Redefining the Workplace
The pandemic has upended work around the world. But, is it also a chance to rethink work and make it better? In Episode 10 of Reimagine, I speak to organizational psychologist Adam Grant and former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot discuss the challenges and opportunities of remote work, the gig economy, and the possibilities for improving where we spend more than one third of our adult lives.
Many of the challenges of this pandemic will fade as we develop and distribute vaccines and treatments. But when it comes to our workplaces, I don’t think we’ll ever return to pre-COVID conditions. And that could be a good thing. The pandemic has massively disrupted — and in some cases destroyed — work for countless people around the world. But it’s also shined a light on the inequities and inefficiencies keeping us from becoming a more prosperous and productive society.
So much of what prevents change is fear of the unknown. The pandemic thrust everyone into a new and sometimes uncomfortable work reality. But now that a new way to work is a little less unknown, I hope we can see the benefits of some change and push ourselves to adapt and evolve for the benefit of everyone.
My guests this week on Reimagine, organizational psychologist Adam Grant and former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot, discussed some of the opportunities we have to redefine the workplace.
We’ll start with the elephant in the Zoom room: remote work. No, I don’t think we’re heading for a future of 100% remote work. For one thing, a lot of jobs can’t even be done remotely. But, for those that can, we should take advantage of the virtual tools we’ve all gotten used to over the last few months while still supporting in-person environments. As Adam discusses, not all tasks benefit equally from remote work and a lot of people miss the structure and community of an office. So, in-person spaces will continue. But for a lot of jobs, people will probably go to the office less and benefit from the greater flexibility of more remote work.
This might sound a bit surprising coming from me, since I famously banned remote work at Google. At the time, I thought it made people less productive and reduced the number of chance interactions that spur creativity in an office. But new evidence and new technology may be proving me wrong. Professor Grant, for instance, made the interesting point that data shows “if you were going to do a brainstorming meeting and you had five or six people together in a room, you would have been better off putting them in separate rooms to work alone. You’ll get more ideas and also significantly better ideas on average.” The key, he noted, is to then have systems to evaluate and refine the ideas people come up with independently. That shocked me. But as someone very in favor of data-based decision making, it’s a strong argument that more remote work may not be as detrimental to creativity as some think.
But our technology-enhanced workplaces won’t be effective if we don’t also make work more inclusive and accessible for everyone. COVID has shined a light on inequities that existed before the pandemic, and has made some much worse. By acknowledging and addressing the ways our workplaces systematically undervalue and exclude people, we’ll not only build a more equitable workforce that makes life better for more people — we’ll also build a more productive and innovative business environment that pushes everyone forward.
Part of that work will mean adapting to and embracing new ways of making a living. One of those new ways is via the gig economy. During COVID in particular, this community of workers has stepped up to make everyone’s lives better and many people have found ways to make a living through gig work. But, as more people turn to gig work and more customers demand the sort of direct services the gig economy provides, we need to make sure this system works for everyone working in it. That means treating people fairly for the work they do. Stacy Brown-Philpot, as the CEO of TaskRabbit, has been a major force shaping the gig economy for the better. She told me she thinks within a decade, “the gig economy will be a way of life.” So much so that we won’t even call it a “gig” — it will just be work. If that’s the case, we need to normalize this sort of work and make sure we’re building sustainable compensation systems so that we don’t come out of this pandemic more unequal than when it started.
Adapting to new forms of work and building the systems we need to make that work sustainable won’t be easy. But Adam mentioned an idea that gives me hope as we face a challenging but worthwhile transition: post-traumatic growth. He described it as “a positive alternative to PTSD” in which people come out of a tragedy knowing it was unfortunate and wishing it hadn’t happened, but also feeling they’ve grown and become better because of it. I hope we see that sort of growth as we rebuild better workplaces and a better world post-COVID.
