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.
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