The Future of Work is Human
Nine years ago, after 15 years working in large corporate, mid-market and startup environments, I decided to make a pivot towards the consultant/freelancer world. I wanted to regain control of my life and, subsequently, find professional and personal fulfillment.
I’ve since spent most of the last decade studying the way people work and I’ve seen that I am not alone. There are hundreds of millions of people around the globe who are moving away from the way we used to work — the 40-hour work week, the 40-year career at one company, the 9-to-5 job, the commute into the office, the siloed teams, and on and on — and this shift has only picked up pace over the last twenty years, kicking into fifth gear over the last two years.
It seems pretty clear that there is now a huge gap between what people want out of their careers and what organizations expect from their employees — but the future of work is more human and more fluid, and organizations are going to have to adapt to that if they want to be competitive.
So, I have two goals with this monthly newsletter: (1) to help individuals navigate this new world of work and figure out what success looks like for them and (2) to help organizations adapt themselves to a world that has already changed and will continue to change at an increasing rate.
Demographics: The Future of the U.S. Workforce
If you look at the demographic makeup of the workforce and what it will be in the near future, it should be clear how dire the need for organizational change is:
Millennials became the largest generation in the labor force in 2016.
Millennials and Gen Z also now make up over half of the overall U.S. population, with the oldest of Gen Z already in the workforce. And both of these generations are digital natives, to boot.
The population is also getting more diverse and, by 2045, minorities will be the majority in the United States.
We’re going to be living longer lives, which means we’ll have longer careers. I agree with Joe Pinsker from The Atlantic: that means we have an opportunity to redesign work — although I’ll go a step further and say this means that we, those currently in leadership positions, have a responsibility to redesign work. If millions of us are experiencing burnout and struggling to find the right work-life fit so we can be our whole selves, I don’t want to subject future generations to more of that.
Changing Attitudes, Beliefs, Motivations, & Behavior
The change in workforce composition has led to (or sped up) a change in the dominant attitudes, beliefs, motivations, and behaviors of the workforce.
In The State of Work and Career Success 2020, every age bracket surveyed, from those just entering the workforce to those who are at later stages in their career, told us that they want more than just a financial incentive out of their jobs — their career goals are personal and multifaceted. Moreover, individuals are looking at what they want individually, not as part of a corporate entity.
And Deloitte’s Global Millennial Survey 2019 illustrates this gap between people and organizations, repeatedly reinforcing a difference in priorities between the millennial generation and the older generations in charge of both the public and private sectors. But I think this graphic succinctly displays how out of step organizations are with the priorities of the largest generation in the workforce:
We have a majority of the workforce that prioritizes being better, doing better, and finding balance between their careers and whole selves — which looks different for each person — and our organizations have to learn how to align their business goals with these human priorities.
The Great Reshuffle & The Future of Work
The big question today is: how will the last two years and The Great Reshuffle change things further? We were already going in this direction. Now we also have an unprecedented amount of movement in the workforce.
November was the 8th month in a row of record-breaking resignations, with 4.5M people quitting their jobs. We can see that people are quitting in the highest numbers from low-paying jobs with inflexible hours, particularly food service, hospitality, and retail jobs.
At the same time, more people are getting hired than are quitting. 6.7M people were hired in November and new businesses were being created at record rates. That indicates that people aren’t just leaving to do nothing or collect unemployment benefits — people are quitting to take different jobs and/or become entrepreneurs.
Many people have gotten a taste of the control, freedom, and flexibility that working from home offers for the first time. Others are “epiphany quitting” after re-evaluating what’s important to them during the global pandemic. Others were fired or furloughed in 2020 and forced to figure something out on their own.
And again, this just reinforces and broadens the gap between what people want and what employers are offering. But I think it’s time we start to close that gap.
So, throughout 2022, I will be sharing insights from The State of Work and Career Success 2021. We conducted this survey at the end of 2021, right in the middle of this cultural revolution, and I am eager to see how people’s perceptions have changed in just one year.
I will be sharing those insights with you in this newsletter, as well as on the Strategic Momentum podcast, because I want to help people figure out exactly what they need to feel fulfilled and I want to help organizations better understand these needs so that we can support our people.
The future of work is here — and it’s human.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn as part of Connie Steele’s monthly newsletter, The Human Side of Work. You can find the original article and subscribe to the newsletter at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-work-human-connie-wang-steele.