Introduction

Welcome to the brave new world of work. ‘What’s Happening to Work?’ is a collection of observations about work, society and individuals, and how workplaces are stumbling through the most rapid evolution in living memory.

In the not-so-distant past, the office was a land of cubicles, where coffee breaks were sacred and water cooler gossip was our daily news feed. But oh, how times have changed! Today, the workplace is a dynamic battleground of innovation, collaboration, and the occasional office plant that’s fighting for survival. The dynamic between managers and workers has been transformed in the age of entitlement, the outside world is leaking into work and the traditional hierarchies are crumbling fast.

Changes in society may make leaders’ steadfastly-held views questionable or even redundant. Meanwhile, we in the rank and file are adapting behaviour to shape our work to new expectations – redefining ourselves along the way and trying to deal with burnout, stress and FOMO.

In this subversive journey through the quirky corridors of contemporary work life, we’ll explore the rise of the gig economy, the dance of artificial intelligence with our daily tasks, and the subtle art of balancing work-life while simultaneously mastering the art of being simultaneously highly competitive and highly collaborative and getting ‘kudos’.

This is a book with very short chapters. This is because people like their info in short-form; happily, I like to write in this way. So, buckle up. This is your invitation to embrace the quirks, challenges, and illusions of working life.

Another way of seeing things

Organisations are divided into the people who lead and the people who do the work. Whether the business is selling electronics, management consulting or entertainment, there is always a hierarchy. This theoretically makes it a lot easier to get good outcomes – you leave the strategic working out to experts in the organisation and, happy days, – the business goes storming on from strength to strength.

Not only are there hierarchies but there are experts who have proved through qualifications and experience that they have what it takes to understand their field and can make the right decisions. So, the board will have directors who will have executive responsibility for functions such as marketing, commercial services, technology, or what makes sense for that particular firm. These experts then have colleagues, who are also experts and can translate strategy into operational work.

New strategy comes floating down from above. ‘Change’ has been synonymous with improvement since forever and when organisations get change right it justifies all the effort and trust put into processes and people to deliver the goods. We all know, however, that often change does not go to plan and things mess up.  Theory and practice seem like two completely different beasts. That clear, meticulously worked out plan of action turns into a complex mass of misunderstandings, perhaps even causing hostility and recrimination and the predictable blame game. So what goes wrong?

After decades of watching seemingly good ideas go wrong and several rounds of seeing businesses go to the wall with very little warning, I’m sharing my understanding of the many assumptions that are behind the disastrous miscalculations by organisations – specifically the miscalculations that are about people. More generally, I’ll explain, what is going on with businesses under the bonnet in terms of adapting to the expectations of society as it rapidly changes around us.

Whether about staff, customers or public opinion, why do businesses still guess the wrong way about how people behave? Well, of course they don’t always get things wrong but, more than at any time before in living memory (well my living memory) there is a strange combination of using data for absolutely everything and still miscalculating. Data, of course, is not ‘just data’; it provides information that is interpreted and used in line with what the users want. The most important data is about the sometimes strongly held beliefs of decision-makers involved and the unwillingness to really appreciate different ways of seeing the same issue. For some individuals there is a problem with anticipating that people can behave in a number of different ways – ways that might not chime with the handy certainty of what data tells us.

Unpredictability is more of an issue now than at any time in history. Why? Because society has never changed as fast, people simply can’t be relied on to behave in the way that we imagine them to. This book looks at what’s happening as a result, as it’s based on personal perception; it is predominantly about white collar working environments (professional firms) but many of the principles can be widely applied.