The Future of Work
Do you know why most of us around the world work from 9AM to 5PM?
I always knew it had something to do with the industrial revolution but I didn’t know the exact reason up until last year.
Here’s how it all began. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, to keep up with production, laborers typically worked 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week. In the quest for a perfect, utopian society, a social reformer named Robert Owens formulated the goal of the eight-hour-workday and coined the slogan “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”. Owens recognized a shorter workday would improve the working conditions and hence lead to a more productive and happy workforce. When Ford Motor Company adopted the 8-hour workday in 1914 and doubled their workers’ salaries, productivity increased significantly and Ford’s profit margins doubled over the next two years. This encouraged other companies to adopt the same practices and soon they became the industry standard.
But it was a different world back then, over a hundred years ago — a world we have so little in common with today. In the production-centric economy, output was mostly tangible and that meant so was input. You could quantify the impact of the 8-hour factory workday by measuring output. Of course, if you can quantify something, you can rationalize it.
The world has since changed dramatically, in fact, the world has especially transformed itself in just the last 20 years or so. The way we produce and manufacture has dramatically changed, and knowledge-based work has become immensely valuable. The world has become flatter, data is the new global language, economies have become intricately tangled within each other, and the way we all view ourselves and the world around us is changing by the day. We come together and collaborate in ways that were unimaginable even up until a few decades ago, we do things that no one thought we could, and we’ve created jobs that meant nothing even in our parents’ times. So why are we still working the same way we did a hundred years ago? Can productivity and creativity truly be measured by a clock?
At this point, if you are wondering, “Jeez, was this article written by a millennial?” then I’m afraid you are right. But for as long as I can remember I’ve been very intrigued by how we think and how we work, and what makes us more productive and more creative. For now, here’s a few shifts happening in the world around us that make me believe the 9-to-5 workday concept may not last forever.
1) Freelancing and contract work is on the rise, more than 53 million Americans did one or more freelancing gigs in 2014. In fact, some employers are starting to launch specific programs to hire freelancers and connect them to projects (like PwC and LinkedIn). Sites like upwork.com and freelancer.com also promote this marketplace idea of connecting contractors and independent workers to short-term projects focussed on specific goals and deliverables.
2) Job-hopping no longer has the stigma attached to it that the previous 2–3 generations went through. For example, on an average, millennials spend about 3 years in a job before moving on.
3) And speaking of millennials, almost half of the millennials in the workforce today will choose work-life flexibility over pay. Millennials will also make up around 75% of the global workforce by the year 2025, so the traditional organization setup will be challenged further as more and more of them take up positions of leadership and influence.
4) 55% of hiring managers place higher emphasis on hard skills rather than personality or attitude, tipping the scale further towards a work culture that is beginning to place more and more value on skills-based input and end deliverables.
5) Albeit somewhat disheartening and bad news for certain industries, it is no secret that automation of manufacturing processes has resulted in higher productivity and output even as employment opportunities have declined over the past couple of decades.
6) Knowledge-based and creative work aren’t completely immune to the advancements in technology either. As machine learning algorithms become smarter and new applications of Artificial Intelligence emerge, soon our programs may write our news and create our art!
7) Access to free universal healthcare, which is a huge debate today in the U.S but may be something that becomes a reality in the coming decades, would be another reason people start seeking out non-traditional employment since their decisions will not depend as much on benefits.
8) Online education is making it easier for a lot of workers to keep “updating” their skills even after their formal education, which may lead to them choosing more fluid career pathways as well.
The above said, the 9-to-5-workday and 40-plus-hour-workweek is so ingrained in modern society that it is definitely not going to disappear overnight. But one cannot deny that little ripples are starting to form and challenge this idea that has existed for over a century. As it always has, technology will play a huge role of course, and so will what we think are going to be the biggest problems for us to solve in the coming decades.
P.S — have some thoughts on this topic? I would love to hear! Connect with me on LinkedIn here. Also, stay tuned for more musings on the future of stuff.
