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PD Spotlight
Creating the future of work: three traps to avoid
What comes to mind when you think about the workplace in 2032? Alex Hagan, futurist and course lead on the HRNZ Strategic Workforce Planning course, looks at what to avoid when creating the future of work.
Chances are when you think about the workplace in 2032, you’ll think about things like increasing flexibility, hybrid working, the gig economy and artificial intelligence. And you’d be right – many of the trends that immediately come to mind will dramatically shape the nature of work and workforces in the decade ahead.
Trends are already upon us
Something interesting happens when you reflect on your list of future work trends with a second, related question: ‘Which of these things are already here?’ In doing that, it becomes clear that when we think about the future of work, we often think about things already happening – the now of work.
In my work as a futurist, I find that we often fall into three opportunitylimiting traps when we plan for the future. The first is that we go ‘straight for the bullseye’ when thinking about the future of a domain by thinking only about trends already impacting us.
A broader lens
Trends, by their very nature, are already here. While their challenges might increase in intensity in the future, they are challenges we already face today. Instead, we should look to the periphery of our domain to anticipate some of the more profound potential changes to come. The future of our workforces will be shaped by the future of our organisations, and the future of our organisations will be shaped by demography, economics, policy, the environment, social and cultural change, and technology. It is by looking at these broader domains that we can get a sense of the future, rather than the now, of work.
To do this, we need to look broader. Rather than going straight for the ‘bullseye’ by directly answering the question ‘What is the future of work?’, we need to look at what’s happening in society more broadly and how these events may impact work in the future. After all, even in darts, only amateurs go straight for the bullseye. Professionals play the game differently, often only aiming for the bullseye right at the end.
Multiple mapped options
A second trap we fall into when planning for the future is that we often identify trends but do not explore their implications. Identifying the trends but not their impacts results in very little actionable insight. Take, for example, artificial intelligence. AI is a technology trend that is already present, will continue to reshape work as we know it and could play itself out in many different ways. While we cannot exhaustively and confidently predict all of the impacts of AI on the future of work, we can map multiple possible and plausible futures. Instead, planners often become overwhelmed by uncertainty and, as a result, do not take action.
Good futures thinking does not make predictions about the future but rather explores multiple plausible and possible futures and ‘maps’ how we might navigate things we can’t control but will need to respond to. We need to think further into the future about the high-impact trends where we can’t predict what’s going to happen precisely. Exploring multiple scenarios can help us make informed decisions today, even in times of uncertainty.
Deeper opportunities
The third trap in planning for the future is to have a knee-jerk reaction to trends. Trends can be risks to navigate, but they can also be opportunities to leverage. Remote work is a trend that the literature about the future of work has been describing since the 1960s. The communications technologies many of us have become accustomed to just recently are not new. Skype was created in 2003 and Zoom in 2011, but it took a global pandemic and a government mandate for many businesses to adopt these as mainstream communications tools.
In many cases, knowledge work and its location have now been disintermediated, and telerobotics is likely to expand that change to physical labour. Yet most organisations continue to hire people within commuting distance of our offices and occasionally allow them to work from home. At the same time, we worry about localised skills shortages. Few organisations truly leverage the communications technologies available today to access the world’s best talent, wherever they are. To take full advantage of remote work and trends reshaping work, we need to dive deeper into their root causes and identify the opportunities they offer.
Looking broader, further and deeper, we can truly create, rather than adapt to, the future of work.
Alex Hagan helps organisations to face fundamentally unpredictable futures with confidence through applied foresight, data science, and strategic workforce planning. The author of two books, Thriving in Complexity and What the Hell Do We Do Now?, Alex teaches his strategic workforce planning and workforce analytics masterclasses in New Zealand as part of the HRNZ Professional Development Programme. Bookings can be made on the HRNZ website.
