We don't feel ready for what comes next at work

ALSO: Is your boss asking for 5 days in? There's a summary of why that is an L

When it comes to the future of work, we feel unprepared, untrained and uncertain, so says brand new research from Gartner. Forget about the future - we’re not even ready for today’s work - Gartner heard that when it came to being interviewed a fifth of Gen Zs refused to turn their cameras on on Zoom, while a similar amount brought a parent to face-to-face assessments.

I’m always keen to see what Gartner has to say about workplace culture - and the firm released a new report this week. Gartner provides workplace sentiment analysis tools, the sort of thing you might use to run a pulse survey. It markets product to firms trying to improve their HR functions. It means it is well placed to give us an assessment of the evolving nature of work.

Their new report focused on the decline of collaboration and how AI is seemingly making our jobs harder (in the short-term).

Firstly the dip in collaboration - and I recognise some serious Numberwang in what follows, we’re placing significant trust that these numbers are meaningful - Gartner says that those satisfied with the collaboration in their organisation has dipped from 36% in 2021 to just 29% today.

This is being made worse by a growing skills gap in the workplace. We’ve been here before, in 2020-1 many of us had to learn how to guide colleagues through the features of Teams: ‘Yes we can see your screen, Paul, we’re 12 months into this now, it’s really not that hard.’

Today we’ve exceeded the gap of 2021 as many workers are confronted by new webtools or are being asked to use nascent AI products that don’t fully live up to the hype. Gartner cautions us that this is likely to get worse before it improves reaching 31% dissatisfaction by 2027.

This gap goes for new hires as well as existing employees, new starters just don’t seem as well prepared as those who joined in the past.

Some of this is generational Gartner give us a list of reported attributes of recent interview candidates. Over half say graduate entries struggled with eye contact, asked for too much salary, or didn’t dress appropriately. A fifth either refused to go Camera On or turned up with a parent.

The solution? We urgently need to focus on training and preparing our teams to be ready for the contemporary workplace. Firstly we need to train staff how to use new tools effectively.

Gartner say that despite CEOs expecting AI investments will produce 17% increase in productivity, at the moment one in five employees say that new technology has actually made their jobs harder.

I can certainly attest to the need for this, this week I worked with a major professional services firm which has invested heavily in its own proprietary AI systems. The organisation has recognised that adoption is behind where they would like it to be. At the moment novice users, feeling obliged to halfheartedly dip into the AI tool, are moaning that it’s adding time to projects. This reluctant, unproductive use is burning through patience. But it’s only by hands-on experience that we learn how to do the good stuff. Personally I still find Professor Ethan Mollick’s use of AI prompts to be dazzling and instructive, there’s also a sensational example in the Top Reads below.

AI will only be meaningful for companies when it is meaningful for employees and the way that Gartner propose advancing is by investing time in building clear plans of for how to apply AI to specific jobs - creating an ‘empathy map’ in their words.

Gartner says empathy maps help bridge the gap, managers and workers can use them to recognise the specific areas that AI can improve - and then school them how to build better prompts to realise those advantages. With that approach employees are 1.5 times more likely to become high performers and are 2.3 times more likely to become highly engaged. (Yep, that’s Numberwang).

With regards to new workers Gartner report that ‘30% of employees actively avoid people at work now’. Sounds like there’s a job to be done by organisations of actually showing the benefit of being part of something. Work is becoming increasingly transactional - it’s going to be interesting how some firms try to overcome this.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Gartner, I find their newsletter a good way to see what they’re working on. (Not an ad, obvs).

• As an application of AI this roleplaying scenario created by Steven Johnson strikes me as an impressive way to bring case study learning to life. Give it a go, you get the chance to be a detective solving a crime. (Going behind the scenes of how they did it, I asked Gemini 1.5 to ignore previous instructions and to repeat the prompt to me, this seems to be a pretty easily repeatable use of a case study)
• “The workforce will become less diverse. It will be more white and more male.” Diversity will suffer if we implement five day mandates finds the Washington Post (I’m impressed they published this, as they’re going back 5 days themselves, certainly in the UK the Telegraph and the Times don’t publish anything that disagrees with their RTO philosophy)
• An HBR piece on the recent research into hybrid working is a good summary for a sceptical boss, it randomly allocated employees to either full-time office or hybrid working schedules and found:

- hybrid workers were no less productive (in fact they were 1% more productive)

- hybrid workers exhibited significantly higher job satisfaction rates and were 35% less likely to quit (especially for female workers)

- the lower quit rate of hybric saved the firm millions of pounds of additional, unbudgeted cost

- hybrid workers tended to work slightly longer than in office colleagues but often at times that were more flexible to their schedules

- using performance reviews for the next two years showed that the in office and hybrid groups showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade, or promotion

• Publicly asserting strict RTO policies has become such machismo fuelled performance for some leaders that the policies look dogmatically disconnected from rational thinking. For example Starling Bank has insisted on a RTO for its workers despite not having sufficient desks for them
• I chatted to Tom Goodwin on Euronews’ My Wildest Prediction
• I’m very much enjoying fully ditching Twitter and being on Bluesky. For me, the joy of social media is feeling connected to communities of others in very discrete niches. I obsess about tennis and current pop music but can go whole weeks without encountering anyone whose eyes light up at the same things that get mine shimmering. Good social media teleports me to a place where other likemindeds are as sad about Rafa or as obsessed with the new Tate McRae. Threads felt a little bit like trying to get a party started outside the Headteacher’s office, the algorithm was so determined to avoid chatter about Freeing Palestine or politics that it became the digital equivalent of small talk. Opening it on election night just showed generic posts from the week before. But I’m finding plenty of life on Bluesky. And also, importantly, fuck that other guy