The Future of Work 2022

What comes next for the employee experience?

The term “future work” has become a bit buzzy but regardless, investigating how the trends continue to reshape work is critical. As uncertainty stretches on, the necessity of managing the emergent continues. The conversation now needs to move beyond hybrid/in office/remote work to something more fundamental: How do we rethink what makes an organization?

In that context, here are three questions worth exploring as 2022 approaches:

1. Rethinking Culture: How can your organization maintain culture in the “out of office” era?

Who knows when we will (if ever) be comfortably settled into the next iteration of the “office space.” As variants continue to disrupt plans for hybrid work, the question will become less and less about when/if/how the office will reemerge but rather, how does cultural fabric continue to be weaved when there are no clear or common ways for connecting. Executives now need to turn their attention to this complex and fundamental question — and maybe even question what legacy cultural practices no longer serve.

My colleagues (Maxine Jaffit and Terri Soller) and I deep dive into the question of how we need to rethink thinking about culture on the Questioning Work podcast. Two takeaways:

• Culture is now more than ever about both the individual and the collective, and allowing them to coexist, rather than asking the individual to subjugate their individuality in order to be a culture fit is imperative.
• Culture is shaped by purpose. It’s the magnet and there is no other way of bringing people together when working remotely than to coalesce around a purpose that holds the center.

2. The Employee Contract: How is the employer/employee contract reshaping and what does that mean for your ability to hire?

Employees are expressing themselves and they want a new relationship to the organization. The power dynamics are shifting and as the hiring market continues to be constrained, the demands cannot be refused. Employees want more safety, caring, security and a more actualized organization that cares about the existential crises facing society (think climate change).

Now commonly referred to as the Great Resignation, there may be an even more fundamental rethinking of what work means in the lives of an individual. The pandemic has been more like a Great Reawakening, where people are wondering about their lives and how work plays a role. Waking up to new concerns about self and identity often happens in times of upheaval, and this is what we are seeing now. It is not just about more pay or more security, but a demand for organizations to rethink what they are to employees and society alike.

3. The Role of the Manager: How can your organization change the role of the manager to be more fit for the new context (without asking them to do everything)?

In a more flexible environment, an employee’s sense of the collective or the culture is fundamentally shaped by the people they are spending most of the time on Zoom with and that is most likely their peers, rather than a manager. So, unless there is a shift in the manager role to curator and convener and carer, then the role of a manager will become less and less important. Employees want support, not direction- they are fine being masters of their own destiny, and their loyalty is to their own growth over company or boss.

Managers have traditionally been saddled with a lot of expectations — performance management, coaching, belonging, task management, and now, managing remote work environments. It is all a bit too much, if not impossible. Instead of redesigning a manager fundamentals course, it is time to rethink what managers must fundamentally do in the future of work and focus more squarely on where they are essential to the new work environment.

This is a time of great change and with that comes possibility, if we begin to rethink and refresh how we understand the nature of the organization. These three questions can get you started.