The future of work is in pieces

Photo by NEOSiAM 2021.

It depends on how you look at it. One lens is that this is a short week. The other is that it's the tail end of a long weekend. And, if you're our family in the States, there's a third lens. That this is yet another Canadian holiday that sounds made up.

We're writing you from the August Civic Holiday Long Weekend. Yes, we know how ridiculous that sounds. But if you find yourself forced into an extra holiday, one that arrives in the middle of summer is pretty great. Best not to fuss too much about what it's called.

There was a time, not too long ago, when summer hours and four-day-work-weeks were all the rage. Part of a long list of pandemic-enabled features of work. All designed to help employers compete for talent in a loud and crowded market. And while the volume has come down from the peak, we're hearing from bosses that the future of work still feels very TBD.

Putting knowledge work on an assembly line

Over the course of three years, we filled dictionaries with new ways to describe knowledge work. We now flit across a shared lexicon that ranges from remote to hybrid to digital nomadism to flex schedules. Pre-2020, it was mostly tech companies doing the "do you make California money if you don't live in California?" dance. And then overnight, the future became more evenly distributed.

"You can work from anywhere" meant several major and immediate changes. To everything from how we hire to how work gets done. And then, of course, massive changes to life outside of work.

While office workers had long been clamouring for more flexibility, this shift was driven by the needs of businesses. It was our organizations who asked employees to rally and, largely, people did. Major banks described rolling out decades of planned digital transformation in weeks. Proud CEOs shared stories of sending employees home on Friday and having them up and running by Monday.

Faced with an urgent need for flexible and remote-enabled work, most office jobs reached for the same tools.

If we don't know exactly when your work is happening, we need to deprioritize real-time collaboration. Work still needs to happen, but as much as possible, it helps to make it piecework. You do your bit, hand off to the next person when you can, and they will do their part. Don't worry too much if you can't see the whole picture. Just do your bit and trust the next person to pick up where you leave off.

We know this model of labour. We learn it as kids when studying the turn of the (last) century. Pick up a piece, do your thing, hand it to the next person. Don't worry about the surrounding context. Just do the thing you're paid to do and clock out when you're done. This isn't quiet quitting. This is factory work.

Shit.

Us vs them

The problem. The core problem that has the Future of Work people fighting with the Get Back to Work people is this. Knowledge work — aligned, sustained, creative, collaborative work — is very hard to do in pieces.

The most wonderful parts of the future of work we've all built over the last few years are the places where it supports that sustainability and creativity. Where giving a person more space — mental space, child-care space, time-of-day space, geographic space, no-daily-commute space — helps them put up their best work. In many cases, it is what allowed them to be part of the work at all. That's good shit. It's valid to want to keep it.

But it isn't foolish or pigheaded to point out that collaboration and alignment have struggled. We still hear from orgs, years in, who feel like their culture hasn't recovered. Like their people are more isolated as humans, and that work is still happening in disconnected pockets. They know that forcing everyone back to the office will backfire, but it's valid for them to want that alignment and collaboration back. And they don't know how else to get it.

So it's frustrating to watch people lazily frame the whole discussion as Us vs Them. Team vs Team. Team Future of Work is arguing for freedom, and Team Get Back to Work is arguing for dominance hierarchies. Or, if you wear the other jersey, Team GBTW stands for dedication and accountability, and the FoW squad are dilettantes and scammers. And inevitably inevitably inevitably, the discussion will eventually collapse into everyone's favourite trope: Gen Z vs the boomers.

These arguments are very boring. You can put yourself on either team and find a simple and self-reassuring story that completely fails to meet the moment. But we should want to meet the moment! Like, holy shit what a moment this is! We have a generational opportunity to design the next few decades of creative, digital work together. And that design will be architected by the people who engage with work as it really is today.

Engaging with work as it really is today

When we talk with bosses about their work today, we don't hear about commutes. We don't hear about summer hours, or four-day-work-weeks, either. When we talk with them about what is going on in their organizations, we hear:

• It's hard to know what I should be working on, or how to prioritize, or how my work fits in with other parts of the organization.

• It's hard to know what other people are working on, or where I should plug in, or where I go to get that information.

• It's hard to know how I'm doing, or where new opportunities are that I might be missing.

• And sometimes it's lonely.

And the very same people will tell us that they like the flexibility of remote, or hybrid. That they like the ability to hire across a broader talent pool. That it's important to them to include their colleagues who can't make an in-office gig work.

There's no contradiction there unless you accept an us vs them framing. Work as it is today isn't a contradiction, it's an opportunity. COVID made us cut our work into pieces, and created a surprising dividend of flexibility. And the meaningful future of work conversation we should be having boils down to, "now what?"

The silliest approach to that question is to try to make it a fight over whether the benefits of in-office alignment and collaboration are worth giving up that flexibility. Other than from an abject lack of creativity, why would you box yourself in that way?

A far better approach is to ask, "how might we?" How do we preserve the flexibility that people value but address the isolation and scattering that piecework has created? It's possible to do that stitching back together. Some of that stitching is made easier with office space, or air travel. But the core of that stitching work is, and actually always has been, management. Bosses, this isn't a moment to argue, this is a moment to reflect and rebuild.

If your team is struggling with sense of purpose and priority, take a look at how you're doing goal setting. Where are those goals showing up in the cadences of your team, and the stories you tell? Where do you need new routines to help your team stitch their work back into the rest of the org?

If they aren't getting the information they need from other parts of the org, that's a strong sign of a need for stitching, too. What should communication look like in your org today? It seems so unlikely that "exactly what it was in Feb 2020" is the right answer. And that goes double for the whereabouts and ways your team spends time together socially, too.

It's not going to look like it did in the past. And it's not going to look like it does in the present, either. That's okay. If it did, we wouldn't call it the future of anything.

- Melissa and Johnathan