The Future Of Work has always been a popular topic on this podcast; however, it is also a topic that needs some serious recalibration in light of the events of 2020. Remote working, flexible working and automation are just three of many areas that have seen an utterly unpredicted acceleration in the last few months. So what does the future of work now look like and how should talent acquisition leaders be preparing for it?
My guest this week is Jeff Wald, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of WorkMarket. Jeff has recently published a brilliant book on the future of work which is based on historical analysis and robust data. I have to say that this is one of my favourite ever conservations that I had on this topic. It’s a must-listen.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Why Jeff wrote his book
▪ How to learn from past historical shifts in work and jobs
▪ Fluid always-on work from anywhere jobs and the pressures that come with them.
▪ Remote work versus flexible work
▪ What is an agile corporation?
▪ Technology, automation and the future of jobs
▪ What do talent acquisition leaders need to be doing right now?
▪ The Future Of Work Prize
▪ What does the near term future of work look like
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI delivers the talent Intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into into a competitive advantage.
Matt Alder [00:00:47]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 321 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The future of work has always been a popular topic on this podcast. However, it’s also a topic that needs some serious recalibration in light of the events of 2020. Remote working, flexible working, and automation are just three of the many areas that have seen an utterly unpredicted acceleration in the last few months. So what does the future of work now look like and how should talent acquisition leaders be preparing for? My guest this week is Jeff Wald, serial entrepreneur and co founder of WorkMarket. Jeff has recently published a brilliant book on the future of work, which is based on historical analysis and robust contemporary data. I have to say that this is one of my favorite ever conversations that I’ve had on this topic and it’s absolutely a must listen. Hi Geoff, and welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Wald [00:01:51]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:52]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Jeff Wald [00:01:58]:
Sure. My name is Jeff Wald. I founded a number of technology companies. The most recent is a company called Work Market, which we raised about 70 million in venture and sold the company to ADP about two and a half years ago. In that time I wrote a book on the future of work called the End of Rise of On Demand Workers and Agile Corporations.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
Now there are lots of things in the title of that book book that I know will be of great interest to the audience. Could you give us an overview of what the book’s about, maybe to start with?
Jeff Wald [00:02:30]:
Well, I’ll tell you this, Matt. The book is at its core about a journey of frustration for me, of people making predictions on the future of work that don’t ground themselves in the history of work, in the data, in the world of work, and in how companies actually find and engage and manage workers. And so that’s kind of what the book is about. Now that said, we look at the history of work, the three industrial revolutions that have occurred, mechanization, electrification and computerization, and we try to draw what lessons we can from how companies, workers and society came together to address this huge change in technology. Because it has a very big implication as we think about robots and AI and how companies, workers and society are going to adapt to that change. And so that was a very important thrust of the book. And when I wrote End of Jobs, it was not the end of jobs because I think robots are going to take all the jobs. Do not think that at all. It was the end of the nine to five, one office, one manager job. Moving to the fluid team based always on work from anywhere job and the rise of on demand workers and agile corporations is not to say that we’re all going to be Uber drivers, but it is to say that the tenants that the pressure that the Uber driver faces around data driven hr, around personal responsibility for their training development, healthcare retirement, around task based work, around algorithms allocating work, all of those things are permeating the full time workforce, making all workers in a sense on demand workers now.
Matt Alder [00:04:10]:
I mean that’s certainly something that we’ve seen accelerate this year. I know that lots of people that I, I talk to in talent acquisition are looking at their talent and where it comes from and how they acquire it. And the work from anywhere thing has literally just sort of been thrust upon us by what’s been happening with the pandemic. How did these trends play out in the shorter term in the next couple of years? I mean, how, how do we develop from. From where we are right now? Is the, is the future of work here or is there a journey still to go on?
Jeff Wald [00:04:43]:
Well, I will say this. Whenever people say, oh, the future of work is now, I’m always like, maybe. I mean, maybe we don’t have the data to say that, oh well, now companies are going to use more robots. Are all companies now going to go on demand labor? Maybe we haven’t seen that yet. It intuitively has some logic to it. But until we start seeing data patterns about how companies are actually allocating their capital expenditures, maybe they’re going to buy more robots, maybe they won’t. Until we see how companies actually start changing hiring and talent policies, maybe they’ll engage more on demand labor, maybe they won’t. But to your point, the one thing that we do know that we have a lot of data on is remote work and a massive, massive increase in the number of people working remote and importantly the number of people with flexible work arrangements, because those are two very different things.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
And how do they develop over the next sort of two years?
Jeff Wald [00:05:39]:
So here’s what we know. Shocking. Nobody I’m going to start with some history and some data. So 10 years ago, the remote workforce was about 1 1/2% of the workforce in the United States and in Europe. And it grew rapidly, Matt. I mean, it grew 100%, which is very rare in labor statistics. You don’t see labor statistics grow that quickly. It doubled over a 10 year period to 3%. Now it doubled because we had a whole host of new technologies that everyone is now familiar with. The zooms of the world, the WebExs, the Microsoft Teams, the slacks, the asanas, and other project management softwares that enable remote work all came on stream and they enabled more people to do it. But we had two big impediments. We had antiquated mindsets and we had a lack of policies, procedures and infrastructures at companies to enable remote work. And so if we had had this conversation a year ago, I would have said, yeah, remote work doubled, but over the next 10 years it probably grows another 33%, probably goes from 3% to 4%. At the height of the pandemic, industrialized company countries saw about 40% of their workforce working remotely. And definitions are important here. Remote work means more than 50% of the time you are not in that office. So huge increases because mindsets had to change in March of 2020. Policies, procedures and infrastructure had to change in March of 2020. And you’re not putting that genie back in the bottle. But when people say, oh, well, now it’ll be 30% remote work, no, when you look at the data of what executives say about what workers say, it’s probably going to be around 8% of workers that will work in a remote work context. Again, remembering that remote work is more than 50%, but flexible work arrangements, the survey data and everything that we have seen indicates about 32 to 33% of workforces will have flexible work arrangements. And that has very big implications for people in talent acquisition and talent management because it is a very different context in which your teams will work and it opens up entirely new talent pools for people to recruit from.
Matt Alder [00:07:58]:
You talk about agile corporations and you know, earlier in the conversation you were talking about, you know, the processes that were in place and how they’ve had to change sort of very quickly this year to accommodate what’s going to happen. What do you envisage when you say agile corporation in terms of the way that employers behave in the future?
Jeff Wald [00:08:21]:
Well, when we think about why we have these things called companies, why do they exist? They exist because the concentration of resources can create productivity increases that allow us to have goods more widely and more cheaply. But what is the ideal structure of a company? The ideal structure of a company is to have as many costs, as variable costs as possible. And labor is most companies by far largest costs than it is predominantly a fixed cost. And so companies have been thinking since time immemorial, have been thinking about ways to variableize that labor cost. And on demand labor is certainly a variabilization of labor. And the more a company can variableize all of its cost structures, whether it’s just in time manufacturing, whether it’s outsourcing certain processes, or whether it’s on demand labor, the more agile it is, and the more agile a company is, the more capable it is to respond when downside or upside revenue signals come.
Matt Alder [00:09:31]:
And this would seem like a good point to ask you more about robots. Where does technology fit into this and where does automation fit into this? Will it be replacing more jobs in the future as companies sort of move in this general direction?
Jeff Wald [00:09:46]:
No question. There is no question that jobs will be lost when we actually crunch the numbers and not just look at headlines. Because there were a lot of reports that came out from McKinsey, from Oxford, from PwC that said, oh, 47 to 50% of jobs are susceptible. And everybody took those headlines, Matt, and they ran like, oh my God, half the jobs are going to go. Nope, that is not what those reports said. We actually look at the numbers, we do the math. 10 to 15% of jobs are going to be displaced over the next 20 years. And that is a massive shift, an absolutely massive shift. And the thing is, is that more jobs will be created whether they’re in the field of robotics or AI or data or cybersecurity or blockchain or all these other things. Those jobs are grow and bounds or whether they’re jobs being created in hard human areas. Customer service and marketing and sales and hr, those jobs are all expected to grow. We will have more jobs as a society, but we need to be mindful of how do we get the people from the jobs that have been displaced into the jobs that are growing. And I would certainly say by studying history. We as a society have not done that job.
Matt Alder [00:11:04]:
Well, I was going to say, what’s the historical context for this? Is this history repeating itself in a different way or is it very different this time?
Jeff Wald [00:11:14]:
Well, I will tell you this. One of my favorite lessons from business school are the five most dangerous words in business are this time. It is different. It is almost never different. It certainly can have some variation but it will rhyme. It will certainly rhyme. And when we look at history, we see every single time when we have these huge step functions in technological change, there are doomsayers. Oh my gosh, all the jobs are going to go and every single time they’re proven incorrect. We end up with more jobs at a higher standard of living, with people working fewer hours. That is what has happened historically. But, but, but, but, but, but it is important to not gloss over the transition of getting to that better future, getting to that future with more jobs at a higher standard of living where people have to work fewer hours. The transition from point A to point B is terrible. It is one where there in history is literally blood in the streets. And so it is something to be very mindful of. As we talked about a few minutes ago, those workers, 10 to 15% of the labor force in the United States that’ being displaced. We need to be mindful and help those workers to retrain into the high growth jobs that are being created. And we don’t do that at our.
Matt Alder [00:12:36]:
Peril to contextualize that in terms of talent acquisition today we’re already seeing, as we’ve already said, on demand working and there’s been a huge discussion around skills and skills that are missing in the workplace and how people retrain the teams that they’ve got or bring new skills in. What would your advice be to HR directors, talent acquisition professionals, people working in this talent space, what do they need to be doing right now?
Jeff Wald [00:13:08]:
There are a few things that come to mind. One, when we think about the remote work or the more flexible work arrangements, I’ll do this by anecdote. I was on the phone with the chro of one of the world’s largest law firms the other day and she said, look, silver lining from COVID is we never used to hire people that needed flexible work arrangements. We always would say, tough. You can’t make it to the office nine to five, five days a week, you can’t work here. And now, now that our senior partners finally understand that people can do that and they can be productive and they can be great members of the team and they can be a part of our culture, now they’re letting me open up to entirely new talent pools. And when we think about the on demand labor force, Matt, it is 25 to 30% of the labor force in the United States and in the eu. And so it’s a huge number of workers that a lot of companies have just left off their radars when thinking about talent acquisition. So be mindful that entirely new talent pools are opening up and more people are going to want to work this way and being able to offer them the types of jobs that they’re looking for, the types of work environments they’re looking for, that’s how you become an employer of choice in the future of work. When we think about remote work and flexible work arrangements.
Matt Alder [00:14:28]:
You mentioned right at the start about people making predictions about the future of work for sort of many years, and there sort of being no accountability or method behind those predictions. You’ve sort of put in place a really interesting initiative in the Future of Work prize. Can you talk to us about that?
Jeff Wald [00:14:47]:
I will tell you this. Writing a book is really hard and it’s not fun. And so a great way, if you’re thinking about writing a book to get it done, is to get a bunch of contributors go a little Tom Sawyer on this. And so I asked a number of the people actually creating the future of work, so heads of major staffing firms, heads of major labor unions, chros at major companies all over the world to ask them to take out their crystal ball and think about what they think the world of work looks like in 2040. What is their vision of the future of work? And I was so honored that so many people came forward and offered to write. And, you know, in another capacity, I serve as an advisor to the X Prize, which I am such an admirer of the work that they do. And I thought I can create my own little X Prize here. So I did put up 10 million of my own money to a Future of Work prize. Now, I didn’t do it in as tight a time frame as our friends at the XPRIZE do. This is in 20 years from now. So it’ll be the 11 area of my life that I’ll root for inflation. But one of the writers in the book will be awarded the Future of Work prize. Whichever of these 20 absolutely amazing people proves to be the most correct with their prediction, and each One of the 20 will get a vote as to which predictor is the most correct.
Matt Alder [00:16:17]:
And out of all those ideas that came in or all those visions that came in, what was the one that surprised you the most?
Jeff Wald [00:16:25]:
I will say, I think that Andy Stern, who is the former head of the seiu, the largest labor union in the United States, how bleak a picture he painted. You know, look, I’ve known Andy for years, and there is not a smarter person thinking about the future of work than him. And when I started Work Market, I actually wrote a list of a few People that I would love to meet and pick their brains. And he was on that list. And the first time we met, I was kind of like meeting my favorite rock star. I was like, oh my God, you’re Andy Stern. He’s like, yeah. So anyway, Andy has a very specific vision of how the world may evolve. And given his role as a labor leader, he is very conscious of increasing corporate power that certainly the robots and AI bring. But I was surprised as to how bleak the picture he painted was.
Matt Alder [00:17:25]:
So we’re talking about 20 years in the future. What would your prediction be for the next five years? What are we going to see? What are we going to be focusing on in the. In the near term?
Jeff Wald [00:17:38]:
Well, I’ll say this. If you’re going to read one thing on the future of work. Well, actually, if you’re going to read one thing, you should read my book, go to Amazon right now and buy it. If you’re going to read two things, you should get the World Economic Forum’s report on the future of work, which does do a five year look now. They wrote it in 2018, and it’s the most sober look at the real term capabilities, in the near term, real time capabilities, I should say, in the near term of what robots and AI systems can really do. And there isn’t much that happens in the next five years. These technologies are incredibly nascent. You know, it’s one thing to go onto YouTube and to look at videos of Boston Dynamic robots doing backflips and jumps and like, oh my gosh, that’s amazing. It’s another to realize that each of those robots cost like $100 million to make. And the idea that they’re going to be in our home anytime soon is laughable. So having that sober analysis, having the context and the real capabilities of robots and AI really opens your eyes that there are some back office jobs around, data entry around, you know, some things in a retail context where kiosks and a host of other things can help displace workers. But there are not that many other near term things that robots and AI will disrupt the labor force with.
Matt Alder [00:19:04]:
Final question, where can people find you and where can they find the book?
Jeff Wald [00:19:08]:
Well, the most active social network I am on is LinkedIn. And so anyone can always reach out on LinkedIn. If you want to talk the future of work. I certainly am on Twitter Efreywald. And I would love to say you can find the book wherever fine books are sold. But unfortunately, given that we are still in the depth of a pandemic, online at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere fine books are sold online. You can certainly find the end of jobs, the rise of on demand workers, and agile corporations.
Matt Alder [00:19:37]:
Jeff, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jeff Wald [00:19:38]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:19:40]:
My thanks to Jeff Wald. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
