Was the Future of Work a ZIRP?

Photo by Digital Buggu.

Beat reporters getting reassigned might not seem like a big deal. But if you work in PR, it's your job to know. PR is like that. Not only do you keep track of which reporters are most likely to cover your own company. You also keep track of reporters who cover competitors, trends, and basically anything that might touch anything to do with your org.

You develop a reflex for checking bylines, often before you've read the headline on a piece. Who wrote it? What else have they been writing about recently? And who's likely to have been interviewed (either on or off the record) that helped shape the piece? These questions are harder to answer when a reporter's beat is something like Business or Local. Easier when their beat is just a single company (like Google or Meta or once-upon-a-time Yahoo).

Dedicated beat reporters have to write about what's going on in their space. Sure, the writer can pitch stories about that company or about their competitors. But fundamentally, they're not gonna hop a flight, land at 6:16 in LA, and write about the Grammys instead of covering tech earnings calls that day. If CRM is their beat, they have met Benioff several times, and maybe even Butterfield. But there's simply no hope of this writer ever getting to the Grammys. Hell, without a CRM startup in YC, they can't even meet the Grahams.

So in 2021, when we met our first Future of Work beat reporters, we had a moment. As people who had been writing non-stop about work and bosses since 2016, it felt like everyone else discovered a thing we'd been on-about for years. They were like us. And also not like us at all. Not only were they writing individual pieces about work. They were dedicated beat reporters. Whose job was to fill inches and inches of newspapers and pixels and pixels of screens with clickable coverage about work. Not how it had been but how it might be.

The problem with Future of Work as a beat is that you're covering prospect. Not news. You're not ambulance-chasing a thing that has happened. You're trend-chasing what organizations say could happen. Or what they expect will happen. And we already have a name for the optimistic business communication that organizations share with the world. That's called Public Relations.

Even when media coverage is expressly about something prediction-based, like stock futures, the coverage is a rolling mix of what people said would happen and then what actually happened.

Now that we're a bit further out from the initial hype cycle, it's easier to see that many of the rose-colored checks orgs wrote didn't clear. Like so many other zero interest rate phenomena, the Future of Work beat reporters are nowhere to be found.
 

Over

To be honest, the remote work conversation was never the most interesting part. Of course a lot of knowledge work can happen remote. We know this, because we were all around for 2020. The world locked down. Everyone started talking about sourdough starters, Taylor made freestyle folk albums, we all switched to paid Zoom accounts, and the knowledge work kept happening. People burnt out, the burdens of childcare and social isolation and fear of a poorly understood disease were crushing. But, like, it was obvious pretty quickly that it was still possible to do the work. For many of us, that was obvious before the pandemic ever began.

Nevertheless, after the initial shock, a kind of euphoria set in. If in-office work was up for renegotiation, maybe everything was. People who hadn't spent much time thinking about what makes a healthy workplace were popping up everywhere and saying everything from the sensible to the comical. The Future of Work is 4-day work weeks. The Future of Work is distributed cooking classes. The Future of Work is employee ownership trusts, or DAOs, or no meetings, or meetings, but only while everyone does push ups. Jabroni-ass thought leaders dusting off their old takes on how organizations should work, ignoring how they actually do, and hoping that a new audience might not notice.

If part 1 was the fear, and parts 2-5 were a mix of poorly-thought-out scams and genuine reinvention from the heart, part 6 feels like the morning after a poorly-run party. There are only a few people left. The food from the cooking classes has gone stale. Large employers are all laying people off, or ordering them back to office as a way to get them quit. Everyone has a headache and no one wants to hear that guy in the corner talking about organizing work as circles any more. The reporters have all gone home and they mostly write about AI these days, anyhow.

So what now? Is that it? It was fun to imagine meaningful and humane work with dignity while it lasted?
 

Um. No.

When the talent markets were frothy and money was cheap, it was a good recruiting strategy to make a bunch of noise and lay out a bold vision for the Future of Work. You'd get a bunch of coverage from people who had to write, you'd reach (and close) candidates you otherwise couldn't. And it'd be years before you'd have to back those statements up. Well now it's been years. And a lot of those visionaries are hoping that, with the coverage drying up, no one will remember to hold them accountable for it. Maybe the media won't. But you can.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that a renegotiation of work wasn't possible. That no one's talking about it any more. That it's not worth imagining anything better and every employer will be equally bad so you should probably just keep your head down. And feel lucky to have a job. Almost as though there's an industry-wide no-poach agreement but for, like, hope.

Um, no. It's not unreasonable to want better and it's not unreasonable to negotiate for it. You can feel lucky to have a job and still want your work to have reasonable hours, pay equity, and the flexibility to deal with family matters on a Wednesday afternoon. You might not get it just because you ask, but you definitely won't if you don't. You are a party to this negotiation, unless you sit it out. And bosses, you can be in it not just for your own working conditions but for your team as well.

With or without coverage, it's happening every day. We spoke with a founder earlier this week who sold his company to his employees. We caught up with a friend who left their company to go to a smaller one with more flexibility and a better values fit. We've heard from people in burnout industries who are walking away, starting their own shop, and building it expressly to prevent the mess they left behind. And we've talked to bosses who are staying right where they are, pushing back against internal structures that aren't doing right by their people.

That's the Future of Work we're excited about. Organizations run by grown ups who don't mortgage their values as soon as the spotlight shifts. They're out there. Yours can be one of them. Whether or not anyone writes about it.

— Melissa & Johnathan