Source : THE AGE NEWS
What is the future of work? That’s one of those grand, esoteric questions that gets thrown at anyone who spends their time thinking about how the grounds we are working on are constantly shifting beneath our feet.
And it’s changing a lot. There are societal adjustments like work from home and employment landscapes, technological changes like automation and AI, rising trends like four-day work weeks, increasing skills gaps in our workplaces and political winds like the right to disconnect and labour laws.
There is no single answer as to what the future of work will hold that will be the same for every person.Credit: iStock
I spend some of my time delivering talks and workshops to businesses of all sizes to help them deal with these shifts. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in Melbourne or Milton Keynes, I can almost guarantee you that during the audience Q&A after talking about how work is changing, someone will always put their hand up and ask a variation of the question: “So, what is the future of work then?”
It’s a loaded question that I’ve spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of, and have now come to the conclusion that the future of work is simply three things: it’s personal, it’s messy, and it’s here right now.
Let’s start with the first one. There is no single answer as to what the future of work will hold that will be the same for every person, as the future of my work is completely different to yours.
Just as each of our winding career paths to get us where we are today is unique, so too are the 3.6 billion different ways that everyone’s jobs will evolve for each worker on Earth.
How it will change is going to depend on your occupation, history, workplace, skills and industry. So please always keep that in mind when someone tells you exactly what’s going to happen to your particular job without any of the context surrounding it.
The second answer is that the future of work will be messy. This is not the neat response most people want to hear, but every organisation and employee is currently trying to figure it out in real time.
Take the upheaval over whether knowledge workers should WFH or return to the office five days a week. There’s hardly a boardroom or team meeting that hasn’t had to deal with the inherent complications in trying to make this new way of working actually work equally for everyone in the building.
Both sides, employers and employees, need to understand that messiness is part of the design, not its flaw. We are all fumbling our way through attempting to figure out how the future of work applies to our everyday reality, and missteps are part of the process.
The final aspect is that the future of work, whether we’re ready or not, is already here. Many of the things we predicted would happen “one day” have arrived. Technology is performing complex tasks easier than before, and advances in science is opening up new fields every day.
Job titles, responsibilities and skills requirements are changing faster than education can keep up, and we are transforming how we work in ways that previous generations could only dream of.
However, at the centre of all of this futuristic talk, sits you and your job. The future of work might be personal, messy and already here, but it’s still up to us to learn how to adapt and experiment so that it still works for us.
After all, the future isn’t something that just happens passively to us, it’s one that we still have the power to influence, one personal, messy decision at a time.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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