Key Trends In The Future Of Work 2024-2025: Inspiring A Better & Brighter Workplace

Key Trends In The Future Of Work

The way we work is undergoing a profound sea change, comparable in magnitude to the shift from farming to factories. This shift is transforming lives, livelihoods, nations, and the planet itself.

For example:

• 94% of workers say they perform tasks that AI or robots could do, and 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one function.
• 40% of employees say their job negatively impacts their happiness, and 90% would take a lifetime pay cut for ‘above average’ happiness
• 93% of senior leaders acknowledge that their organizations are not effectively building leaders and an additional 90% state that leadership development fails to achieve concrete business results or clear impact
• 80% of people want location flexibility, but 94% of people want schedule flexibility
• It’s estimated that excessive meetings cost $37 billion a year in the USA alone
• Companies with a high percentage of women and minorities in their top teams are 25% more likely to have above-average profitability
• The No.1 reason to stay at a company is due to “finding meaning at work”
• 60% of female hybrid workers felt they had been excluded from meetings and 50% are worried that they do not get the exposure to leaders necessary for career progression if they work remotely
• In one experiment, 75% of grads preferred unpaid internship at purpose-driven non-profit vs. paid work at Fortune 500
• 1/3 of the global population was born after 2001 and they’re the most educated and progressive in human history
• ‘Real wages’ for non-managers are not much more than they were in the early 1970s
• Fewer than one in six (16%) employees say that they feel that their mental health is very well supported at work, despite 81% wanting their employers to give them help with their mental wellbeing
• Workers across 31 markets said that they were “craving” more in-person time with their teams and 37% of the global workforce complained that their companies were “asking too much of them” when out of the office
• Major depressive disorder in the United States costs workplaces about $100 billion due to absenteeism and presenteeism (being physically at work but not at full productivity)

How does a leader and people manager navigate these realities?

Analyzing The Key Tensions In The Future Of Work

Changing needs, as well as existential anxieties about everything from loss of meaning to loss of livelihoods, are creating an era of profound turbulence and turmoil in the workplace, with issues bursting out into society as a result.

Tensions are everywhere, cracks are appearing, and schisms are growing. By understanding where the contested realities are causing the most conflict, leaders can make the choices they need to lead to the Future Of Work they envision.

While some expound the benefits of a 4-day work week—stating it can cut staff turnover by c.40% and improve mental health and motivation—others are scrapping their experiments after staff complain. While in some countries, like Germany, 1 in 10 companies offer a 4-day work week, Greece has just bucked the trend by legislating a 6-day week to drive growth, generating civic discontent as a result.

Inflexible Return-to-Office-mandates that increase oversight but risk losing top talent vs. permanent remote or hybrid working, including proactively employing “Digital Nomads.”

A boom in union energy at major brands like Starbucks, REI, and Trader Joe’s vs. attempts at banning, blocking, and “crushing” organized labor completely.

Belief in business purpose and social impact to engage and motivate younger generations vs. attacks on so-called “woke capitalism” as anti-democratic and wrong-headed.

Redoubling of DE&I efforts to unlock organizational strengths vs. claims that DE&I is dead!

At the core of everyone’s unease is the very real prospect of AI and automation replacing us all. And I mean white-collar workers as much as blue, brown, or pink.

The Top 3 Challenges of Building A Coherent & Future-Positive Workplace Culture

This means that the Future of Work is highly contested. It could go in either direction, back towards a time of more control and hirerahcy or forward to a period of distributed creativity collaborative innovation.

To understand where you can start, you need to think about these 3 challenges:

1. Industrial Age working practices, focused on efficiency and profit at the expense of creativity and connection, are failing to solve for the challenges that you and your people must deal with today.
2. Your workforce, spanning four generations, has diverse needs, leading to growing tensions between generations as workers grapple with the loss of status, respect, and earnings. Younger people may value purposeful work contributing to society, yet all generations want to improve their skills and balance work/life calibrations.
3. Workers have to not only deal with the threat of being replaced by an AI, but also existential concerns about climate change, inequality, layoffs, living… as well as stress from poor management, excessive workloads, competing demands, micro-stresses, mental health issues, lack of safety, and, of course, endless meetings.

Leading Towards A Better Future Of Work

Having run my own organization as a hybrid for over a decade, and helped scores of Fortune 500 improve their work places and working cultures, I have long been committed to inventing a better future of work.

In fact, my first start-up, a fast-growing innovation agency and accelerator, was conceived to unlock the power of all its people, and we invented many processes and practices for high performance and creativity.

Going deep into the science of work as well as collecting what works from across the world of work, we have put together a comprehensive framework for designing a future of work that is a win for employees, a win for employers, and a win for our world.

The framework seeks the “highest common factor” of needs and motivations shared by the most number of workers, meaning you don’t need to design for different cohorts or generations but for all. The framework consists of the 5ms of a healthy and energized workplace: meaning and purpose, mastery and autonomy, membership and belonging, majesty and dignity/safety. The 5th M is money.

The 5Ms In Detail

While every organization is different and must find its own future of work to fit its context, I believe each organization needs to address the 5Ms proactively, consciously, and publically:

Meaning: The organization has a genuine purpose—a compelling service to society and/or the planet—and that the organization is on an authentic journey to live that purpose. It also means that each role is also thoughtfully framed as meaningful and  valuable to the whole, no matter its place in the hierarchy.

Mastery: Rather than disempowering, fake delegating, and hierarchical cultures, people managers and senior leaders believe in the potential of their staff and the motivation of developing mastery in their jobs, so they go out of their way to give all employees clear agency and autonomy (within safe boundaries and clear guardrails).

Membership: There is a sense of care, safety, and belonging in the workplace and within each team—which many speak of as “in-it-togetherness”—without having to salute the flag or become part of a corporate cult. Thoughtful care is taken to ensure that workers can build their wellbeing and resilience so they don’t get overwhelmed or burnt out.

Majesty: Employees are afforded dignity, where not being groped at a work party is a right not a privilege—and employees are honored for effort as well as outcomes, and regularly. Workers are valued equally for their shared humanity although their worth to the business is different depending on roles and capabilities.

Money: Workers are paid fairly for the work done and for the context within which it is done—making adjustments for family responsibilities, location, safety, convenience etc. Benefits do not come at the cost of being abkle to afford the cost of living.

In our Future of Work design programs—which we also run within our full-spectrum transformational leadership programs as practical fieldwork projects—we help leaders, HR business partners, and OD experts engage with each M within the context of their specific organization, understand how it could work with the other 4, run experiments and prototypes rapidly to explore possibilities for impact, and develop roadmaps for implementation across the organization.

My Keynotes On The Future Of Work

With a decade of experience running my own hybrid organizations and assisting Fortune 500s in enhancing their workplaces and leadership models, I am committed to inventing a better future of work and leadership. I love to share my ideas on the Future Of work as a professional and global mainstage keynote speaker.

In my specific Future of Work keynotes, I usually share some or all of:

• Why each generation is different in terms of needs, attitudes, and motivations
• How to balance meaning and fulfillment with efficiency and accountability
• How to build a safer, more supportive, and more sustainable working culture from the bottom up as well as top-down
• How to go beyond diversity to embrace dignity and be meaningfully inclusive and still meritocratic
• Ways to shorten and cut out unnecessary meetings to claw back time for strategy and breakthroughs
• How to build an awesome culture without becoming a cult and how to embrace new technologies without losing our humanity
• What practices and procedures can unlock each of the 4Ms and how to use the 4M framework to envision a better future of work for and organization

As a leadership futurist, rather than a typical one, I engage and inspire audiences not only with what is probable and possible in the future, but also how to shift mindsets and behaviors to forge the future you want to see.

If you’d like to explore working with us with a keynote or full design program, don’t hesitate to reach out.

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