Editorial
Futurist Alvin Toffler predicted a future of work where telecommuting and the “electronic cottage” made the home the place for work, education, social contact and commerce in his 1980 book, “The Third Wave.”
A few years later, reptile-based clothing enthusiast Steve Jobs predicted that computers would extend beyond the office into homes, connecting us via some yet-to-exist mystery network of webs, world-wide.
These prescient predictions were very much on the money. Digital workplace technology has allowed for knowledge workers to work from anywhere, pretty much anytime. Even my “Usborne Book of the Future” that I read as a wide-eyed seven-year-old, predicted the rise of artificial intelligence, though its predictions of nuclear-powered hearts proved rather wide of the mark.
It’s fascinating to see how (mostly) accurate the computing predictions from the 1970s and '80s were. However, the people-side of work has not quite turned out as anticipated. For example, we really got things wrong anticipating the impact of the humble bug. It wasn’t the Y2K bug that disrupted work as we know it, but another predicted bug that went largely ignored — a novel coronavirus.
Covid-19, more than anything else, facilitated the rise of the electronic cottages, a flexible utopia that arose from the darkness of lockdowns. In an incredibly chaotic and unpredictable environment, we came together virtually. Our office relationships — through necessity — moved online giving us the resilience to maintain a level of productivity. Where the home really did become the economic powerhouse of knowledge economies. Or did it?
From Electronic Cottages to Return to Office?
Fast-forward a few years, and the electronic cottage should be thriving, as part of a flexible, dynamic world of work. Seamless working across time zones and regions. The technology has been in place now for some time to facilitate this, so welcome everyone to gig-worker, flexible-parent, pajama-wearing utopia.
Lately, however, the electronic cottage is now perceived as powering not the economies of today, but just the next load of washing (on work time). The smartest device is the doorbell to ensure we don’t miss that important delivery (again on work time). The expensive and rather extravagant-looking coffee machine still manages to make a brew that looks like it’s been made by Mr. Bean.
As we see the last of the technology giants to support remote work, Microsoft, now bringing people back to the office, it appears as if the electronic cottage era is over. The technology revolution may continue unabated — as my AI agent binges on the latest boxset leaving me more time to put the washing out — but the people revolution we got a brief glimpse of is now dialing back not just a few years, but a few decades. It seems that the office nine-to-five just won’t change.
The future of work, however, is a curious creature. Countering the return to office mandates, unions in Australia are questioning the impact of the office on the wellbeing of their members. And some governments are legislating to protect working from home arrangements.
This is the political theater of work, not the reality. If we ignore the headlines, working from home numbers are trending much the same as the last two years.
Work, simply, isn’t a one-size-fits-all activity. It requires different practices, skills and tools. The office, the home, they are tools; elements sometimes required to deliver work but not work itself. And these different tools have different purposes; the focused environment, the collaborative space, inspirational third-space surroundings or the conforming greys and beiges of meeting rooms to remind you that work shouldn’t be fun, or creative, or interesting.
Collaboration Moves Online, Despite the Office’s Triumphant Return
This creates a new people-problem. Rather than everyone collaborating in the office, networking, enjoying the boss’s inappropriate jokes and being told to ‘man-up’ when we decline another drink, we are spending less time with our colleagues. Collaboration is occurring more and more online.
With the tendency to optimize the technology, we default to online meetings or a hybrid format, and without managers having the skills to facilitate these properly, these offer a very poor experience to remote attendees. The result is we spend much of the day virtually as meetings tend to occur on the screen. The pleasure of the commute without the inconvenience of having to see any of our colleagues face-to-face. Although we still need to label our food in the fridge, and hide our favorite mug from the office mug thief.
A Distraction Whilst We Face Automation-Fueled Extinction?
So where do we go next? Is the future of work really about political motives to control and cajole us? Or perhaps this is just a distraction to make us humans at least feel important enough to be included in this debate. Meanwhile, AI is busily getting on with the job, without complaints. It doesn’t make a fuss about its hot, energy-hungry data center workplace. It doesn’t worry about the lack of motivational posters on the walls, reminding it to “keep calm and hallucinate.” It just quietly replaces us. One use case at a time. Although the AI culture wars of 2035, where some AIs want quieter spaces for focused agentic actions and block out their calendars and can’t be contacted, will result in some productivity issues.
Automation and the replacement of humans has always been a fear when predicting the future of work. And whilst some roles become redundant, other roles surface. There’s no doubt AI will perform more and more tasks - and in a big shift from previous automation trends – take on specific roles. Albania, for example, has just appointed an AI cabinet minster to oversee procurement in response to corruption. This could be interesting; whilst AI won’t be able to accept the offer of Taylor Swift tickets, it can be influenced by past behaviors and biases.
Relationships With People, Not Technology, Will Matter
We’ve faced automation in the past, and it will inevitably continue to change how we work. The challenge to the future of work is not our relationship with technology, but our relationship with people.
In Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement fell two points last year, with managers particularly disengaged. This particularly matters, as a feeling of being disconnected from colleagues is the top reason cited for burnout at work. All of our predictions on the future of work focused on the technology, but lost sight of our people.
The fall-out from the pandemic, whether hybrid, remote or office-based, is that we are losing connections at work. Focusing on getting work done during lockdowns placed the emphasis on the team and collaboration in digital team spaces, such as Microsoft Teams. Changes in working behaviour, such as more virtual meetings and remote working means we’re less likely to bump into colleagues. And cross-collaboration tools like Viva Engage that are designed for broader pan-organization connections and networking aren’t filling the gap. In fact collaboration between colleagues on Viva Engage is trending downward.
All this makes opportunities to build and nurture second-degree connections harder than ever. Yet in a world of increasing complexity, it is a robust network of friends, support and knowledge that will help us. Mentoring, informal collaboration, being listened to, expertise — these conversations shape our decision-making; helping us to be more confident with AI and to deal with future disruptions in the workplace.
How Can We Design a Human-Centric Future of Work to Build Connections?
This year we at Designing Collaboration asked a number of organizations what they were doing to improve the hybrid employee experience, and identified a number of specific actions that made a difference:
- Training managers on skills to engage remote and hybrid employees.
- Making the office more than a place to sit at a workstation: providing mentoring days, hosting in-person community events and celebrations, having senior managers available to chat informally.
- Empowering teams to design how they want to work, building clear purpose around the role of the office and identifying in-person and virtual rituals.
- Using enterprise network tools for communities and informal collaboration, intentionally creating spaces and – most importantly - managing these.
- Running events specifically to facilitate making new connections
- Making time and space for informal communication.
AI can potentially help here. Tools like Microsoft Places integrating with Copilot is starting to change the focus from booking a desk to aligning with colleagues, and after recent conversations with Microsoft, the Places product strategy is moving towards building second degree employee connections.
Which brings us back to the future of work. The electronic cottage may not become the center of work, but it still plays a role. However, the focus needs to shift from the cottage to the community that knits everyone together. It’s the quick chat in the café when we pop out for a coffee, the school fete where we get to meet the parents we never knew existed, the argument with the neighbor over their leaf blower (well, maybe not that one). Just as in 1999, where in a time before social media and online meetings, we actually spent more time with our colleagues and friends. These interactions are what extend our life in the home cottage into the community, and we need to do the same with our electronic cottages.
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In fact, this situation was known way back in 1624, when John Donne remarked that “no man is an island." We all rely upon one another, and one person’s actions affect another. Surely, then, he must have been foreseeing the transition from largely agricultural work to 21st century work of back-to-back meetings and comments like, “you’re on mute, Janet.”
And in this sense, nothing has changed. We’re all part of a bigger system, and together, rather than alone, we can navigate and try to improve it. Except for figuring out how to get the camera to turn on.
Editor's Note: What will the future of work look like? Some other theories below:
- The Future of Work Can't Be a Return to the Past — The push to return to pre-pandemic norms is causing employee expectations and employer mandates to clash.
- The Future of Work Belongs to the Curious — In the AI era, credentials aren’t enough. The future of work belongs to curious leaders who question, adapt and innovate faster than change itself.
- What AI Can't Take: 5 Traits to Preserve Humanity in the Workplace — The future of work can’t just be about what AI can take from us. It should also be about what we refuse to yield to it.
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