In Working Assumptions, Julia Hobsbawm examines the impacts of Covid-19 and generative AI on the future of work. Exploring debates around how flexible working impacts productivity, the rising number of managers and how great a threat Generative AI poses to job security, Hobsbawm’s book is a timely and astute examination of change in the workplace, writes Martin C. W. Walker.
What will be the ultimate impact from the Covid-19 era and the emergence of generative AI on the future of work? Management “gurus” and management consultants often have a weakness for making sweeping predictions about the future. Making big statements that either tap into the fear of either missing out on the “next big thing” or play on more general fears about the future is a great way of getting attention. Whether the message is one of fear or optimism, the implicit message from many business books is that you need to pay for the advice of the right guru or consultant. Julia Hobsbawm’s new book Working Assumptions avoids such sweeping predictions. Instead, the author works hard to understand the reality of how things have changed, looking pragmatically towards the future.
Hobsbawm has previously written six books about work and writes for Bloomberg’s “Work Shift” column. Her work is often at the very edge of new trends in work. Her previous book, The Nowhere Office was one of the first to look at the impact of the widespread move to hybrid working and how it led to the questioning of the basic assumptions that underpinned working life. In Working Assumptions she broadens her analysis of the post-Covid world, one that now encompasses the sudden impact of generative AI. The first of the themes she addresses is how the combined impact of a general desire for greater flexibility at work and new technology are changing the fundamental nature of work. Boundaries in work are breaking down, whether between Blue-collar and White-collar roles or work and life. This has provoked heated debate about the impact of flexible work on productivity that reveals differing world views between many employees and employers. It also points to a deeper problem: How do we measure productivity at all? For many professions it’s not a simple task.
Boundaries in work are breaking down, whether between Blue-collar and White-collar roles or work and life.
Another theme is the changing nature of the tasks that make up work and the skills they require. Hobsbawm does not propose we all become “prompt engineers” giving hints to ChatGPT to do our work for us. She also raises doubts about the value of much business education. Is the MBA, the gold standard for management education, genuinely adding value? Surely managers need to prioritise improving their understanding of technology, not to mention critical thinking (she suggested firms introduce a “Chief Critical Officer”). The chapter, “The Commuter Triangle” puts the impact of hybrid working within context of the evolution of “the office” and “the commute” as routine parts of work. While being an advocate of more flexible working conditions, she recognises that employees need to connect in person with their colleagues, need driven by both a desire to get the job done and our social nature as humans.
Hobsbawm points to the existence of toxic workplaces, caused by bad management, long before the Covid era.
The theme of recognising “the human” in both employees and managers is continued in “Culture Clubs and Clashes”, one of the more difficult chapters. Hobsbawm points to the existence of toxic workplaces, caused by bad management, long before the Covid era. Virtual or hybrid working seem to have created even more of a divide between the attitudes of managers and workers, both about the nature of work and arrange of broader cultural issues. She quotes a survey that showed only 12 percent of leaders have full confidence their team is productive while 87 percent of employees claim that they are. Hobsbawm recommends managers spend more time listening to staff. Though this is a fair enough suggestion, decades of work by firms on “employee engagement” seems to have shown little tangible benefit.
A very real problem that Hobsbawm highlights is mental wellbeing. Boundaries between work and personal time were already blurred by email and smart phones before Covid. Now for many people those boundaries seem to have largely disappeared. Hobsbawm’s advocacy of both flexible working and a proper demarcation of work and life are well intentioned, but the two can drive in opposite directions. It is easy to say the focus should be on “Getting the job done” but as acknowledged early in the book, productivity (ie,, how quickly the job is done) is hard to measure for many jobs. The confusion of when people are working or not is not just a problem that can be laid at the door of employers.
In spite of the serious issues laid out in Working Assumptions, the overall conclusion is optimistic. Hybrid working should mean a focus on the real human connections that come from working together in person. She believes new technologies such as ChatGPT should accentuate the “need for the human” in the workforce. Generational cohorts are coming to dominate the work force that are better equipped to work flexibly and adapt to change. She calls this the “AMaZing Generation”, from the Millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alphas.
But rapid workplace change is not a new phenomenon […] automating repetitive tasks such as accounting/bookkeeping out of existence has been talked about for decades
But rapid workplace change is not a new phenomenon. “Nothing is simple anymore. Nothing is stable. The business environment is changing before our eyes, rapidly, radically, perplexingly.” A familiar post-Covid sentiment? James Champy wrote that in 1993 in Reengineering Management. Talking about various iterations of information technology sweeping away managers, automating repetitive tasks such as accounting/bookkeeping out of existence has been talked about for decades, but in fact the data shows an increase in the number of managers. In 2002 there were 14.5 million managers in the United States, 10.6 percent of the workforce. By 2022 there were 20.2 million making up 12.76 percent of the workforce. Business and Finance Operations (the category including accountants and bookkeepers) saw similar growth. All this combined with an explosive growth in the number of those working in computing science from around 2 million to 6 million. Modern economies seem expert at absorbing new technologies without necessarily increasing productivity in the promised areas.
Perhaps what keeps so many of us busy in spite of technological advances is a failure to measure individual productivity
Perhaps what keeps so many of us busy in spite of technological advances is a failure to measure individual productivity – not that measuring productivity is easy in many areas of what are commonly called “knowledge work”. Hobsbawm writes approvingly of many of the innovations Henry Ford introduced to the world of work, such as the five-day working week. The advantage Ford had in applying his changes was that his workers produced a highly standardised product. That made it easy to experiment and see whether changes in working conditions objectively impacted productivity.
The idea that world would be fundamentally changed by Covid was dismissed at the time by the controversial French writer and philosopher Michel Houellebecq: “We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse”. The alternative hypothesis for the lack of interest in work is highlighted in Working Assumptions: cultural clashes in organisations and the increasing unhappiness of many employees could simply be explained by increased home working pushing what Houellebecq called the “obsolescence of human relationships”.
Whether you agree with the specific conclusions of the book or not, it’s hard to disagree with her view about how the last few years have changed the way we think about work. Its philosophy is probably best summed up by this paragraph:
…when the entire world stopped at the same time and restarted under different conditions, things were revealed which couldn’t be unseen, un-felt, unheard. Much of what we do and how we do it isn’t going to change with technology because we will stay the same: we feel things, we corrupt easily but also have moral cores, and these two human states will always have to co-exist.
It can only be hoped the reality of work does not go back to being “unacknowledged”.
