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This question is very basic and for a moment nonsensical but it has a profound question, as work takes up most of our waking hours and on occasions more than our sleeping hours.
Work as we know for centuries, is no more what we perceive it to be. Work to many is for most to make end meet and to some a sword hanging over their head. To many it is life itself, it is gives them their identity on who they are, their entire lives revolve around work. Yet to a few, there is a clear divide between work and their personal life, a perfect work-life balance.
HBR in their article by David Burkus indicates: Keeping Work and Life Separate Is More Trouble than It’s Worth – yes to many it is the fact of life. The truth is that work-life balance is dead in our present environment of ubiquitous connectivity in which employees can be accessible at any time of the day, any day of the week, working from different locations - locally, nationwide or globally. The article further goes to say:
“new research suggests that maintaining strict distinctions between work roles and home roles might actually be what is causing our feelings of stress to set in. Instead of leaving work at the office and home at the door, integrating both might be a better strategy for enhancements in well-being and performance.”
As a consultant providing project delivery services, I have been integrating work and life since 2002 and have found it liberating and less stressful. Work-life is an attitude which one cultivates to move between the two aspects of our life seamlessly. The 9-to-5 Workweek Is Dead and the 40 Hour myth and the line between people’s work and nonwork lives continues to blur
What is future of work and the workplace anyways?
Work and the workplace, as we know is slowly but steady mutating into something we are not familiar with and we cannot possibly identify with.
Jeff DeChambeau has this to say about work and the workplace: "Work is what we do, not where we go. Work is what we produce, not when we produce. It’s the problems we solve and the things we create. It’s how we use our skills and our smarts."
I think he has something here that could assist us in determining the answer to what is work and the workplace. To understand work better let’s understand what happened to work? Work has changed as business has changed.
The work we did in the past, from the advent of the industrial economy to digital revelation revolved around structures of control and creating efficient organisations or effective workplaces and facilities which resulted ina workplace where we worked in isolation carrying on our individual task.
Technology is changing the business and its environment where team structures are becoming fluid and response times even unclear. The workplace is where many of the established formalised structures of what is considered ‘work and the workplace’ will disappear and instead the imperative of necessity is defining ‘work and the workplace’.
The future of work of managing and leading; the work of setting priorities, making strategy, reviewing performance, divvying up work and allocating rewards is going to get distributed to the edges of the organization as social technologies such as crowdsourcing, social graphs, microblogging, tagging, opinion markets, mash-ups, peer ratings, peer production, crowdfunding, social curation and other new socially-enabled technologies emerging almost daily move into the workplace and redefine work itself.
The way we work is also undergoing massive change, where mobility and digital sophistication becomes a key requirement in the workplace and redefining how organization works commercially and culturally to deliver genuine customer experience. The workplace is digitally being disrupted – “The fourth industrial revolution is creating prospects of a future that few fully comprehend, but the implications for the world of work are already taking shape”. More and more of our work is done collaboratively, securely and productively. There is no doubt that the relationship between technology and humanity is changing very fast and it is shaping the way we work. The future of work is slowly creeping into our collective psychic in the workplace.
Automation technologies and artificial intelligence technological advances are incredibly meaningful and will revolutionize the commercial interactions and expand possibilities of new type of jobs that were unimaginable before the technology. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) indicates “that the potential for automation across 54 countries and more than 2,000 work activities indicates that the number of jobs that can be fully automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology is less than 5%. That number could go as high as 20% in some middle skill categories”. It further reports that: “even if a job isn’t completely taken over by a robot, about 60% of all jobs have a least a third of activities that could be automated based on current technology (think: virtual assistants)”. These changes to the workplace will require a need for preparation, through training, education and ultimately encouraging flexibility towards the untethered workplace.
Throw into this mix the Global Talent Crunch where talent is available in countries such as India, China that are developing while talent is decreasing in the developed countries such as Canada, USA and the growth of the contingent worker. The Intuit 2020 Report indicates that 80% of global corporations’ plan to significantly increase their use of contingent labor. The US government reported that 40% of Workers Now Have 'Contingent' Jobs. This means that a person next to you in the future will be a contingent worker and you are working into a growing environment of “Co-Working space”.
Coworking is growing in our industry where we can work anytime and anywhere, untethered, unlike we’ve ever could work in the past. Coworking has its challenges but workplaces that are co-working places are exploding as it enters our corporate spaces and workplace become less managed and more collaborative where individuals are working together leveraging their talent, experience and tacit knowledge triggering judgement work to arrive at decisions where traditional hierarchies will not be operative rather where team members who are brilliant, inspiring and contribute to the team becoming leaders.
Someone said, you must look far into the past to see the future more clearly!
It is true to understand the workplace of today we need to look at the difference between the ways we worked before the exponential burst of ubiquitous technology on the work landscape and the way we work now in the digital globalized economy. The reason I say this is somehow as human beings we are wired to look for “what is in the future” in this case - what is the future of work, not realising that the future of work is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.
As William Gibson said: The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. Understanding these shifts in the work and workplace can help policy makers, business leaders, and workers move forward. What are your insight on work and the workplace of the future? I would like to hear from you.
Philip Thomas is an Enabler, Client Advocate, Management Consultant – Project Delivery, Project Director & Manager and a budding Idea Entrepreneur at Optum+.
Sparking conversation on “Disrupting the AEC Industry” and “The Untethered Workplace”.
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be presenting on February 15, 2017 on “Disrupting the AEC Industry” and on February 16, 2017 on “The Untethered Workplace” at the upcoming BUILDEX Vancouver conference!
This is Western Canada’s largest event for the Construction, Renovation, Architecture, Interior Design and Property Management industries with 14,000 attendees attending each year.
This event is held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West where I’ll be joining other speakers who are all committed to employing the best practices and keeping up with the trends in their industries. You can visit www.buildexvancouver.com for more info.
Hope to see you there!
