The optimistic metaphor “every cloud has a silver lining” feels like a weak attempt to apply a cliché to the wound felt around the world.
Every facet of life deeply challenges us as we endure an uninvited and intense change in our day-to-day. There is no daily practice more acutely disrupted than the routine of work.
Remember: we are the same people, with the same team collaborating on the same work. That remains untainted. The traditional routine of commuting to a central location on a repeating timetable stems from the early factory system. Widespread beliefs frame this routine as the superior design for work and company requirements protect it.
What is the “silver lining” to COVID-19?
We have an evolving opportunity to break from inertia and discover the mental muscle of free will in the design of a modern world of work.
In today’s muted world, we find ourselves, surprisingly, working together on a global proof of concept of an alternative approach to work. We are experimenting with how physical location can be supplemented by digital reach (think, telehealth). We are testing how variable hours can work across teams when we are willing to trust (think, working parents who are homeschooling). And more than anything, we feel with intensity the desire and need for human contact.
As we endure through the response to COVID19, a new approach to work is evolving at the midpoint of the traditional routine and the fully-remote world in the form of a digital, flexible, and humanistic style of work.
Blending the best of both worlds within the employer/employee relationship is known as the evolution towards Work as a Lifestyle (WaaL). The gift of this collective experience and response to COVID-19 is the emergence of the Future of Work mindset, awakening the Futurist within to establish this style as the “new normal” in shaping a 21st-century workplace.
Shifting the World of Work
We are facing nothing short of a paradigm shift in the world of work. And that’s a pretty big deal – it’s only happened twice before in the history of humanity.
We started as a hunter-gatherer society and foraged for what we needed.
Then, we evolved into an agricultural economy based on the innovation of growing crops.
Next, we evolved into an industrial economy on the continuous innovations of steam, electricity, and technology.
Here we are again on the precipice of monumental change as artificial intelligence technologies influence everything about how we live, work, and consume.
Monumental but also alarmingly rapid, this change presents the potential to reshape, eliminate, and create new job types. The Future of Work mindset is digitally native, curious, and adaptable.
COVID19 & The Future of Work
We generally don’t change by choice. We mostly change because we must.
Even in our recent past, we have changed our behaviors to chart a new course. We reacted to 9/11 by changing how we think about personal and community physical safety and becoming more security conscious. We reacted to the 2008 Financial Crisis by changing how we think about spending and consumption, becoming more conscious of financial security. We are reacting to COVID-19 by becoming digitally conscious—no longer seeing digital skills as a millennial hallmark but as life skills for people of all ages and all occupations.
Gig Work is not the Future of Work
Digital awareness as a developing skill set has given rise to a generation of gig workers (ex. Uber & Upwork). The work arrangement between gig worker and gig platform provides the highly desired benefits of choice & flexibility; we all want autonomy over the decisions that shape our lives.
The Future of Work is flexible, but not in the way that Gig platforms envision.
This strong desire for choice has given rise to a generation of digital day laborers as we resurrect the hunter-gatherer model in digital format, watching painfully as most spiral downwards in the absence of a social safety net.
Work as a Lifestyle (WaaL)
Companies view the traditional routine as an organizational necessity, long suppressing human potential, marginalized talent, and excluding a significant part of the labor pool.
To solve for this disconnect while maintaining the status quo, leaders pursue a patchwork system of creative “work/life balance” initiatives: unlimited vacation time, ping pong tables, nap pods, and the like. The intent is spot on, to humanize the workplace, but it misses the mark. A top / down, one size fits all corporate policy can’t, by design, reflect the unique needs of individual workers.
Modernizing the Workplace Relationship
We find the key to success in the Future of Work in developing a system of mutual trust between front line managers and their employees when working together and creating value in a hybrid digitized workplace. Flipping the script to offering employees a reasonable choice in where and when they work transforms a company to Work as a Lifestyle.
We get there by building a new ecosystem of virtual resources, technology, and, most importantly, by adjusting behavioral norms.
These behavioral norms build on a new cornerstone of blended work environments where employees work fixed and variable hours within physical and virtual workplaces. This model replaces the traditional routine of work as superior in producing economic value as the world becomes increasingly artificially intelligent.
Can We Do It? Really?
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
The legacy of COVID19 will be the mass evolution towards the Future of Work. We can do it if we choose trust over fear. Sway your mind to a new way of thinking.
The future depends on it.
