Long-Sought by Parents, the “Future of Work” Needs to be Better for Everyone

Many parents and caregivers are facing the idea of heading back to work in their offices.

There are countless discussions raging about how to do this right, whether it’s from an EQ perspective (see this article about Apple’s tone-deaf failure), a productivity perspective (great data in here from Josh Levs about how remote work will be even more productive this year), or a geographical and cultural mandate (as the CEO of Morgan Stanley declared by saying NYC employees must live in NYC and be in the office by Labor Day.)

But if we don’t fundamentally change HOW we work, none of this will matter.

The future of work is modular.

That means every element or resource is treated as a plug-and-play option, tapped as needed to meet a goal.

In other words, it’s time work stops meandering. It’s time we focus on the outcomes of work and stop navel-gazing at the process.

Parents have been asking for this for decades, by the way. Working mothers were the first and most vocal to ask for flexibility, trust, and autonomy. They were punished by being thought less devoted to their jobs, denied paid leave, then discriminated against, paid less, and forced from the world of work altogether by the pandemic.

They were the canaries in the coal mines for all future workers, who need and now expect these same basic attributes of work.

All workers are human beings and family members, possibly caregivers and even parents, and who have children at home, or a sick parent they need to take care of, or someone in their immediate family who needs some extra care, or a child with a special need, or maybe a houseful of a kids who needs their parents.

People have to be able to drop into their work projects, pull back out, drop into their home demands on their time and attention, pop out, head back over to work, and then repeat. At their own discretion.

The only way that's going to be possible is if we make some key shifts.

1.0 We’ll have to change how we think about work

Work is the product, the result, the deliverable; it's not the process. Now, I'm certainly not the first person to say that. That's been discussed off and on for years, but it’s a hard turn for a lot of us.

We’ve had an opportunity to work collaboratively in the same place and space for 40+ hours a week where we knew everyone was going to be around. In the modular future of work, we must proactively think about the solution we need, who needs too contribute to that solution, and how we are going to plug those people in as time and demand, and skill levels require.

That’s especially going to be true if we expect people to work somewhat synchronously, and somewhat asynchronously in a hybrid model, in which collaboration will change day-to-day.

2.0 We’ll have to change how we communicate

The project manager now becomes elevated to drive all the modules or episodes we're stringing together toward a goal. We won’t necessarily have the luxury now of meandering our way toward something with a group of people who all happen to be co-located 40 hours a week.

We have to plan for and communicate more proactively to everybody on the team how that's going to work, and communicate above and around that team to set expectations with other managers or executive leaders, or even with clients and other stakeholders in projects.

We have to be more clear on what we communicate and what methods we use – the remote nature of work calls us to question and align on how we use email, chat, text, video, calls and meetings. My former colleagues at Mindset Digital were right, we also have to button up our writing skills to save everyone time.

How many of us have been in a meeting that starts to meander… and we go through the narrative of beginning, middle and end, instead of thinking about, from the end, what we need, who needs to contribute and how to be efficient with everyone’s time?

3.0 We’ll have to change the way we lead

Leadership is under a microscope right now – the leaders who insist on doing what they’ve always done and working in the “old ways” will find themselves with a lot of turnover as employees point to the success they’ve managed to have this past year and ask why the remote setup can’t continue.

We aren’t calling 2021 “The Great Resignation” for nothing. If people could be more productive with all the extenuating circumstances of 2020 around them, what’s possible when kids go back to school and parents get a break?

4.0 We’ll have to change the way we compensate people

We will need a more creative way to compensate team members, to bring them in on key pieces of business and compensate them based on the value of that module of work they're delivering, the value of getting their initiative across the finish line, and not just based on hours and years of experience.  

It also means thinking creatively about how we potentially compensate people to stick with us, to join us again for the next project. We need to reimagine signing and retention and longevity bonuses. It’s critical to pay people based on performance of the project or deliverable. And it doesn’t stop there: we also have to examine how we incent people along certain criteria that we share and measure from the beginning.

These are the ways we can all contribute and dial into our specific strengths, give something of ourselves and our expertise and our experience in these laser-focused contributions. These have been parents’ preferred ways of working all along.

Employers have never earned the right to have always-on access to their employees’ lives.

I think 2020 told us, in no uncertain terms, that people have other stuff to do.

They have other people to take care of. They have other things to think about. And they have other ways of getting themselves to a place of being able to contribute to work, being able to contribute thought leadership, being able to contribute something that may or may not have been part of a standard job description in the past but may actually be a key way to get that person's best and highest contribution out of them.

Isn’t that what you want for your people, and for yourself? You want everyone on the team (and everyone in the family) to be able to bring their best and highest selves to the moment at hand.

I genuinely hope that 2020 opened up communication channels so people feel an ability to be real with each other, and with their managers, and with their partners, and with their kids, about what needs to happen and what they need so the future of work can become a reality.