The Future of Work 🔮

What work and life will look like in 2040

What’s happening now

Coronavirus brought us a pandemic in 2020. We all know the story. One side-effect is our view on work.

Contemplated by governments, companies, and employees, we’re finally asking questions like how should we work? where should we work? what’s our relationship with work? how and when are we the most productive?

Technology is more democratised than ever before. There’s an abundance of digitalization of products and services. A significant portion of the world has rapidly embrace remote work. It has never been so easy to work from anywhere. So what does this mean?

In this article, I will attempt to make predictions on what the next 20 years would look like for workers in (primarily) the technology industry and beyond. This article is based on my opinion only, and not extensively researched, so take my ideas with a pinch of salt. Here we go.

Connected — Globally

Roughly 4.66 billion people around the world now use the internet — that’s close to 60 percent of the world’s total population. The last 12 months saw a total of 321 million new users (875,000 new users each day) added to the online community on a 7.4 percent growth from the previous year.

For most people, the internet is already an integral part of our lives. In 2040, this will be a basic necessity for at least 90% of the population. Governments will prioritise connectivity, as a core infrastructure needs, such as transportation, healthcare, education, and so on.

A social and economic theorist, Jeremy Rifkin, predicts A Third Industrial Revolution with the convergence of three pivotal technologies: an ultra-fast 5G communication internet, a renewable energy internet, and a driverless mobility internet, all connected to the Internet of Things embedded across society and the environment. This 21st-century smart digital infrastructure is giving rise to a radical new sharing economy that is transforming the way we manage, power, move economic life, and ultimately, the way we work.

Office — Where we work

The shift of tech companies like Twitter, Slack, Shopify, the list goes on, offering fully remote work. However, the office won’t be a thing of the past. What will be, is our relationship with our 9–5 cubical.

Globalisation means schedules will differ for different employees and going to the office will be based on things like which markets are you serving, which time zone makes the most sense for collaboration, personal routines & productivity hours, and so on.

Employees won’t be required to work permanently on-site, but instead, companies will have smaller hubs in major locations to attract potential talent. Having an office in your city will be more of a perk than a necessity. Offices will be a voluntary place of work and will be more of a creative space for people to communicate, connect, and cooperate.

Gone are the days of companies like Apple spending $5 billion on their Spaceship offices. To cut down operating costs, tech giants like Google offer their campus services: daycare, catered lunches, gyms, auditoriums, coworking spaces, to the public — benefitting the local community. This could help them build better brand loyalty and increase the perception of being socially responsible.

Community and cities — Where we live

Smaller cities and towns will thrive as workers move away from large and expensive cities. Perhaps near the beach? Maybe a with a view of the mountains? Perfect weather anyone?

This leads to new businesses in the local area and entrepreneurship will boom to cater to the local community. Some tech workers opting to forgo their current jobs and run a small business instead.

Large cities will still be attractive, however, mixed-used neighbours become the norm and eradicate the central business districts. Urbanisation stabilizes and instead of more people in Megacities and Large (5 to 10+ million people), we’ll see a rise of Mid and Regional-size (500k to 5 million) cities.

Employers, employees, co-workers — How we work

The Gig Economy will overtake the current tradition of the permanent workforce. Gig workers (independent contractors) is the preferred choice for most people.

It’s likely that future generations in the workforce have never worked from a permanent office — digital nomads are the majority of tech workers.

Overall productivity rises as tech workers work on according to their own schedule, time, place, way.

The flexibility with schedules means people spend more time doing things they want, i.e. spending time with their families, hobbies, etc. Leisure expenditure increases.

Sabbaticals (every few years) are a norm and retirement ages increase to 70. —overall happiness rises.

Resumes are wildly different with more people having multiple jobs that don’t necessarily align with their main profession. The average tech worker has more revenue streams and skillsets, i.e. photography and coding.

Gig workers treat the cloud storage of their data akin to paying for the water bill — an essential utility.

We’ll be working in smaller groups — creative individuals setting out to do quests and missions, then resting — similar to movie productions, it will be a contract-based system.

Chief People Office becomes one of the most important roles —a new role exists called “internal relationship manager” who work with employees to improve peer to peer and department to department relationship through promoting culture and collaboration.

Companies — Lateral networks

In 1982, the richest companies average workforce size was 477k, in 2018, it’s only 192k. The shift will be more fluid in size because of the atomization through the Gig Economy. Building a vast network of capabilities (similar to today’s Nike and Apple), and dedicate more resources on core business competencies, in this case: research, development, marketing, and design.

Companies official size will shrink even further to only core operational teams. Smaller, happier teams, with more real human connections, fewer rules to operate under, more flexible, more creative, people wearing more hats.

Paradoxically, companies of the future are lateral networks that could scale and become the size of the Manhattan Project, 120,000 Americans working on a single goal. The difference is the reduce cost of doing so. A game-changer for non-profit organisations and causes — imagine 10 million engineers working 1 hour a week on the climate change problem.

Companies will be obsessed with big data and measuring people success, not just through revenue per employee, but adopt something akin to the happiness index (similar to Bhutan’s gross national happiness metric). These will be benchmarks for the best workplaces in the world:

• Psychological Well-Being: optimism, senses of purpose and of accomplishment
• Health: energy level and ability to perform everyday activities
• Time Balance: enjoyment, feeling rushed, and sense of leisure
• Community: sense of belonging, volunteerism, and sense of safety
• Social Support: satisfaction with co-workers, feeling cared for, and feeling lonely
• Education, Arts, and Culture: access to cultural and educational events and diversity
• Environment: access to nature, pollution, and conservation
• Governance: trust in leadership, sense of bureaucracy, and competency
• Material Well-Being: financial security and meeting basic needs
• Work: compensation, autonomy, and productivity

Source: Walden University’s Happiness Index Methodology & Happiness Alliance

The hiring process will look radically different. It’ll be referral-based (either through people or platforms), trial contracts, project bidding, gamification, transparent negotiations and process, automated candidate filtering, a person’s digital footprint will be taken into considerations, interviews will be recorded, more standardized measures for skillsets and relocation becomes rare.

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) will become one of the world’s leading technology firms as workforces use more tools, with the need to be more collaborative, and connected than ever before.

Every company will be further automated to become more lean and efficient thus a fluffy of small niche business will give birth to thousands of opportunities new jobs in co-botics: managing systems, diagnosis, and so on.

Human-machine collaboration is at its all-time high and there’s essentially nothing that we do is without some sort of assistance with AI.

Tools — Remote-first

As we get further apart, in terms of face to face interactions at work, the feeling of connectedness becomes more important.

AR and VR will help to simulate the physical world and tools, from being face to face with your coworkers to sketching ideas on a whiteboard. This will all be scientific facts, not fiction.

Digital tools are more human. Through the use of our voice and language, precise contextual reminders (better parameters than the current time and location), assistance with more complex tasks, built-in behavioural and emotional analysis to predict what we want, when we want it.

In the developed world, wide adoption of domestic robots and digital assistants to help us with our most basic jobs at home, from cleaning, washing, to cooking, and making a cup of coffee.

The company you work for, or with, will have virtual hangout spaces by default. Employees will log into a system and be presented with tools from communication to payroll. These are either integrated, or proprietary, and free to use for all employees — 95% of them will be on the cloud and accessible with just one click. An intranet for work and play.

Using an AI personal assistant is a norm for most tech workers. She will be your most useful friend. She’ll learn everything based on your interactions with her. Recommendations are immediate without us asking Alexa, Siri, or Google.

And the big one! What replaces the mobile phone? A more natural way of interfacing with the machines. Most likely it will be a hybrid of virtual, physical, with both voice and touch, shapeshifting buttons, screens, and interfaces based on context. Imagine AirPods one minute, an iPad the next.

Driverless electric vehicles will dominate traffic and overall car ownership will decrease by 80%. Car accidents decrease from 1.35 million people in 2020 to just under 10,000 in 2040.

Education

Education with a pedagogic approach: Constructivist, Collaborative, Integrative, Reflective and Inquiry-Based.

Learning becomes more practical. A huge emphasis on vocation for all jobs.

Companies and universities will have a revenue-sharing model. Studying for your degree and real-world work will be integrated in such a way that you fall naturally into a job. University products and services will diversify offerings with shorter training programs.

Human capital management is taught in all business schools and companies. Self-managing regarded as an essential skill for employers.

Sciences (behavioural and others) will be preferred over Creative degrees when employers look for Product (and UX) designers. Emotional design is a fully matured specialization in UX.

We are moving from Ownership to Access. From Markets to Networks. From Consumerism to Sustainability.

The next trillion-dollar company will be in Education, Healthcare, Climate Change, or AI. These are the biggest industries to disrupt.

What new jobs will exist in the world of tomorrow?

Before you go

👏 10 Clap if you enjoyed this article — lets me know if I should write more
😬 Comment and tell me how you envision the future of work
🙂 Follow me to get updates on my latest article

📺 Subscribe to my YouTube for silly videos
📸 Follow me on Instagram for UX tips and tricks

📥 Email chr.s@hey.com if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions.

Chris is a self-taught product design leader, facilitator, and creator with a business degree. He’s passionate about org culture, design education, and everything UX. Formerly @ TINYpulse, Wizeline, and Ascend, where he held design leadership positions.

Want to work with Chris? Get in touch via his portfolio.