[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Sudddhart here, aka the Focus B, and on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness, and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.
[00:41] Katie: Delighted to be with Emily Carter on the show today. Emily is a workplace futurist who's passionate about equal opportunity and designing better systems. Thank you so much for joining the show, Emily. It's fantastic to have you here today.
[00:56] Emily: No worries. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
[00:58] Katie: Such an interesting topic. I'm really excited to discuss this topic because it's something that I feel is relevant for everyone, but also not something that everyone reflects on and that is around the future of work. So I'd love to hear your insights, your philosophy around this topic.
[01:16] Emily: Yeah, definitely. I think you're absolutely right in saying that not everybody reflects on it because especially in the last couple of years, I mean, future of work is something that's always been there. We're always moving towards an unknown future, but people have had to adapt really quickly in a really short period of time. And so the responses have been predominantly reactive rather than strategic. And so you see a lot of debate going back and forth all the time on LinkedIn and on other channels where people are debating about whether you really need offices to build the right kinds of culture or whether the cost benefits or the time savings of commuting kind of outweigh all of that. And those are kind of operational questions, I guess, based on the way that people have changed how they do things in this reactive sort of space. But I think if you stop and you take a step back and you think about, well, what kind of future are we actually building here? If we try and build by strategy rather than in a purely reactive way, then you can really get into it and start to ask some deeper questions about why we're doing what we're doing when we have the freedom to kind of plan by design rather than simply reacting to external forces.
[02:27] Katie: Planning by design, I think, is something that I always find extremely interesting, both in terms of lifestyle and here comes into play, as you mentioned, with the commuting, for instance, but also in general, having that proactive approach to how we want to live and how we want to work, and especially in big companies and groups. You also mentioned offline before we began recording that most people generally think about company culture, but you have different insights into how this can change and what can sort of happen in the future.
[02:59] Emily: Absolutely. I mean, if you think about working, it really is no matter how idealistic you want to be about lifestyle, but working is a big part of our lives. And I mean, when you meet somebody, usually you asked me when we met today what is it exactly that you do? That's usually the first thing that we ask people about themselves to kind of understand or get some sort of reference about what kind of person this person is, what they care about, what their skills are. And it is a really big part of our identities. So even if you think that, oh, well, in an ideal world, or if you follow the kind of four hour work week philosophy, we would all work a lot less because technology or computers could take on a bit of our mundane work and let us have more relaxed lifestyles. But still, most people don't want to sit around and do nothing. They might use that time for volunteering or doing some kind of other work that is less financially rewarding. But most people want to feel like a productive member of society. So I think it is really important that we think about how work fits into society as a whole, if you want to do this kind of forward design type planning instead. And we're at a really interesting point in time right now because this is the first time ever in the whole of human evolution that our technology is enabling us to redistribute populations instead of concentrating them. So we started out as hunter gatherers and then we developed agricultural technology and we moved into little villages and then we developed military technology and those villages got bigger and we built walls around them so that we could be protected in groups. And then we developed industrial technology and more people moved to cities because that's where jobs were. And it was much easier certainly, to get some kind of minimal salary working in a factory rather than being a self provider in this kind of like peasant farming sort of situation. But now technology is actually enabling us to move away again. And there are a lot of factors that have come with or that are interlinked, I suppose, to the kind of situation of people moving to big cities in order to be where the jobs are. One, you have in most large cities, very unsustainably, like high rising costs of living. And that does come up in the future of work conversations to some degree. You have these kind of from a population survival perspective, there's something called a food bowl which is the area around a city and whether the agricultural production of that space can actually sustain its population. So you have now cities with populations which cannot be sustained by their geographic food bowls which requires that we ship food in from longer distances. You have links in long commutes with rising rates of depression. You have loss of biodiversity due to increasing concrete spaces. And from a cultural perspective, you also have this kind of cultural death of small towns which get gutted when large portions of their young populations move away to the big city looking for jobs. So that can be that certain resources get closed down. So for example in the town that I live in now, my husband was born here but the hospital here no longer has a birth center which means that anybody living here now has to travel like quite a distance to be able to give birth because the population shrank so much that they closed down critical services. There are also towns where, for example only the men stay behind because they're working in industrial roles whereas the young women go to university and move to the city to seek other kinds of opportunities. And then you have increasing rates of depression and drug use and suicide among the male populations that are left behind and kind of enter this sort of mental hopelessness. So this kind of social structure of the fact that we have built our societies and these large communal living situations around geographic job location has had a lot of different effects throughout all layers of our society from like physical health to climate and sustainability issues to mental health and everything around those as well as cultural issues. Because if you looked at the world now and you picked the whole population off and had a blank slate you wouldn't put us back on the surface of the Earth the way we are now. You would look at the best life sustaining areas and kind of evenly distribute the population over those spaces. But that's obviously not what happens with organic growth. Like things change incrementally. And we haven't really built in a design sort of thinking way, but now we do have that opportunity to think, well, okay, if we actually redistribute our workforces, then that means that people don't have to like the access to opportunity to earn money, to earn a living, to have kind of hope for your future should not be essentially a geographic privilege. And in many countries where you have immigrants as well, then you have kind of this situation. Or, I mean, not just immigrants, but it could also be locals who are on, like, a lower socioeconomic status where the cost of living has increased so much in cities that they have the choice between essentially living in a city in a ghetto kind of area that they may not want to live in with their families or moving to a small place, which then, if there aren't job opportunities, will trap them into this kind of poverty cycle. So I think it's really important to consider this access to opportunity in certain countries. There's been a big dialogue now around future of work and what remote working means for parents. We here in Sweden have not had so much dialogue around that because in general we have pretty good support systems for working parents, good childcare and the ability to reduce your working hours anyway. But in the english speaking world where care is extremely expensive. This kind of argument about the right to work from home has almost become a gender equality or like a human rights issue for women and for families that need the dual salary to survive. But then you also have other groups, like people with chronic illnesses or long term disabilities that can't handle a five day commute for various reasons, or perhaps people who are carers for elderly parents, not just for children. And all of these people have access to opportunities through remote working that they do not get from a typical nine to five. So if any company is sort of I've been on, this is like a really long monologue. So, you know, I'm really passionate about this topic, but I think it should be a critical point of discussion in terms of what kind of society we want going forwards. And also for any companies that say that diversity, equity and inclusion is like an important issue for them, that they really need to think about how their ways of working policies fit into their values on that. Because the old system in quotation marks was really designed for a very homogeneous workforce, like one worker profile, typically male, with a wife at home taking care of things, one location, one time zone, one set of working hours. And now we're moving into this very heterogeneous landscape where a lot of different people's needs need to be balanced against each other.
[10:14] Katie: Yes, that's such an interesting point. And there's so many questions that come to my mind, and I've reflected on this already, the fact that now there's the possibility to be working from home or to be working remotely, which aren't the same.
[10:28] Emily: Right?
[10:29] Katie: So in both cases, we're not in the office, but in one case, like you said, it might help parents to take care of their child at home, or if they have disabilities, and it's not easy for them to commute, but also the possibility to travel and live anywhere you want. And that does make me think, then aren't there going to be just some places that are just going to have higher attraction in terms of weather, in terms of conditions, or in terms of peace in the country or whatever? And these places with higher attraction, then how will that impact their social economical scale? Right, because if everyone starts to go and work from Italy or Portugal, for instance, that will affect how the economy is there, which will also affect how local people live. So, although I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to work wherever we want and to be able to work from home, I also think this over. Digitalization can have a lot of consequences, both in terms of how we work in time zones, in terms of how it affects socioeconomics of different countries, but also from a belonging perspective, which is a whole other thing. But belonging in the company culture and belonging as a whole.
[11:38] Emily: Right?
[11:38] Katie: If we're just all these sort of digital nomads all over the place, that really breaks us somehow compared to being together in a team.
[11:46] Emily: Yeah, I think digital nomads is another thing, and that's also only a subsection of people. And as you said, working from home and working remotely doesn't necessarily mean the same thing. But I prefer to use the term distributed workforce because it can also mean, for example, that a company that previously would have had an office with 5000 people in one city chooses to have ten offices with 500 people in ten smaller cities. And that means that each of those workforces could have a talent pool that works from that office as their base or in a hybrid situation without having to relocate to one specific major city. And I think something that people don't consider as well is that at the moment we're talking about this access to a remote first future or a distributed workforce. That's kind of something which only touches a certain level of a privileged class of worker. But actually, if you have these remote workforces, it is a positive thing, I believe, for people in other kinds of like frontline workers and people in hospitality and heavy industry and other kinds of positions where they can't work remotely to be able to work in those locations like these smaller industrial towns and still have access to a thriving community around them. Because it's not simply like shrunk down where everybody else that wants to work in more white collar kind of professions has moved to the larger cities. And this is I mean, it's something that you have to see it or you have to experience it. And I never thought about this until I moved to a small place. I'm sorry, I feel bad to say it, but it was something that I was kind of aware of, but I hadn't really thought about it that much. But also, it's not only something we need to think about kind of what sort of systems we're setting up and what sort of frameworks we're designing that can also be extrapolated to other parts of the world. Because the emerging megacities of the world are happening in are being built in emerging markets which are essentially just modeling what has already been done in developed nations and this kind of media. So also, if we develop remote technologies, we have to think like, is this accessible to everybody? Could this be applied in emerging markets as well as here? Or is it being designed for these markets and kind of pricing people out? In which case these megacities which are emerging are going to just kind of repeat this cycle of food bowl issues of biodiversity. Sorry, I've had a complete mental blank here. And also these kind of like poverty line balances. But in terms of how attractive certain areas are to digital nomads, there are people that will be attracted to places as well because of the cost of living or because of a more relaxed pace of life. So I don't think it's only there is a subsection of people that want to move around frequently and want to go to where it's sunny, where it's some other factor that makes it seem as an attractive destination. And I did this, I was a digital nomad for about a year, and it gets tiring. I mean, there are some people that would like to do it for their whole lives, but for other people, it's something they just do for a little while. I know now Portugal has developed a digital nomad village where the whole village is oriented around attracting digital nomads there. But it's something that, again, only appeals to a certain profile. Usually it's younger and single people. There's always exceptions to the rule. But if you have a family, for example, it adds another layer of complexity because then you have to think about schooling, whether you can enroll your children and the kind of housing that's available and that sort of thing. And that's not easy so far. And it's not to say that it won't change so far. Most of the digital nomad services are not targeting that user group or that worker group. So those people tend to maybe go stay in an airbnb for a few months, but then go back and they still have their home base somewhere else. So I think it's more likely that other groups of workers might take if they have the freedom of remote working, they might kind of have extended vacation periods where they will combine weekend tourism with remote working during the week. But I don't see it as being that likely that the entire population will suddenly embrace the digital nomad lifestyle, because it really is an entire other lifestyle, not just a matter of where you're working from.
[16:25] Katie: Yes, it's unlikely that suddenly everyone will be digital nomads. It's true, and it doesn't suit everyone. So I suppose that won't be the biggest of issue because it's such a minority. But what you're saying is that you think there'll be maybe less densely populated cities, big cities, because more people can work from smaller cities. And therefore then the positive outcome would be that there's a bit more culture everywhere and a bit more people, and maybe some places that were slowly dying out or had very little population or less younger people there. Maybe they start to relive a bit. In which case it would be a fantastic thing, of course, because most big know I'm originally from France, and Paris is very densely populated, and most people know that once they graduate, they need a job, they'll get it in Paris, and that's sort of the default. And I think it would be a lot healthier if it's a lot less people there. Paris is great, but not everyone has to work there, and more people everywhere else in France and the possibilities to do that. I'm actually not quite sure why that wasn't the case before because they could still have had offices in different places in know like buildings, plus it would have been cheaper. So I'm actually not quite sure why that wasn't already something before now.
[17:43] Emily: Yeah, I don't have an answer for that, except that I think most people only enact large scale changes if they have to. And the majority of the way that we've built our social and workplace systems have been very organic rather than strategic. So it happens that you have an office here or you feel that you have to start your business in Paris for example, because that's where you're going to have the most contact with partners and suppliers and customers because if everybody is there, then you must also be there. But now we have the opportunity to rethink if that's really necessary and to say, well, okay, if I want access to a broader talent pool but maybe I don't want to be fully remote. Perhaps it would suit me to have, if I'm a very big company, to have these satellite hubs rather than one enormous office hub. And that will open me up to a broader talent pool that doesn't have that pressure of, well, now I must relocate to Paris or Stockholm or London. And then we might also see more opportunities for collaboration between small and medium businesses who could perhaps share a space with non competing companies and then they kind of would create, like, autonomous. Collective is probably not the right voice, but if you imagine, like, a very large company that takes over a whole building, they have all departments, all resources internally. Now, smaller and medium companies don't have that, but you might see a medium sized company that decides to split its offices into several different towns and then they share spaces with other organizations that can kind of complement what they do. So you might have, for example, lawyers and graphic designers and product designers or different kinds of companies with different focuses that share spaces and can also collaborate and almost give themselves kind of collectively the same advantages that a large company with all the resources internally has. These are kind of speculations. They're speculations that are based on trends. But it's really up to every individual company as to sort of think strategically, well, what kind of setup would actually be advantageous to us and why? Rather than simply reacting to that, oh, well, everybody wants to work from home or everybody wants to work in the office or doesn't want to work in the office, but there's really not going to be any one size fits all because there are so many different people. And this is kind of about enabling personalization on a massive scale and also balancing that against the need to work together. So I think that it will become part of companies differentiator into the kind of talent that they attract as well.
[20:32] Katie: Yes, you speak a lot about attracting talent and different talent pools if you're placed in different areas. But this also makes me think about company culture and how can you maintain then a company culture if you have so many hubs in so many different places? Because then there is the risk that they will all build their own little culture which is fine, but then when you belong as a whole as a company, that can cause some complications.
[20:59] Emily: Yeah, and there are discussions about this in terms of the difficulties of maintaining a sort of a company culture collectively when you have people distributed across a space, people who may not necessarily feel connected if they don't see each other face to face very often. I think that what seems to be appearing right now is that one of the strongest things for bringing people together. So by definition, culture is sort of the way we do things around here. If you take away that around here because if you're taking away the kind of the physical location then it just becomes the way we do things. And that will increasingly include ways of working, consideration towards others but also sort of alignment towards mission and values which is something that a lot of companies are already promoting very heavily. Because if people are I mean, there will always be individual differences and those have existed anyway. I mean, even when you had an office culture, there would be certain people that were uncomfortable with what that office culture was. And you see, like, there was some report, and I don't know, off the top of my head, I don't have the link to it. But I know that I wrote a report a couple of weeks ago that was saying that women and people with diverse backgrounds felt much happier working from home because they weren't, for example, submitted to microaggressions in the workforce, which is kind of eye opening and quite sad in a way. So I think I mean, just assuming that a culture was good because it was pervasive in a certain location, there would always have been people that weren't necessarily aligned with that or that. For example, if your company culture is very extroverted and that everybody comes in and goes around and says hello to everybody in the morning, people might see that as a positive indicator of culture. But there might be some people that are actually not comfortable with that, but they feel pressured into doing it because everybody else is doing it. But if you have an alignment towards why you're doing something or what you're doing that collectively this is our output. That's probably a better way of aligning people to have behaviors that are helpful to each other than just a kind of a pervasive pressure to behave a certain way in a certain place. The focus on values and mission alignment has been happening regardless but I think that will become even more central in these kind of distributed workforces because that's a thing that will bind people together regardless of where they are.
[23:34] Katie: In some ways what you're saying is the fact that in some ways, because you're not in the physical office, then other things that are maybe higher, like the mission and the values will have a stronger, maybe impact or as strong an impact on the company culture compared to the day to day behaviors because that is and I can sort of see that though it does bring people together and it is nice to see people face to face, but it also does put an emphasis on things that aren't as important. So, for instance, what you were saying about the company culture being slightly more extroverted and that was the way people acted in the office. That really isn't the end all and be all of a company. But maybe if that's their day to day, maybe if someone in that type of company were to describe their company culture, maybe that would be the first thing that comes to their mind. Whether they like it or they don't is another question but now, if that's not there, then it has to be a strong mission and values because otherwise what are you doing, right? If you're just there working from home on your own thing you need to have something that pulls you towards it. So if it's not just other people that's an interesting perspective because I love offline and seeing people face to face and that's why I work from a co working space. But it's true that yes, focusing more on the mission and the values is a strong aspect of company culture for sure.
[24:56] Emily: Yeah, and that's the driver of why we're doing things and that's kind of a more intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation to engage with the people around you, to place value on those face to face encounters that you do have. Because I don't think it's realistic. The majority of companies will not move to the fully remote, never see each other model. There are some companies that thrive on that and that is part of their value proposition and they attract people that want to work like that. But again, that's only a subsection of the population. And I think this is not a bad thing because we are all different people with different preferences. And I come from a marketing background. So I also see this as like a huge marketing and branding effort. Because if I think, well, I am this sort of person that likes to work this way and see my colleagues, I don't know, one week a month or one week every two months. But mostly I like to work quietly and alone. I don't like to sit in voice meetings. But how do you go out there and find a company with people that work the way you like to work on things that you also care about? And at the moment, or traditionally, it's been very like trial and error. You see a job and you think like, well, that role description kind of sounds like me. And the salary, if you can see it, seems okay. And then you jump into the company and kind of hope for the best. And if it doesn't work well, you stick it out for at least a year because it looks bad if you leave. Even if you hate the culture, even if you hate the way they work, you just has to ride it out. Whereas now, in order to differentiate themselves in this kind of globalizing and less tangible sort of ecosystem, companies are having to promote that like, well, this is what we care about and what we're trying to do in the world and this is how we work. And this all becomes part of their differentiator which will attract the people that like to work in that way. So there are some people that do like to work from home and have no interaction. Again, I think that's like a relatively small, even introverted people mostly like to have interaction sometimes there are people that will want to have a high degree of interaction. There are people who will be quite happy to have like two weeks once a year instead of one day every week. And those people will end up finding each other.
[27:17] Katie: It's true. There's something for everyone out there, right? We don't all fit in the same box. There's something special for each person and it's about finding that right match. I mean, finding the job or the work that is aligned with you is a bit like finding your soulmate, right? In a professional way. I often say, though, when I discovered coaching, I fell in love with coaching because that's what it is. It's finding that right fit and that right match. We're already approaching the end of the podcast. See, I pre warned you it would fly by.
[27:54] Emily: For hours.
[27:55] Katie: What would be your last piece of insight on this topic for people who are listening, who may be curious to understand this better or understand how they can implement it in their life or in their work?
[28:07] Emily: Yeah, I think the key pieces of advice and maybe ties into your kind of focus on focus actually is not to be sucked in by the trends. Like, think about what makes sense for your business, the kind of product you're creating, your customer base, and the kind of candidates that you want to attract and try to design consciously rather than just thinking that, oh, everybody's doing the four day work week or everybody's doing work from home or whatever. Because a lot of what we see is designed to be exclusive because most social media algorithms will reward content that's a little bit polarizing. Because if people start arguing in the comments, then that pushes it up, right? So they. Are very simplistic views that are presented online, usually on purpose, because people will argue. If you go out there and say, like, work from home is the way of the future and that's the only way, and everybody that disagrees with this is wrong, then people will start arguing and the algorithm will reward that. So don't get sucked in by the hype or the trends or any of those articles that say like, this is the way of the future, because there is no one size fits all, and you absolutely have the freedom to design what works best for your organization and your people.
[29:23] Katie: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Emily. This has been a fantastic conversation. Really enjoyed talking about the future of work. Made me think about lots of different topics. So thank you so much for being on the show today.
[29:34] Emily: Yeah, no worries. Thank you for having me.
[29:40] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Bee show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. So let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.