Managers Need To Embrace Uncertainty Of New Workplace

Consultants and management gurus are apt to overplay what they like to call “paradigm shifts,” but it is hard to argue with the central premise of Julia Hobsbawm’s new book, Working Assumptions. “The scale of the disruption we’re experiencing now has not been seen in the workplace for a hundred years,” she writes early on. Just how chaotic and unpredictable the world of work has suddenly become since the change in habits accelerated by the pandemic combined with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is demonstrated by how far things have moved on in the just two years since her earlier book, The Nowhere Office. Hobsbawn, who has been writing about and advising on the world of work for many years, was brave enough in that work to suggest — when others were predicting a swift return to normality — that things would not end up back in the same place they started, but she could not have expected either the pace or the extent of the changes that are playing out.

Helpfully, at about the time the book appeared, Hobsbawm began a regular column — under the same title as this new book — and examples appear throughout, illustrating the developments as they happened. Along the way she makes it clear that she believes that managers who even now plead that the shift to more flexible ways of working and the attitudes of younger generations of workers are not conducive to developing culture or improving productivity are wasting their time. The working assumption that you can put the genie of flexibility back into the bottle would prove to be one of the biggest management errors of the post-pandemic economy, she writes.

This is not to say that she thinks this is an easy state of affairs to deal with. “To be fair, hybrid work is hard to handle, and causes a headache for managers precisely because it is not one size fits all,” she writes. Instead, managers will have to make decisions about which jobs can be done flexibility and those for which presenteeism is required.

But, of course, flexible working is not the only issue creating turbulence. Of potentially much greater impact — especially for well-educated knowledge workers — is AI. Describing the advent of ChatGPT as a “game changer” for the world of white-collar workers in a similar way that automation and outsourcing had been to their blue-collar counterparts decades earlier, she says it has “ushered in an identity crisis we are only just beginning to comprehend.”

This is perhaps not so surprising. Already technology has had such a far-reaching effect on what is done in offices in particular that, combined with the prevalence of management speak, many job titles are almost unintelligible to all but those who possess them. If AI is not going to take jobs away so much as change them (as the more optimistic proponents suggest), then this anxiety will only increase. As such, it will only add to the sense of upheaval in the workplace — and the headaches for managers.

Hobsbawm herself is hopeful that these changes will create an “extraordinary opportunity”. This is possibly because — as she relates — she did not attend university and has instead of hoping that a degree would lead to success and status forged a career through networks and taking her chances. But she does believe that leaders and managers are going to have to change their behavior in order to bring out the best in employees who do not perhaps share an approach to work that matches their own. One particular challenge relates to creating what one commercial property expert quoted in the book calls “peak workplace experience” as a way of encouraging workers to return to the commute. Apparently, the role of free coffee in this is not to be underestimated.

More seriously, employers need to realize that making the modern workplace work will require soft skills alongside more technical ones. Just because it is possible to monitor time spent online does not mean that this is the best way of motivating people. Above all, leaders need to respond to this period of uncertainty by accepting it. Indeed, says Hobsbawm, they need to convey uncertainty as much as conviction.

Unlike those proposing a universal basic income, Hobsbawm is convinced that work will remain part of the fabric of society — although “the detail is still up in the air.” We should look forward to her next reports from the front line on what that detail looks like.