The Meaning of Work Radically Changed. Stop Forcing a Return to the Old Ways

COVID hasn’t been just a viral pandemic. It became the catalyzer that accelerated a trend that had been in the making for a long time. It added fuel and fire to a cooking recipe that was otherwise slowly, but unrelentingly simmering in the backburner of society and which suddenly started to boil, spilling over everything and catching most organizations, institutions and leaders off guard: a profound transformation in the meaning of work.

If you could travel back to our time as hunter gatherers or early farmers or even as workers of the early first and second industrial revolutions and you could ask people then what “work” meant for them, most likely the answer would have been pretty straightforward: time and labor in exchange for enough food to survive or enough money to procure enough food to survive.

But, we are not anymore in the year 10,000 BCE, or 1750 or 1850 CE. We are in the year 2022, and the question “what is the meaning work” has a completely different answer today.

Work isn’t anymore a transactional activity by which labor and time are exchanged for money to procure food, all happening in a physical office as the marketplace for that exchange.

Instead, work became a conduit for personal realization. Work became an outlet to unleash human talents, creativity and passions. Work and the activities at work became the opportunity for humans to push the limits of our skills and excel at the craft at hand and continually improve and get better at them. Work, ultimately, became an extension and perhaps one of the very expressions of what being human truly is: an insatiable curiosity to explore the frontiers of what’s possible and a powerful drive to, once arriving at those frontiers, leap forward into the exciting unknown and learn how to excel in it too to then repeat the journey.

Furthermore, this upgraded definition and meaning of work is rather a representation of something much bigger than a transaction. It is the transformational pursuit for meaning and the quest to continually elevate humankind by providing an opportunity for achievement and realization, and everything in between.

This isn’t new, though. This definition of work has always been true, but unevenly distributed. Work as the quest for human realization has been true ever since our early civilizations, but its real expression sadly reserved only for a handful of humans across time lucky enough to have had enough money, or hereditary rights or a powerful last name to keep them away from the toils of what work (time and labor for money) really meant for the majority.

If this is true, if work really is as empowering and elevating as I am describing here (and it is), then a return to the old ways (and by old ways I don’t mean the old ways of 10,000 BCE, 1750 or 1850 CE, but the old pre-pandemic ways of 2019) is not just absurd, but it is the most inhuman, intolerable and painful negation of the very cultural and work evolution humanity has gone through over so many years, mostly through very painful experiences and horrible tragedies and crises.

A return to the old ways, therefore, is nothing more than an attempt to reject all the efforts we have put in and the toils we have gone through to get to where we are now. A return to the old ways is equivalent to negating the majority from enjoying the fruits of this new meaning of work. A return to the old ways is forcefully obligating everyone to engage, once more, in a mere transactional exchange of time and labor for money, in the office as a marketplace. And that must be unacceptable to all of us, including those who would seemingly and only in the short-term benefit the most from seeing us return to the old ways.

We should not let anyone force us back to that. We should not let them get away with trying to make work inhuman again.

We have the most extraordinary opportunity in history to bring our organizations, institutions, leadership and management styles, up to date with the new meaning of work and what humans want out of work, instead of forcing those humans to go back to the old and obsolete ways of doing things and the transactional definition of work.

Now is the time to crank up our creativity and invigorate deep conversations at all levels (in our communities, workplaces and political institutions) that lead us in the same direction in which our cultural evolution and unrelenting positive transformations are already heading toward. The opposite is simply too intolerable to even contemplate.

But, sadly, there are many in the “return to the old ways” camp.

Are you in that camp? Then you are on the wrong side of history. You are just trying to stop the unstoppable. By forcing a return to the old ways you are not gaining anything of long-term significant value, but you are already losing everything (including your reputation). However, if you choose to continue on that path, then do so at your own peril and assume the consequences of your intellectual blindness, your dogmatic stubbornness and your closed minded outlook of the world.

Don’t you dare to say that people are lazy, entitled or that they don’t want to work. The problem isn’t them. It is you, and more specifically, it is your inability to accept that the world is different, that work has radically changed (even in comparison to what we accepted as “normal” as recently as before the pandemic) and that people don’t want to give you their time and their labor (and, with them, their talents) solely on the basis of an exchange for money. Everyone wants more. People want to work to succeed, to learn, to grow, to progress, to realize their passions and purpose, to unleash their potential, and to excel at their craft. Providing a work experience that allows them to do so is not only good for them, but good for you too.

By forcing a return to the old ways you are missing out on the greatest opportunity that we (including you) ever had to create a work experience that leads to the most successful transformation of work in history and, with it, a significant improvement of the human experience and condition, and the outcomes of work. If you are in this camp, you are on time to abandon it and move on, or you will lose. The journey of human improvement and evolution is unstoppable, even when obstacles and adversities block the path, including your attempts to derail progress.

On the other hand, if you are in the camp of those who see work as empowering and elevating as I described here, then we must accelerate the speed and traverse this journey of transformation faster and together. We must speak out and up against those who are encroached in the old ways, trying to drag everyone back to where they are. And we must continue to listen to the people and experiment with ideas, practices, leadership and management styles that successfully respond to what we are listening to. That road, though not free of obstacles and disillusions, will certainly lead us in the right direction.?