It will comprise a network of entrepreneurs who collaborate dynamically rather than an assembly line of specialists who work linearly.
Simply put, I think full-time employment will likely go the way of the record.
I came to those conclusions within days of launching my own company in 2012 at NYC’s co-working innovation hub called NeueHouse. I was introduced to an ecosystem of fellow entrepreneurs I’d never have encountered if I’d simply leased space in a building and siloed everyone in our own bubble, like nearly everyone else at the time.
Often the lines blur between these things, as they will when you’re in an environment that cultivates fluid connection and collaboration above rigid corporate orthodoxy. What started as one thing quickly became another, as clients became friends, friends became collaborators, and some became all three.
The primary reason this happened is that none of us had any obligations to one another. There was no ladder to climb, no hierarchy to navigate, no conflicts of interest to solve, and no favors to curry. Everyone was on equal footing; each of us had paid our dues to be there, and none of our successes depended on what the others did. All that remained were people to meet, discoveries to be made, and relationships to be forged… by choice.
It was the best workplace I never knew was missing, until I had it.
As my company grew and we reached the point at which it no longer made economic sense to be there, I loathed the idea of potentially returning to the static environment of a single-company office and missing out on one of the very best things I discovered at NeueHouse: that work and play could feel surprisingly similar when our choices were ours alone to make.
I realized that the “office” was not only uninviting; it was a leftover from another era — one in desperate need of reinvention. It dawned on me that the concept of employment itself emerged in that same era — the Industrial Revolution — and that industrial methodologies, too, required a significant rethink.
Most people scoff at the idea that employment is dying. They point out that business is booming, that not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, that there will always be leaders and followers, that job security matters to most, and that for many people, “work isn’t everything”, and they “just want a job”.
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. But it’s not that simple.
There are several forces that conspire to rewrite what work is, and we’re already in the “initial thrust” phase of that particular rocket trip.
Why Work is Changing
Corporations face pressures that demand ever-increasing efficiency, market share capture and profitability. In this paradigm, employees are resources first and people second.
These metrics are an ever-tightening belt that demands continual weight loss. As such, corporations can’t help but streamline or automate the jobs they can, cut costs everywhere possible, and even reconsider full-time employment altogether, with its expensive benefits programs, comp time and absenteeism.
Even before the pandemic super-charged the phenomenon, there was a huge increase over the preceding decade in people working part-time because they wanted to.
The allure of working for a single company full-time is eroding.
A key reason for this is that there’s been a wholesale change in incentive — the “why” of work. Employment is becoming more closely aligned to — and driven by — one’s values. That is, work is decreasingly “work” and increasingly “the means by which we practice what fulfills us”.
“Human flourishing has largely replaced productivity as the modus operandi of work.”Work is increasingly influenced by values, and values are sticky. When given the opportunity, we now live our values at play, at work and with family. We increasingly live in one bucket.
Consider these statistics from the latest World Economic Forum:
1 in 5 employees have quit their jobs or plan to in the next six months
What one does for work is fast becoming a reflection of self. And self is non-transferrable. Values can be shared between people, but how we apply them varies greatly and evolves alongside us. Work has nearly always consisted of some form of give and take — of negotiation and teamwork. However, because the definition of work has grown to more strongly reflect our values, and because we now have powerful toolsets, technologies and collaborators at our disposal, I believe that the future of work will look like a dynamic network in which we assemble for a discrete period of time to achieve a specific outcome, whether out of convenience or better, the alignment of values.
Even more interesting, because all humans are works in progress, evolving internally as our experiences and interests develop while also responding to external changes in demand or opportunity, what we do will become as dynamic as we are.
Besides, it’s more fulfilling that way.
The Future of Work, by the Numbers
Self-directed work is here to stay. Consider the following astounding statistics shared by April Rinne in Flux:
Since 2008, 94% of net new job creation in the United States has been part-time work or self-employment
Rinne provides other statistics that are accelerating this trend:
43% of recent college grads hold jobs that don’t require a college degree
And these stats all preceded the pandemic. Two years later, a global virus has cemented it. Consider that work, by which we define where, to what and when we contribute our energies to earn money, have all changed overnight. Now, nearly no one goes into a workplace. Overnight, our workplaces have become our computers and phones.
These are things we can take with us anywhere. Cue the digital nomad.
Temporary? Likely not. Many of us believe most people will never return to work full time, and a large chunk of those may never return at all. In my own 600-person architecture studio, my partners and I recently gave our employees 3 choices: remote (<1 day/week in the studio), hybrid (2–3 days), or full-time (4–5 days). We decided we would give everyone agency in their own lives. The feedback blew us away. Fewer than 8% of our staff — one in twelve — opted to return “full time”. And most of those were my partners (the owners) who show up for just a portion of each day when we want. 70% chose “hybrid”, while the remaining 22% — one in five — chose never to return.
It is now their choice.
Our Toronto studio, built for 200, rarely has more 5–7 people in it.
It’s game over. Everyone just hasn’t gotten the memo.
The biggest exceptions to this trend are in healthcare, education, construction and retail… for now. And even those fields are in jeopardy of going increasingly virtual, and separately, increasingly technological.
Healthcare
As I wrote in The Rise of the Useless Class, Forbes reports, “There’s no hiding from the robots. Well-trained and experienced doctors will be pushed aside by sophisticated robots that can perform delicate surgeries better and read x-rays more efficiently and accurately to detect cancerous cells that can’t be readily seen by the human eye.” Beyond these, prevention programs like the one my wife is incubating for her hospital are taking healthcare from the hospital to the home, offering increasing amounts of virtual care, which in hindsight seems obvious.
Education
As I wrote in Five Reasons for Serious Optimism Right Now, “We are just at the infancy of a wholesale rewriting of a knowledge-based economy. It’ll likely take the hybrid form of conventional teaching being beta-tested online nearly everywhere, with students across the globe sequestered in their homes as legendary institutions like Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, Cambridge and Stanford open their doors to the public at large, for free, with the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). There are thousands of these, right now, on the Internet.
TED Talks, Rebel Wisdom, and countless other platforms are now supplementing — and will ultimately supplant — the classroom.
The economics of doing so are clear. A class size of 300 paying $75,000 in annual tuition will net an institution the same income as 300,000 globally connected students paying just $75 for the same material without incurring the attendant costs. (Mortgages, utilities, etc.)
Meaning, it’s a hell of a lot more profitable.”
Not to mention, education may, at long last, become democratized.
Construction
The industry is being increasingly moved to the factory, which went robotic ages ago. On-site labor has never been efficient, nor has it been particularly safe. More and more, technology-enabled prefabrication — of components or assemblies — is already replacing manually constructed buildings, in situ. My own architecture firm is pioneering in some of these initiatives. Moreover, robots are moving from the factory to the site. Soon enough, robots will be seen climbing buildings, laying bricks, clipping prefabricated components together, and doing it all much faster, cheaper and safer, with higher-quality outcomes, than how we build buildings today.
A recent episode of Apple TV+’s Home showcases not-for-profit New Story’s collaboration with construction start-up Icon to provide the world’s first 3D-printed homes for the world’s poorest.
The revolution will be televised.
Retail
We all know where this is headed. Apple’s Angela Ahrendts was one of the first to realize tech’s impact on retail. As Chief Marketing Officer, she turned Apple stores into experiences — where one went to play with, learn how to use and troubleshoot their products, wherever they chose to buy what was on offer at the store. Others haven’t been as lucky, or as resilient. In 2020, 12,200 American “bricks and mortar” stores closed due to the pandemic. In 2021, that number is expected to exceed another 10,000.
That’s just the United States.
Meanwhile, Amazon — the online retailer and retail broker — saw its profits soar 220% year over year during the pandemic, with retail contributing 64% and advertising up 77% to that growth. The future of retail is online, giving us yet one more reason to keep eyes glued to a screen. It’s not just Amazon. Global marketing research company GWI reports that online advertising works. Whether sponsored posts or straight-up online ads, 24% of global internet users have clicked on one of these in the past month alone, while 49% of Internet users say they’re likely to buy brands they see advertised.
Final Thoughts
The shifts from employed to independent, office to home, and human to AI are all utterly seismic. Together, they spell out a total rewrite of work as we know it and open the door to transformational creativity for those brave enough to take matters into their own hands and create the future.
Already, a near-majority of the workforce is doing just that. With 94% of all job growth being part-time and freelance growing at 3x the rate of conventional employment, the discussion is now moot.
All of this points toward two things: a future in which individuals are the captains of their own ship, and the overwhelming majority of work will move online to avail itself of the global resource, collaboration and customer network.
We are in the infancy of these things, yet the pace of change is astonishing. Companies that have doubled down on bricks and mortar workplaces without adequate investment in decentralized online platforms will experience increased pressures to compete for people and market share. As a result, power will continue to shift downward and outward, whether through shared ownership of companies with full-time employees or the continued “freelancification” of the workforce.
The question is: what will you do next?
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