Working It Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work

Copyright 2022

First edition January 2023

Book and Cover Design by Jane Rade, impact studios

Published by Relentless Press

http://www.relentlesseconomics.com

If you are interested in having Linda Nazareth be a keynote speaker at your event, please contact [email protected]

For Maddie and the rest of Generation Z—I look forward to seeing where you take the future of work.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: The Uneasy Present

Chapter 1: Lessons from the Great Resignation

Chapter 2: The Mother of All Experiments

Part 2: The Work Megatrends

Chapter 3: Generational Shift

Chapter 4: Climate Considerations

Chapter 5: Industry 4.0

Part 3: The Redefined World

Chapter 6: The Kaleidoscope

Chapter 7: The Great Reskilling

Chapter 8: Redefining Workspaces

Chapter 9: New Leadership for a New World

Acknowledgements

Introduction

When the world shut down in 2020, one of my first thoughts was that I should write a book. After all, I was not going be spending time in airports or conference rooms anytime soon, and it was unclear whether I would be working much at all. I told myself that I should use my time productively and have a book ready to go the minute the lights went back on. My provisional title for the project was Where We Left Off, and it seemed to fit the mood of 2020. The plan was for the content to focus on the trends that had been in place pre-pandemic.

By 2021, however, it was clear that both the title and the premise of the book were not going to work. First, it didn’t seem like the pandemic was going to have a hard stop, even though vaccines had been produced and sleeves were rapidly being rolled up to get them. At the beginning of 2020, someone had tweeted that we would know the pandemic was over when Whole Foods brought back their hot bar, but even when the mac ’n’ cheese and yucca fries returned, COVID-19 was still in the picture. The pandemic was not over, and economic decisions were still being made around the virus’ existence. I was back to giving presentations, but I was doing them using streaming technology in a home studio kitted out with expensive lighting, a good camera, and the coolest green screen backdrops I could find.

Regardless of whether the pandemic was on or off, my original premise had a second problem: there was simply no going back to our pre-2020 world, partly because a lot of people did not want to go back to it. That was particularly true in the world of work. Having tasted the freedom of remote work, many had zero desire to go back to an office ever again. Technology was changing, managers were being challenged, and organizations that had negotiated long-term leases in office towers were trying to determine if they could possibly get out of them. A huge debate was raging over whether we would ever go back to the good old days, with passionate arguments from all sides. All sorts of other work-related questions had come to the fore as well: Was quiet quitting a slacker phenomenon or just a sensible way to protect one’s mental health? What kind of management styles would be needed in the new world of work we were creating? How could we keep everyone reskilled, or at least as skilled as the robots eying our jobs? The more I talked to people and the more I simply observed the world around me, the more it was clear that talking about where we left off was as sweetly antiquated an idea as having a lifetime supply of hand sanitizer in my house. I needed to explore what was coming next for work, even though the future was anything but clear-cut.

Luckily for me, I had a front-row seat to the discussion, courtesy of my podcast Work and the Future, which I launched in June 2020. I had toyed with the idea of doing a podcast for years, but had never gotten around to launching one until the pandemic gave me an unwanted pocket of time. Once I figured out (with a lot of help) the logistics of getting a podcast to air, I started talking to people about the issues that were changing the world of work in real time. I found guests who were experts in all kinds of areas, and we talked about hybrid work and reinventing yourself and your career and the factors driving the Great Resignation. One guest spoke about what we could learn from astronauts (the original remote workers) and another about how we were doing a terrible job drawing on workers’ creative skills. I talked to tech executives who were learning how to manage in a new way and to designers who were figuring out what we needed from the next generation of office spaces. Although I already knew a lot about the economic factors that would come to determine the future of work, I became much more aware of the things that are driving workers’ psyches and how those will shape the future as well. It became clear that we were entering an era of experimentation regarding the best arrangements for both workers and organizations and that there was going to be an awful lot of working it out before any definitive new norms were established.

As I got back out on the road again in 2022 (revelling at presenting to actual human beings in lovely hotel ballrooms bedecked with crystal chandeliers instead of in front of the green screen in my home studio), I found audiences that were eager to hear about what came next for the world of work—and I had a lot to tell them.

***

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 takes stock of where we are right now, at what I believe is a turning point in the history of work. We have been through an actual black swan event, something that no one had as a certainty in their business plans but that we all handled as best we could. This uneasy present will not last much longer, but it is causing some disruption while it’s here. Workers and organizations alike are re-evaluating their situations and making plans for the future, even knowing full well that those plans may need to be rethought sooner rather than later.

Part 2 examines the work megatrends that are transforming the economy and the world. Demographics are changing the composition of the labour force, and as generations age they will also have an impact on the decisions that are made around work. Then there is the climate emergency. Our world is warming, severe weather events are increasingly common, and the repercussions have implications for the organizations designing how people will live and work in the future. Finally, there is Industry 4.0, otherwise known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The robots are coming and workers are done—or are they?

Finally, Part 3 takes a stab at imagining a redefined world of work. This starts with imagining new work styles and arrangements (will we all work like Hollywood actors on a project-by-project basis with time off in between?) and the future of the physical office, but it goes beyond that too. In the years ahead, we will have to think about constant reskilling, which may mean our old metrics, like prestigious academic degrees, are less important than they used to be. We are also going to have to also think about leadership in a world where business as usual may result in resolutely losing the war for talent.

***

Although some believe the gyrations currently shaking up the world of work are a temporary phenomenon and that sanity will prevail soon enough, history is against them. We have been through at least three industrial revolutions over the past 400 years, as well as mini-revolutions that have decreased the number of hours we work. We have also introduced technology that has expanded the possibilities in all spheres, including work. Everything is indeed on the table, and it is for us to decide what we want the future of work to look like.

What will we choose? Lots of things, no doubt, and then lots of things again when some of them fail. It will be a process of trial and (sometimes expensive) error, but at the end we will have redefined both the workplace and our work lives. The possibilities are exciting, so now is the time to start working it out.

Part 1

The Uneasy Present

Before talking about the future of work, we should be able to briefly sum up what the present looks like. But, in fact, that task is harder than it sounds. Even before anyone had heard of COVID-19, the work world was already in flux as organizations struggled with how to best juggle a competitive global economy, technological change, finding the right workers, and then setting those workers up to function at their best. Steps toward trends like remote work were being taken gingerly, and despite talk about revolutionary changes, the revolution was happening at a glacial pace.

The pandemic has set off a bomb in terms of the evolution of work. It has changed how people feel about their lives, sometimes prompting them to quit their jobs and try their luck elsewhere. It has changed management structures, organizational behaviours, and even physical office spaces. It’s also set off huge debates over what the future should look like—debates that might take years to settle.

Chapter 1

Lessons from the Great Resignation

There are a lot of business catch phrases out there, but during the second year of the pandemic, one in particular struck a nerve: the Great Resignation.

You can picture it in your mind, and the visual will lend itself to a documentary when someone gets around to making one: across the United States, across Canada, across the world, workers just Having Had Enough (this could potentially be its title; the statement is certainly fitting based on statistics). Going into their supervisors’ offices and telling them a thing or two before finishing off their impassioned tirades with, I quit! Gathering their things into cardboard boxes, shaking hands with their colleagues, and leaving for better things, a spring in their step. Or what they hope are better things, anyway. Because if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that life is short. When we take that lesson and apply it to our work lives, it’s easy to see that this short life shouldn’t be spent at a place of employment we hate, being supervised by someone who may or may not have the skills necessary to perform that function. And so: That’s it. I’m gone. I’ve found something better. Hopefully.

Whether or not the Great Resignation turns out to be a lasting phenomenon, in 2021 and 2022 it was certainly a wake-up call for businesses. Suddenly, many realized they were losing the workers they had—and finding it hard to attract the new ones they wanted. Partly a product of the economy, partly of tapping into something related to what workers were feeling in a pandemic-scarred world, this trend represents one of the pandemic’s most significant impacts on the workforce to date. It could and should have a lasting impact. The Great Resignation was and is something of a report card for organizations, and for many it delivered failing grades. Across the board, workers are not happy, and that can’t be good for anyone who wants to build a thriving business or economy.

The Rush to the Door

The term the Great Resignation was coined in 2021 by Anthony Klotz, an organizational psychologist and professor at Texas A&M University. He used it to describe the wave of people quitting their jobs at the end of the first year of the pandemic, when the previous twelve months of uncertainty had led people to rethink where, how, and why they wanted to work. At the time, the U.S. economy was springing back to life. Shutdowns had turned to re-openings, and the newly vaccinated were flooding restaurants and stores, where there was barely enough staff to serve them. At the same time, low interest rates and tons of government stimulus initiatives had sent the economy flying, and seemingly everyone was hiring. Workers with the right skills had their pick of jobs, and whether you were a waitress or a systems analyst, it seemed like a good time to try out a new one—especially if you hated your boss (and apparently a lot of people did). The Great Resignation was on.

The official statistics go some way to capturing the disruption. The I quit!s started in earnest early in 2021, and in the United States, 48 million people quit their jobs during the year as a whole, a record number. The numbers were not as clear in Canada: as of the beginning of 2022, job churn did not seem much different than was normal before the pandemic. But in Canada and around the globe, the idea of the Great Resignation caught the imagination. Every media outlet had stories of workers being treated poorly and wanting to quit, and every coffee shop full of disgruntled workers did as well. As the months went on, there seemed to be no let-up in the number of people considering their options and looking for something better. A study released by consulting company Willis Towers Watson in the spring of 2022 found that 44 percent of employees were job seekers and 33 percent had actively looked for work in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Statistics aside, the anecdotal evidence was overwhelming. Whatever the reason, people seemed not to like the jobs they’d gone into the pandemic with very much, and that situation didn’t change once the health crisis hit full force. Perhaps it makes sense: workers, like all of us, had been through a dramatic episode. And that can change a person’s perceptions about everything, work included. The consulting group McKinsey & Company surveyed workers in September 2021, noting that eighteen months into pandemic, workers were tired and some felt as though they were actually grieving a loss. Forty percent of respondents said they were at least somewhat likely to quit their current jobs in the next three to six months, with the findings holding across the five countries surveyed (Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and across the range of industries. Workers in the leisure and hospitality industries were most likely to plan on quitting, but the healthcare sector and those in white-collar jobs were not far behind. Even among educators—the group least likely to quit—almost one-third reported that they were somewhat likely to do so.

Some of what we saw during the pandemic was simply a reaction to practical circumstances; at least in the early part of the crisis, women were the most likely to quit because of childcare issues. Schools, in many cases, had pivoted to online learning, and someone had to be home with kids to supervise the studying or at least to provide the childcare that would normally have been covered during the day. Data from human resources services company LifeWorks shows that of those who resigned in Canada, 16 percent did so because of caregiving responsibilities, with parents more than twice as likely than non-parents to have quit. Some of those leaving were lower-paid workers in the hospitality or service industries whose work hours had been eliminated or drastically cut by the pandemic and who did not rush back to work when things reopened.

There is also an argument to be made that people were resigning simply because there were great opportunities elsewhere. After a rocky patch during the first lockdowns in early 2020, by mid-2020 and 2021 much of the world found itself in an economic boom, if a fairly unusual one. Governments were spending wildly to stimulate economies, which worked fine, especially when paired with rock-bottom interest rates. Housing markets roared, people borrowed to buy cars and do home improvements, and both the public and private sectors found themselves in need of workers, particularly highly skilled workers. An unhappy employee at a tech company could peruse the listings on LinkedIn and find a raft of opportunities, or just touch base with friends at other companies and learn that, yes, they were hiring. If the grass looked greener somewhere else, there was nothing stopping them from trying it