10 years of the Future of Work – and We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

10 years ago, Lynda Gratton and Hot Spots Movement set out to figure out what the future of work would look like. Lynda had a hunch that there would be a massive transformation and was keen to understand 1. what was changing, and 2. how it would impact organisations, people and ultimately 3. how work would change as a result. We gathered an enthusiastic group of companies who would spend an academic year with us coming up with answers to these three questions.

You could argue, and we would agree, with the wisdom of hindsight, that it was rather optimistic to expect that after less than one year, we would have clear and concise answers.

10 years on, we’re still at it, and it’s getting more exciting by the day. In fact, it turned out that what we had started wasn’t a one-year research consortium, but a journey with an open-ended ticket, where the destinations and the routings are being defined as we move along. 

The first leg of the journey was about identifying the major forces that would impact and partially or significantly define what organisations and work would look like, as well as the shape and form of future talent. We looked at technology, globalisation, societal change, demography and low carbon.

The second leg of the journey was spent on understanding how these major forces challenge fixtures of work such as – ‘work has a place’ – we work in an office or in a factory; ‘work has a time’ – we work from 9-5 or we work shifts’; and ‘work is a job’ – we’re employed to do a defined role, on a permanent basis. We explored what happens if these fixtures would no longer hold up, and we quickly moved from ‘if’ to ‘when’ as it rapidly became clear that the jury was no longer out on whether it would happen but only on how quickly.

The third leg was when we turned to investigating in detail what was happening in people’s lives, based on the understanding that at some stage (generally it should happen sooner than it does), work and organisations need to adapt to what is happening in people’s lives. We saw lots of evidence that rather than expect people – talent – to conform to how work had been organised, largely unchanged, since the 1950s, the organisation of work would need to change to attract and engage talent. So, we dove into shifting identities – how notions such as gender, family structures, age are now much more fluid and diverse. We established the need for organisations to create workplaces that embrace the whole selves of their talent and how they evolve, in all facets, over time. 

All along the way, we have focused on how companies need to adapt their legacy people policies and processes. One of our favourite images to illustrate the status of people processes in many global organisations is an archaeological excavation site with multiple layers. To understand how companies can address the challenge of having to attract and engage talent with/despite multiple era processes, we studied the Future of HR and particularly the importance of identifying and saying parting with sunset processes.

Are we at our final destination? Absolutely not! Because the future of work is impacted by how people’s lives change, by technology and by societal change, all of which remains in the making, our final destination is not yet in sight. There is so much we still need to understand, and over the next 12 months, we’ll be researching Agile People Strategy, the High-performing Organisation, and Digitising the Organisation. We’ll be looking into why so many big organisations are struggling to adopt flexible working widely, what digitalisation means for organisations, talent and work.

So, my prediction is that in five years’ time, we’ll be as excited about the future of work as we were 10 years ago and as we are now.

Please stay in touch – this co-creational project is only possible thanks to great members of the Future of Work Research Consortium.