The future of work (is that we are all going to be writing articles about the future of work...)
As you read this, I am confident that somewhere, someone far smarter than I, is pointing a powerful AI algorithm (is pointing the right verb for how one uses an algorithm?) that is churning, nay, vomiting out articles about the “future of work”. What bothers me the most about these articles (each of the previous words link to some real treats) is not just the futility of predicting what work will look like in a time that is “the future” but the incredibly formulaic nature of them all.
For those of you who want to get on the proverbial bandwagon and write your own article or post about the future of work, I’ve pulled together a helpful template that should save you a bit of time:
1. First paragraph must contain reference to a first-person emotional tag- line as told by someone working for a major organization in a remote capacity. For instance;
Nothing is the same anymore
I just don’t feel like this is sustainable
I now work with people whom I have never even met in person!.
If possible, use a stock photo of someone looking morose in the kitchen of their own house, ideally sitting at a table with both hands around a mug. One of these two examples should do the job.
2. Second paragraph must include some vague, sourceless data with but a passing relevance to either the idea of work, of working or indeed, of the future. It is important to ensure that the statement avoids any exploration of what this means, what implications it might have or whether it is even noteworthy. It is usually enough just to present the point and then walk away.
Where possible, try and position it as reading in a “more people will than won’t” format;
You know, something like;
“…it is said by experts, that within 10 years more people will be doing a thing than won’t be doing that same thing...”
e.g. In 10 years more people will work from home that those who don’t
In 10 years more people will have no human contact at work than those who do
In 10 years, a thing you’ve never heard of will take over the thing that you do right now
3. Third paragraph has to provide some reassurance that the future of work isn’t itself a problem if you just choose to frame it in a different way. Try to ensure that you create the individual as being the problem rather than say, the increasingly intangible concept of workplace demands, unrealistic performance expectations and a maniacally assumption that everyone will love and indeed, die for their job and/or organization;
e.g.; So while we will work for longer hours, we will have greater flexibility to choose what hours they will be.
So while we will be paid less than we are right now, our work-life balance will be more in our control.
So while the future of work will mean there will be more competition for jobs, those jobs will be able to be done in your pajamas
4. The fourth paragraph MUST contain a picture of someone who is excessively smug about how much they enjoy whatever idea of the future of work you’ve laid out for the reader (I suggest using one of these two pictures). Ideally, these people should have an unhealthy number of qualifications, work fewer than 20 hours per week, have a salary at least 4 times the median of the reader and use at least three of the following phrases in regular rotation:
“It is what it is”
“It’s all about upscaling”
“It isn’t the future most people want but it works for me”
“I couldn’t imagine it going back to the way it was”
“Side-gig” and/or “hustle”
5. The fifth paragraph is a final chance to ensure that you put any barriers to accepting the future of work that you have laid out solely at the feet of the individual and not the organization or occupational sector to which they belong. Maybe bring back the person from paragraph one and position their views as outdated, entrenched and regressive? If possible, focus on artificially manufactured generational differences to drive your point home. Phrases like the following are helpful;
“It might be that those who get left behind in the future of work, are those who can’t accept that things are changing at breakneck/ lighting/ quantum speeds”
“Confined in their vision about the future of work, they and their jobs may now be consigned to irrelevance”
“And as the millennials replace the GenX-ers across organizational roles, we can’t help but ask, how come nobody saw this coming?”
6. Remember when closing out your article on the Future of Work, avoid anything concrete by way of predictions, rationale to support said trajectory or anything outside of an opinion on which to base everything you’ve already written about. If possible, close with a frustratingly ambiguous rhetorical question that again focuses on how unprepared the individual is for the thing that you think might be happening at a time that isn’t now;
Whatever the future of work looks like, we can be sure of this; it is coming and when it arrives, will you be ready?
Some even say, the future of work is already here and it begs the question; if you can’t see it has it already passed you by?
Yeah? All done. Great. Now throw it on the pile of other articles that are echoing around the internet these days
So just to be clear, what bothers me about the “future of work” movement and futurology in general is not that I don’t believe the “future of work” won’t happen, it is that I hate the redundancy of the concept in the first place. Of course work will have a future and of course it will look different to how things have looked at work before because, well, that is the nature of things – they change with the passing of time. That is nothing new. The issue here is that they seem to tout that the individual worker has everything to gain by this utopian future, but also is expected to shoulder the cost of these gains by way of spending their own social and professional capital.
I’ve noticed these types of articles bother me in the same manner and with the same frequency as articles about adjusting to The New Normal. Now I’m not sowing conspiracies here but take a look at the patterns between The Future of Work and The New Normal in respect to search terms on Google (which as we all know is now the HIGHEST form of scientific rigor available).
These articles seem to be trying to convince us by way of an afterlife principle, that however tough things are these days, they will get better as long as we are willing to adapt, change and sacrifice. Now, I’m not against adaptation, especially if the outcome is survival, but all these claims exist without any plausible evidence, rationale or for the most part, logic. They rest on the belief that things will be better if only we choose it to be so. I’m not sure that has ever been the case and more so, I feel that these are all promises that have been made before, believed before and indeed, broken before.
However, and this will be the end of my rant, is that it again places so much emphasis on what is going to happen with work, what work might look like, how it could be different but manages to completely avoid and shun the fact that we are far more willing to engage with speculative futurism of what work might be like rather than try to understand the experience of work as it exists right now…today, you know…here in the present.