The Future of Work is Human

The future of work looks different. It's a reality that has been accelerated over the course of the past few years, as the COVID-19 pandemic upended traditional office environments, forcing organizations to pivot to remote or hybrid work models. But the debate around the future of work is far from new – as long as there has been work there has also been a desire for it to be better.

But despite this ongoing conversation, I can’t help but feel that far too often our response is not nearly nuanced enough. As changing cultural environments around us allow (or force) us to rethink our work, we often leave our imaginations behind.

In many instances, for example, we've simply replaced the tyranny of the office with similar all-or-nothing approaches on the opposite side of the debate.

It's a pendulum swinging sort of way of thinking that overlooks the complexity of work, the needs of individual workers, and the unique requirements of different organizations.

For instance, my LinkedIn feed is flooded with statements about the remote work movement that I love the ideals behind, but that can also miss much of the point. It's true that remote work can offer flexible schedules, significant cost savings, and other advantages. However, it's just as true that remote work can be isolating, demanding, and emotionally taxing – especially for those who struggle to separate work and home life. We need to think more deeply about these complex challenges and opportunities.

I want to call for a bit of a pause on how we are thinking about the future of work. Instead of rushing towards more one-size-fits-all solutions hiding behind a false veneer of worker empowerment, let's take the time to examine what might be possible. By shifting our focus to more nuanced, individualized approaches, we can create work environments that are better suited to the needs of both organizations and individual workers.

The Current Moment

The tides of work culture seem to shift back and forth, often correlated to the vagaries of the concurrent economic climate. In times of tight labor markets, when talent is in short supply, employers tend to support the empowerment of workers, providing greater flexibility, autonomy, and benefits to current and prospective team members. We see examples of this in the trends towards flexible or fully remote work, generous PTO policies, and emphasis on employee well-being.

But are these shifts towards human thriving motivated by genuine concern for worker needs or by business convenience? I know that many organizations are truly pursuing thriving cultures. But when economic downturns occur, layoffs happen, and it's workers who compete for jobs rather than the other way around, we've seen that many of these perks and priorities seem to vanish overnight.

It's concerning, but understandable – businesses are facing unprecedented uncertainty, and many are struggling to adapt to rapidly-changing circumstances.

However, this moment of flux also presents an opportunity. We can choose to view this period as a chance to re-examine our priorities and values as they relate to work. We can create systems that better balance the need for economic stability with the need for human well-being and flexibility. We can embrace new technologies and ways of working that allow us to find novel solutions to old problems. We can create a more equitable and humane world of work for all.

The Future of Work will be Different

Despite the pendulum swings we've seen in work culture, we have irrevocably crossed a threshold of permanent change in the future of work. A tide has turned; even with short-term economic variations seeming to anchor us to old ideas, the future of work will indeed look different – and exciting possibilities lie ahead.

Technologies like AI, while not the focus of this article, will play a massive part in our understanding of what work is. Right now we are seeing many massive short-term AI-fueled gains in our daily work lives.

The globalization of the workforce is undergoing a massive shift, affording much greater geographic flexibility to workers and much greater access to talent. A huge amount of new tools, startups, and products are being created that help make this more possible: everything from how to hire, pay, and manage people who work anywhere in the world to asynchronous processes and collaboration that add more flexibility to the actual working day rhythms of individual workers and teams.

But all of these things are also still in the infancy of their potential. It's easy to be dazzled by the surface-level changes and new technologies, but we need to ask ourselves:

"In our gold rush towards the nuggets on the surface, are we missing the deeper opportunities before us?"

Our collective imagination has not been sparked enough about what larger shifts these trends and technologies will cause.

Missing the Point

Much of our effort has missed the point.

In our rush to vilify the commute, we have ignored the loss of a healthy buffer between our human lives and the work we engage in with part of them. In our zeal to embrace the value of flexible work schedules and output-based performance, we may be minimizing the dehumanizing risks inherent in seeing humans as work-producing units.

Even the overwhelming success of most 4-day work week trials is misleading. Though we'll continue to see growing calls for broad adoption of this reduced work week, this too misses the point. The key truth is not that 4 is greater than 5 (why not 3 then?), it's that our human relationship with work is broken, and we need to rethink it entirely.

When we reduce the future of work to a binary argument about remote versus in-office, 5 days vs. 4, real-time meetings vs asynchronous, we miss the nuances and complexities of what work truly is. Work is a deeply human experience. It's a space where we spend a significant portion of our lives, where we develop skills and relationships, and where we create value – not just for our employers, but for ourselves and for society at large.

Make no mistake: I love the work being done by my co-conspirators who are focused on building a better future of work. There is no shortage of amazing efforts underway to create more sustainable, equitable, and human-centric work environments.

But unfortunately, much of the remote-first movement seems to miss the point. While remote work does offer many benefits, including greater flexibility and autonomy, it is not a cure-all for the deeper problems facing the future of work. Indeed, without careful consideration and intentional effort, remote work has the potential to exacerbate these problems, by creating a more fragmented and isolated work environment that prioritizes productivity over people.

If we truly want to reimagine the future of work, we need to look beyond surface-level changes and instead examine the deeper structures and systems that govern how work is organized, compensated, and valued. We need to recognize that the current work paradigm is steeped in outdated assumptions about what work is and what it means to be productive.

It's understandable why we tend to focus on short-term gains when it comes to the future of work. These gains are valuable, and we shouldn't ignore them. And it's always easier to imagine the next step when big things start to change. The uncertainty around each successive step compounds, until predicting the future becomes science fiction.

However, if we don't look beyond the immediate gains – if we don't look a little bit farther than "commute bad, flexibility good" – we might miss the rich opportunities that we have even now to imagine a healthier and less reactionary workplace present, on our way to a better workplace future.

How Then, Should we Imagine?

This is just an introduction to a more nuanced conversation about what the future of our workplaces might look like. This future will look different, and while it’s hard to imagine just what all of those differences are, there’s one that we cannot allow to escape us: the opportunity to build a future of work that is human-centered.

We need to rebuild our relationship with work from the ground up. We need to ask ourselves: What is work for? How does it contribute to our individual and collective well-being? How can we create an environment where work is a positive and meaningful part of our lives, rather than a necessary but soul-sucking burden?

What if empathy, deep human connection, and even love could be built into the fabric of our collective work efforts? What if we could create environments where workers felt truly supported and valued – where their well-being was as much of a priority as the bottom line?

By embracing these deeper questions and engaging in more nuanced and complex conversations about the future of work, we may be able to create a future that is truly human-centric and sustainable. Let's not miss the point – the future of work is not just about where and how we work, but also about why we work and what it means to be a worker.

This, by no means, is a given. In fact, this is the Mt. Everest of work futures. We are deeply prone to repeat the mistakes of the past, and instead of a human-centric future, we could easily create a dehumanized future of work where all that matters is process and output, rather than the people creating it.

So how do we imagine a future of work that is truly human-centered? How do we balance the economic imperatives of work with the deeper values that underpin our social and cultural lives?

There are no easy answers to these questions. And this article contains no roadmap. 

The truth is that this work is messy and complex. But that's exactly why we need to engage in deeper, more nuanced conversations about the future of work.

We need to pursue not just the easy and quick answers, but the deeper and richer opportunities of rethinking our work. And the good news is that we don't have to do this alone. There are countless individuals and organizations that are committed to building a better future of work.

So let's do this work together. Let's imagine a future of work that is truly human-centered, and let's be willing to do the hard work necessary to make that future a reality. The journey ahead won't be easy, but it will be worth it. Together, we can create a future of work that is truly human.