The Future of Work

Ashley: Hello and welcome to Health and Safety To Go , a podcast from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. We're living in a rapidly changing world and alongside changes in technology, the environment and geopolitics, the workplace is changing, too. What motivates workers is changing. Here to discuss how this is shaping the future of work is Tyler Waye, a work and leadership strategist known for translating leading research into actionable strategies. Tyler is the managing partner of Motiversity, producer of the Icons podcast and co-founder of Mindset App. It's great to have you here, Tyler.

Tyler: Thanks Ashley, it's a pleasure to be here.

Ashley: So, set the scene for us, what are some of the factors that are reshaping the world of work right now?

Tyler: You know Ashley, it's such a big question, actually. It's, it's a question that took us all around the world, trying to uncover. And, you know, that sounds like a really bold way to start an answer to a question. But about 2016, 2017, we were working the space where we were trying to help organizations and people get ready for what's coming next. And for a long time, there was kind of an assumption that we base what's coming next on what's come before. And people could say, "Follow us. We know where this is going" and as a result, employees could start to kind of think through their next steps based on the skills they had or kind of the expertise they had with experience they had. And about that time, 2016, 2017, we started to realize that there was quite a few more fears and factors that people were thinking about and in particular, organizations and people were saying, "I've long assumed I knew where things are going, and I'm not quite sure that I do anymore." And you know, trying to teach in that space and be a consultant in that space, we didn't have a good answer for them, there's no textbook for it. We ended up doing a project where we were trying to understand influences into the world of work by going all around the world and we ended up going to 15 different countries, over 15 months. So, we'd spend a month per country and try to, you know, embed ourselves in the world of work where we were and understand from CEOs, or from everyday people, what do they see when they look into the future? And the goal was to try to out-think change. Could we go around the world and try to figure it all out and put a nice bow around it and come back and tell people about it. And within a few months within a few countries, we realized it was impossible, and this task that we taken on to kind of out-think all the big factors that you were talking about – geopolitics and digitization and demographics, and migration of people. I mean, it's just so vast. And then something connected and we went from trying to predict the changes that were happening around the world and what we did instead was start to predict the challenges. And that flip from predicting change to predicting challenge was really instrumental for us. And we couldn't know when technology would come in and impact your job or your organization, but we could guess that it would. And once it did, how would you deal with that challenge? And so, we started to kind of have a better sense around the future, by not out thinking change but by trying to figure out the challenges and I'm going into this kind of pre-context, because we discovered that for big challenges that we felt like would redefine the coming decades of work. And they sound different than a lot of people think. When they think about the future of work and they think chat GPT or something that kind of sounds tech-ish, right? What we discovered instead was that there was this human experience of work that connected about four billion people around the globe who went and did this activity every day or for at least 10,000 days in their life, and the challenges we started discovering that almost everyone would run into was first, can you find work? And I know that you know maybe depending on where you're listening to this from that may not seem like the biggest challenges but there's place in the world that is a big challenge. And I would say that even in places where it doesn't feel like a challenge maybe to you, or to me, there's still a lot of people who are trying to figure that, that piece out of what are the skills that are valuable to other people. So that was challenge one. Challenge two was interesting, challenge two was around this, this expression of work that would sneak up for people or would kind of come towards them. It was really around engagement at work. So, once you've got a job, can you stay engaged with that work? Like when work shows you how sharp of teeth it can have and either, you get frustrated with it, or it starts to be somewhat unfair to you or all sorts of things that can happen. How do you continue on with that relationship? And we could anticipate that almost everyone will find a point in their career or multiple points where they would feel that pressure around engagement. Challenge three was kind of connected to the tech piece. And that was, you know, if you can find work, and you can stay engaged, can you stay relevant? Given all the changes that are coming, can your skills and can your experiences, stay valuable to other people? And that was one that was starting to kind of pick up a lot of speed over that time period and it continues pick up speed.

Ashley: Right.

Tyler: And challenge four really snuck up on us. We didn't expect it to land the way that it did. And it was this idea that if I can find work and we can stay engaged, can I stay relevant. Can we stay healthy. And health was sneaking up as a factor all around the world, whether it was physical health, or mental health or emotional health, we were just noticing how damaging work can be. how promising it can be, but also how hard it can be on people. So we started to realize that those four challenges, you know, we're almost universal, and they would really define where the future went and are influencing today in drastic ways.

Ashley: Right. Well, I think that kind of dovetails well into the second question, and you kind of addressed it a little bit, but how are these challenges and these factors impacting workers from a health and safety perspective?

Tyler: Yeah, you know, there's the direct way, so you know that fourth challenge of can we stay healthy? Obviously, that's touching on this in like very clear terms. But I wouldn't say that's the only place that it affects health and safety. You know, for example, challenge two, this idea of engagement, you know. Gallup would say that if they compare the highest engaged organizations versus the bottom engaged, top quartile versus bottom quartile, there's about a 60 plus percent difference in terms of workplace safety incidents, just that idea of engagement. And so it's not it's not just this thing that kind of connects to you if you feel burnt out or you feel like “this isn't working for me” or it's hard on your body. Engagement and other factors can play a huge role in health and safety. And I think that that's an interesting layer in all this sometimes people will look at those four challenges I laid out and say, “well, what about other stuff that we know is happening?” You know, there's big problems with work around fairness and equity and all those pieces where we find that those actually apply is that every single one of those challenges that you know, if there is a bias at work that's going to affect you at the skills development stage it’s going to affect you the engagement stage or the relevancy or the health. and we find the same thing around health and safety, is that in lots of ways, these pieces are connected at almost every step. Because you can imagine for that person who can't find a job, that's got quite a bit of impact on them too. So it's interesting how many layers this goes deep.

Ashley: So, from an employer perspective, what can organizations do now to become the workplaces of the future? How can they keep their workers engaged in thriving?

Tyler: Yes, it's an interesting question and I would say one that's still really alive. You know, if we go back in time, there was a big set of discoveries, I think, that then started to come practice and were really helpful at work. And there's a phrase that I use, sometimes that states it well. There's an expert out of the UK. And, you know, when he was taking over an organization to try to raise the bar, he said, what we're going to do is take the crown off the head of the coach and put on the head of the rider. He works with with riders and, you know, I think that that was almost the first piece that needed to come into place. Is that we recognize that this is about people work is about people. We people were doing it long before we had organizations. It's really deep in our DNA to do it to help ourselves and to help other people. And when we put the focus on the individual and the human experience of work, a real opportunity arrives. And so this idea of taking the crown off the head of the organization and putting on the head of the rider. I think that's the first piece, that's fundamental the second piece that's, that were learning more and more of late. I just had an interview with someone named Dr. David Yeager, and he works on mindset. And so he works with Carol Dweck who wrote kind of the preeminent book on growth mindset and they do a bunch of research together and he was talking about this combination of high support, that idea of taking the crown off the organization, but also high standards. And that both those pieces now really go hand-in-hand and I'd say that's the part that we're learning how to keep alive. You know, what's the right balance point there. It's probably different for every person and every organization but this idea that high support and high standards can really create a climate where people know what's expected, how high the bar is, and also feel like they've got the support of those around them to get there. And we feel like that's almost the strongest way to put it in in this, you know, in short ways, to help people get ready and organizations, get ready for the future.

Ashley: That makes sense. What's something workers can do to help shape the changes that they'd like to see in their workplace?

Tyler: I think this is, you know, really fundamental question, you know, not everyone would feel like they've got high support or high standards or really would understand what that means or maybe they're at the stage where it isn’t a factor for them for multiple reasons, there's all sorts of things that pop up over 10,000 days. And the question is, what do you do,  

Ashley: Right.

Tyler: And there's, there's a word that we've heard a lot about lately, leadership, that we kind of know what it means, and we kind of use it in the right way. But leadership before we even had a word for it was a set of actions that were really powerful for people. And it's the set of actions that says, if you're on a path that's working, you keep going. And if you're on a path that's not working, you create an inflection point or a pivot and you start down a new pathway. And so, I would say this mindset of leadership, it doesn't require a title, doesn't require a promotion. It's something that all of us can grab hold of, and I think it's really fundamental to if you feel like work is working, keep going. And if you feel like you need to make a shift, you know, empower yourself to recognize you can make that shift and it doesn't mean you need to leave your role. It means that, you know, you can start to invite yourself to do the things that you love. Or, you know, can have impact in a positive way on other people. So, I'd say, leadership is really core to kind of the individual experience of work. The second is listening and I think that listening has lots of pieces to it. One is, you know, how do you know, if you're on the right path or not? Part of this, to listen to yourself, part of its listen to other people. We would also discover that in lots of organizations, you know, one of the greatest opportunities nowadays is to connect with our customers in new ways and and that's an opportunity that lots of us have. And whether it's customers in terms of, you know, in a company setting or, you know, a participant who's kind of in an organizational setting or somebody who's got some kind of connection that human-to-human component of work is so rewarding for individuals. It's also rewarding for organizations to better understand it. And so, I would say, you know, listening and leadership go hand and hand right now. Listen to yourself and listen to others around you. And when you discover it's not working out anymore, to create those inflection points are there by targeting new activities you can do, engaging with new people or exploring wider change.

Ashley: I love that. Is there anything else you'd like our audience to know?

Tyler: You know Ashley we've touched on it but I think I think there's this, again this idea of work that we all understand you know, so many of us do it, it's, it drives all of us crazy but it's also so powerful. You know, it's this four-letter word that is really unique to humans. We’re the only living thing that does it. All other living things wake up to the exact same experience every day and we've discovered how to change our future through work, how to lift our lives through work. And the greatest example of that is, if each one of us listening to this can think back to just the generations that have come before them, your parents or your grandparents, your great-grandparents. And to think about what they've done to get us into this conversation. It's such an amazing opportunity of work that with these 10,000 days, taking these tiny little steps every day, there's this promise that it can lift our lives. And that doesn’t mean that it happens for every person in all moments always. I get the hard parts and we've been around the world and seen the hard parts of work. But there is this promise that if we can just keep taking those steps forward and believe in it and believe in it through the human experience, that we can really lift our lives and lift the lives of other people. And that's the exchange that's long been at the foundation of work. We did it for hundreds of thousands of years before money was invented. Work is so part so much a part of our DNA. If and when we get back to that, a human that human experience, pieces of it come back that feel organic and real and powerful. And it does have this opportunity to lift lives. And so I would say I'm, you know, I fell in love with work through feeling a frustration with it. And when we zoom out and see the big picture of it, it really does provide this opportunity to take on those 10,000 days in different ways. .

Ashley: I love that. And I think you're speaking to sort of the idea of work being, not our whole purpose, but being infused with purpose.

Tyler: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ashley: Tyler Waye, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us today. For more information on the future of work and many other health and safety topics, visit our website, CCOHS dot CA. Thanks for being here and stay safe.