Anxiety, Technology and Change Unite the Modern Global Workforce

Turbulence is here to stay and stability is long gone. That’s my overall working assumption.

The five-year plan? Forget it. Five months is more practical. The combination of Covid and ChatGPT has shortened the time horizon against which we work. Trying to lengthen it again, invoking stop–start delays and pushback, as has broadly happened with return-to-office policies, is a management mistake. Iterating, learning, listening, responding: This is the opportunity.

We’re all in a new state of work — I call it “The United State of Work.” The global workforce is more united than at any point in its history: by anxiety, by technology’s proximity and by unease. Managers are wrong-footed by the speed of change and staff is wrong-footed by working life not living up to expectations.

Common challenges are rendering differences narrower. Jobs which were dominated by class and educational disparities are all facing the same headwinds and there’s a blurring of roles within those jobs. We can see this now with fresh eyes. We may not all have 20/20 vision but we all have clarity post 2020 about how things were, how they are and how they can be.

Many workplaces have the same components: elements of construction, marketing, administration and management. Workers are planning, operating, providing, communicating, learning and delivering. People remain at the heart of any operation. The phrase of the moment is “keeping the human in the loop.” Well, it was ever thus.

Focusing less on the differences and more on the similarities will help. Why? Any organization that pulls in the same direction is more successful than the one that doesn’t. We are all united by what we face right now. Not an enemy exactly, but without doubt a very powerful universal competitor who everyone is cheerfully calling “a co-pilot.” This doesn’t quite do justice to what’s happening. From now on, and it’s happening already, every human in every workplace in the world will to some degree have to work alongside a very fast, very shiny new kind of worker who doesn’t need as much sleep, doesn’t need as much hand-holding, doesn’t have feelings that need managing — and is here to stay.

The chatbot, the robot, the programmed software will interpret their keystrokes or their past behavior or monitor how their eyes move on a screen and then provide a response. These are our co-workers, our co-pilots. Everything, everywhere, all at once. We humans have to stick together more and not less as the new technology threatens to remake us, control us or at the least increasingly define us. It’s the human spirit, character and essence that will continue to differentiate us and hold the biggest possibility to make of life and work what we always have had the capacity to do: amazing things. The potential for this now is only increasing.

Notwithstanding the risks of cyberattack, surveillance nightmares, job disruptions, plus, of course, the risk that bad management continues to resist a necessary evolution, the balance for optimism is greater than pessimism. This lesson is explored in another blockbuster movie, Poor Things, which swept the awards boards in 2024. In this adaptation of the 1992 novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray — reminiscent of Frankenstein, the character — the heroine, played by Emma Stone, discovers humanity as a baby does: at exceptional speed. This character, who has been given a baby’s brain as an implant, provides a metaphor for much of what we are learning today: to see the world with fresh eyes, to accept the fundamentals of love and decency and community which bind us, but also to accept as well the advances of science and technology, without which we can’t prosper.

The closing scene, set in an idyllic garden, with both work and rest on beautiful display, is clearly intentional. How we live and how we work — it’s not that different in the end. The lesson of Poor Things is also one that all workers learn who survive in hostile environments: to arm themselves with knowledge and support systems. Having the right skills, networks, mentors, trade unions and well-chosen workplaces is all vital. What is a “well-chosen workplace?” Anywhere that doesn’t trumpet their culture as if it’s a branded slogan, backed up by rigid policies, but instead embodies a culture which responds to the times and keeps it real. A place which operates in person, remotely, hybrid, using the best technology and with the best human psychology, which shows those who work in it, and its consumers, that it’s fair, relevant and open to change.

The optimist in me does see a management culture that’s changing. I do have great faith in people who are attracted to working in “people,” the newly rebranded HR function. I do see HR communities as being a bit like careers in health and social care. Generally speaking they want to help. Generally speaking they get the thin edge of the wedge in terms of support. They are often forced to work within the part of “the system” which is most outdated or most disrupted — often both. But they care. They know that their job matters.

Stick with the “people” people, I say. What of those who call themselves, a little too proudly in my opinion, “leaders?” Well, they need to learn. They need to convey uncertainty as much as conviction. This is not a certain time and respect to the leader who admits this openly. They could start with dusting off some of the most interesting case studies of the last century (start with the Hawthorne effect) because the present and the future always have elements of the past. We need to know and remember the past in order to move forward. In doing so, fresh new case studies from across the world can be created. What are the lessons being learned and how do we access them outside of the ivory tower of academia? We badly need a global dashboard of data — I struggle to find one — which shows what works well in different countries against certain obvious metrics: employment, skills, gender equality, stress and sickness, and productivity being chief among them.

There is much we can learn from the Nordic or Canadian child-care model, or the South Korean R&D model, just as there is much to watch from the connection between flexible working laws and productivity. The UK will be an interesting test case in this. What of America? Will the American work ethic of always-on and always-in ever regain its momentum? I think that Americans love work, they just don’t like working for no benefit: insecure jobs that don’t pay enough to pay the rent. They are becoming more disillusioned faster with their “dream” than in other countries because the American Dream was so tied up with work.

The scales are falling from American eyes and they are hurting. As Johnny Paycheck sang all those years ago, if it isn’t right, take this job and shove it. Beyoncé echoed it years later in Break My Soul. The tools of social media and the post-Covid landscape give workers, especially the “AMaZing” generation, much, much more power now. They can be listened to not only through their pop songs but in their own actions. The soul of the American worker matters. If it has taken a pandemic and a threat to the world order of work to get this message through, then all I can say is: Better late than never.

Plus, you can already see green shoots of change in America. New initiatives to promote new skills, a painful but necessary reckoning that the Ivy League universities have to some degree lost their way and that a degree-only management class trained on the MBA isn’t the only way to develop world-leading brands or services. A $250 million American initiative, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, to prepare high school students to graduate directly into health-care jobs is a good example of fresh approaches.

America matters. It’s the largest economy in the world right now, one of the largest employers in the world outside of its own shores and it created the very fabric so much of the world relies on — from mass transportation to mass production to mass communications and now the latest mass AI. But it’s also because of its art, its culture and its stories. The way we see ourselves and our lives, if we look, has always been a story told predominantly by America. So America’s survival as a great nation of work is important not just to America — but to all of us. We see ourselves in America and we always have.

I’m optimistic that the current dramas around working patterns and working time will calm and settle. At the moment it’s extreme and volatile: Some bosses want everybody back in, some economies want everyone working more and not less. The four-day-week campaign is, for me, a symbol of a time that says: Who we are now are blended selves with work and home lives. Let the tech help not hinder us, whatever that working model is. Wishful thinking, but also a working assumption: Ever since Henry Ford connected his workers with their consumer selves — they worked to earn to consume his products during their leisure time — and ever since the smartphone and the internet embedded the tech we use for work within the tech we use to live — a new system of living and working was inevitable. It took 2020 for this to happen. Times change. And they change suddenly.

When Michael Jackson sang of too much work in Workin’ Day and Night in 1979, it was not that long after he debuted his robot dance. He articulated two of the biggest shifts at work in short order: The fact that humans and machines are becoming more aligned and the tendency to work more is sapping our strength and our souls.

From Charlie Chaplin to Michael Jackson, American 20th century icons used movies and music to move to the beat of work as the central story, exploring how we live and how we work, as souls and as humans working with machines. This timeless truth comforts me as we enter a new era and new opportunities.