The World Economic Forum recently shared key takeaways from Harvard Business School regarding the 5 work trends that are predicted to define 2024. Here they are, along with my unfiltered reactions.
- Hybrid work will evolve: New modes of collaboration will continue to emerge.
My take: Absolutely, as it should. Collaboration is always going to be critical, but it can take place in a number of ways. In person days at the office designed around brainstorming meetings, learning sessions, etc. can be so productive and rewarding. Virtual collaboration can be just as productive and at times, more inclusive. Individual work time is essential, too – time that is protected from meetings, when the real “thinky doings” can take place.
Coming up with the right recipe for success, at the individual, team, and organizational levels, requires discarding prior notions of what work should look like and going back to the drawing board, with desired outcomes being starting point, and with a focus what fosters actual productivity vs. the appearance of being busy.
There are many ways to build a strong, supportive, and adaptive work culture. Clear boundaries establish the guardrails that let everyone know where they stand and what they can expect. A high degree of autonomy and flexibility within those boundaries provides everyone with the needed breathing room and space to optimize their performance based on their own personality and needs. Clarity is kindness. - Pushback against ‘workism’: People will shift away from constructing their lives around work and expecting work to provide total fulfillment.
My take: Yup. I think the pandemic was a catalyst for a dynamic shift that was already under way. I won’t get too deep into how the pandemic highlighted so many problems with how we structure our lives and opportunities to reshape things, as this topic has been thoroughly discussed over the past few years. What I will say, though, is that technology was already making it possible for people to start to question the 9-5, the need to be in a particular location, and the assumptions we make in terms of how we structure our families, caregiving duties, and so many other facets of daily life: the little things that really are the big things.
Technology has made our economy more accessible, and softened the edges around traditional notions of what it means to have a job or a career. Technology has reformed our families, compensating for our lack of national policies to support families (maternity and paternity leave, universal preschool, etc.) and allowing more parents to more evenly share child and elder-care responsibilities, which in turn supports more men participating fully in the wild, messy, and deeply transformative experience of fatherhood, and more women maintaining access to jobs and economic opportunity. And because this man/woman, father/mother binary does not apply to every family, the bottom line is that technology has made work-life integration possible for more individuals and more families across the board.
And because of the rise of work-life integration (discussed more fully under item 5), we expect to see benefits on both sides of the hyphen. Work is still possible, even for someone who only has 20 hours a week to spare, and those hours are primary at night after the kids go to sleep (read: me, from 2014-2017). Importantly, this creates more space for life as well, and if there’s anything that the pandemic taught us, it is how precious and fragile life is. - Caregiving policies come to the fore: The pandemic revealed the weight of caregiving and we cannot un-realize that.
My take: Based on everything I’ve just said, it’s clear to me why we continue to place a premium on support for caregivers. There are many ways in which we can return to our pre-Covid norms. If we’re blessed enough not to be immunocompromised, we can eat at restaurants without worrying about exposure. We can travel freely and go to concerts and enjoy being social without guilt or fear. But we cannot, and we should not, forget what we learned about the weight of caregiving and the requirement that our society adequately factor that into what it asks of us.
This is one of the reasons why I am such an outspoken critic of performative work culture. There are reasonable sacrifices that any job will require – challenges that caregivers must expect to navigate, like the need to get lunchboxes packed and kids shuffled off to school and still make it to that weekly team meeting where so much collaboration occurs. That’s hard but reasonable and necessary. In contrast, there are certain aspects of a performative work culture, like return-to-office mandates that are not aligned with the actual needs of the job, which chip away at the resilience of caregivers and create resentment.
It is completely normal in some work cultures and revolutionary in others to say what I am about to say: Being required to be in the office on a day when there is no planned in person collaboration, and no tasks that must be done from the office, is generally counter-productive. It also creates a missed opportunity to provide a totally free benefit to that employee, who may have been able to complete their work that day and help their kids with their homework, or squeeze in a workout. Yes, there’s always the chance that proximity to others in the office could lead to some unplanned organic collaboration, but is that happening enough to offset the sacrifices? And could that have happened in another way? There are no easy answers, but we need to ask the questions. Finally, I want to make sure that people who thrive in the office feel seen: if you love going to the office, being in that head space, and then heading home and shifting gears, that’s great. You do you! I just don’t think a one size fits all approach is fair to anyone, and fortunately, many employers seem to be realizing this as well. - Boomers make way: Gen X and Millennials are waiting in the wings to take the lead.
My take: This one’s pretty clear. The Baby Boomers are aging, and Gen X and Millennials are ready to take the reigns. And as thoroughly described above, the expectations are different. In the unlikely event that anyone who’s reading this is thinking that Gen X and Millennials do not want to work as hard as boomers, hence the high expectations for a personal life and hobbies and mental health and a social safety net… have y’all seen our student loan debt and current interest rates!? We’re doing more with less. - The “portfolio life’ is on the rise: This lifestyle redistributes time and talent across a number of areas: work, family, community, hobbies, and rest.
My take: I love, love, love this one. It is so great to have a name for the phenomenon I’ve been observing. The most interesting, creative, brilliant people I know all appear to be doing a lot of things. Are they just hustling all the time? It’s really hard to tell, because they are practicing work-life integration. They have hobbies that make them healthier and more well-rounded and rested and inspired. This feeds right into their work, which happens to also benefit their communities, while protecting space for time with their families, with whom they practice their hobbies, which make them healthier and more well-rounded and rested and inspired… I can’t fairly say that people are working harder than ever, but I suspect they might be working smarter than ever.
This connects to the rise of the multipotentialite: someone with many interests and creative pursuits. Or perhaps it’s the rebirth of the Renaissance persona (and yes, I realize that ‘renaissance’ literally means ‘rebirth’). Technology, the pandemic, and all other aspects of interconnectedness have brought us to this stage in our evolution where creativity, flexibility, and dynamism are assets, and our relationship with work is irreversibly changed and ever-changing.