Soon we'll all be Corporate Sims. 3 predictions on the Future of Work.
For some reasons I can’t explain, I’m really interested in how we approach work and thinking about how we can optimise workplaces for the things people really care about and improve performance (e.g. autonomy, psychological safety), rather than what’s often perceived or actually is most coveted or rewarded (e.g. novelty perks, presenteeism). Our perception of future changes are often rooted in what’s possible now rather than what could be in future. For example, what once seemed unachievable or niche e.g being a full-time Digital Nomad, while perhaps not mainstream, is no longer as aspirational myth but rather a lifestyle that is much more broadly accessible than it everyone was before, limited more so now by personal circumstances, than know-how or infrastructure. Also, thanks to Covid, many of us have had the opportunity to drive-test the process by hunkering down for a few months in our parents’ house or a Portuguese surf town while working (I still regret not doing this during lockdown), resolving the can-I-really-work-from-anywhere question entirely.
So with all this in mind I’ve started thinking of what are the ways-of-working trends that we’ll likely encounter as the norm in the future. Below are my 3 predictions for how the future of our working environments, conditions and expectations will change in the next 10 years.
Image credit: Stewart Brand & Alicia Eggert
Prediction 1: The 4 day work week will become the norm
Microsoft Japan tested the approach in 2019. The UK Labour Party adopted it as an official policy in that same year and yet somehow didn’t manage to win the election even with this promise. Since then the 4DWW has steadily been growing in prominence. Shorter working weeks have been tested in several utopian Nordic countries. Bolt recently became the largest tech company to introduce to the 4 day work week as their standard practice. Worky introduced a 4 day week for their product and tech teams which shows companies which shows it doesn’t have to be an org wide approach (although I think that could lead to having a whole host of other cultural and engagement issues). The results are nearly unanimously positive with greater productivity and wellbeing being reported by employees. Right now I find this practice still gives off slightly marketing gimmick vibes, used to lure talent in a hyper competitive market, similar to how in-office ping-pong tables were not too long ago. However, while initially skeptical about this practice, I believe it is going to become the trend for three reasons:
It’s a policy that most organisations can offer: It’s not location or industry specific. You don’t need to reduce service hours, provided you can get the scheduling in order. You don’t even need to be able to pay people 100% of their current wages (yet) as many people are willing to take a pay cut for a reduced week. The approach does require some preparation and changes but most of those are administrative rather than structural (unless you work in the public sector or in unionised industries that would require some third party agreements in advance). Arguably the main thing stopping many companies doing so, or even trialing it today, is the fear of the unknown and perhaps having to come to terms with the fact that the way it’s always been done doesn’t need to be the continued approach.
The trend will reach a tipping point: As more companies offer it, more employees will come to expect it, and more businesses will become used to navigating around it. Some roles are more easily transitionable to the approach (think Support teams working on transactional type tickets or Engineering teams who have agreed this as a sprint approach), however, teams whose schedules are more often directed by their customers than their own (Customer Success, Sales) will likely find ways to adapt to it as their customers will be more empathic of, and in sync with the approach.
Increased automation and the rise of async: A lot of the work we do now will take less time to complete. Calendly already saves me an enormous amount of time compared to the previous back-and-forths I used to experience via email. If the initial reviews are to be believed, Github’s co-pilot is helping to increase the effectiveness of engineering teams. What used to be a meeting or training session can now often be replaced by a 2x’d Loom. I think we’ll see a rise in productivity enhancing software in the next decade that increases admin automation even further reducing the more mundane workload for teams.
The pros of a shorter working week are obvious. It forces us to be mindful of how we spend our time, culling ineffective meetings and like any tight deadline, acts as a good antidote to analysis paralysis and actioning what matters, more immediately.
Every silver lining has a cloud to surround, and a shorter work week will likely lead to a decrease in individual flexibility to increase the collective productivity of the group. There is also a danger that we’ll remove the fun and humanity out of work if we sacrifice everything to the altar of efficiency, something I think that we should be hyper-vigilant about. For the most part most roles will still likely require interaction with other humans and we’ll need to do so in a shorter time frame (think of the calendar squeeze that already precedes no meeting days). Realistically, there are some roles that will never fit this mold, like startup founder, especially in the early days, or Prime Minister, as international emergencies aren’t known to stick to a schedule. However, for the rest of us, I think 3 day weekends, every weekend are on its way 😎 .
Prediction 2: Gig Economy meets Ownership Economy
One sad fact about the gig economy is that often those providing the most value in a marketplace, whether it’s VC-backed cab app drivers, delivery riders or easily schedule-able DIYers, typically don’t get to benefit from the value they are creating, in the same outsized way that employees directly hired by these companies do, because they don’t have an opportunity to earn equity. Similarly, the majority of content creators who power engagement on social media platforms don’t reap any rewards beyond those sweet sweet dopamine hits. This inequity is one of the drivers that’s currently drawing a lot of investment and hype into Web3, which if the Twitter accounts I follow are to be believed, “wagmi frens” and will soon reap the crypto-ripened spoils of the Ownership Economy. Joking aside, one of the reasons I am bullish on Web3 as a concept, if not quite yet technically (great post on that topic here), is because of that focus on enabling creators to be able to generate an income from their art (I use that term loosely because yes cat photos absolutely do count), and not just from ads. Ownership isn’t just limited to online enterprises. Some restaurant groups already provide ownership options to employees, other companies engage in profit sharing and let’s not forget that co-ops were the original DAOs. What I do think will change in the next decade is the expectation that any type of employment, whether FTE or gig worker, comes with both an immediate monetary reward (salary, hourly rate) and an ownership element driven in part by increased awareness of and democratization of investments through trading apps and crypto. So what could this look like:
Uber drivers earning fractional shares per ride
Freelance designers creating NFT based sign-up campaigns for companies, earning more as each new user signs-up
Fixed term contract workers being provided the options of salary only, or lower salary and equity packages
This may all seem ridiculous and I’ve brushed over what are no doubt countless financial, regulatory and technological barriers to achieving these. However, as the sign above says, this present moment used to be the unimaginable future. 15 years ago nobody ever thought we’d be using the same device to help us meditate, send work messages and share drunken photos, but Tony Fadell went ahead and invented the iPhone and here we all now are, living in that unimaginable future.
Prediction 3: Companies will invest in intentionally designed virtual workspaces
Tech companies (or at least the successful ones) are notorious for designing beautiful workspaces, where their offices aren’t just treated as a place to work but rather an extension of the brand and a physical embodiment of the culture. However, the “places” aka the tools we use for socialising or collaborating with colleagues online are often sterile, save for the odd custom background (á la Zoom) or else impose a very particular aesthetic as the interface for discussions, that may or may not be in line with the existing brand or culture (Gather Town is good example of this). Regardless of how quickly remote working does/does not accelerate, virtual meetings will continue to be the norm, just as they were pre-pandemic. I think we will see companies become as intentional about designing their internal online spaces as they are about their physical locations. What this could look like? A rise in more customised virtual meeting spaces for webinars (think Roblox but for B2B SaaS companies), VR meetings will finally become a thing and we’ll all be wearing company swag in the Metaverse.
We recruit new employees, sell to prospects and host marketing events online every day, where the attendees’ main visual representation of the brand during these interactions are usually just a slide deck. For some remote workers, their only physical representation of their company’s offices is the screen in front of them. Extending a brand and cultural lens to our virtual workspaces in many ways seems like the natural next step. I’m not sure if we’ll see companies advertise experience designer roles for their corporate Sims equivalent anytime soon but I do think that Marketing and People teams will start to more explicitly own the entire experiences of these spaces.
Agree or disagree?
Part of the reason I started this newsletter was to dive deeper into topics of interest and also get different perspectives on them, so if you agree or disagree with any of the above (happy to place bets on any of these to be redeemed in 2032), or just want to generally philosophise on the future of work feel free to reply or reach out on Twitter.