What do people do all day?

In 1968, Richard Scarry published the seminal text, “What Do People Do All Day?”.?A popular read in the Ellis household for numerous generations.?I fear the work has been discredited somewhat because of its unsympathetic portrayal of different cultures and a very 1968 level of gender stereotyping.?Although, as every character in the book is depicted as a different type of animal, I may be wrong on this.?

I have no desire to set off a culture war with a racoon.?But it is fascinating to ask whether “What People Do All Day” still reflects what people, well, do all day??

“Some workers work indoors and some work outdoors.?Some work up in the sky and some work underground.?Some workers always do their work at the same place.?Others travel from place to place to do their jobs… What do YOU do??Are you a good helper?”

Being a good helper is much underrated as a workplace attribute, obsessed as we are with 9 box models, bell curves of performance distribution and feedback loops.?But parking that to one side, what has really changed?

At first glance it looks business as usual

Richard Scarry has a book focussed on jobs we would all recognise.?Dentist, doctor, dressmaker, farmer, grocer, police officer, fireman (first women firefighter in 1976…), train driver, cook. And so on.?We should recognise this for what it is – the foundation of work today, looks very similar to what people would have understood 55 years ago.?There’s no tech, of course.?But outside of that, do jobs look that different?

Look a little closer…

Not really.?The fundamental construct is the same.?Which rather makes me wonder what we have all been banging on about as we have been debating both huge and constant change in the workplace.?

But there is always something to learn from a 55-year-old description of work.?I have grouped my learnings into 4 themes:

Macro events change jobs

For example, the four-page spread on “Digging coal to make electricity work for us” is an interesting read.?Particularly as we are told how “coal is burned to heat water, to create steam, which in turn forces a turbine to move – just as the wind moves a windmill”.?There exists a blueprint for green energy somewhere in this sentence.?Slightly less forgivable is the sentence in the section on Wood, "This tree is almost 100 years old and is ready to be cut down...".

In essence, work is impacted by outside-in events.?In this case, the environment we live in.?Or a pandemic, or a war, or access to cheaper labour elsewhere in the world.?Work is not a “thing” in its own right – it is a response to a “thing”.?And now, for example, the people who used to get paid for landing four-page spreads on the wonders of fossil fuels, are doing the exact same job, but trying to avoid such a four-page spread being published.

It’s not what we do, it’s how we do it

My reading tells me that the biggest changes we have seen relate not to the concept of work itself, but the methods deployed in getting it done.?

Who does what, how they are employed, where they do it, the conditions they work under, what aspects are outsourced, offshored or nearshored, the level of automation.?And so on.?However which way we look at it, much of the work done in the world today looks pretty similar to how it was done 55 years ago – but who is doing it (and how) looks very different indeed.

In fact, even our relative newcomer tech businesses have their roots in some traditional industries.?Uber is a cab company.?Our social media enterprises sell advertising space next to what they publish.?We would normally call them “publishers”.?Amazon is a shop.?

I can remember advising companies during the dot.com boom of the late nineties.?Back then we thought these were new businesses – with new products.?It soon became clear that the products were the same as that which went before.?It was the route to market that was new.?Still valuable – but not that different after all (hence the 740% fall in the Nasdaq, as we all worked that out at the same time).?Selling door to door, becomes that bit more efficient when you can get beyond everyone’s door and into their living room, everywhere in the world, at the same time.

What people want

Interestingly, in the developed world, the biggest changes we have seen more recently have been driven by workers wanting different things.?

At one level, there are whole swathes of jobs that people have expressed they no longer wish to do.?Or organisations that people no longer wish to work for.?Or ways of working that people no longer subscribe to.?Whether it is a desire for flexibility, self-determination or down-time. ?Or the simple fact that people have a choice, better understanding of what else is out there and instant access to a whole world of stuff that isn’t work.?

It’s not all progress since 1968

There is an interesting section on water – “water is used for many things.?It gets dirty and must be made clean again at the sewage plant before it is put into the sea”.?We could learn something from this today, clearly.

In fact, it tells me that the final piece of our jigsaw relates to the impact of the state on working practices and work more generally.?Whatever movement we may have seen from purpose driven employers, the fact is that employee welfare remains largely a product of state intervention.?Be it TUPE (the EU loved an acronym), the national minimum wage, gender pay gap reporting, or the prohibition of sending children up chimneys to clean them.?These are not changes in the world of work.?They are changes in the attitude of the state to intervention.?

Confusingly, when we ask the question, “what do people do all day?”, the answer therefore is:

• Much the same as they did 55 years ago;
• Unless an “outside-in” influence has changed it;
• Impacted by an ever-evolving appetite from employers to shift “who does what” and on “what terms” in a cycle of (hoped for) continuous improvement; and
• Subject to the watchful eye of the state standing ready to regulate (or not) against poor outcomes from time to time.

I’m not sure what an equivalent book, written today, would say??The funny version would be about us all being social media influencers.?But maybe the honest version would describe us as dentists, doctors, dressmakers, farmers, grocers, police officers , firefighters, train drivers, cooks and social media influencers.??