Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The 10 Ways to Know Whether Your Job is Meaningful

In my book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, I made the point that the formula for the traditional deal at work is as follows:

I work... to earn money... which I use... to consume stuff... which makes me happy.

I suggested that this deal is not a sufficient description of what work can and should be. Instead I put forward the following future-focused deal at work:

I work... to gain productive experiences... that are the basis... of my happiness.

But this begs the question – what exactly is a meaningful productive experience, and how do you know when your work is meaningful? So here are the 10 questions to ask yourself to establish whether your work is meaningful.

1. Do you use the majority of the knowledge you have on a daily basis?
   ...because meaningful work provides an opportunity for you to keep your knowledge fresh by using it constantly.
   
   
2. Do you feel intellectually stretched in your work?
   ...because meaningful work both uses the knowledge you have and pushes the boundaries of what you can become.
   
   
3. Are you able to learn something new at least once a week?
   ...because meaningful work creates constant opportunity for learning.
   
   
4. In your view are your colleagues at work knowledgeable and do you learn from them constantly?
   ...because meaningful work is also about the colleagues who come with it, and your learning and development comes primarily through learning from others: what I have called ‘The Posse’.
   
   
5. Are the tasks you do at work interesting and complex?
   ...because at the heart of meaningful work are the day-to-day tasks that you do.
   
   
6. Do you get lots of feedback about how you are doing?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to grow, and feedback from others is a crucial part of this.
   
   
7. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on the business?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to make a clear link in your mind between the tasks you perform and the broader goals of the business.
   
   
8. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on society?
   ...because meaningful work is made up of tasks that you believe do good and, as a consequence, make you feel good about yourself.
   
   
9. In your daily work, do you have the opportunity to reach out to develop networks with people very different from yourself?
   ...because meaningful work creates opportunities for you to develop the ‘Big Ideas Crowd’ that is so crucial to developing your innovative and creative capacity.
   
   
10. Does your work give you time to really develop deep regenerative relationships with people inside and outside of your organisation?
    ...because meaningful work creates time and space for you to develop emotionally.

So where are you on meaningful work?

Score 8-10
Through your active choices, or sheer luck, you are working in a meaningful way. Cherish the opportunities this provides and don’t compromise in the future.

Score 5-7
Some aspects of your work are meaningful. Take a closer look at those you have said no to and search for the underlying patterns. Is it possible to focus on developing these areas?

Score 1-4
Your job lacks meaning – you already know that! The question is – what are you going to do about it?

This is my take on meaning at work – are there any areas you would add?

It's Education, Stupid

It’s that time of year when I spend much of my time reading the books that have been nominated for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. It’s a judging duty that is both a pleasure and a pain. The pain is the sheer amount of time it takes to wade through thousands of pages.  The pleasure is reading books that would not necessarily cross my path. This year, as with the last, many of these books are written by economists and, understandably, focus on the state of the world economy. It is interesting to read how many agree that education and training are crucial to long-term economic success, for individuals, companies and countries. I made a similar argument in my most recent book The Shift, focusing in particular on the types of education and training that create specialization. Here are the two reasons why it has never been so critical to become educated:

• Rampaging connectivity - will see at least five billion people around the world using some form of mobile device to download information, access knowledge and coach and teach each other. Some will have the intellectual capacity and motivation to really make something of this extraordinary opportunity, wherever they happen to be born. These people will want to join the global talent pool and, if possible, migrate to creative and vibrant cities. By doing so, this vast crowd of talented people will increasingly compete with each other, continuously upping the stakes for what it takes to succeed.

• The technological revolution - brought mobile devices to billions, and is now transforming how work gets done. Robots are taking the place of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, while business analytics, modelling and collaborative technologies are taking away much of what has traditionally been the role of the middle manager. However, while technology may be replacing the mechanical aspects of work, it is not replacing the more complex, skilled work that involves creativity and innovation. That’s the high value piece that remains, and it is once that requires education and training. 

As high quality education becomes more of a premium, we can expect the sector to begin to transform itself even more rapidly. Just what this transformation will look like is difficult to predict with accuracy. But here are two emerging trends that I believe will shape it over the coming decades:

The Gutenberg Project: the race is on to digitalise many of the books and articles of the world, while the professors of academic institutions such as MIT are making their key lectures available on the web. Combined with hyper connectivity and the potentially global reach of the Cloud, this means that knowledge and wisdom will be available to anyone with access to the Internet. This could see the development of new ways of educating that leapfrog those of normal educational institutions, creating more fluid, virtual and vibrant networks of learning. 

Virtual Schools and Universities: there has been a great deal of research over the last decade focusing on how people learn. This has looked at e-learning, face-to-face teaching and over-the-phone coaching. What has become clear is that none of these on their own are the best; it’s the combination of all three that has the greatest impact. This is important for educational strategies since at least two of these processes are virtual, and F2F can largely be substituted by video conferencing. I saw the speed of this transformation recently when I visited UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Its sleek headquarters are the hub of a virtual university that has 60,000 students (and growing) taught by a faculty of over 3,000 virtual educators. Using simulations, games and collaborative environments, the institution is building deep expertise in supporting education across the world.

Some have argued that, of all the institutional forms, education has changed least over the past few decades. It looks as if the need for deeper knowledge and rapid advances in learning technologies may change all that.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Last week in New York I was astounded to hear a business head from one of the multinationals, who - just off the flight from Shanghai – remarked that in her business right now, turnover rates for young people is approaching 80%.

Imagine for a moment the consequences of 80% turnover – constant recruitment and induction combined with massive overwork as others (called appropriately ‘the survivors’)  catch up on the work that those that have just walked out should have done. And that’s not even taking into consideration the longer-term impact on succession planning and leadership development, or indeed the possibilities of hanging onto intellectual property or signature processes. 

‘Ahh’…I said ‘I guess they are moving for higher salaries’ . That would fit with my own expectations of the over heating Chinese labour market when it comes to the talented young.  But, I was wrong. Instead, she had discovered that people had not left the firm for a higher salary ….they had simply left with no other job offer in their hand. Moreover, they had every intention of staying out of the labour market until something better (more interesting, less stressful and more developmental) came up. 

What we are seeing here is an unintended consequence of something completely different from the anticipated end-result. In this case, the end–result of hyper mobility of talented young people in cities such as Shanghai, is in part an unintended consequence, so my Chinese colleague told me, of the one child per family rule. In the larger Chinese families of the past, it would be impossible for parents to financially support their working age children through their 20’s and 30’s. But in one child families, with more resources focused on the single child - parents appear to be willing and indeed able to step into the economic breach. 

Last week I talked about the acceleration of some of the trends we are watching – I highlighted the situation in Egypt, where the interface between technological developments, rising mobile connectivity, rapidly changing societal norms and the emergence of a new generation of thinkers – together have created enormous energy and volition. 

But as we can see in the emerging mobility of talented Chinese youth – sometimes these events arise from much less understandable paths. 

Scholars of complexity theory have often drawn attention to the limits of rational prediction when it comes to imagining how a system will actually work. They have also shown that it is often these unintended consequences that create some of the chaos that can be such an important feature of a complex system in motion.

And that’s very much the case as we think about the future of work. Yes, we can follow, as indeed we are, the trends we believe will change the face of work. And we can even begin to imagine how these trends will intersect and work with each other to create a vast array of possible outcomes and scenarios. However, what is much more difficult to predict- and for which we need to be particularly observant and sensitive – are the unintended consequences, which through their very nature are less amenable to rational prediction.

So, lets take a closer look at these as they emerge – for, as my acquaintance in China has found – it could be that unintentional consequences frame the future with even more power, than the trends we are observing so diligently.