December 2022
In our 2022 ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series Lucy Lewis asked ten leading experts and thinkers to share their insights into what the future of work could hold.
In this final episode of 2022, Lucy reflects on the conversations she has had this year and draws together many of the insightful perspectives shared by her guests.
Lucy explores the key themes that emerged across her conversations. These touched on the role of trust in the workplace, the impact of shifting employee values across generations at work, the Great Resignation and the employee value proposition, the significant challenges of building skills for the future, and the continuing importance of diversity and inclusion.
Importantly Lucy considers what we’ve learned from these insights and explores what action we, collectively and as individuals, need to take as societies and businesses adjust to the rapidly changing world.
Finally, Lucy reflects on some of the fascinating responses she received to the question we asked all of our podcast guests this year: ‘If you had the power to ensure one change for the workplace of 2031, what would this be?’ Tune in to hear what they had to say!
In Conversation with…Reflections on 2022
Series 2: Episode 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’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
As this is the last episode in our 2022 series, I’ll be reflecting on the conversations I’ve had with all of our guest speakers over the last year, revisiting some of my favourite parts of those conversations and drawing out some of the key insights they’ve shared about the future of work.
We’ve covered so much this year but what was striking were the key themes that emerged across the various conversations such as the role of trust in the workplace, the impact on work of shifting employee values within and across generations. Of course we explored the “Great Resignation” or as some see it, the “Great Recalibration”. And we also looked at the significant challenges behind the need to build skills for the future and the need for strong action on diversity and inclusion. If you want to dive deeper into any of the individual conversations, you can catch up on the full podcast discussions on our Future of Work Hub website.
Reflecting on the past year, I think many of us started the year with a sense of optimism. Businesses and their people were embracing the “new normal” in that immediate phase following the worst of the pandemic and we were engaging in quite an exciting period of “conscious experimentation”, exploring the new-found flexibilities driven by the pandemic and beginning to take action on new priorities in work things like wellbeing, work/life balance, reassessing the workplace experience, and building workforce skills for the future, taking steps to combat the climate emergency.
Since then the optimism has been overtaken somewhat by significant global volatility and disruption. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Soaring energy and commodity prices. Inflation. A cost of living crisis and, domestically, a period of political turmoil. And many businesses grappling with these difficult challenges are also continuing to face acute skills shortages which pose a significant challenge to their operations.
The developments over the last year were unexpected by many and I was struck by something my first guest of the year, Claire Haidar, shared with me. Claire is a technology entrepreneur, future thinker and Founder and CEO of Wndyr and Pattyrn and when we spoke we explored her view that “the future of work is chaos”. And that certainly resonated with me and I’m sure for many employers and individuals this year – the past few years have felt chaotic. But Claire explained her view that chaos isn’t actually about lack of control and disruption.
The Future of Work is chaos
Claire Haidar: And that was my big epiphany. I was like, this is why it feels like chaos, but it actually isn’t. It’s just that globalisation and the fact that we are so in interconnected as a world and as a global human race nowadays and everything impacts everything else. That is why work feels chaotic. But it in fact isn’t.
So, my challenge to humanity at large is we need to make serious mind shifts about what we felt was normal and good and healthy before, and what this new reality really is that we’re dealing with.
Lucy Lewis: I thought this was such an interesting lens through which to view what is happening around us. Claire’s call to action feels more relevant now than ever and really that sets the scene brilliantly for the rest of our podcast conversations. What action do we, collectively and as individuals, need to take as societies and businesses to adjust to this really rapidly changing world.
And that’s what we’re here to help you do. The Future of Work Hub has been facilitating access to leading-edge information and insights about the future of work for many years now. Please do go and explore the website, keep up to date with our podcasts, but also share with us your insights and use this free resource to support you and your business to see ahead as you prepare and navigate this incredibly changing world.
So, on with the podcast!
Perhaps the current uncertainty we’re experiencing goes some way to explaining why certain themes that were central to our 2021 podcast series, things like sustainability and globalisation, feature much less prominently in our discussions this year, with more people orientated themes taking the lead, such as trust and workplace culture, the skills agenda, diversity and inclusion and, of course, hybrid working.
Hybrid working not surprisingly became a feature of several podcasts this year and my guests’ perspectives on this varied, which just goes to show the challenges facing many employers as they navigate the best way forward. And whilst hybrid working seems here to stay there is very little consensus on the best way to enable this.
And Claire’s view on this really stood out when she said she strongly believes that hybrid working doesn’t work.
Hybrid Working
Claire Haidar: We’ve tried to do the hybrid workplace. And it doesn’t work. It genuinely doesn’t work. And the companies who have experimented with this have been very, very large operations and then very small start-ups, like ourselves. So, this dataset actually spans the large and the small. And they’ve all come back as failed experiments essentially. And if you unpack that and you look at why it doesn’t work, it’s because building a virtual company and building an in-person company require completely, completely different cultures. So, what I genuinely believe is going to happen, based on the evidence that we have from the companies that have experimented with this, is that people are going to try back to what they determine the near normal, which is this hybrid model, and they’re very quickly going to see that it isn’t going to work. And so, we’re going to have this whiplash effect where people are going to have to go back to the drawing board. Instead of doing the hard work now of redefining their culture and actually staking something in the ground, they’re kind of going to play this like ‘let’s kick the can down the road’ and in two years’ time they’re going to be forced to do it because they’re going to push their workforces to the brink.
Lucy Lewis: With culture change playing a pivotal role in the success of hybrid working I asked Clare to share her insights on how to build a successful culture in the context of a totally remote workforce.
Claire Haidar: We don’t approach our online spaces with the same level of intentionality that we do when it comes to creating physical spaces. So, there’s this whole concept of online architecture, you know, online interior design that is completely new. And right now, people are just allowing themselves to essentially just go with the flow of how these tools have been designed by the UX designers that have designed them. But the concept of them being actual physical workspaces is something that was never taken into consideration by the UX designers. It was always just a tool you know that was used in a workplace.
And so, fundamentally, there’s a lot of work that needs to be re-done there and so that’s where, that’s ultimately the areas where the hybrid fails. And why companies need to make such a strong decision about it.
Lucy Lewis: As many businesses look for ways to bring people together and spend some time in the office my next guest in the podcast series talked about the importance of social contact for innovation. Dr Carl Benedikt Frey is a Director for the Future of Work at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, and he shared his view on why ‘place still matters’:
Carl Benedikt Frey: We benefit from sporadic interactions and the knowledge below us that happen when people meet in spontaneous ways and we can see this more broadly through a variety of studies that cities with more walkable streets and restaurants and bars, also have higher rates of innovation.
Lucy Lewis: He also gave a really fascinating example to illustrate this in terms of the disruption in people’s social networks during the prohibition against alcohol in the US in the 1920s which saw a significant reduction in patenting and patent applications.
Two of my other guests, Dr Eliza Filby, a generational expert, and Harriet Molyneaux, Managing Director at HSM Advisory, suggested thinking about hybrid working in the context of autonomy – so acknowledging that, by giving people more flexibility about where they work you are, in effect, giving them more autonomy. Their view was that it was important to reframe the hybrid working discussion to make it about autonomy and to make it about how people use their time.
With this in mind, I asked Dr Grace Lordan, Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative, for examples of the practical advice she gives to businesses who are navigating these new found flexibilities:
Grace Lordan: Every job is going to be different, and every task is going to be different. I think for professional workers where we want to create, innovate, and assess risk, the starting point has to be, ‘what is the time that we need to bring the team together in order to have these sessions where they really go deep into discussions on what is the best way forward?’ and then they divide up the tasks and they go away with autonomy to do those tasks in a linear way, so, this kind of deep dive into productivity.
Lucy Lewis: Dr Lordan went on to discuss the four-day work week, which has been gaining momentum in the UK and obviously elsewhere in the world. She argued that employers could instead increase productivity by reducing presenteeism and offering greater flexibility which would really benefit workers. I thought this was an excellent point so its shifting the dial away from the four-day working week debate and actually, using this as a moment, an opportunity to be a lot more creative about how we work.
And Dr Lordan and I also explored how we can enhance inclusion in organisations to enable workers to become more productive. And although conversations on flexible and remote working they often focus on the benefits those things can offer for diversity and inclusion, Dr Lordan rightly pointed out this can also pose challenges when creating inclusive workplaces:
Diversity & Inclusion
Grace Lordan: So, the new bullying is isolating and ignoring somebody. With the virtual world, we saw a rise of what economists would call ingroups, where people who have affinity with each other, whether it's through sharing demographics or sharing a football team, or sharing a love for opera, whatever it is binding them together, did actually come together, exclude workers who could add incredible value to the business, and ultimately, that was more done through not being invited to the meeting, rather than somebody being shouted down in a meeting. So, it's a much more subtle thing for Human Resources departments to tackle, but it absolutely needs to be tackled.
Lucy Lewis: In my conversation with Dr Eliza Filby she was also concerned about the interplay between flexibility and inclusion:
Eliza Filby: That it actively disadvantages women and people of colour because all stats indicate that women again, women with small children, are the ones that are most supportive of flexible working arrangements and actually ethnic minorities as well prefer working behind a screen. They feel that it’s a safe environment. They feel more, more integrated and actually feels a more democratic place, and actually the danger is of course is that yes you introduce flexible working but then in 5 to 10 years down the line you have an inequality issue; and so flexible working leads to a D&I crisis and we’ve come so far in the last 10 years haven’t we in, in addressing that issue and I’d hate for that to pull us back. So a culture of presenteeism cannot prevail.
Lucy Lewis: It’s clear from my conversations with our podcast guests that work to drive diversity and inclusion in the workplace is continuing, alongside efforts to reshape the employee value proposition and build trust in the workplace.
And these themes featured strongly in our 2021 podcast series and continue to receive significant focus this year, driven I think by many people reassessing their priorities during the pandemic and of course skills shortages in some areas which helped to shift the balance of power further towards those employees.
And I was really struck by something Dr Eliza Filby said when she warned of the risk that employees would start to question staying with an organisation if their employers lost their hearts and minds by failing to nurture a sense of belonging, a sense of alignment with company values.
Eliza Filby: They need to start compensating now and fast for what has been lost in the last two years, because you will lose people. In fact you may already be losing people because they’re thinking well you know I can do this remotely. Why am I, what, what is keeping me here actually? What is holding me here? How much do I actually belong to this company?
Lucy Lewis: And I picked exactly this up again in another really fascinating conversation with Kit Krugman, Managing Director and Derek Newberry, Senior Director of co:collective’s Org + Culture Design practice. It is really interesting to reflect that back in March, Derek was already explaining that the “Great Resignation” should actually be viewed as a “Great Recalibration” with people shuffling jobs because they’re thinking more about the relationship they have with work and with their employer as well as the ‘value proposition’ that their employer is offering them. And we’ve seen this shift play out over the last 9 months so it is really interesting to reflect on Derek’s advice on what employers could do in the face of this shift:
Social Trends
Kit Krugman and Derek Newberry: Employers need to really think about what is our value proposition for the people who show up for work here and for the talent we’re trying to attract, and they get really crisp about that. What is our purpose in the world that you’re going to have an impact on? How can we help you grow in your career, but a relationship is two ways right so it’s also important to be really clear on what’s in it for the organisation, for the employer and does that really clear expectations right?
They’re thinking about the relationship they have to their work and to their employer, and they’re asking is there something out there that’s a better fit for me, that meets my needs; and so to address that what we would recommend is what my Undergrads used to call having a DTR moment, a define the relationship moment, with employees.
Lucy Lewis: This view was echoed by Kevin Cook CEO and co-founder of TreasurySpring when he shared his own experiences. He told me that people coming out of education and joining the workforce wanted to be there for something beyond just receiving a paycheck.
Kevin Cook: People want to be doing something that they can really buy into, something that they can believe in or you know, for some decent period of time, something that they can invest in, or if they can’t find that, then you end up with a much more transactional relationship.
Lucy Lewis: So I picked this up with Harriet Molyneaux and in our discussions we explored how people now have more of a voice and that organisations are expected to have a voice on many topics that they didn’t need to in the past things like inclusion, diversity and sustainability.
Kit Krugman summed this up brilliantly when she explained the important distinction between story telling and story doing:
Kit Krugman and Derek Newberry: It’s much easier for organisations to say both to their audiences and both internally and externally what they believe in, but it’s much harder to make that real; and we call that difference the difference between story telling and story doing and in the context of organisational culture, we find that often organisations have higher purposes that are really important to them, or values or a mission, but then when it comes to laddering that into the organisation and actually making that real and lived in their behaviours, in their systems, in their structures, that’s much more difficult.
Lucy Lewis: And we can see this growing expectation for employers to take action to support their workforce playing out today, for example by providing one-off payments to help with the cost of living crisis as we’ve seen some employers do and the topping up furlough payments that we saw during the pandemic.
And when I reflect on this, it seems to me that it’s tied up in the need for authenticity. In my conversation with Kevin Cook, we touched on this in the context of the growing focus on ESG and the risk of falling into the trap of greenwashing:
Kevin Cook: I think as a start-up you always have to be careful that you’re not greenwashing or you know, paying just lip service to something, I think there’s very much an increasing awareness of there are always opportunities for people to do things for the right reasons, but also sometimes because they feel like they need to or for the wrong reasons.
Trust
Lucy Lewis: It was clear from all these conversations that it is becoming increasingly important for organisations to intentionally architect the value proposition for employees and to build into that a sense of autonomy, of freedom but, most importantly, of trust.
And trust has been a key theme in our podcast discussions over recent years. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer shows that business continues to be the most trusted institution, with trust between employer and employee coming out as something that’s considered particularly important. Being a source of trustworthy information on contentious issues is the number one driver of trust in employers.
And so we explored this really key theme in several podcasts this year and in my discussion with David Liddle, founder and CEO of TCM Group, we explored how the way in which companies manage conflict resolution can strengthen their workplace culture and build employee trust.
As polarisation within society around certain issues grows, the so-called ‘culture wars’, it’s inevitable that these divisions will spill over into the workplace. David told me that organisations should be treating conflict as a strategic priority and, when managed correctly, it can be a source of opportunity rather than a source of adversity.
David Liddle: We need to learn how to disagree well because disagreement and these fissures will continue to evolve. They will continue to be black swan events, we’ll continue to have massive issues coming down the line here, just looking at the inflation rate, the cost of living crisis. All of the stresses in our economy are going to create ongoing challenges within our workplaces.
Conflict is an unavoidable, inescapable, in fact, it’s a healthy expression of working life and indeed I would argue that when it’s managed well, conflict can be a really important driver or a catalyst to innovation, creativity, growth, insight, learning. In fact, well-managed disagreements conflicts within our workplaces are the antecedent to growth. And therefore, we need conflict and disagreement in our organisations.
And it’s not a risk to put your people first. It’s not a risk to be more humanising in the way that you develop your policies and processes. It’s not a risk to be compassionate, supportive and to engender an environment where people can be constructive. In fact, it’s the opposite of a risk. You’ll generate the most brilliant outcomes and you’ll release the inner brilliance of your people, your teams and collectively within the workplaces.
The other thing I would say is about the employee experience. It says in the employee handbook. It’s great to have you here. It’s really wonderful to have you as part of our business, page 1.
Page 2 - this is what we’ll do when you fall out. This is what we’ll do when you disagree. This is what we’ll do when you bully someone. This is what we do when you’re bullied by someone else. We don’t trust you. You’re a risk. You’re a potential problem. You’re a threat. We don’t think you’re going to quite fit, so we’ve created a different set of systems and processes to manage you when you don’t fit anymore.
In essence, this is screaming out ‘We don’t trust you!’
Lucy Lewis: I also touched on the importance of trust in my discussion with Ritu Mohanka, Managing Director and Head of EMEA at Syndio, a leading workplace equity platform. We looked at how data driven decision making is becoming one of the most important components in future strategic decisions, and can help to counter systematic bias when it comes to issues such as pay equity and the opportunity gap.
And thinking back to Kit’s concept of story telling versus story doing, my discussion with Ritu reemphasised the importance of businesses taking action, living their values when it comes to building trust with their employees.
Ritu Mohanka: The way that I see that is, as leaders, we’re on a very short leash in terms of being able to keep up people’s trust but we have an opportunity and a chance to do even better trust and transparently are two sides of the same coin. Research has shown numerous times that when companies are transparent around a commitment to fairness in the workplace it makes a difference in the minds of employees but on the flip side when there’s no transparency, employees really start to fill the void often, of course, with misinformation. I think striving towards a fairer society and truly equitable workplaces is long overdue and we know that addressing systemic bias and pay equity are key to making this a reality. Many businesses are talking the talk but deprioritising walking the walk for whatever reason it is. And for me, it should be given that everybody should feel valued and treated fairly regardless of their personal background.
And if you think about why, why trust is even more important. It’s even more important as employees are increasingly leaving jobs where they feel unfulfilled, overlooked and undervalued and in a challenging economic climate, it’s also not surprising we’re starting to see an uptick in strike action that reflects the sentiment too.
Lucy Lewis: I picked up on this in my conversation with Elizabeth Bieniek. Elizabeth is an internal start-up founder, and Director of Innovation at Cisco with a particular focus on the interface between people and emerging technology.
And we explored how trust is developed by seeing people, by connecting with people and it was so interesting to hear how technology can feed into that kind of connection, particularly as teams are increasingly geographically dispersed and people aren’t always together physically in the office.
And Elizabeth shared some really fascinating insights on the fundamental importance of human connection and the ways in which we can harness emerging technologies to make hybrid working and remote working a bit more human, allow people to connect virtually in a way that fosters trust and builds collaboration.
Elizabeth Bieniek: I think getting together in person is the holy grail. Seeing someone, hearing someone, being able to shake a hand, share a hug, you know, squeeze somebody on the shoulder or have some sort of physical interaction as well as take part of all the non-verbal cues that come through in communications. So much of the human language is non-verbal. We use body language, gestures. We have, different interactions that are based on different customs and cultures and, much of that is lost when you’re using purely a technology platform to remotely communicate with someone.
So, a lot of my interest is focused on, how do you bring those non-verbal cues back into that interaction? And all of that is what helps the person on the other end of the phone call, other end of the video call, other end of the chat, seem more human and therefore seem more relatable and, because of that, you can start to build a relationship. You can start to build and establish trust.
AI/Automation and Skills
Lucy Lewis: I also asked Elizabeth what other emerging technologies we might see in the not to distant future. She talked about haptic interfaces, which allow you to add the sensation of touch into a virtual experience.
As automation continues to change the working landscape and the technological advances play a central role in driving innovation I discussed how that influences workforce skills for the future with a number of my guests.
Dr Carl Benedikt Frey shared his views on the human skills that technology finds difficult to replicate:
Carl Benedikt Frey: What we identified were three key domains. So complex social interactions being the first, creative tasks being the second and perception and manipulation tasks that centre on interacting with irregular objects so more unstructured environments more broadly.
Lucy Lewis: And lots of my guests this year shared their views on what they believed would be the ‘skills of the future’.
In Claire Haidar’s view, it was vital for employees of the future to have a curious mindset which would enable them to look objectively at what parts of their job could be automated and just be able to let go of those, where others might feel more protective of them.
Dr Lordan highlighted resilience, adaptivity and creativity.:
Grace Lordan: The economy is going to be changing, so people are going to need to continuously upgrade their core skills, and the one thing that deciphers whether somebody is actually proactive or inactive in doing that, is whether or not they're an unadaptable person.
Lucy Lewis: And this concept of adaptability cropped up again in my conversation with Harriet in the context of the increasing attention being paid to the role of managers and HR in light of the growing focus on human capital.
Harriet Molyneaux: For organisations to be a step ahead, they need to be thinking in a highly strategic and intentional way around people; and this is very complex and of course you need the operational elements of HR that’s fundamental to a business but you also need the people, organisation, values, employer attractiveness elements to be coming in as well so my view is to take a step back and for HR professionals to think do we have in our department the skill sets and capabilities that we need to be the strategic partner to our CEO?
A really crucial element of that is that middle management group because of course the way that people will experience that flexibility, and therefore autonomy, is through their touch point which was their manager the role of managers is broken and we need to redesign the role of managers. We need to redefine what success looks like as a manager in order to make this happen.
Lucy Lewis: Claire and I touched on the challenges faced by leaders when we spoke too. This is what she had to say about it:
Claire Haidar: We need to understand that our responsibility as leaders and managers in workplaces is significantly changing. Talent is no longer just human talent. Talent is now bots plus humans.
And so, the next skill there is really being able to lead people through that change. So, understanding change management and understanding how to lead teams through that into a new identity and a new way of being is one of the most critical leadership skills.
Lucy Lewis: And I also discussed the evolving role of leaders in leading through change with Dr Lordan:
Grace Lordan: And when I look at leaders now, instead of the leaders needing to have all the answers, they're looking to the team for inspiration, and then their gift really, which is, and I use that word strategically because it is a gift, is joining together the dots of these unique diverse ideas, in a way that really enhances the business they're working for.
Lucy Lewis: Dr Lordan went on to share her concerns about how automation could result in a ‘winner takes all’ economy with a reduction in medium paid jobs and a widening of inequalities.
And even where automation replaces existing jobs with new jobs and possibly new industries, there will still be a question of how accessible they will be both in terms of geography but also in terms of skills.
Dr Carl Benedikt Frey also reflected on that when we spoke, pointing out that something that is often missed is that new jobs tend to emerge in different places than those that were being automated away from. He summed it up perfectly by saying:
Carl Benedikt Frey: If you put one hand in the freezer and the other in the stove you should feel quite comfortable on average but obviously we know from experience that that’s not the case. And the same can be said about the labour market.
Lucy Lewis: There will also be a question of how individuals whose jobs have been impacted by technology can gain the skills required to fill the new roles that are being created, and that is likely to be a significant consideration for employers as the skill shortages continue.
As technology is accelerating generational differences in the workplace are also being exposed and Dr Eliza Filby noted that whilst we talk a lot these days about technological disruption, demographic societal disruption is almost an equally powerful force in society driving change.
And there’s been a lot of focus on different generations experience and expectations of work over the last few years and so it was really interesting to hear Eliza’s view on how different generations are influencing culture and the working environment.
Generations
Eliza Filby: Gone are the days where you can just motivate people by salary or status. It used to be that you had your name on the office. It used to be that salary and bonus culture was the keyway of keeping people. It used to be the company car. It used to be you know all of that kind of stuff I think was being questioned in the 1960s and 70s by Baby Boomers by the way who were the first generation to talk about purpose and meaning in the workplace, but it’s really been accelerated by millennials and now Gen Z, and I think gone are the days, by the way, when a graduate scheme was the golden ticket to social mobility, fixed salary, purpose and meaning and a professional lifestyle, partly because all of that is much harder to acquire.
You’re seeing the changing status of professions they don’t have the same status that they did even 10 years ago I speak to a lot of professional mid-lifers who have young teenage kids and they will say they want to be working in something that is fulfilling, that is satisfying an individual need or purpose and desire or dream, and one that almost doesn’t feel like work, and I think there’s a total jarring between kind of traditional corporate culture and people’s idea of themselves and their world.
Lucy Lewis: It’s been clear from many of my guests that a lot has changed in the world of work, in terms of the skills that are required as well as employee motivations around work, particularly in the case of younger generations. Dr Filby made the point that when looking at generations in the workplace it is important not to generalise too much.
Eliza Filby: What I try to do is tease out the nuances within those generational categories, and then kind of also understand, to what extent are these behaviours reflective of their life stage? So you know the young being perhaps politically optimistic and ambitious and potentially naïve in their youth because that’s what you do when you’re young, you challenge the status quo, you are idealistic. So what is it that’s generationally specific to Gen Z or Baby Boomers, and what is life cycle-specific, life stage-specific whether you’re in retirement or whether you’re a 20 something just breaking out into the world.
Lucy Lewis: Harriet Molyneaux picked up on this in my conversation with her. We explored the idea that having a ‘job for life’ is becoming something of the past. She also advised against equating ‘age’ and ‘stage’ in the way that we have previously done.
Harriet Molyneaux: We’re moving away from the three-stage life. By that I mean education up till 18 or perhaps 21 or 25. Then assuming that that knowledge body is going to last you for your whole working life, working in a sprint until you’re in your fifties or maybe early sixties and then retiring; and we’re seeing a breakdown of this for a number of reasons. Education taken in your early twenties simply isn’t going to last you even into your mid to late twenties if you’re in a technical high speed change environment. We’re seeing that actually we’re going to be living enormously longer. So we need to fundamentally rethink our lives and just start to think about can we rethink time? Maybe take some more education in our thirties. Perhaps not always be doing the stepping stone to the next bigger thing, and certainly not focusing on retiring and then dropping off a cliff and living that life of leisure.
So I think perhaps we need to retire the word retirement and start to think about it a bit differently but I acknowledge that the way that we structure careers and jobs in organisations is so unable to take on that idea at the moment but that requires a fundamental rethink of what that looks like.
Lucy Lewis: As we draw this podcast to a close, I wanted to particularly reflect on the one question I asked each of our guests in the podcast series. I asked them that if they had the power to ensure one change for the workplace of 2032, what would this be? And we had some brilliant responses really interesting, totally fantastic. Let’s hear what some of our speakers had to say about that…:
Kit Krugman and Derek Newberry: I feel like we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to completely rethink the context, the culture, the way that we work and I don’t want us to miss it.
Eliza Filby: I think there needs to be a return to a sense of obligation to your employees; and I think that should come in the form of constant training that is personalised, bespoke, driven by the individual not by the company so that it’s you know individualised learning but is I think the key to creating an agile workforce fit for the 21st Century.
Harriet Molyneaux: I think my change I’d like to make is to take pleasure in the day to day of what we do; and realise that we’re not always working towards a destination. Our destination is the life we’re leading right now so to try and lean in and enjoy the today and now a bit more than perhaps we are sometimes.
Grace Lordan: It would be to increase the number of inclusive leaders who do not hire their friends or hire based on their own affinity, but hire for diversity and for perspectives that they do not yet have.
Elizabeth Bieniek: Don’t forget the people! I think the biggest thing is really getting back to the root of humanity and my favourite place to look for future technology trends and make fairly accurate predictions of what I think might be happening 5, 10, 15 years down the road are looking at societal trends. I think those are the technologies that will be phenomenally resilient and applicable in the future.
Lucy Lewis: I loved hearing everyone’s response and thoughts on that question! So what are my thoughts having reflected on all these fascinating conversations?
A strand that really runs through all my podcast discussions this year was the importance of people, whether that be in terms of workplace culture and the employee value proposition, whether it’s about building trust, resolving conflict, whether it’s about the skills agenda or generational shifts or something that ran through a lot of the podcasts, whether it’s about diversity and inclusion.
And the pandemic brought the future of work to the here and now, it gave us this snapshot of what the future world of work could look like. Although geopolitical events and worsening economic conditions have required many employers to shift focus in order to focus on the organisational and workforce challenges and priorities of the moment, my hope is that over the next few years employers and politicians will be able to turn their focus to the longer term and to take forward many of those fantastic lessons we learned from the pandemic to improve work and working life, and to improve business and society and our planet for the better.
So, next year, I will be asking each of my podcast guests to give their views on what they think is missing from the current conversation on the future of work – what are the things that they don’t think are getting the attention it deserves, and why are those things so important?
As the working landscape continues to shift rapidly in response to world events, my colleague, James Davies, a partner at Lewis Silkin, has taken this opportunity to reflect on the ways in which key developments over the last 12 months have significantly altered the work landscape. His new publication “Eight Drivers of Change – 2022 and beyond” comes at critical time for businesses assessing how to prepare for the future of work by giving a comprehensive assessment of the current situation, alongside insightful perspectives on the journey ahead. And I’ll be In conversation with… James in our first podcast in 2023 so make sure to tune in then to hear his predictions for the future and the steps employers can take to prepare.
So, on that note, a really big thank you to all our wonderful guest speakers who appeared on our 2022 series and thank you to our listeners for your support. The Future of Work Hub podcast series will be back in January 2023, bringing you more insights and perspectives about the future of work.
Thank you.