We’re in a weird limbo when it comes to AI, where the promises are still in hype mode, but the productivity (and profitability) are yet to pay off, and the dystopian and disaster stories are getting more attention than the sensible stories about the time and careful thought required to integrate these new tools in a sustainable way.

The second is Atlassian’s latest State of Teams Report, which reports that 93% of executives say teams could deliver similar outcomes in half the time if they collaborated more effectively. These same executives estimate only 24% of their teams are doing mission-critical work.

From the worker’s perspective, The State of Teams Report shows 65% of knowledge workers say it’s more important to quickly respond to messages than it is to make progress on top priorities, and 70% of them agree it would be easier to make progress if they had fewer, more specific goals.

When you read this, it makes sense why managers are itching to get workers back to offices. There’s a gulf of understanding, communication, and ultimately trust between what leaders think is the reality of the day-to-day for their teams, and the actual day-to-day reality for those teams.

All of this feels like we’re in an imagination void. The conditions of work have changed a lot in the last five years, but the ways of leading, designing, and organising work have not kept up. We’ve likely let a good crisis go to waste on this issue, and are still trying to shoehorn the new world into outdated mental models of leadership and work.

A new generation of benefits

Another area that changed quickly during the pandemic, and continues to evolve is employee benefits. This year, Sweden passed a world-first law allowing grandparents to access paid parental leave while caring for grandchildren (new parents can transfer a portion of their parental leave allowance to eligible grandparents).

Back in Australia, some companies are offering paid Grandternity leave for their workers, including some workplaces acknowledging that some grandparents may actually take on more of a primary care role for their grandchildren.

Whilst this is progress, there seems to still be an assumption of childcare only coming from blood relatives. I wonder what a future might look like where this flexibility extends to the whole ‘village’ who are involved in a child’s life and care.

We’re also seeing other forms of leave offered in workplaces; from broadening parental leave to include time off to access fertility treatments, leave for gender-affirming care, the ability to switch public holidays to suit your cultural celebrations, more workplace flexibility for neurodiverse team members, and even ‘pawternity’ and ‘furwell’ leave. But my favourite find was the Asian entertainment company that offers their staff a day off as ‘Tinder Leave‘ to go on dates.

Whilst these are all amazing, I wonder when we’ll get to a point where everyone is just given a block of ‘x’ number of days which incorporates everything from sick leave, caring leave, time for wellbeing and health, annual leave, and public holidays, to be used on anything, without having to go through the process of justifying why they want to access that time off.

This would be a much more personalised approach, and prevent the inevitable ‘what about…’ as people feel these existing buckets don’t give them what they need, which we’ve seen emerge in the conversation about legislating menopause leave.

What’s next for the future of work?

These topics barely scratch the surface of what’s possible with how we work, and how work may shift over the next decade. Whilst the conversation is loudest around gen Z’s introduction to the workplace, the changes we’ll need as a result of an ageing workforce who are working to an older age, are going to come up fast and is a topic that is not being discussed enough.

Climate change, falling fertility rates, and more complex geopolitical issues are going to create some interesting (and some potentially quite dark) realities and conditions for workplaces in the near future. Leaders are going to need to make decisions and policies on topics they haven’t ever considered before now. And given that we’re still talking about getting people into an office, I wonder how prepared they will be for this.

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