December 2021
In our final ‘In conversation with…’ podcast for 2021, our host, Lucy Lewis, reflects on the perspectives shared by our ten guest speakers on what the future of work could hold. Our conversations have covered a lot of ground, reflecting the dynamic landscape of the world of work. Highlights include how the role of trust between people and business is changing, the rise of hybrid working and the future of the office and how the workforce is shaping the sustainability agenda. Lucy concludes with a look back at what some of our ten leading experts and thinkers consider will be the biggest and most radical change for the future of work that we’ll see coming out of the pandemic.
In Conversation With…Reflections on 2021
Series 1: Podcast 11
Lucy Lewis: Hello. And welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation With’ podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team, and in this podcast series I have been hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on what the future of work holds.
This is the last podcast in our 2021 series and I’ll be reflecting on the insights all of our guest speakers have shared with me over the last year, talking about what the future of work could hold, and spotlighting some of my favourite parts from those podcast conversation.
We’ve covered a lot of ground this year! We’ve touched on megatrends like globalisation and sustainability alongside other drivers having a significant impact in the workplace such as the growing importance of trust and brand activism. And with the telescope lens edging towards the post pandemic horizon, we have of course touched on big questions of the moment, about the future of the office and the importance of building an inclusive and flexible working environment as we emerge from the pandemic, how we go about providing opportunities and good work for all. You can catch the full recordings of each of the podcasts on the Future of Work Hub website.
But before I look back at these fascinating conversations, I’m going to share some of my own reflections.
Future of Work
Lucy Lewis: For many years, the Future of Work Hub has been facilitating access to leading-edge information and insights about the future of work, we wanted to support organisations in seeing ahead but the pandemic has accelerated the impact of the longer term societal, economic and technological trends that we have been debating for all those years. 2021 is the year that the future of work became the here and now. And there is this collective realisation that our generation will never have a better opportunity to reshape the landscape of work. We can reimagine how, when and where we work. But real and lasting change will require a willingness to experiment; we’ve got to be brave and bold and we need to resist the temptation to fall back on the ways that we did things before the pandemic. Each of our guests shared their insights on how we can transform the adjustments we have had to make for the pandemic into lasting changes for the future of work.
Back in January, I spoke with Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change. Automation and the digitisation of work is having a dramatic and significant impact on work and jobs, and I asked Ian about the structural shifts that are underway as a result.
World of work
Ian Goldin: The seismic changes happening that have been going on really at an accelerating pace for the last 30 years, but it’s the rise of the digital economy, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, which has really brought these to the fore at a much at a much more rapid pace.
The main change I think is that a widening range of activities that were previously the preserve of humans, that now can be done by machines. Much more effectively, 24 hours a day, without having to be paid and without getting sick or complaining. And it is that encroachment on human activities, which I believe, is both accelerating and globalising which I think will be the biggest structural shift.
The second very big shift is that all our economies as they progress are going through a transition from first, agriculture, to manufacturing, and now services. And so, when you look around the world you see a growing share of economic activity in services. Less and less making things. Less and less atoms and more and more bits.
And so, we go from a physical world where we mainly are making, we’re mainly employed, we’re mainly producing. Products you can see that you can put on a shelf that you can manufacture in some way to products which are experiential. Products which are a service and many of these can be traded. But many of the things, can be done at a distance and so it’s that which is transforming economies and as a bigger and bigger share of our economies becomes services, what those services are, who produces them and where they have produced themis shifting in a very radical way.
Lucy Lewis: Ian went on to explain the findings of some startling research by the Oxford Martin Programme in 2013 which showed that 47% of jobs may be vulnerable to technological displacement over the next 20 years.
What was really fascinating about speaking to Ian about this research was the point he made that often what gets missed from estimates on numbers of jobs created or eroded was about geographical location, in that when new jobs are created, it won’t necessarily be in the same place as where jobs have been lost.
Digital Transformation
Ian Goldin: Many people, I’m thinking of the McKenzie Global Institute for example, say less than 10% net of jobs are likely to be lost. In other words, there is going to be so much new job creation, the World Economic Forum thinks that there will be many more new jobs than jobs lost. And the OECD points to 13%. So, those numbers are very different from ours and part of the explanation is that we believe it would be very difficult for the people that are losing jobs, for example in the north of England and the mid-west of the US, in manufacturing, or call centres in India or the Philippines, to get to the new jobs. So, it’s different people in different places with different skills getting the new jobs and that really matters because that’s where the social dislocation comes.
Lucy Lewis: With these thoughts in mind, I sat down with James Davies, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team. We discussed a new report he’s written for the Future of Work Hub, which looks at eight drivers which are collectively propelling change in the world of work at an unprecedent rate. And in his report, James identifies a number of themes emerging from these drivers which will characterise the evolving world of work, one of those was the way the labour market is changing.
Future of work trends
James Davies: Very briefly, the labour market has worked very well for many years. However, we are seeing various factors come together. There are serious skill shortages around the country. Some of these issues are UK specific, but others are not. No doubt over time these skill shortages will reduce. But I do think in the long term, bearing in mind the potential for technology to replace human labour, we will find ourselves increasingly with both ongoing skill shortages but at the same time increased unemployment and under employment.
It will be incumbent for Governments to take action but also employers.Employers will need to be more flexible in their resourcing strategies but also focus on the sustainability and resilience in their workforces. They will move from just in time to just in case. Skill shortages will change bargaining power between employer and employee.But also focus employers on the need to train and develop people with the requisite skills. And I do worry that major technological change is going to have an impact on the number of jobs that are available.We’re in the what’s known as the fourth industrial revolution at the moment, and the other previous industrial revolutions which have all seen dramatic technological change.There was, in each case, concerns beforehand that the change was going to result in a reduction in the number of jobs.However, on the contrary, the number of jobs increased particularly due to the increased productivity and affluence created by the change.And I just wonder whether or not this time it might be different.And this time the pace and scale of change may have long term impacts on the number of jobs which are available for all of us.
Lucy Lewis: Alongside increasing automation and digitisation in the world of work, the very relationship between people and work, and the role of trust between people and business is evolving.
We can see from Edelman’s Trust Barometer, published earlier this year, that employers remain considerably more trusted than other institutions but employee expectations of employers is high. I discussed the importance of trust with Neta Meidav, CEO and Co-Founder of Vault Platform, a leader in what is termed ‘trust tech’.
Trust tech
Neta Meidav: So that’s why ‘speak up’ is so important, such a crucial indicator of the ethical health and the culture in a company, and of course of trust itself. Beyond that, trust tech means tools that are there, technology that is there to increase, let’s say, intensify the bond between a company and its people, which I think is especially important in times of COVID where we’re all working remotely and most of us still do. So we have technology that truly breaks trust right. We have surveillance technology. You know people today don’t trust technology that much because they think their employers are using it in harmful ways or in ways that are not beneficial towards the employee like different productivity tools for example that measure employee’s productivity whilst working remotely would be one example of those; but there is actually technology today that brings employees and employers closer together and helps to overcome that gap of trust, that deficit of trust that exists today.
Lucy Lewis: And that is something we’ve come back to time and time again over the last year – the role technology can play in building trust between a company and its people. High reporting rates with lots of people ‘speaking up’ as Neta put it, could give the impression that this is a place that people wouldn’t want to work. But actually, it can indicate that there are high levels of trust in the workplace – it’s a place where employees trust their employer to listen to their concerns and take action where needed.
2021 has certainly been fascinating in terms of seeing how attitudes and working practices can switch – none more so than around trust and data privacy.And that’s because the pandemic has been shaping attitudes to data privacy, We’ve been having to make some quite significant trade-offs between things that we consider established freedoms and our health, our wellbeing and our safety. I asked Alexander Milner Smith, a Data Privacy specialist at Lewis Silkin, to share his thoughts on how the impact the pandemic has shaped our attitudes and approach.
Impact of the pandemic on data privacy
Alexander Milner Smith: I think it’s going to have an absolutely massive impact Lucy. if you’d have asked me in April 2019 if we could process temperature data or vaccine data or medical test data as a matter of course, as opposed to the exception, I would have said, “very unlikely, I would not recommend it, this is high risk”. But now of course it is par for the course.
So, these are enormously intrusive data sets in some ways from a 2019 or very early 2020 mindset, but now both in the marketplace and the workplace are just all pervasive, everyone has accepted them, we’ll have to see how it develops in the marketplace – obviously hub and passports and so on – but from a workplace perspective, I think everyone has got used to being asked health questions very regularly to protect their health and the health of visitors and the health of other workers.
The question I think Lucy is how long will this type of processing continue and I can’t answer that question because I’m not a public health expert, but perhaps more interestingly is what impact has it had on the general perception of data in the workplace? In fact, there was a very interesting survey from Yougov recently, where it found over half of workers wouldn’t accept a job where tracking was used to monitor, but I imagine that if you had asked them “would you accept intrusion on your health data to protect both your health and your co-workers’ health?” they would probably would have said “yes”.
So, it’ll be an interesting dynamic just to see how that plays out over the next 12/18 months as the pandemic – fingers crossed of course – dies down and just as a final point, with the rise of home working, we have seen more and more emphasis on information security; ….. employers and engagers are trying to work out how to ensure that data remains secure, questions not just on home working but on non-home country working, so I think that’s something that the pandemic has may be accelerated; I think home working has been on the increase for the last five/ten years; we’ve probably moved ten years forward in the space of one year and that raises data issues that aren’t going to go away in terms of information security.
Lucy Lewis: My conversation with Alex was a really good reminder of how the pandemic has affected aspects of work and behaviours, that we couldn’t really have anticipated at the start. The introduction of the GDPR had already hugely increased awareness of everyone’s rights regarding data and how it would be used, but as a result of the pandemic we’ve shifted quite quickly away from that in some areas, to actually people quiet happily providing their employer with sometimes very sensitive health data.
Data privacy concerns have loomed large for employees and employers in part because of the immediate (for many) move to remote working at the start of the pandemic and of course because of the current discussion on hybrid working. One of the most discussed area of the future of work in the context of the so-called “New Normal” is the future of the office. I picked this up with Neil Usher, a workplace expert. Here’s what Neil had to say.
Impact of the pandemic on office spaces
Neil Usher: The last sort of 12 months or so, I don’t think we’ve ever seen as much sort of online content about the future of the office, what it means for us, what its purpose is? I do think in the last year, we’ve probably spent too much time thinking about physical space, and not enough time thinking about the cultural drivers for how we might use it.
I think it’s important to remember that, in the last 12 months as well, we’ve gone from one safe harbour, with everyone in the office, at least theoretically everyone in the office, but to another safe harbour with everyone out of the office and at home. And much of the talk now is about sort of a blend or a mix of the two, this idea of hybrid, which actually isn’t a safe harbour. There’s no case studies, there’s no best practice or even good practice that we can draw on to understand this. So, I think that it’s really important to understand as well that it’s a hybrid organisation that creates hybrid working, which necessitates a hybrid workplace. It doesn’t work the other way round.
A physical workplace is actually quite a long way downstream in our thinking, and it’s really important to understand that the organisation itself and what sort of reinvention is needed for the organisation rather than just focussing purely on the workplace. Because, changing the workplace, or the time we actually spend in that workplace is not going to create that sort of, you know, reinvented culture for the organisation.
I should say I think it’s vital we take a triple bottom line approach. For those not aware of what that means, it means focussing on the needs of people, on the needs of the organisation and on the needs of the planet. What’s interesting is when we focus on one of those in particular, there are very often negative connotations for the others. So, achieving a balance between those three is an incredibly difficult thing to do. And that will sort of cover effectively every decision we have to make going forward is that, there’s been a huge focus in the last 12 months on the needs of people, very little focus on the needs of organisation, some focus on the needs of the planet but, while we’ve not been in those city centres and those urban environments and in our offices, you know the climate emergency has taken a little bit of a backseat while we deal with the immediate problem being the pandemic. But, it’s going to come again, and it’s gonna come again like it’s never been with us before.
Lucy Lewis: For me, Neil’s point about a triple bottom line approach encompassing people, organisation and planet really resonated.
And turning to the planet, sustainability and climate change has been a huge focus for businesses this year, second only to the pandemic. It’s an area we’ve spoken a lot about on the Future of Work Hub and picked up in our November podcast where I spoke to Andrew Magowan, Director of Sustainability and General Counsel at Berry Bros. & Rudd.Andrew spoke really interestingly about the significant impact on businesses, both as employers and as business brands, and of the expectation to “do the right thing” in terms of sustainability and the huge role the workforce has to play in shaping the sustainability agenda. Andrew talked about the importance of interactions between leaders of the business and employees on the issue of sustainability.
Change in employee expectations
Andrew Magowan: And they weren’t shy at grabbing me or some of the other executives when the opportunity arised to suddenly go “Right, I wanna talk to you about this, and why’s it happening and why is this happening?” So, I think even quickly within the first couple of times I remember being collared, for want of a better word by them it made me go out and go “Actually, we need to have these answers”. And they were huge in driving us to look at what we needed to do.
So, the workforce absolutely has a huge part to play and, what I like about it is that immediacy, they’re standing in front of, the people who run their business and they therefore have a huge ability to be able to shape what those people are thinking about, or to show them what’s important to them.
Lucy Lewis: Andrew and I also touched on the tricky area of whether government or business should be taking the lead on sustainability.
The role of government
Andrew Magowan: I think businesses need to take it upon themselves first and foremost. As I say it’s a risk management issue to me and, businesses should be managing the risk for their own benefit as much as anything else and I think the primary responsibility sits with businesses to recognise it for what it is, which is a huge threat to their business, to their business model, to their industry, to the planet and the people that they rely upon. So, I think the primary responsibility absolutely sits there!
But that is not by any stretch to say that the Government doesn’t have a huge role to play in, helping people. To me, it’s about thinking about things. To me, a lot of this is, I’m a big believer that once you start to think about a topic that you, effectively can’t stop thinking about it. Once it’s in there it will keep sort of twirling away in your brain, and that’s a role to me that legislation can play.
There’s some good examples of that from the past, you know, the modern slavery legislation, the gender pay gap reporting. Those have led to a lot of positive developments. Now, there’s a number of people who have, issues with those legislations and they’re not perfect by any stretch, but to me a key point is that legislation doesn’t have to be perfect or all-encompassing in order to be effective, if it’s focused on the right things.
What I like about both of those examples is that they made businesses go and look at what they were doing and, in the process, for the bulk of them in looking at what they’re doing, they see things that they don’t like and realise that they need to go ahead and deal with. Modern slavery reporting, gender pay gap reporting, the SEC or carbon reporting, that’s part of accounts now, you know, they have led to improvements in those areas, just by dint of making people go and find out the data and find out what’s happening.
Lucy Lewis: The pandemic has also accelerated cultural shifts in the workplace with many organisations now making public commitments and taking action on societal and environmental issues – and they’re doing that because they are getting pressure from investors, from consumers, and of course, they’re getting pressure from employees. It’s something Andrew and I spoke about, but I also picked up in my conversation with Philippa Wagner, creative strategist and thought leader about this very issue and the effect it is having.
Sustainable business
Philippa Wagner: And you know, everyone talks about COVID as being the great accelerator, which I totally agree it has. It really has fast-forwarded so many of the trends that are already emerging and I think what’s the most important piece is that trends often will take three to five years to go from sort of innovator, early adopters, all the way through to mass consumer. But, what we’ve seen is everything move very, very quickly in a matter of months through to mass consumer spurred on by Black Lives Matter, big debates around some of these things and the spotlight on the equalities as well that COVID has shown us is meaning that responsibility is now happening.
And I guess one of the things, and this connects across so many different areas and we’ve been seeing the fashion industry particularly had picked up sustainability much quicker than perhaps some of the other industries because they were quite rightly being, you know, a light was being shone on them for not doing things. We’ve recently seen the likes of Hermès launching their new handbag which is made from mycelium which is grown from mushrooms. And there’s a lot of hype around it and that’s fantastic. But this technology isn’t ,this alternative material has been around for over a decade. But it’s actually now that people are ready for it that it’s able to flourish in the market. And I think that’s really what’s super interesting is because consumption has become a big topic of conversation and people are now looking at that in a different sense and saying actually, where can I make the right choices and the mycelium handbag is a perfect example of an extension of the veganism rising trend that had been happening. And as it’s gone sort of more mainstream.
Lucy Lewis: I also asked Philippa if she felt there was becoming a convergence between what employees want and expect from their employers and what consumers want from brands.
Consumer Trends
Philippa Wagner: Yeah, I mean I do think there is absolutely a convergence. But, we have to remember, at the end of the day we are all consumers aren’t we?, whether we’re the boss or whether we’re the worker, at the end of the day we’re all still being influenced by the same drivers that is happening around us. We’re still watching the same news, we’re still engaging those, same kind of conversations. So, yeah, I do think it is good for business in the longer run.
Well it possibly doesn’t feel good for business at the moment, particularly with the millennials and some of the older Gen Z’s who are actively making choices about who they’ll work with based on these shared values and so it, you know, it’s making it harder for a business or a brand because it’s not necessarily about the location that they’re sitting in or the salary that they perhaps offer if somebody is going to work for them or the perks and benefits. That sort of stuff feels tokenistic now because people are making choices about do I believe we share the same values or do I believe that they’re making good choices for the world around them and if that’s good for me, then I’ll connect with them and ultimately that’s got to be good for business because, if we’re looking from the outside in as a consumer into a business or a brand, and we want to align, if the people inside the business aren’t all working towards that same value, then disconnect comes and that’s when you see it. Almost as a sort of societal greenwashing for want of another way of looking at it.
Where I think it does really build strength is, it makes businesses and brands accountable, because it really forces them to review and reassess their best and worst practices. Because, not everyone is getting it completely wrong. Some people are doing amazing things.
Lucy Lewis: And on the topic of what employees want, there’s been lots of debate around the future of working hours. Will they get shorter, will we move to a four-day working week, how does hybrid working fit into this debate? So, I asked the Chief Executive of the CIPD, Peter Cheese for his thoughts on that issue.
Remote working
Peter Cheese: Well I think it will absolutely act as this trigger point to really re-think work in these ways. I mean if one thinks about the traditional paradigms of work that we’ve had for a very, very long time, the five day working week is all commuting into offices and all these other things, they’ve been with us literally for well over 100 years. And we’ve talked about more flexible working, we’ve you know, the CIPD and others have researched the benefit of it. You know because more flexible working provides opportunities for inclusion, you know many people have otherwise constraints in their ability to work with so called standard hours, five day working weeks.
But it’s also good for our mental health and our wellbeing and ultimately therefore our productivity if we can provide more flexible working in all it’s different forms. So, it has been, as so many people have called it, the biggest experiment in home working we’ve ever had. But, let’s not forget that less than half of the total working population actually were able to work from home and those people that were not working from home, often they were in jobs which were, you know, what we’ve started to call ‘essential’ but they weren’t always the highest skilled jobs and the higher paid jobs.
So, we have to be really, really careful as we take forwards the learning from the pandemic that we create flexible working opportunities for all. Because flexible work is not just about working from home, or different workplaces, it’s also about different work schedules and giving people more choice in when and how they work and empowering them all. And these are such fundamental principles of how people trust and how we trust them to work and what is good, as I said, for their wellbeing and these ideas of inclusion, but the pandemic can and must act as a real wake-up call for us all that these ideas of these standard ways of working, the challenges we’ve had with presenteeism and so forth, really can be overcome and we can trust our people to work in these different ways and we need to build those things into our organisational thinking and working practices in the future. And I think that’s very exciting.
But, as I said, we’ve got to make sure that this works for all and we don’t just focus entirely on the idea, that while everybody who works from home thinks it great so that’s what we’ll continue to allow them to do.
Lucy Lewis: There has been such huge focus what flexibility looks like from home-workers perspectives, but Peter makes a really important point that we do need to look at flexibility and work with a wider lens.
And picking up on making the future of work, work for all, is the really important question of upskilling. I was so delighted to speak to Rebecca Glover, Principal and Clemmie Stewart, Senior Head of Prep Schools at Surbiton High about what the skills and preparation our children need to take their place in the workplaces of the future.
Dynamic learning
Rebecca Glover and Clemmie Stewart: I think there are four areas that we need to be preparing our children for, for the future.
The first is problem solving. The second is self-management. The third is being able to work with people and the fourth is being able to use technology and the development of technology. And by problem solving, I’m talking about allowing our children the opportunity to learn to become analytical thinkers. To become innovators. To become complex problem-solvers and critical thinkers as you mentioned.
With regards to self-management, we’re looking at resilience, stress tolerance. Making our children flexible and allowing them to be able to adapt to new situations.
I think working with people is an absolute key for schools, a key priority for schools and we need to allow our children to be able to actively listen to other people and look at their own learning strategies, but also looking at their own leadership and their own social influence as an individual.
And then finally with the technology and the use of development of technology, we need to make sure that our children are going out into the workplace with all the tools that they need technology wise.
Lucy Lewis: And keeping with the topic of inclusion for all, what better episode to reflect on that then the fascinating conversation I had with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, one of the world’s leading global consultancies focused on gender balance. And I spoke with Avivah about what immediate legacy the pandemic had left with women.
Future of work challenges
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I couldn’t agree more that it has been both a positive and a negative so the negative I think you’ve described very well. We know that unlike the last financial recession of 2008 where men were in the sectors that got really hit, this time round women have been dominant in all the front line sectors involved in the pandemic – whether they’re in health, education, cleaning services, they’ve been really affected and stretched by the demand.
They’ve become essential workers overnight which is a, I think, very useful reminder, of how essential a lot of these sectors dominated by women are and I think that one of the big shifts that you were seeing coming through this is the enhanced flexibility and embracing of technology to power flexibility so that it’s no longer 9-5 in the office that determines our workforces but much more about output instead of input. And this is something that women have been asking and lobbying for, for, you know, decades and I always suggest that look, we’ve kind of seen the Berlin wall fall between the personal and the professional sides of life with the fact that now both men and women have done so much work with the visibility of their personal life so much on display has I think accelerated a shift in one year that nobody could have dreamt of.
Lucy Lewis: It wouldn’t be right to move on from my conversation with Avivah without picking up on her thoughts on gender balance and what we can expect companies to be doing in this area.
Importance of gender balance
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: This is a millennial shift in gender roles, in what men and women do and in the economic opportunity that women are now the majority of many labour forces, talent pools and customer bases which means that for a lot of organisations this is not a 'nice to have'; it's do or die. This is your future talent and your future consumer, customer, stakeholder, legislator, regulator, decision-maker; and any company and leader that doesn't yet understand that and really is skilled in how to connect with that reality will underperform in the future and I think the challenge that we have is that too many organisations still are fiddling at the side lines.
To me the issue of gender balance was kind of like the issue of digital or AI.It's not that you need a little department or group taking a look at your digital strategy, right.It's not like you need a little women's network talking about are you being nice to women.It’s if gender balance doesn't completely traverse all of your business functions and areas including, by the way, digital, then you're probably programming an old, obsolete view that has biases and imbalances baked in which just won't be future-ready.So the idea of how this should be seen is as a strategic priority, as it is in all the countries and companies that have gender balance, it's up at the top of the CEOs agenda, not down in the diversity departments to do list, but up on the CEO and Exco's list of priorities, accountabilities.They're measured on whether or not they've managed to gender balance their divisions and teams and they get a performance kick out of that and they're skilled at knowing how to build that balance.
Lucy Lewis: And finally, I think my favourite part of the podcast, is that i’ve asked every guest speaker, what they think the biggest change we will take forward from the pandemic is. I think that it’s only fair I answer that question myself but before I do, let’s hear what some of our speakers had to say about it…
Future of Work
James Davies: So, I think from the pandemic, the biggest change will be the amount of time that we spend in the office.
However, I think the most significant drivers of change in the years ahead won’t be COVID but will be technology and sustainability.
Philippa Wagner: Flexibility. Absolutely.
…people have had the opportunity to sort of sit back and take some time and work out what’s right for them, their work life balance. So, flexibility is of location. Flexibility of hours. Flexibility of roles.
Neta Meidav: I think the most important trend that will emerge is that the sense of purpose and working for purposeful companies, understanding truly and believing from an employee perspective, understanding and truly believing what the company does beyond its performance and revenue line would become even more important than it used to be.
Avivah Witternberg-Cox: What I've always been preaching is the four W's that are interdependent and the big shifts we're looking at:
Web;
Weather;
World; and
Women.
Technological change, sustainability priorities, globalisation and the rise of women. These are all being incredibly accelerated by this crisis and if we get the good side of them coming out, they're going to power us through into much sunnier days.
Lucy Lewis: I’ve absolutely loved hearing everyone’s thoughts on that question. But, what do I think is the biggest change we’ll take forward from the pandemic?
I think the biggest change will have been a huge shift in the way we look forward and plan for the future. We have learned that we cannot predict what is around the corner but if we refocus our planning on developing skills and building on the adaptability and resilience that we’ve shown in the pandemic, we can go bravely and boldly into a period of conscious experimentation. We know we won’t get everything right; we’ll need to learn from each other – but if we want to reshape the future of work, we need to start to trust in the adaptability and resilience that we’ve already shown and we need to take a big step forward not back.
So, a really big thank you to all of our wonderful guest speakers who have appeared on our 2021 series and thank you to our listeners to for your support. The Future of Work Hub podcast series will be back in January 2022, bringing you more insights and perspectives about the future of work.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in continuing the conversation, please visit www.futureofworkhub.info and get involved. To keep up to date with the latest thinking on the future of work hub, you can sign up to our monthly newsletter and follow us on Twitter.
Thank you.
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