The Future of Work

Concepts essential for transforming our workplaces to survive-and-thrive in the future next ten years

To the memory of Jacque Fresco

Five thousand years ago, humanity invented writing, which changed the world forever. The invention of the Internet and faster computers is one of the greatest innovations of humankind after it, which connected the whole Earth and even beyond.

Millennials will be remembered in history as the generation of Great Change who had to live on the edge of the disappearing old broken, disconnected offline world and a new globalized digital and sometimes virtual world. They had to survive the Great Recession, unaffordable housing, debt, expensive, outdated education, which became useless in a New Digital World. They had to learn to cope with new technologies and an overwhelming amount of information and choice, scams, fake information, and learn the hard way to trust no one but themselves.

That's why millennials are known as stressed, job hoppers, problem makers who challenge the Status Quo. They adapt, diversify their skill set, and are looking for flexibility and financial independence, and had to become entrepreneurs to guarantee themselves this stability no matter what disaster or disruption will happen without relying on anyone else, and yes, being an entrepreneur is f* stressful and you have to work from home a lot. They had to build this whole New World, new economies, new markets. They wanted to change the world, and they did.

Now Gen Z is entering the workforce, and it wants more stability again in this New World.

While this New World still is a privilege mostly for startups, the majority of organizations and governments on this planet are still not sure what happened and how to jump into this New Digital World.

What drives change and what all organizations and especially governments should do if they want to survive?

Four main categories are affecting the workforce globally:

1. Global Economy, Politics, Sustainability, Regional Development and decline of Governments
2. Education, Housing, and Basic Support
3. Technology, CX, Processes, High demand in Product Designers and Product Managers, New Roles, Shared Ownership and a Life after Founders gone
4. Culture, Gigs, Personalization, Liquidity, Diversity, and Recruiting

Global Economy, Politics, Sustainability, Regional Development and decline of Governments

Trying to ignore poor regions and people looking for a better life, and building walls, leaving Unions, voting for independence, preventing people from doing so, and introducing hard immigration policies will not solve the problem itself. It only sparks more issues long-term.

Talent exists everywhere equally. Opportunities are not.

All our main problems today come from the imbalance. Because of that, companies are flooded with too many applications, while from another side - job search is becoming more stressful and takes more time.

Businesses started to heavily influence the world, more than governments. Perhaps, one day, we all will be governed by fair AGI where corruption won't be possible, and those old, slow, bureaucratic governments will be replaced by a machine. Because of such responsibility, organizations have to think about moral and sustainable choices and to support developing regions and open more jobs and training programs across the world to balance the world and stop having people trying to illegally cross the border or die climbing the wall.

The world is globalized, and we all should think of it as a single country where every region matters, and every person matters, and we all are Global Citizens. Stop thinking just about gender equality and start thinking about people and planet equality.

Everyone wants to have a better life. Still, not everyone wants to work hard in an impoverished region and make it modern and competitive like China did lifting more than a billion people out of poverty in just a few decades. The fact is, regular people will continue to move towards better economies do you want it or not, so it's only up to organizations and governments to work together and balance the world by modernizing themselves and introducing the new educational systems and opening new opportunities worldwide. While West is wasting time on discussions and building walls, China is developing into the future and started investing in many regions across the globe.

It's a win-win situation for anyone. Because talent is equal everywhere, organizations can benefit from a cheaper workforce in cities where bills are ten times less expensive than London or Hong Kong. Still, you have to treat them well and not just as temporary slaves from 3rd countries whom you will replace if they won't work hard. We need to help local people develop their regions and not use them and take their natural resources and then abandon them. By supporting those regions, we also will prevent the world from overpopulating because people tend to have fewer kids and have them later in developed countries.

The global world is vast and always will be, at some point, unstable. With trade wars, bans, and declining economies, companies have to play one step ahead.

In EU, we have a legal business type - European Company or SE (from Latin - Societas Europea) which is formed when at least two companies in EU are merging or when you expand into another EU country. If there is instability in one country, your business stays stable because it exists across countries, and you quickly can move HQ into a new country without dissolving a company and registering a new one.

We should have a similar framework globally where, let say, US businesses could form a new legal entity with EU or Chinese company. If suddenly, you are not allowed to sell something to another region, you still have part of your venture there and can start manufacturing it directly in a new location. It means no tariff and no need to sell cross-border. Intellectual property and the Internet don't have physical limits, and bans are not practical there. Physical resources can be found elsewhere.

We also should build more Special Administrative Regions and independent business hubs like Singapore, with English as an official language. You might develop and build a modern business center in Sahara, for example, but it doesn't mean people would love to live in the middle of the desert. Climate change, geographical location, weather, sun, sea, beaches, islands matter. EU should have it's own Federal/Republic City in an ethical and shiny area that will stop every capital in the EU to fight against each other in the race for the "EU's/Next Silicon Valley." We still have Sophia Antipolis, which is as old as Silicon Valley, located in France's most beautiful southern province, but it seems like development halted.

Education, Housing, and Basic Support

Organizations, governments, educational institutions, professors, instructors, corporate professionals, students have to work together on a flexible curriculum, short courses to teach students in one-year maximum all the practical skills business needs.

An internship should be a regulated must-have part of the process in all organizations and not just for students, but also for people who lost their jobs due to innovation and automation or simply are trying to switch careers and acquire advanced skills in the form of a Basic Support - Think of a Basic Income but to finance a course with this internship.

The workplace is no more just an office, it's a whole ecosystem across continents, and it's alive. Housing is another side of a workplace coin being it education or work. While supporting housing is essential for people who lost their homes either due to increasing expenses in big cities, a job which decreased it' value and hence income or due to natural disaster, technology made it easier to find a job in a Gig Economy and simply reduced the need of the expensive housing and office due to remote work. You don't have to live in expensive London and take a tube to downtown every day if you can't afford it. You still can have the same job, but work, from, perhaps, a more attractive place with more sun and beach. If you are going to apply for a Hong Kong visa, you might provide a good reason why you can't do that work remotely and want to take a limited physical space from a local worker who needs physically to be there to do the job.

Thanks to those millennials who jumped from one job to another and challenged Status Quo and thanks to startups like Airbnb, Uber, WeWork, Coursera, Revolut, UpWork, Kiwi/Skyscanner and many others it became easier than ever to learn new skills, find remote gig or work, travel, find home away from home, find co-working space, connect with locals, other travelers, find experiences, book cheap flights, etc. The Digital Nomadic lifestyle and 100% remote cultures are on the rise. Other organizations and even governments should support that lifestyle to save a lot of money and physical space.

Technology, CX, Processes, High demand in Product Designers and Product Managers, New Roles, Shared Ownership and a Life after Founders gone

Technology now allows us to have remote virtual 3D AR meetings, collaborate, store, sign documents online real-time, manage our finances, automate our workflows. It replaced the whole need of the office, hence bringing more freedom and transparency into "how" people work.

We also will see new processes emerging and will have another Manifesto replacing Agile, which is People, Love, and Result-driven Manifesto for the globalized, diverse, gender-equal age of automation, flexibility, and transparency. 

Governments, especially in developing regions, currently are behind anyone else because they are not staying up-to-date with the tech intentionally, take a lot of time to adapt new changes, and government roles are not modern, sexy startup jobs, hence majority of its workforce is older generation, rather than Silicon Valley hipsters running crazy experiments and sprints on regulations and society every week.

We will continue seeing more innovations in the next ten years, and organizations have to learn to follow-up and be able to introduce changes as fast as startups, as well as high-end CX is not just a delighter anymore, but a must-have. If somebody will launch a LinkedIn with a great UX, without spam and audience LinkedIn has, I will switch instantly. We need a Lean Enterprise and not just a Lean Startup. Hackathons, experiments, business incubators will become common. We need love, CX, people-led organizations.

Product Designers and not just UI/UX, Product Managers, and not just Product Owners, UX Researchers will be crucial and most demanding roles next ten years. We also will see new roles and titles like AI Architect, Self-Driving System Engineer, Hologram-Rockstar, whatever.

However, change is only possible when the Executive Leadership is open-minded, and decisions are made by professionals together and not dictated by the CEO or HiPPO alone. That's why having shared ownership and transparency is very important for the modern workforce and will be even more demanding from Gen Z in the future.

Talent leave big corporations because they can not earn more there and take a C-level seat. They don't own anything in a company. Organizations should become closer to governments where each talent can be equally elected into top positions, where everyone can earn as much as they contribute. It's not about IPO any more, but rather IEO (Inclusive Employee Offering), which should be a final growth stage of a private company. It also will prevent corporations from dying and being taken by new unicorn replacing them. It will prevent next Apple from declining because Steve Jobs and Jony Ive are not there anymore. Organizations should stabilize their long-term survival for generations and not just decline and die after Founders are not there anymore.

Culture, Gigs, Personalization, Liquidity, Diversity, and Recruiting

It's not about full-time anymore. This model is unflexible and in some instances, expensive for an organization. Gig Economy replaced Job Economy. Even startups still are afraid of utilizing distributed, remote workers, freelancers, contractors, consultants. They prefer to hire an "in-house" team because it sounds cool, sexy, and self-proclaimed CEO will be able to yell at his employees and feed his ego. It's about high-quality results and getting the job done, it's an intellectual team effort. Remote work and fully remote cultures are continuing to rise. Organizations have to support part-time, flexible work, learn how to utilize the newest communication and collaboration tools, work remotely, respect, and trust each other and leave the ego behind the door.

With such diversity and a big choice today, its all about personalization. There will be a culture for anyone. So far, only AngelList recently introduced a change in Business Profiles, and now entrepreneurs can showcase their culture and perks. It soon will be a must-have feature.

Recruiting became such a broken and ancient process as word CV itself. Every big organization has enough ego to think that everyone should create another account on their Jobs platform and copy-paste their LinkedIn because they can't just import it with one button. We can't find talent on a platform with millions of users; let us copy-paste the same job description, which was copy-pasted from the Internet across ten different job portals. Recruiters are not senior professionals in fields they are trying to recruit for, and it looks as pathetic as a guy trying to teach a lady about her menstrual cycle.

They scan for keywords without knowing what they mean and how different keywords are related, meaning if a candidate knows X, she also knows Y, and because Y is not in the CV, it doesn't mean she doesn't know it. Recruiters often are just lazy to take time and think through and beyond a one-pager, and use tools to automate now even worse keyword-based matching process. Then they click one button to send an automated default email with rejection telling a candidate that she doesn't have the required skills because they have enough ego to assume that the candidate was stupid enough not to check the role's description. Or another time, you might also receive a lot of spam from different recruiters who send you irrelevant offers or somebody wants to sell you another web or mobile app development. In some instances, when it might be relevant after they sent you an outreach message themselves, and when you responded and offered a Zoom video call, they disappear.

Feedback is crucial in the process and sending everyone the same template message without providing at least a direction of where and what to improve won't help anyone, and organizations will continue to receive a lot of applications.

The recruiting process should be visualized. The organization should tell a story and utilize the newest technologies and smart tools to give candidates questions, challenges to solve, and provide feedback based on that. Saying that you receive too many applications and it is not possible to respond to anyone is just an excuse and won't solve a problem itself.

Earth's population, amount of people connected to the Internet, amount of educated young professionals will only continue to grow and with all that amount of information and we have to adapt to the problem of "too many," we can't keep ignoring it. Otherwise, we will flood ourselves.

Finally, CV itself just became an ancient useless piece of paper in this New Digital World, or should I say a sales funnel page when you create a new sales landing page for each audience, I mean different Resume for each role and company. Millennials and Gen Z especially want fluidity and often have more skills than you can imagine, and they can easily wear many hats. Resume itself can't prove you that the candidate has resilience, grit, fast learning, adaptability, independence traits, can't tell you about who that Human Being is, his values, culture, and what this person wants in the future. If a recruiter or candidate doesn't know how to use LinkedIn, well, I am afraid no paper will fix the main issue.

We should teach people how to think and not just how to follow instructions and read keywords like monkeys. With the number of HR startups and other job portals popping up somewhere on Earth every month, I guess, we all can agree that recruiting and job hunting industry is not just outdated but f*cked up. Only by launching another job portal with mysterious AI connecting both sides, we won't solve the problem.

Conclusion

In the end, it's not about somebody else, it's not just about organizations helping people be more adaptive and resilient, and it's not about sitting and waiting when somebody else will come and help you change.

The change is possible only within, don't seek it outside. When the egg is broken from the outside, life ends. When it is broken from within, life begins.

It's always up to anyone of us to work on ourselves, continue self-development, reading and learning something new, working out, incorporating healthy and productive habits, exercises to manage our mental energy and stress, and keeping our lifestyles, bodies, and mind strong and healthy. It is also our responsibility to treat anyone with love, kindness, and respect. Yet, its also up to organizations and people with wealth and influence to help the ones below to rise. Instead of being mad, be a leader, a teacher, and a friend. Show them the way and don't just tell them about a Silicon Wonderland.

Education is a foundation of any society and a primary Human Right. Only by having the new and right moral education where we teach how to learn, listen, respect, find information, build your own curriculum, how to connect with people and learn from them, how to think, how to treat people equally, personal finances, self-development, work ethic, adaptability, stress, energy, conflict, emotional management, kindness, empathy, how to think big, long-term and zoom to a full picture, innovate, be open-minded, humble, independent yet part of a society as a global citizen without ego and how to look down and help those in need, and make an action instead of ignoring, only then we will address all those issues altogether and will have a world beyond politics, poverty, and war.