workplace of the future essay

The Future of Work - How Work Will Look Like by 2030

A helping hand: Technology will make the future of work better in the optimistic scenarios Image:  REUTERS/Hannah McKay

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Stay up to date:, future of work.

Will technology kill jobs and exacerbate inequality, or usher in a utopia of more meaningful work and healthier societies? What will the future of work be like in 10 years from now?

While it is impossible to know what tomorrow holds, research by global professional services company PwC explores four possible futures – or “worlds” – driven by the “mega trends” of technological breakthroughs, rapid urbanization, ageing populations, shifting global economic power, resource scarcity and climate change.

4 Different Scenarios for the Future of Work

We discuss different scenarios that will shape up the future of work in the coming decade.

The Red World – innovation rules

The world becomes a perfect incubator for innovation in one PwC scenario. Digital platforms enable those with winning ideas and specialist, niche profit-makers, to flourish.

However, PwC warns, the risks are high if innovation outpaces regulation. “Today's winning business could be tomorrow's court case.”

Projects will develop at a fast pace and specialists will only stay with them as long as they, or the business, last. There will be few in-house human resources teams, with outsourcers or automation providing the human services needed.

The future of work may see little regulation from companies that prevent them from doing what they like, while workers will enjoy fewer benefits like health insurance, pensions and long-term employment.

The Blue World – corporate is king

Corporations grow so big and influential that some become more powerful and larger than national economies.

In a frightening vision, almost worthy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , PwC predicts: “Human effort [will be] maximized through ... physical and medical enhancement techniques and technology and, along with automation, analytics and innovation, push performance in the workplace to its limits.”

While rewards for some will be high, the price will be people’s data, which will “predict performance and anticipate people risk [predict behaviour that may damage a business financially or reputationally]”.

In both the future of work scenarios i.e. the Blue world and Red World, people who have strong skills – and update them – will be in demand, those who do not will be discarded.

The Green World – companies care

“This is a world where corporate responsibility isn't just a nice-to-have, but it's a business imperative,” PwC says.

A strong social ethos places a heavy emphasis on diversity, human rights and the non-financial impacts of business on the planet and people’s lives.

Competition for talent in this future of work scenario is intense and financial rewards are still important, while incentive packages include “three weeks’ paid leave a year to work on charity and social projects”.

However, workers are expected to reflect their employers’ values at work and at home and travel is tightly controlled.

“In this world,” the writers say, “automation and technology are essential elements to protect scarce resources and minimize environmental damage … But ... technology is a double-edged sword: it allows organizations to meet their ethical and environmental agenda, but at what cost to humans?”

The Yellow World – humans come first

In the fourth scenario of the future of work, financial technology enables more crowd-funded capital to reach ethically “blameless” brands, while workers and companies seek greater meaning and relevance in everyday life.

Artisanal skills return, as do workers’ guilds, which protect members’ rights and train new craftspeople: “It's a world where humanness is highly valued,” says PwC.

Non-financial rewards are given in a trade-off for less money, work is often a fluid concept and the standard 9-to-5 working week is rare, while the divisions between home and work blur.

However, while the automation of tasks that are dull, damaging or impossible for humans continues, the writers say: “Conflicts remain around the use of technology, as people are less likely to take the downsides of automation without a fight.

“As more people are impacted by technical advances and see their skills become obsolete, disaffection and the push-back against policies that favour the elite grow.”

Which way to the future of work?

All of the four possible futures of work in PwC’s report share the common theme of increasing use of technology to assist, augment and replace human work.

Some foresee the dominance of global corporations, others predict the growth of smaller, more individual endeavours. All, however, depend on digital technology to link talent pools and customers, and create financially beneficial relationships, whether these are between individuals and corporations, or groups of people.

“By replacing workers doing routine, methodical tasks, machines can amplify the comparative advantage of those workers with problem-solving, leadership, emotional intelligence, empathy and creativity skills,” PwC says.

“Those workers performing tasks which automation can’t yet crack become more pivotal – and this means creativity, innovation, imagination and design skills will be prioritized by employers.”

Changing lanes

Any of these futures of work – or a combination of them – are possible, but how we reach 2030, and who will benefit, needs careful planning and consideration.

In the film Escape from the Planet of the Apes, a scientist compares reaching the future to a driver changing lanes: “A driver in lane ‘A’ may crash while a driver in lane ‘B’ survives. It follows that a driver, by changing lanes can change his future.”

Working out which lane will lead to a less fractured world is one of the greatest challenges facing policy makers and corporate leaders today.

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• futureofwork

The Office of the Future Is Greener, More Social, and Might Even Include Childcare

B efore the pandemic struck, Lucy Jefferson spent nearly £50 ($57) a day commuting from London, where she had moved in 2019, to Birmingham, England where she worked as a product manager at a large U.K. bank. Although it was Jefferson’s choice to relocate 125 miles away, she believed that the 5 a.m. starts and two-and-a-half journey weren’t necessary for her to do her job well. She says the workplace culture encouraged employees to always “look busy” in the office. ”Classic corporate culture.”

When a U.K.-wide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 forced her employer’s staff to work remotely, Jefferson was able to save time and money working from home. But, frustrated by her employer’s reluctance to guarantee the flexible work model would continue, Jefferson handed in her notice in November 2020. Fast forward nearly two years, she works full time running her own e-commerce brand, Bare Kind, and all of her six employees work remotely. “I haven’t looked back, it’s been amazing,” she says, citing benefits to her mental health—and her bank balance.

Jefferson says her former colleagues tell her it’s now much more common to work from home and as a result, the Birmingham office has lost its former buzz, with some floors no longer in use. This shift in office culture is in no way unique—offices in major U.S. cities are less than half as busy as they used to be, according to data from security provider Kastle Systems. The pandemic forced many companies to shift online, and some employees realized they preferred it. In the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K, 18% of workers aren’t going into the office at all, according to a survey published in July by Future Forum, while patterns of hybrid working have become the norm for nearly half of the workforce.

Meanwhile, business leaders have been twisting themselves in knots over the return of in-person work, which some argue promotes more productivity and collaboration. At times this has created tensions .

Read More: Dropbox Tossed Out the Workplace Rulebook. Here’s How That’s Working

The clash in priorities between employers and workers has come amid record resignations across the workforce around the world. In the U.S., around 4 million workers have been quitting their jobs every month since April 2021, with many citing workplace inflexibility as a key factor. But being in the office could make a difference to their careers. In response to a survey published last month by workplace platform Envoy, 96% of U.S. executives said they were more likely to notice the contribution of employees in the office.

The conundrum for businesses has been getting workers to come back. Some industry leaders are viewing the pandemic disruption and shifting labor market as an opportunity to reconfigure workspaces in a way that prioritizes flexibility, wellbeing, and sustainability—and actually entices employees to travel in. The office may never dominate the world of white-collar work in the way it did pre-pandemic, but innovative designers and bosses are hoping it will add greater value to both their businesses and employees’ lives.

Making workplaces “commute-worthy”

While the new ways of working during the pandemic came as a shock to many businesses, global music streaming platform, Spotify, was well ahead of the curve. Just a month before the U.K. first went into lockdown in March 2020, Spotify unveiled its new London headquarters that would house hundreds of freshly hired employees and one of the company’s largest R&D hubs. Gone were the sea of desks typical of traditional office spaces. Instead, large booths, plush lounge spaces, production studios, and dedicated “listening rooms” gave the space, a “social club” feel, says Sonya Simmonds, Spotify’s global head of workspace design. Although employees initially couldn’t benefit from the new space—situated inside the Grade II listed Art Deco Adelphi Building in the heart of London—during the early months of the pandemic, the building was primed to cater to the blend of remote and in-person work on their return.

“We all felt disappointed not to use the new office and share the new spaces [during lockdown], particularly the stage and listening rooms with artists,” says Simmonds. As workers returned to the offices, it was set up to better suit their needs. Spaces dedicated to wellness provided a welcome getaway for workers dealing with the stresses of the pandemic, Simmonds says. “When we were allowed to return we really appreciated the wellbeing rooms.”

The idea behind the space was “very much based on where we wanted to go in the future,” Simmonds says. In February 2021, Spotify announced a work from anywhere policy, a transition that she says was accelerated, not triggered, by the pandemic. Yet, the company found that staff were still choosing to travel to the London office—the huge variety of spaces within the building offered even greater flexibility than employees’ own homes. In a post-pandemic era, workplaces must be “commute-worthy” for remote workers, says Shane Kelly, principal director at London-based architecture firm TP Bennett, which designed Spotify’s London office. “It’s about creating buildings that offer really collaborative experiences, focused on community and amenity, that you don’t get when you’re engaging remotely,” he says. Following the success of the London HQ, Spotify rolled out the design concept across its global locations.

Read More: How to Ask Your Employer if You Can Work Remotely Permanently

Swiss furniture brand Vitra took the concept of work flexibility one step further, when in spring 2021 it filled its headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland with customizable fittings that allow for multiple office configurations. The company’s new range, dubbed “Club Office,” includes modular sofa systems, flexible partitions, and foldable desks that fit together like a puzzle, allowing teams to tailor the work set-up to a variety of needs, moods, and even locations. By letting employees use their own office as a “laboratory” for new design concepts, Club Office fostered flexibility within Vitra’s workforce, says the company’s chief executive, Nora Fehlbaum. “Environments shape our thoughts and feelings,” says Fehlbaum. “This environment signals to stay on your toes, be ready to move.”

Fehlbaum hopes that Vitra’s products will make all workers feel connected to their office environments, even as their companies downsize or shift to co-working spaces. “The Club is the physical environment where a common mission and sense of belonging comes to life,” she says.

Blending the office with the home

Months of isolation during lockdowns around the world made workers appreciate the feeling of belonging to a team and connecting with colleagues—even when working remotely or from their homes. According to recent findings from the WFH research project , a monthly survey run jointly by the University of Chicago, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, the average professional spends more than 40% of their working day interacting with others. With this in mind, Edouard Bettencourt and Malik Lemseffer, founders of French-Moroccan architecture firm Studio BELEM, have focused on designing a space where workers could connect and interact with others within the comfort of their own homes. Their aula modula apartment block design—a Tetris-like system of cube-shaped units with sliding wall panels—incorporates the collaborative elements of an office environment in a residential setting. While the block hasn’t been built yet, the firm says it is in talks with various developers.

With each block arranged around a sunny inner courtyard, the idea is that inhabitants would be encouraged to develop a sense of neighborly community, even while they work from home. “If you work remotely and just stay in your own flat or office all day, you’re going to go crazy not seeing anyone,” says Lemseffer. Creative shared spaces in the building, including shared terraces, co-working rooms, and roof tops, allow residents to network, brainstorm, and celebrate professional milestones—”all the things that can be a little bit harder to do remotely,” he says. At the same time, the architects were keen to contain the intimate living spaces and office units in different rings of the building, to allow residents to switch off from their work as they cross the physical boundary.

The blurring of the home and work environment precipitated by the pandemic forced many businesses to accommodate the unique personal circumstances of each employee. One such accommodation was caregiving responsibilities, as workers had to juggle educating their children while schools were shut or caring for elderly or sick relatives. Research published in June by the Society for Human Research Management found that, even as the pandemic subsides, workers place increasing value on jobs that offer the flexibility to care for family members.

Read More: The Dream of an ‘Internet Country’ That Would Let You Work From Anywhere

Entrepreneur Keltse Bilbao recognized this need before the pandemic when, after relocating to Los Angeles with her husband, she struggled to find a space where she could work on her own projects while being close to her daughter. In 2018, she founded Big and Tiny, a daycare service that provides on-site co-working spaces for parents—one of the first to do so in the U.S. “As a parent, what I wanted was the option to choose,” Bilbao says. “I could spend all day working, or I could have a break and be close to my child.” Big and Tiny has three studios in the U.S.—two in Santa Monica and one in Battery Park, New York City. They combine soundproof study rooms and phone booths, but also common spaces for working parents to socialize and relax.

While the business took a financial hit due to the pandemic—forcing it to shutter a center in Silver Lake, Los Angeles—the shift to remote working meant that more parents needed the service when lockdown restrictions were lifted. The increased demand for family-friendly work spaces led to partnerships with co-working office provider Second Home and mall and office complex Brookfield Place in New York City, with Big and Tiny providing on-site childcare. “These companies were having issues getting their customers back,” says Bilbao, adding that employers partnering with Big and Tiny to offer these workspaces to employees have been able to “differentiate themselves” from rivals whose offices didn’t cater to the demands of modern life.

Sustainability and wellbeing

Months of mask mandates, social distancing and enhanced hygiene practices shifted many people’s understanding of what makes a healthy environment. As poorly ventilated office buildings became potential public health hazards, citizens found respite in outdoor spaces. Simultaneously, the pandemic appears to have heightened public awareness of the climate crisis, according to a survey by Boston Consulting Group, as the effect of human behavior on the natural world, and the risks to humankind, have become more apparent. This shift inspired a new wave of office design that prioritized the wellbeing of both employees and the external environment.

Read More: In Some Workplaces, It’s Now OK Not to Be OK

Turkish architecture practice Salon Alper Derinboğaz made the learnings from the pandemic central to the design of Ecotone, an innovation center at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul. When construction is completed in late 2023, the transitional space between teaching facilities and a professional academy will be “pandemic resistant,” says the architecture firm’s founder, Alper Derinboğaz, referring to the building’s partially open air design. Istanbul’s mild Mediterranean climate has allowed Derinboğaz to permeate a series of open co-working spaces with outdoor walkways, creating the kind of passive natural ventilation system that the World Health Organization says reduces the transmission risk of airborne viruses. Ecotone’s geothermal heating and cooling system is low emission, while the self-supporting structure—featuring columns resembling stalagmites and stalactites in caves—removes the need to lay intrusive foundations in the land. Fluid, glass-paneled walls and interior foliage allows for greater connection between workers inside the building and nature.

Developing innovative approaches to reducing the office building’s carbon footprint was a priority for Derinboğaz, who notes that the construction industry produces nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. “As architects we really need to find a new way of doing things,” he says. “That’s why we wanted the university’s innovation center to be innovative in its design.”

When it came to choosing architects for an addition to its Geneva campus , the United Nations (U.N.) says it chose London-based firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Swiss studio Burckhardt+Partner. The architects took an innovative approach designing the 250,000 square foot office space. Completed in November 2021, the building was constructed on the historic Palais des Nations complex of buildings overlooking Lake Geneva, the U.N.’s second largest site after its New York headquarters. Water from the lake is used and recycled to heat and cool the building, eliminating the need for air conditioning units that are expensive to run and harmful to the environment .

According to Kent Jackson, SOM’s lead designer on the project, which the firm said was for a “non-profit humanitarian organization in Geneva,” the impressive surroundings gave the architects a unique opportunity to enhance the building’s design. “We wanted to give every employee [working in the office] a 360 degree view around the natural setting,” he says—floor-to-ceiling windows stand in place of walls. “Who couldn’t be inspired in their work looking at the hillsides, parkland, water, and mountains?”

For many of the companies pursuing new approaches to workspaces, that is the ultimate goal: creating a space to inspire and motivate employees to produce their most innovative work. In an age of increasing flexibility and less emphasis on geographical location, the office space must benefit its inhabitants as much as it does the business. “It’s about going through the whole journey of the build and design process together,” says Spotify’s Simmonds. “Coming out the other end, our staff feel they really have ownership over their office.”

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The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less

By Jonathan Malesic Sept. 23, 2021

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Mr. Malesic is a writer and a former academic, sushi chef and parking lot attendant who holds a Ph.D. in religious studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book “ The End of Burnout ,” from which this essay is adapted.

A dozen years ago, my friend Patricia Nordeen was an ambitious academic, teaching at the University of Chicago and speaking at conferences across the country. “Being a political theorist was my entire adult identity,” she told me recently. Her work determined where she lived and who her friends were. She loved it. Her life, from classes to research to hours spent in campus cafes, felt like one long, fascinating conversation about human nature and government.

But then she started getting very sick. She needed spinal fusion surgeries. She had daily migraines. It became impossible to continue her career. She went on disability and moved in with relatives. For three years she had frequent bouts of paralysis. She was eventually diagnosed with a subtype of Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, a group of hereditary disorders that weaken collagen, a component of many sorts of tissue.

“I’ve had to evaluate my core values,” she said, and find a new identity and community without the work she loved. Chronic pain made it hard to write, sometimes even to read. She started drawing, painting and making collages, posting the art on Instagram. She made friends there and began collaborations with them, like a 100-day series of sketchbook pages — abstract watercolors, collages, flower studies — she exchanged with another artist. A project like this allows her to exercise her curiosity. It also “gives me a sense of validation, like I’m part of society,” she said.

Art does not give Patricia the total satisfaction academia did. It doesn’t order her whole life. But for that reason, I see in it an important effort, one every one of us will have to make sooner or later: an effort to prove, to herself and others, that we exist to do more than just work.

We need that truth now, when millions are returning to in-person work after nearly two years of mass unemployment and working from home. The conventional approach to work — from the sanctity of the 40-hour week to the ideal of upward mobility — led us to widespread dissatisfaction and seemingly ubiquitous burnout even before the pandemic. Now, the moral structure of work is up for grabs. And with labor-friendly economic conditions, workers have little to lose by making creative demands on employers. We now have space to reimagine how work fits into a good life.

As it is, work sits at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing. It’s much more than how we earn a living. It’s how we earn dignity: the right to count in society and enjoy its benefits. It’s how we prove our moral character. And it’s where we seek meaning and purpose, which many of us interpret in spiritual terms.

Political, religious and business leaders have promoted this vision for centuries, from Capt. John Smith’s decree that slackers would be banished from the Jamestown settlement to Silicon Valley gurus’ touting work as a transcendent activity . Work is our highest good; “do your job,” our supreme moral mandate.

But work often doesn’t live up to these ideals. In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.

This view is simple yet radical. It justifies a universal basic income and rights to housing and health care. It justifies a living wage. It also allows us to see not just unemployment but retirement, disability and caregiving as normal, legitimate ways to live.

When American politicians talk about the dignity of work, like when they argue that welfare recipients must be employed, they usually mean you count only if you work for pay.

The pandemic revealed just how false this notion is. Millions lost their jobs overnight. They didn’t lose their dignity. Congress acknowledged this fact, offering unprecedented jobless benefits: for some, a living wage without having to work.

The idea that all people have dignity before they ever work, or if they never do, has been central to Catholic social teaching for at least 130 years. In that time, popes have argued that jobs ought to fit the capacities of the people who hold them, not the productivity metrics of their employers. Writing in 1891, Pope Leo XIII argued that working conditions, including hours, should be adapted to “the health and strength of the workman.”

Leo mentioned miners as deserving “shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health.” Today, we might say the same about nurses, or any worker whose ordinary limitations — whether a bad back or a mental health condition — makes an intense eight-hour shift too much to bear. Patricia Nordeen would like to teach again one day, but given her health at the moment, full-time work seems out of the question.

Because each of us is both dignified and fragile, our new vision should prioritize compassion for workers, in light of work’s power to deform their bodies, minds and souls. As Eyal Press argues in his new book, “ Dirty Work ,” people who work in prisons, slaughterhouses and oil fields often suffer moral injury, including post-traumatic stress disorder, on the job. This reality challenges the notion that all work builds character.

Wage labor can harm us in subtle and insidious ways, too. The American ideal of a good life earned through work is “disciplinary,” according to the Marxist feminist political philosopher Kathi Weeks, a professor at Duke and often-cited critic of the modern work ethic. “It constructs docile subjects,” she wrote in her 2011 book, “ The Problem With Work .” Day to day, that means we feel pressure to become the people our bosses, colleagues, clients and customers want us to be. When that pressure conflicts with our human needs and well-being, we can fall into burnout and despair.

To limit work’s negative moral effects on people, we should set harder limits on working hours. Dr. Weeks calls for a six-hour work day with no pay reduction. And we who demand labor from others ought to expect a bit less of people whose jobs grind them down.

In recent years, the public has become more aware of conditions in warehouses and the gig economy. Yet we have relied on inventory pickers and delivery drivers ever more during the pandemic. Maybe compassion can lead us to realize we don’t need instant delivery of everything and that workers bear the often-invisible cost of our cheap meat and oil.

The vision of less work must also encompass more leisure. For a time the pandemic took away countless activities, from dinner parties and concerts to in-person civic meetings and religious worship. Once they can be enjoyed safely, we ought to reclaim them as what life is primarily about, where we are fully ourselves and aspire to transcendence.

Leisure is what we do for its own sake. It serves no higher end. Patricia said that making art is often “meditative” for her. “If I’m trying to draw a plant, I’m really looking at the plant,” she said. “I’m noticing all the different shades of color that maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t drawing it.” Her absorption in the task — the feel of the pen on paper — “puts the pain out of focus.”

It’s true that people often find their jobs meaningful, as Patricia did in her academic career or as I did while working on this essay. But for decades, business leaders have taken this obvious truth too far, preaching that we’ll find the purpose of our lives at work. It’s a convenient narrative for employers, but look at what we actually do all day: For too many of us, if we aren’t breaking our bodies, then we’re drowning in trivial email. This is not the purpose of a human life.

And for those of us fortunate enough to have jobs that consistently provide us with meaning, Patricia’s story is a reminder that we may not always have that kind of work. Anything from a sudden health issue to the natural effects of aging to changing economic conditions can leave us unemployed.

So we should look for purpose beyond our jobs and then fill work in around it. We each have limitless potential, a unique “genius,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. He believed that excessive toil had stunted the spiritual growth of the men who laid the railroad near Walden Pond, where he lived from 1845 to 1847. He saw the pride they took in their work but wrote, “I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.”

Pursuing our genius, whether in art or conversation or sparring at a jiujitsu gym, will awaken us to “a higher life than we fell asleep from,” Thoreau wrote. It isn’t the sort of leisure, like culinary tourism, that heaps more labor on others. It is leisure that allows us to escape the normal passage of time without traveling a mile. The mornings Thoreau spent standing in his cabin doorway, “rapt in a revery,” he wrote, “were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.” Compared with that, he thought, labor was time wasted.

Dignity, compassion, leisure: These are pillars of a more humane ethos, one that acknowledges that work is essential to a functioning society but often hinders individual workers’ flourishing. This ethos would certainly benefit Patricia Nordeen and might allow students to benefit from her teaching ability. In practice, this new vision should inspire us to implement universal basic income and a higher minimum wage, shorter shifts for many workers and a shorter workweek for all at full pay. Together, these pillars and policies would keep work in its place, as merely a support for people to spend their time nurturing their greatest talents — or simply being at ease with those they love.

It’s a vision we can approach from multiple directions, befitting America’s intellectual diversity. Pope Leo, Dr. Weeks and Thoreau criticized industrial society from the disparate, often incompatible traditions of Catholicism, Marxist feminism and Transcendentalism. But they agreed that we need to see inherent value in each person and to keep work in check so everyone can attain higher goods.

These thinkers are hardly alone. We might equally take inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s contention that Black Americans would gain political rights through intellectual cultivation and not only relentless labor, or Abraham Joshua Heschel’s view that the Sabbath day of rest “is not an interlude but the climax of living,” or the “ right not to work ” advocated by the disabled artist and writer Sunaura Taylor.

The point is to subordinate work to life. “A life is what each of us needs to get,” wrote Dr. Weeks, and you can’t get one without freedom from work’s domination. “That said,” she continues, “one cannot get something as big as a life on one’s own.”

That means we need one more pillar: solidarity, a recognition that your good and mine are linked. Each of us, when we interact with people doing their jobs, has the power to make their lives miserable. If I’m overworked, I’m likely to overburden you. But the reverse is also true: Your compassion can evoke mine.

Early in the pandemic, we exhibited the virtues we need to realize this vision. Public health compelled us to set limits on many people’s work and provide for those who lost their jobs. We showed — imperfectly — that we could make human well-being more important than productivity. We had solidarity with one another and with the doctors and nurses who battled the disease on the front lines. We limited our trips to the grocery store. We tried to “flatten the curve.”

When the pandemic subsides but work’s threat to our thriving does not, we can practice those virtues again.

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Crafting the Workplace Culture of Tomorrow

Future of Work

Crafting the workplace culture of tomorrow

With hybrid schedules rapidly changing workplace culture, what can leaders do to keep employees feeling connected and engaged?

It was the office holiday party, the 2pm chitchat by the coffee machine, the company retreat – these experiences were what built connections between professionals. And through connection came culture. Then the hybrid work schedule arrived, and people started asking: where did our connection go? What happened to our workplace culture?

These questions have real business consequences for the future of work. Our latest research on the future of work reveals that 52% of employees suggest the disconnect they feel with their employer could push them to leave their roles. However, if bringing people back to the office is your solution, think again. A separate study highlights that ​​64% of respondents said going back to the office will negatively impact their mental health. The only way forward, then, experts say, is to adapt to the culture change and rebuild connection. “Unless managers and organizations are intentional about doing that in hybrid work environments, there are going to be ongoing issues with creating full engagement and trust,” says Margie Warrell , Korn Ferry’s Senior Client Partner in its CEO succession and executive development practice.

Positive culture change might be uncomfortable — at first

There are indeed few things that can replace the in-person bonding dynamics that we evolved over millions of years. However, for those in hybrid models , there will still be a chance to form relationships – it’s simply that the chances will be fewer, meaning each opportunity will require intentionality. “The office is the new retreat. And when people come together, make sure that it’s meaningful and not just random,” says Warrell. The benefit of being present in the office, even occasionally, reveals itself in an environment’s increased psychological safety, which is one of the best predictors of high-performing teams. “At the core of that is shared vulnerability,” Warrell continues.

For those balking at coming into the office at all, Warrell suggests leaders have one-on-one conversations in which they share their own uncertainties while also giving employees a sense of control. “As a leader, I’d be saying, ‘I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to do this. And I invite you to help me in figuring this out.’” These conversations may, of course, elicit some pushback around the discomfort of having to commute once again to a physical location. But Warrell reminds that while we are psychologically wired for familiarity, certainty and comfort, it’s doing the uncomfortable that causes us to learn and expand into our best selves.

“It’s the role of the leader to help set the conditions for people to grow into their fullest potential. And growth and comfort can’t coexist.”

The future of work acknowledges our biology

Still, the question lingers: how can leaders create a semblance of rapport between employees for times when they’re not in the same physical space? “Being on video calls all day is a struggle because our brains are saying I can see you, I can hear you, but I can’t feel you,” says Andy Holmes , a Korn Ferry Associate Client Partner who takes a human-centric approach to sustainable high-performance. We are biologically conditioned to be empathetic and to feel each other, says Holmes, and doing so through a screen is very difficult.

Instead, Holmes advises workers to change their environment throughout the day and also try more ‘walk and talk’ calls to improve mental health. “We’ve done stress recovery diagnostics, where you can see a clinically significant drop in stress and active recovery when people do a 20-minute walk and talk on the phone using an earpiece.” Reducing the stress around interactions, Holmes asserts, is bound to make those connections more meaningful.

Experts say another way to build bridges among hybrid workers is by organizing drop-in online lunches, where team members have the option to log on during lunchtime to chat about non-work topics – this offers a much-needed space to share your humanity with colleagues, just as you would at the office cafeteria. A more bite-sized version of this would be setting up occasional one-on-one 15-minute morning coffee breaks and rotating who you casually start your day with.

When it comes to work-related video calls, Holmes suggests leaders should focus on keeping the number of participants as low as possible. He posits that 60-70% of meeting attendees are either overqualified or underqualified for the topic of discussion. “If you’re overqualified, you’re going to be bored. If you’re underqualified, you’re going to be anxious. It’s like watching a really bad TV program.” Trimming attendee numbers, he adds, not only benefits the people who don’t need to be there, but it also strengthens the bonds between those who do.

Our time to take control

The future of work in 2023

Embracing the Radically Human side of workplace culture

Workplace culture has been through countless iterations and innovations through the eras. What hasn’t changed from Henry Ford to today is what culture is: the sum of all our behaviors. And as Warrell posits, senior executives have a responsibility to model those behaviors appropriately if they expect to see them in their own workforce. “ The more leaders can show up fully human , the more they give space for others to show up.”

To learn more about how to build a dynamic workplace culture, download the future of work eBook and watch our webinar, “ Secrets to culture success: World's Most Admired Companies share their insights ”, to gain further insight into building a future-fit culture.

Key takeaways

• How to approach co-creating the culture your people need to thrive
• Why it's important to set the 'right' workplace conditions
• Tangible actions to build bridges between remote and hybrid workers

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Future of Work, Essay Example

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The Future of Work

People spend a third of their adult lives working, which has led to many of them looking for ways to reimagine work. Since people have to work to guarantee their survival and wealth, methods of making work more flexible and comfortable are being developed, a phenomenon regarded as the future of work. The future of work will involve working in places with equity and inclusion. Many businesses are changing to accommodate a stress-free working environment. Company leaders are starting to establish a culture of trust in their organizations, which will allow them to become more transparent, compassionate, and acquiring more vulnerable management styles. This essay discusses the characteristics that will define a flexible and comfortable workplace and how workers are being prepared to adapt to the future of work.

Artificial Intelligence

Many fields of work, such as health and development of leadership are continuously growing, which has led to the experts in these fields to seek wellness and professional advice from technical experts to help in their work. Artificial Intelligence has replaced many jobs, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted a decade ago, that by 2017, the 1.7 million trucking jobs will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence Systems (Wang 10).

Seeking Flexibility and Autonomous work

Self-employment, which started in the UK after there was a global crisis, was regarded as an alternative that people took because there was no employment. However, when jobs became available, and there was an improvement in the economy, self-employment rates also went up. People involuntarily became self-employed, because they wanted to work flexible, and any age and a pace where they did not require to be controlled. This is similar to the use of new digital platforms in the workplace. Many employers are seeking to improve their workplace by allowing people to work the way they want to work through the use of digital technology. However, this will also affect a certain amount of employees who will need to be terminated to give room for the digital platforms.

Distribution

In the 20 th and early 21 st century, most jobs involved people being in a physical location. However, in the modern world, there are tools and new approaches that have allowed work to be successfully executed with people distributed across many places, including continents apart. For instance, the company Automattic has 762 people from 68 countries, and they speak 81 different languages (Franck 442). The employees meet online because of the availability of transparency, which allows them to understand each other. Based on the development of teleworking and open-source software projects that have made distribution easier, many companies are seeking to do away with offices, allowing their workers to work from home offices or spaces where they can co-work. Employees will, therefore, become flexible and will save more money because of avoiding commuting costs. Through distribution, an organization can employ people with great talents, with the constraint of geographical location or language differences. An example of a company living in the future of work is the Linux Foundation, which has membership from more than 1000 companies all over the world. Linux Foundation meetings involve video conferencing and remote calendars. Team building is done daily, where workers communicate through emails, calls, forums, and other forms of technology.

Open employment

The future of work will not be traditionally-based, where people are hired in a company to work until they resign after getting new jobs. In the modern world, according to the 2016 Gallup Report, millennials like to job-hop from company to company, because they are always looking for new job opportunities in new companies (Hoffman 47). This has turned 57.3 million American youths into freelancers, which is 36% of the American workforce. This means that the percentage of youths to employ is decreasing, which has led companies to come up with new strategies for the future business market.

The future of work involves organizations being more fluid in their terms of employment. Many companies are hiring youth as part-time employees, independent contractors, advisors, and consultants. In the new work setting, there is a whole network of contract and part-time workers, working based on the needs of projects in an organization and coming to work based on their preferences. An example of a company that has already implemented this setting is the management consultancy company called SYPartners, which has both full and part-time employees, and the company has several freelancers. When the company has new projects, it hires people with expertise in the project in question, after which they are dismissed at the end of the project.

The appearance of Monopolistic Companies

The future of work will also involve people witnessing the emergence of big companies that will have better quality than the existing businesses, and the companies will appear to be operating in a monopolistic system. A large group of satisfied consumers then characterizes such companies. An example of a large company that has already dominated the market is Uber (Merkert 49). The main characteristic of these companies is to pop up in places where the traditional or the standard version of their work did not exist. For instance, taxis were rarely found in poor neighborhoods or areas where accommodation was not easily found. Uber, other than joining the car-ride business, has improved service quality and made traveling more flexible, rendering the traditional taxi business ineffective

Preparing the Workforce for the Future of Work

The future of work mostly involves the use of technology, whose adoption in organizations gives the workers a bleak future. Therefore, before preparing their workers for a shift from the standard work arrangement, organizations first convince their workers that technology will be a form of deliverance, helping them have a more productive, brighter future. Organizations convince their workers of the importance of the future of work to make them open towards what they will be taught about the changes in the Organization. Some of the ways that employees are prepared for the future of work are discussed below

Developing Leadership skills

The future of work will require workers to be aware of to be inspirers, regardless of whether they are leaders or not. In the future, these workers will be required to guide new workers in organizations. Many companies seek to develop leadership skills among the youth to prepare them for leadership positions at higher levels after the senior employees have retired.

The best approach in developing leadership skills is to allow employees to be leaders at any capacity, regardless of how minor it is. For example, they can be in charge of running company projects or welfare groups, where they help solve issues in the workplace. Practicing leadership skills will make them more confident, and eventually skilled enough to assume significant leadership roles.

Learning to use Technology

Embracing technology is in the future of work, which makes it compulsory for every worker to be well versed with technology. Employees at all levels are prepared to embrace technology by teaching them about communication, operations, and insight. The organization provides technological gadgets to employees, such as computers, where they are trained on how to send emails, make calls, and other common forms of technology within the company. Showing employees that technology is not a competition or their enemy will encourage them to learn, therefore making their work easier.

Create Continuous learning Opportunities

Evolving of employees will be required as technology changes. Organizations have to instill a growth mindset among their employees to create room for growing (Claro, David, and Carol 8665). Employees are encouraged to develop their skills and be more creative in their work. Hard work, new strategies, and input are some of the methods that employers use to improve the learning opportunities of the employees. Employees with a growth mindset can learn, feel more empowered, and committed in their work.

The future of work has people’s best interests, because they become more flexible, and they can work how they see comfortable. Workers can choose to be full or part-time employed, or they can work from home. The future of work does not only involve replacing human labor with technology, but also enhancing the skills of workers. If a worker loses their job because of technology, the skills that they learned from the organization will enable them to get employment at another skill level.

Works Cited

Claro, Susana, David Paunesku, and Carol S. Dweck. “Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  113.31 (2016): 8664-8668.

Franck, Edwiygh. “Distributed Work Environments: The Impact of Technology in the Workplace.”  Handbook of Research on Human Development in the Digital Age . IGI Global, 2018. 427-448.

Hoffman, Blaire. “Why Millennials Quit.”  Journal of Property Management  83.3 (2018): 42-45.

Merkert, Eugene. “Antitrust vs. Monopoly: An Uber Disruption.”  FAU Undergraduate Law Journal  2 (2015): 49.

Wang, Fei-Yue. “Toward a revolution in transportation operations: AI for complex systems.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 23.6 (2008): 8-13.

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The bright future of working from home

There seems to be an endless tide of depressing news in this era of COVID-19. But one silver lining is the long-run explosion of working from home. Since March I have been talking to dozens of CEOs, senior managers, policymakers and journalists about the future of working from home. This has built on my own personal experience from running surveys about working from home and  an experiment  published in 2015 which saw a 13 percent increase in productivity by employees at a Chinese travel company called Ctrip who worked from home.

So here a few key themes that can hopefully make for some good news:

Mass working from home is here to stay

Once the COVID-19 pandemic passes, rates of people working from home will explode. In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics  figures show  that 8 percent of all employees worked from home at least one day a week.

I see these numbers more than doubling in a post-pandemic world.  I suspect almost all employees who can work from home —  which is estimated  at about 40 percent of employees ­— will be allowed to work from home at least one day a week.

Why? Consider these three reasons

Fear of crowds.

Even if COVID-19 passes, the fear of future pandemics will motivate people to move away from urban centers and avoid public transport. So firms will struggle to get their employees back to the office on a daily basis. With the pandemic, working from home has become a standard perk, like sick-leave or health insurance.

Investments in telecommuting technology

By now, we have plenty of experience working from home. We’ve become adept at video conferencing. We’ve fine-tuned our home offices and rescheduled our days. Similarly, offices have tried out, improved and refined life for home-based work forces. In short, we have all paid the startup cost for learning how to work from home, making it far easier to continue.

The end of stigma

Finally, the stigma of working from home has evaporated. Before COVID-19, I frequently heard comments like, “working from home is shirking from home,” or “working remotely is remotely working.” I remember Boris Johnson, who was Mayor of London in 2012 when the London Olympics closed the city down for three weeks, saying working from home was “a skivers paradise.” No longer. All of us have now tried this and we understand we can potentially work effectively — if you have your own room and no kids — at home.

Of course, working from home was already trending up due to improved technology and remote monitoring. It is relatively cheap and easy to buy a top-end laptop and connect it to broadband internet service. This technology also makes it easier to monitor employees at home. Indeed, one senior manager recently told me: “We already track our employees — we know how many emails they send, meetings they attend or documents they write using our office management system. So monitoring them at home is really no different from monitoring them in the office. I see how they are doing and what they are doing whether they are at home or in the office.”

This is not only good news for firms in terms of boosting employee morale while improving productivity, but can also free up significant office space. In our China experiment, Ctrip calculated it increased profits by $2,000 per employee who worked from home.

Best practices in working from home post pandemic

Many of us are currently working from home full-time, with kids in the house, often in shared rooms, bedrooms or even bathrooms. So if working from home is going to continue and even increase once the pandemic is over, there are a few lessons we’ve learned to make telecommuting more effective. Let’s take a look:

Working from home should be part-time

I think the ideal schedule is Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the office and Tuesday and Thursday at home. Most of us need time in the office to stay motivated and creative. Face-to-face meetings are important for spurring and developing new ideas, and at least personally I find it hard to stay focused day after day at home. But we also need peaceful time at home to concentrate, undertake longer-term thinking and often to catch-up on tedious paperwork. And spending the same regular three days in the office each week means we can schedule meetings, lunches, coffees, etc., around that, and plan our “concentration work” during our two days at home.

The choice of Tuesday and Thursday at home comes from talking to managers who are often fearful that a work-from-home day — particularly if attached to a weekend — will turn into a beach day. So Tuesday and Thursday at home avoids creating a big block of days that the boss and the boss of the boss may fear employees may use for unauthorized mini-breaks.

Working from home should be a choice

I found in the Ctrip experiment that many people did not want to work from home. Of the 1,000 employees we asked, only 50 percent volunteered to work from home four days a week for a nine-month stretch. Those who took the offer were typically older married employees with kids. For many younger workers, the office is a core part of their social life, and like the Chinese employees, would happily commute in and out of work each day to see their colleagues. Indeed,  surveys in the U.S.  suggest up to one-third of us meet our future spouses at work.

Working from home should be flexible

After the end of the 9-month Ctrip experiment, we asked all volunteers if they wanted to continue working from home. Surprisingly, 50 percent of them opted to return to the office. The saying is “the three great enemies of working from home are the fridge, the bed and the TV,” and many of them fell victim to one of them. They told us it was hard to predict in advance, but after a couple of months working from home they figured out if it worked for them or not. And after we let the less-successful home-based employees return to the office, those remaining had a 25 percent higher rate of productivity.

Working from home is a privilege

Working from home for employees should be a perk. In our Ctrip experiment, home-based workers increased their productivity by 13 percent. So on average were being highly productive. But there is always the fear that one or two employees may abuse the system. So those whose performance drops at home should be warned, and if necessary recalled into the office for a couple of months before they are given a second chance.

There are two other impacts of working from home that should be addressed

The first deals with the decline in prices for urban commercial and residential spaces. The impact of a massive roll-out in working from home is likely to be falling demand for both housing and office space in the center of cities like New York and San Francisco. Ever since the 1980s, the centers of large U.S. cities have become denser and more expensive. Younger graduate workers in particular have flocked to city centers and pushed up housing and office prices. This 40-year year bull run  has ended .

If prices fell back to their levels in say the 1990s or 2000s this would lead to massive drops of 50 percent or more in city-center apartment and office prices. In reverse, the suburbs may be staging a comeback. If COVID-19 pushed people to part-time working from home and part-time commuting by car, the suburbs are the natural place to locate these smaller drivable offices. The upside to this is the affordability crisis of apartments in city centers could be coming to an end as property prices drop.

The second impact I see is a risk of increased political polarization. In the 1950s, Americans all watched the same media, often lived in similar areas and attended similar schools. By the 2020s, media has become fragmented, residential segregation by income has  increased dramatically , and even our schools are starting to fragment with the rise of charter schools.

The one constant equalizer — until recently — was the workplace. We all have to come into work and talk to our colleagues. Hence, those on the extreme left or right are forced to confront others over lunch and in breaks, hopefully moderating their views. If we end up increasing our time at home — particularly during the COVID lock-down — I worry about an explosion of radical political views.

But with an understanding of these risks and some forethought for how to mitigate them, a future with more of us working from home can certainly work well.

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The future of work in the developing world

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Laurence chandy lc laurence chandy former brookings expert, director of data, research and policy - unicef.

January 31, 2017

• 13 min read

The 2016 Brookings Blum Roundtable was convened to take on that agenda. How are the factors driving change in global labor markets playing out differently in developing economies? What are the jobs of the future and how will the terms of employment differ? What skills will those job demand and how will those skills be acquired? And finally, what are the implications of these changes for development prospects and for society?

This essay provides a brief account of the roundtable conversation. It is followed by six essays, authored by leading experts on this topic, that were commissioned to inform the roundtable discussion.

An era of change

The effects of technology—especially digital innovation—and globalization on labor markets are three-fold.

The first effect is disruption as jobs relocate to take advantage of lower costs, evolve to entail different tasks, or undergo wholesale change with the elimination of old jobs and the emergence of new ones. Disruption is a permanent feature of any dynamic economy, the upshot of markets responding to changing conditions. While the effects of disruption can be devastating for any particular individual or community, its effects for workers as a whole are positive if old jobs are replaced with new ones that are safer, less physically arduous, more stimulating, and provide greater autonomy. This has been the case for the median worker in rich economies throughout modern history up until recently, but less true for developing economies. [1] Today’s patterns of disruption are more discriminating, creating new groups of winners and losers, and can no longer be blithely assumed as a net positive. In addition, disruption is believed to be growing in intensity.

Technology has made capital goods cheaper and encouraged their substitution for workers. The result has been a shrinking share of national income accruing as wages as opposed to profits across rich and poor economies.

The second effect is a diminishing role of labor . Technology has made capital goods cheaper and encouraged their substitution for workers. The result has been a shrinking share of national income accruing as wages as opposed to profits across rich and poor economies. Some analysts view this phenomenon in combination with accelerating disruption as inevitably leading toward large-scale technological unemployment. This is an especially alarming prospect in the developing world where demographics are expected to increase the size of the global work age population by half a billion people by 2030. Another possible consequence is to reinforce the trend toward widening inequality.

The third effect is to decentralize economic activity away from corporations to which individuals provide their labor, toward the crowd in which workers participate as micro-entrepreneurs. This phenomenon is a facet of both the digital economy and globalization with the unbundling and contracting out of ancillary services from firms such as accounting and marketing. It is associated with changes in the terms of employment, both positive, such as increased flexibility, and negative, including the decline of unions and weakened workers’ bargaining power, the erosion of norms on pay equity, and reduced job security. These effects are most apparent in rich economies where the formal sector dominates.

While there is good evidence for each of the three effects, their speed and scale is surrounded with uncertainty. For instance, estimates on the share of jobs that are at risk of automation over the medium term vary from 9 to 47 percent for OECD economies; fewer estimates exist for the developing world meaning the possible range is arguably even greater. In another example, a year ago the World Bank reported evidence of the hollowing out of labor markets in the developing world, mirroring the pattern observed in industrialized economies. More recent analysis reveals no such pattern. [2]

Breaking free of a Western lens

One of the challenges in discussing the future of jobs in the developing world is that the jobs agenda and the semantics and metrics that go with it principally reflect a rich economy setting. Without recognition of this, such discussions can easily become divorced from reality.

In the West, being employed means generating an income; those that are not employed are assumed to be either idle or not in a position to take on a paid job. By contrast, individuals recorded as being employed in the developing world typically represent only a small portion of those that are economically active, with the majority instead engaged in low productivity activities in the informal sector. Thus, whereas raising employment in the rich world means moving people into paid employment, in the developing world it entails moving people into more productive—and likely better paid—lines of work.

This has important consequences. In industrialized economies the spread of automation implies the risk of redundancy for many workers. In developing economies, many workers are engaged in economic activities that are already some distance from the technology frontier—in other words, they could feasibly be done with greater technology and efficiency—and are paid accordingly. Automation needn’t imply the loss of that work, but rather the possibility of a further diminishing income. Thus, estimates of the share of jobs at risk of being eliminated in rich and poor economies have different consequences, though both are undoubtedly worrisome.

These differences can also result in labor market conditions in the developing world being mistakenly glorified. For instance, subsistence living in the developing world can be unhelpfully classified as entrepreneurship, implying a degree of choice and value that is clearly lacking. By the same token, subsistence living and informal work share some characteristics with the gig economy in rich economies, despite obvious and important differences.

Distinguishing a jobs agenda from a development agenda

The jobs agenda is increasingly becoming recognized as a priority within developing economies and the international development community.

Despite these challenges, the jobs agenda is increasingly becoming recognized as a priority within developing economies and the international development community. Demand for better jobs and anxiety about the sustainability of livelihoods consistently poll among the top issues in surveys of public opinion, including the vast My World exercise conducted to inform the contents of the Sustainable Development Goals.

At the same time, the development community has struggled to articulate how a jobs agenda differs from support for economic development more generally. This is understandable. Job opportunities in any economy are in part a function of a country’s level of income with poor countries constrained by low domestic demand and investment.

That’s why linking poor economies with consumers and investors in rich countries can be such a powerful force in expanding the range of opportunities for workers—and it is precisely this economic integration that underpins the dramatic economic convergence and poverty reduction in the developing world over the past quarter-century. New technologies have the promise to further expand these linkages, including platforms that couple workers with overseas firms, and, in the near future, instant translation services powered by artificial intelligence. The ability of poor economies to take advantage of these opportunities rests on equipping their workers with sufficient education and skills, as well as access to technology and digital infrastructure.

Even for countries that share the same level of income, the number and quality of jobs can vary significantly with the sectoral composition of their economies. For policymakers seeking to steer their economies toward more labor-intensive sectors, this can present a moving target. Whereas 20 years ago, manufacturing was lauded for its ability to absorb large numbers of relatively unskilled workers and to provide a stepping stone for economies seeking to develop capabilities and move into increasingly productive activities, today service-driven economies with a digital focus such as the Philippines and India may present the most promising and sustainable example to follow.

Just as low income in an economy constrains the number of good jobs that are available, it is also associated with various other adverse characteristics of labor markets including greater job insecurity, limited social protections and high information costs. A credible jobs agenda requires recognizing the constraint of low income and the extent to which it is binding for different labor issues. For instance, the biggest barrier to firms moving into the formal sector is arguably their low productivity and this cannot be divorced from a country’s level of development. By contrast, new technologies can be transformative in reducing information costs in even the poorest economies.

Skills for the future

Education has consistently been associated with high rates of return in both rich and poor economies, but the precise mechanism by which education generates those returns remains somewhat contested. Some view education principally in terms of the imparting of skills while others emphasize its ability to sort individuals by their innate capabilities. The recent emergence of evidence of dismal learning outcomes in schools across large parts of the developing world could be interpreted as swinging the debate more in favor of the latter explanation. That is problematic for a future where the skills demanded of most, if not all, workers are seen as increasingly complex and quickly evolving implying the need for lifelong learning.

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Another area of contention is the skills that should be given emphasis in training tomorrow’s workers. If that determination is made narrowly on the basis of the pattern of job creation and elimination, it likely leads to an emphasis on STEM skills. If instead it is made on the basis of the increasing speed of disruption and the changing organization of economic activity toward micro-entrepreneurship, then this raises the importance of soft skills and business skills to help workers adapt to a changing marketplace and to make optimal choices. Workers themselves appear to see the wisdom in this assessment: the most popular course on the online education platform, Coursera, is on “learning to learn.”

Digital technology is ushering in broader changes in the education sector, by threatening to depose those institutions that deliver inadequate outcomes and replace them with ones better suited to the changing global economy. However, we remain a long way from building an ecosystem that can address workers’ needs in assessing capabilities, imparting skills, accrediting skills acquired, and guiding each individual’s trajectory through a path of lifelong learning. A particular institutional gap exists in establishing a credible and secure repository to record each individual’s portfolio of qualifications and capabilities.

As the institutions that dominate the education sector change, this inevitably leads to questions about the role of government in the sector. The enormous positive externalities associated with education would suggest an important role. However, this need not necessarily be as a service provider, but more in shaping policy and providing finance for education. The greatest externalities likely occur for early childhood interventions—an area where government’s role has historically been too limited.

The future of job matching platforms

Another area where digital technology is altering the institutions that shape labor markets is in the process of matching workers with vacancies. This is an exciting area of innovation and invention in the developing world. By linking workers and firms to the information they need, digital job matching platforms can both help markets clear more quickly and induce dynamic responses, including in the content of education programs and in the investment decisions of firms and workers. For example, when Apple adopted the new programming language, Swift, hundreds of freelancers on the digital job platform, Upwork, responded rapidly by training themselves to take advantage of new work opportunities.

A central objective for job matching platforms is to accelerate this feedback loop. That will likely require greater linkages with other actors including those involved in education provision and skill certification. Such partnerships hold enormous potential for transforming labor markets but have yet to be harnessed at scale.

A bolder challenge still is to assist those workers for which matching platforms consistently fail to find job opportunities. Solutions for these individuals may require partnering with NGOs or government, and more complex interventions such as supporting worker relocation.

The consequences of a weak labor movement

While changes in the nature of work associated with the changing global economy are most prominent in advanced economies, there are nevertheless some important patterns shaping the developing world. Perhaps the most prevalent is the absence of a well-defined labor movement in many developing economies and a consequently limited role for collective bargaining. This is notable given what a prominent role these played in securing political goals and improvements in quality of life in the advanced economies during their own process of economic development. Moreover, the effects of technology and globalization appear to be reinforcing this pattern. There is already some early evidence of gig work in the developing world resulting in workers’ rights being less effectively upheld. [3]

There are a number of creative efforts underway to mitigate the negative consequences of these circumstances. For instance, some job matching platforms identify one of their core services to workers as helping them to optimally price their work. However, any attempt to strengthen workers’ bargaining power in an atomized work environment is unlikely to achieve the kind of results won by organized labor. For this reason, some entities focus today on promoting alternative ownership structures to avoid pitting workers against each other and against capital owners.

For most workers in the developing world, a secure job remains only an aspiration. Should the pattern toward decentralized economic activity continue unabated, that possibility may diminish further, even as economies develop and workers enjoy greater earnings. That would fundamentally redefine our idea of what “middle-class” status represents.

Rethinking the role of government

The prospect of greater disruption, a diminished role for labor, and the decentralization of economic activity places a greater onus on the adequacy of safety nets. While safety nets are at different stages of maturity across different countries, those in the developing world have some advantages over those in rich nations in adapting to the needs of a changing global economy. These include programs being less fragmented and more harmonized, and avoiding the constraints that come when benefits are tied too closely to employment.

Compensation forms a central part of most public safety nets, which in its most comprehensive form means a universal basic income. The UBI concept has sparked excited debates in the West over the past year, so it is striking that the most extensive pilot, and one designed with rigorous evaluation in mind, is taking place in Kenya, and that the country arguably most poised to enact a UBI on a national scale is India. Other aspects of safety nets that require more innovative and effective solutions are those focused on retraining and relocating dislocated workers.

The redesign of social safety nets can be understood as one important component of a broader rebalancing required in the social contract between government and citizens, employers and employees, and the winners and losers of the changing global economy. The role of government is not just limited to helping those most vulnerable to change, but shaping change itself, whether by guiding the direction of technology through public investments in research and development, putting in place regulations that foster competitive markets and that are supportive of collective bargaining, and providing digital infrastructure for all.

Perhaps the most fundamental changes government can help usher in concern culture and norms that constrain worker opportunities in the modern global economy. This includes addressing discrimination in hiring and the workplace, removing the negative stigma associated with certain types of jobs, and altering how work is defined to more fully encapsulate all the productive activities by which people define themselves, such as bringing up children and civil participation.

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The changing workplace

Learn how to write about changes in the business workplace.

Do the preparation task first. Then read the text and tips and do the exercises.

Preparation

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What skills will the workforce of the future need?

As technological innovations continue to change the workplace, we are seeing more industries entrust their operations to new gadgets, software and programs that can transform the workplace. One such technology that has the potential to revolutionise workplaces in the coming years is RPA (Robotic Process Automation). With more industries starting to embrace RPA software, RPA robots would be able to handle mundane, repetitive tasks like some of the clerical work normally dealt with by administrative staff, thereby lowering running costs and increasing productivity.

There is a common concern that companies employing technology like RPA are only interested in increasing their profit margins through cost reduction, and that this trend would eventually leave most of the workforce jobless. However, while it is true that the menial tasks of administrative and clerical jobs are likely to be taken over by automation, the demands on the average office worker will evolve to include more creative work, managerial duties and communication with clients and suppliers.

With this shift in focus, the skills required of future workers are also bound to change. Moving away from basic data entry skills, the worker of the future will be expected to have transferable problem-solving and critical thinking skills that will enable them to tackle any difficult situation and work independently to find solutions.

The ability to adapt and be agile would also be essential in a world that is likely to become increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex. Having such flexibility, coupled with the desire to keep learning and the initiative to step forward, the successful worker of the future is one who will be able to use their skills to seek out opportunities, make improvements and take on new challenges wherever they'll be working.

By equipping our future generation of workers with such business skills, we can ensure that when automation fully takes over, our workers will have the survival skills to become better employees and leaders of the future.

• It is helpful to start with a more general statement before narrowing it down to talking about a specific example, e.g. technological advancements will continue to change the workplace → one such technology is RPA .
• over a period of time, e.g. As technological innovations continue to change the workplace, ... /  With more industries starting to embrace RPA software, ...
• at some point in the future, e.g.  when automation fully takes over, ...
• Connect new paragraphs to what was previously written in order to achieve better cohesion, e.g. With this shift in focus, ... /  The ability to adapt and be agile would also be essential  ... /  By equipping our future generation of workers with such business skills, ...
• When talking about future trends, use a variety of phrases to show the different levels of probability of things happening, e.g. to be likely to ,  to have the potential to ,  to be expected to ,  to be bound to .
• Conclude with a summary of the main points of your article.

How do you think the workplace of the future might change? What business skills do you think will be necessary for the worker of the future to be successful?

Language level

Over the period of Technological Era, Computers and Technological device has revolutinise the way work is typically done. In fact the workplace has changed rapidly that more Industries heavily rely on computers to perform a mundane task. However Human's creativity, critical thinking skills, problem solving, and communication skills are essential skills that outmatch a computer. Considering the fact that Technological Inventions such as robot and super computer are widely utilise in a Corporate Industry. Future Generations of Worker must be equipped to adapt to ever changing workplace and must harness essential skills. Human's drive for success and recognition are vital traits that distinguish us from the rest. Therefore I conclude the future of workplace will not be entirely dominated by Automation, Human provided with necessary essential skills will always have its role in this ever competitive workplace regardless of the given field.

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Honestly, it's hard to predict how workplaces will look in the future but I think the development of technology obviously will change them dramatically. First of all, I expect fewer papers at work. I think most of them we easily can change on e-documents: this is a much faster way to deal and much more ecological. And dull work. It would be great to replace people with robots on it. No one likes boring jobs and we must provide more intellectual jobs to humans. Of course, more intellectual jobs demand more intellectual employees so we have to adjust our education to the coming conditions. And, of course, I have some words about dangerous jobs. Every day millions of people risk their lives on dangerous jobs: like miners or firefighters. I predict some serious changes in these fields in the future. I'm sure we should replace people with robots there too.

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Research Brief | October 26, 2020

The Impact of New Technology on the Healthcare Workforce

Research Briefs

Working papers, other publications.

Report | November 17, 2020

The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines

Report | November 1, 2019

The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions

To provide a framework for MIT's Task Force’s efforts over the next year, this report examines several aspects of the interaction between work and technology.

Research Brief | January 25, 2021

Factories of the Future: Technology, Skills, and Digital Innovation at Large Manufacturing Firms

Research Brief | January 7, 2021

Cognitive Science as a New People Science for the Future of Work

Research Brief | December 17, 2020

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Research Brief | November 24, 2020

Manufacturing in America: A View from the Field

The state of industrial robotics: emerging technologies, challenges, and key research directions, additive manufacturing: implications for technological change, workforce development, and the product lifecycle.

Research Brief | November 10, 2020

Understanding and Addressing the Modern Productivity Paradox

Extending unemployment insurance benefits to workers in precarious and nonstandard arrangements.

Research Brief | October 29, 2020

Robots as Symbols and Anxiety Over Work Loss

Working Paper | June 23, 2021

Digital Transformation in a White Collar Firm: Implications for Workers Across a Continuum of Jobs and Skills

Working Paper | March 3, 2021

Innovations in Collective Action in the Labor Movement: Organizing Workers Beyond the NLRA and the Business Union

Working Paper | February 1, 2021

A Firm-level Study of Workforce Challenges at U.S. Manufacturers

Working Paper | January 22, 2021

Strengthening Manufacturing Innovation Ecosystems Before, During, and After COVID: Lessons from Massachusetts

Working Paper | December 15, 2020

The Learning System at IBM: A Case Study

Working Paper | December 14, 2020

Understanding the Incumbent Worker’s Decision to Train: The Challenges Facing Less- Educated Workers

Working Paper | December 11, 2020

Avenues of Institutional Change: Technology and Urban Mobility in Southeast Michigan

Working Paper | November 24, 2020

A Case Study of Integrating Technology and Work Systems at Kaiser Permanente’s Health Hubs

Working Paper | October 23, 2020

Participatory Design for Digital Transformation of Manufacturing Enterprises

Working Paper | May 20, 2020

Robots, Automation, and Employment: Where We Are

How to think about automation and potential job loss, where predictions of rising automation & job replacement come from, and offering paths for future research.

Project | September 29, 2020

MIT Global Research Network

The Global Research Network is an MIT-led network of researchers, generating comparative international research to help reach data-driven conclusions on topics related to the work of the future and other relevant topics.

Project | August 3, 2020

Regions and Industries

MIT WotF task force researches trends in several industries in terms of technology adoption, changing skills requirements and overall changes to work and jobs.

Mobility and the Work of the Future

The MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future uses Detroit MSA to examine the relationships between technology, work, and society through the lens of mobility.

Learning, Education, Training, and Skills

The focus of this sub-group is to explore new pathways and institutional arrangements for delivering skills, training, and education based on new technologies.

Advanced Manufacturing

MIT Work of the Future approaches manufacturing to understand how new technology is designed and developed, and how it changes the nature of the work & skills required to succeed.

Publication | January 25, 2022

The Work Of The Future: Building Better Jobs In An Age Of Intelligent Machines

Publication | January 6, 2022

This new book by the Co-Chairs of the Task force discusses why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher-paid knowledge workers. What's wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation. (to be published 1/25/22)

Publication | December 21, 2021

The work of the future. Building better jobs in an age of intelligent machines.

Publication | July 16, 2020

The Nature of Work after the COVID Crisis: Too Few Low-Wage Jobs

The authors ask whether the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the conventional wisdom about automation and inequality in the US over the past four decades.

The Future Workplace

Compared to the past, today’s workplace is vastly different. Even though computers have replaced typewriters and machines have replaced jobs, it’s no secret that machines are taking over. The outbreak of COVID-19 has expedited workplace transformation. Because of this, people are more equipped than ever to work with each other worldwide. They’ve come up with new ways to work with computers. People are adapting to novel customs of at work, and organizations necessity to reorganize themselves to keep up.

There has been a significant shift in the workplace during the previous several decades. Using contractors and independent contractors as employees is an example of how this could be accomplished. Knowledge-based work is increasingly being done on the internet. There are various reasons why people choose to work from home, including the desire for a more flexible work environment and the desire to avoid spending a significant amount of money on real estate. Managing one’s identity while working from home can be difficult when one works from home. Before anything else can be accomplished, it is necessary to develop a virtual but apparent culture.

It is not apparent how a combination of natural and virtual surroundings could aid in the development of a culture of acceptance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Algorithms are being employed in various applications To connect people with employment, evaluate their work performance, and compute remuneration. There is a great deal of chaos, which usually spells the end of any civilization. Employees who perceive that algorithmic task allocation and payment are unjust may become furious due to these modifications. Because of this, the following workgroups would only consider them transactional participants, which might result in mediocre performance from the entire workforce. You must be aware of the number of firms that use algorithms and their employees’ attitudes toward procedural and distributive justice.

It doesn’t take long for businesses to discover that the great bulk of their information to generate new value is located beyond their traditional borders. On the other hand, companies are more likely to rely on independent contractors and consultants to complete their tasks (dubbed “gig workers”). Customer groups, open-source development, and crowd-sourced projects are examples of places where early signals of the future of work can be discovered. Workers from outside the company’s organization can join work teams, allowing for more efficient completion of tasks. Companies can form and dissolve groups at their discretion. Every work team has its distinct collection of agents, and an organization may be responsible for a large number of agents at any given time. Employees can now report to an excessive number of managers simultaneously and have resulted in a significant increase in the number of matrices groups relative to before. There are numerous reporting lines and performance evaluators to consider when operating in a matrix. Algorithms may become increasingly significant in job execution as a result. (Williams, 2021)

Work incentives must be integrated into the corporate culture of every organization. Intrinsic motivation and equitable reward for work can impact a person’s professional choice and teammates. Companies will have to use inherent motivators in the future to locate and hire “intrinsically motivated” individuals if they want to succeed. Dual incentive systems must be effective because they appeal to both internal and external motivations. It is critical to understand which intrinsic motivators are most effective in particular contexts and how they interact with one another to maximize performance. As a result, it will be easier to recruit for internal and external positions.

The underlying motives of collaboration and learning have been vital in the past and the future. Especially in today’s competitive environment, businesses must discover ways to create an environment that encourages collaboration and the generation of new ideas. For them to be able to generate new ideas, they must learn how to synthesize information. To ensure that all work is completed most efficiently and productively possible, large-scale cooperation has occurred within the organization. Consider how technology can make large-scale collaboration easier.

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) take over more and more jobs in the future, human agents will be forced to master new skills. If you want to master these hobbies, you’ll need positive and negative feedback. It will not be easy to automate this type of information entry in the future. It is possible that auto-feedback will be seen negatively and could hamper learning, mainly when supplied in the form of ratings. Additional research must be conducted to discover how algorithmic feedback may be made acceptable. People and machines can provide input, despite little research having been done in this area. The use of human-machine synergy, for example, could assist people in predicting their future employment potential.

The inclusion of their staff is becoming increasingly crucial for businesses to be successful and run efficiently. The importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace will only grow in the years to come. There is an increasing demand for organizations dedicated to accepting, utilizing, and benefitting from neurodiversity in our communities. In the end, there will be an increase in the number of these organizations. While businesses strive to make their workplaces more diverse, they must consider demographic factors, notably ethnicity, in their efforts. Employers who rely on algorithms are attempting to be more inclusive. Working to eliminate human prejudices should be a priority. Human biases may pose a serious threat when it comes to developing algorithms. Understanding algorithms and how they work is critical for avoiding biases that make algorithms less inclusive. Examining how virtual work has made us more inclusive, as well as how the outcomes of this experiment may influence future work practices. (Lind, Madgavkar, & Manyika, 2020)

Specific issues stated concerning future employment can be solved by utilizing two fundamental design characteristics. In terms of design, we have these two criteria to keep in mind: Mindfulness is a critical design component. To understand post-epidemic employment, these two aspects of work design will play a significantly more significant role after the pandemic. Mindfulness in the workplace has lately been a hot topic among experts looking for ways to boost productivity and predict the future of work. According to research in fields as diverse as psychology, neurology, and medicine, mindfulness is essential for designing future workplaces that encourage cognitive engagement with work and healthy work behavior. Technology and human interaction must be included in mindful work’s future production. Future workplaces will need to consider such issues as fostering concentrated thought, recuperation intervals (after technology usage), and non-technology-mediated engagement. There are times when proximal human connections must be employed sparingly to achieve mindful job design. More research is required to balance technologically better assisted and non technologically assisted aspects of future job design. Because of the Zoom fatigue that many companies have been experiencing during COVID-19, it’s clear that finding a way to balance technology and human requirements is an important step. Research is needed to build organizational norms to help maintain this equilibrium. The future of mindful workplaces will entail taking into account workers’ mental health. (Malhotra, 2021)

Another part of the future of work that must be prepared is meaningful work. Workers at a typical firm preparing for the future may use their free time to work on educational projects unrelated to their “assigned” responsibilities. An employee’s extra time can study and develop if they aren’t distracted by their primary responsibilities. Employees in the future will expect their employees to have a positive influence on society. Therefore, companies will have to make social impact a critical capability of their employees. Individuals can utilize their leisure time to have a positive societal influence even if their regular work does not. The legal and financial professions have a long and renowned tradition of pro bono service. A more significant social and societal impact might be achieved through pro bono labor in the future. Pro bono and free time work influence job satisfaction and organizational loyalty, but further study is needed. There are a lot of essential issues that need to be answered via investigation.

In conclusion, Since the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been able to move faster toward the future of work and plan for post-pandemic employment and organizations. This discussion aims to inspire further study on a lot of work and organizations. Individual reactions and future work structure must be considered in developing a multidisciplinary vision of future work. This method helps understand future post-pandemic organizational situations since other undiscovered routes exist.

Lind, S., Madgavkar, A., & Manyika, J. (2020). The future of work after COVID-19. Retrieved Deecember 2021, from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19

Malhotra, A. (2021, April 6). The postpandemic work.  Journal of Management, 47 , 1091-1101. Retrieved December 2021, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01492063211000435

Williams, C. (2021). The fight over the hybrid future of work.  The World ahead . Retrieved December 2021, from https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2021/11/08/the-fight-over-the-hybrid-future-of-work

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Essays About Work: 7 Examples and 8 Prompts

If you want to write well-researched essays about work, check out our guide of helpful essay examples and writing prompts for this topic.

Whether employed or self-employed, we all need to work to earn a living. Work could provide a source of purpose for some but also stress for many. The causes of stress could be an unmanageable workload, low pay, slow career development, an incompetent boss, and companies that do not care about your well-being.  Essays about work  can help us understand how to achieve a work/life balance for long-term happiness.

Work can still be a happy place to develop essential skills such as leadership and teamwork. If we adopt the right mindset, we can focus on situations we can improve and avoid stressing ourselves over situations we have no control over. We should also be free to speak up against workplace issues and abuses to defend our labor rights. Check out our  essay writing topics  for more.

5 Examples of Essays About Work

1.  when the future of work means always looking for your next job by bruce horovitz, 2. ‘quiet quitting’ isn’t the solution for burnout by rebecca vidra, 3. the science of why we burn out and don’t have to by joe robinson , 4. how to manage your career in a vuca world by murali murthy, 5. the challenges of regulating the labor market in developing countries by gordon betcherman, 6. creating the best workplace on earth by rob goffee and gareth jones, 7. employees seek personal value and purpose at work. be prepared to deliver by jordan turner, 8 writing prompts on essays about work, 1. a dream work environment, 2. how is school preparing you for work, 3. the importance of teamwork at work, 4. a guide to find work for new graduates, 5. finding happiness at work, 6. motivating people at work, 7. advantages and disadvantages of working from home, 8. critical qualities you need to thrive at work.

“For a host of reasons—some for a higher salary, others for improved benefits, and many in search of better company culture—America’s workforce is constantly looking for its next gig.”

A perennial search for a job that fulfills your sense of purpose has been an emerging trend in the work landscape in recent years. Yet, as human resource managers scramble to minimize employee turnover, some still believe there will still be workers who can exit a company through a happy retirement. You might also be interested in these  essays about unemployment .

“…[L]et’s creatively collaborate on ways to re-establish our own sense of value in our institutions while saying yes only to invitations that nourish us instead of sucking up more of our energy.”

Quiet quitting signals more profound issues underlying work, such as burnout or the bosses themselves. It is undesirable in any workplace, but to have it in school, among faculty members, spells doom as the future of the next generation is put at stake. In this essay, a teacher learns how to keep from burnout and rebuild a sense of community that drew her into the job in the first place.

“We don’t think about managing the demands that are pushing our buttons, we just keep reacting to them on autopilot on a route I call the burnout treadmill. Just keep going until the paramedics arrive.”

Studies have shown the detrimental health effects of stress on our mind, emotions and body. Yet we still willingly take on the treadmill to stress, forgetting our boundaries and wellness. It is time to normalize seeking help from our superiors to resolve burnout and refuse overtime and heavy workloads.

“As we start to emerge from the pandemic, today’s workplace demands a different kind of VUCA career growth. One that’s Versatile, Uplifting, Choice-filled and Active.”

The only thing constant in work is change. However, recent decades have witnessed greater work volatility where tech-oriented people and creative minds flourish the most. The essay provides tips for applying at work daily to survive and even thrive in the VUCA world. You might also be interested in these  essays about motivation .

“Ultimately, the biggest challenge in regulating labor markets in developing countries is what to do about the hundreds of millions of workers (or even more) who are beyond the reach of formal labor market rules and social protections.”

The challenge in regulating work is balancing the interest of employees to have dignified work conditions and for employers to operate at the most reasonable cost. But in developing countries, the difficulties loom larger, with issues going beyond equal pay to universal social protection coverage and monitoring employers’ compliance.

“Suppose you want to design the best company on earth to work for. What would it be like? For three years, we’ve been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organization.”

If you’ve ever wondered what would make the best workplace, you’re not alone. In this essay, Jones looks at how employers can create a better workplace for employees by using surveys and interviews. The writer found that individuality and a sense of support are key to creating positive workplace environments where employees are comfortable.

“Bottom line: People seek purpose in their lives — and that includes work. The more an employer limits those things that create this sense of purpose, the less likely employees will stay at their positions.”

In this essay, Turner looks at how employees seek value in the workplace. This essay dives into how, as humans, we all need a purpose. If we can find purpose in our work, our overall happiness increases. So, a value and purpose-driven job role can create a positive and fruitful work environment for both workers and employers.

In this essay, talk about how you envision yourself as a professional in the future. You can be as creative as to describe your workplace, your position, and your colleagues’ perception of you. Next, explain why this is the line of work you dream of and what you can contribute to society through this work. Finally, add what learning programs you’ve signed up for to prepare your skills for your dream job. For more, check out our list of simple essays topics for intermediate writers .

For your essay, look deeply into how your school prepares the young generation to be competitive in the future workforce. If you want to go the extra mile, you can interview students who have graduated from your school and are now professionals. Ask them about the programs or practices in your school that they believe have helped mold them better at their current jobs.

In a workplace where colleagues compete against each other, leaders could find it challenging to cultivate a sense of cooperation and teamwork. So, find out what creative activities companies can undertake to encourage teamwork across teams and divisions. For example, regular team-building activities help strengthen professional bonds while assisting workers to recharge their minds.

Finding a job after receiving your undergraduate diploma can be full of stress, pressure, and hard work. Write an essay that handholds graduate students in drafting their resumes and preparing for an interview. You may also recommend the top job market platforms that match them with their dream work. You may also ask recruitment experts for tips on how graduates can make a positive impression in job interviews.

Creating a fun and happy workplace may seem impossible. But there has been a flurry of efforts in the corporate world to keep workers happy. Why? To make them more productive. So, for your essay, gather research on what practices companies and policy-makers should adopt to help workers find meaning in their jobs. For example, how often should salary increases occur? You may also focus on what drives people to quit jobs that raise money. If it’s not the financial package that makes them satisfied, what does? Discuss these questions with your readers for a compelling essay.

Motivation could scale up workers’ productivity, efficiency, and ambition for higher positions and a longer tenure in your company. Knowing which method of motivation best suits your employees requires direct managers to know their people and find their potential source of intrinsic motivation. For example, managers should be able to tell whether employees are having difficulties with their tasks to the point of discouragement or find the task too easy to boredom.

A handful of managers have been worried about working from home for fears of lowering productivity and discouraging collaborative work. Meanwhile, those who embrace work-from-home arrangements are beginning to see the greater value and benefits of giving employees greater flexibility on when and where to work. So first, draw up the pros and cons of working from home. You can also interview professionals working or currently working at home. Finally, provide a conclusion on whether working from home can harm work output or boost it.

Identifying critical skills at work could depend on the work applied. However, there are inherent values and behavioral competencies that recruiters demand highly from employees. List the top five qualities a professional should possess to contribute significantly to the workplace. For example, being proactive is a valuable skill because workers have the initiative to produce without waiting for the boss to prod them.

If you need help with grammar, our guide to  grammar and syntax  is a good start to learning more. We also recommend taking the time to  improve the readability score  of your essays before publishing or submitting them.

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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