Pictured Above: My very first corporate celebrity encounter!

As someone who sits right in the middle of the Millennial generation, I certainly know a thing or two about ruining companies. (Let’s be honest though, is anyone actually upset that we might lose Applebee’s?) So, imagine my surprise when something else came along and started shutting down businesses faster than a bunch of picky and (relatively) broke twenty- and thirty-somethings ever could. Enter COVID-19. Socializing, entertaining, eating, travelling, shopping and let’s not forget, working, all transformed overnight. You couldn’t go more than an hour without hearing the term “new normal.”

Now, two and a bit years of pandemic later (day zero was March 11, 2020), I find myself thinking a lot about the multitude of ways in which our lives have changed since early 2020. Often those thoughts drift to work and, more specifically: where do we go from here?

But why, though? Excellent question! You’d think I’d have far better things to do in my spare time but, here we are. Allow me to explain (please, because if you stop reading now, I just seem really depressing). The average continually employed individual will log approximately 90,000 hours working throughout their career. That’s 11,250 eight-hour workdays or just over ten years’ worth of time. Should you live to be 80 years old, you may end up trading about ⅛ of your time for money in some way, shape or form. During your peak working years, that’s more like ¼ of your time or about ⅓ of your time if we only count the hours when you’re awake. (Sorry, I’ll stop now.)

As we start to see parts of our lives return to the “old normal” we’re also seeing, among other things, a global reassessment of our relationship with these jobs that consume so much of our time and energy. Many of us just spent a couple of years doing our jobs completely differently than we ever have before. For the most part, it worked! (And by that I mean the economy didn’t collapse.) Suddenly concepts that seemed completely absurd 15 years ago now sound slightly less insane. Our work isn’t going away any time soon, but we do have upon us a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to redefine how we go about it.

Although, before we get to that…

How did we get here?

To speculate about where we’re headed, we should first look back at how far we’ve come. The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century was preceded by numerous systems throughout Europe that would become the building blocks of modern capitalism. Urbanization and technological advancements – mainly mechanization and infrastructure upgrades – produced the factory which enabled the mass production of goods.

Worker protections, however, were completely non-existent. Many individuals worked six days a week for ten hours a day (and sometimes more) in physically demanding roles. Minimum wages, employment insurance and severance packages were nowhere to be seen. People were routinely killed or injured on the job and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, some companies intentionally hired women or children to work in these conditions simply because they could pay them less. To say the least, it was a tough way to make a living compared to how things are done today (in first-world countries, anyway).

Fast forward a couple hundred years and modern employment looks (thankfully) quite a bit different. With all due respect to the substantial progress in workers’ rights made during the early twentieth century, four major events from the last five decades have contributed significantly to how we got where we are now. Unfortunately, this is arguably no better off than where we were 50 years ago. For many, things are actually worse.

As a two-time business graduate, I feel obligated to present these four major events within the framework of a PEST analysis. (Or PTES, in this case, to keep things in chronological order.):

Political Factors

Economic instability throughout the 1970s ushered in Margaret Thatcher as the UK’s Prime Minister (1979) and Ronald Regan as the President of the United States (1980). They quickly moved away from Keynesian economic policies centred around protectionism in favour of von Hayek’s policies of trade liberalization and the free-market economy. Manufacturing jobs in both countries, and many others like them, have (mostly) decreased in number ever since. Labour unions and, by extension, some of the worker protections that they had established earlier in the twentieth century began to deteriorate as “good” (i.e., paid a living wage) jobs were moved offshore in large quantities (most notably in the United States).

Technological Factors

The mainstream adoption of technologies built upon the internet (e.g., the web browser, email, wide area networking, etc.) in the early 1990s rapidly changed the availability of information and the way we communicate. It also meant that the globalization forces that had negatively impacted numerous manufacturing jobs throughout the 1980s and 1990s were now a threat to certain office jobs (e.g., call centre employees). By the mid-2000s many white-collar workers were equipped with internet-connected mobile phones (i.e., Smartphones) that blurred the lines between work and personal time, ushering in a “right now” or “always-on” culture. Now, these fun little pocket computers have become pivotal in facilitating the “gig economy” that currently employs about one of every eight Canadian workers.

Economic Factors

Apple introduced the first iPhone in June 2007, the device perhaps most responsible for shaping modern culture. In an unrelated turn of events, just over a year later an economic downturn of levels not seen since the Great Depression was upon us. Millions of people lost their jobs during the 2008 Financial Crisis, including many who had dedicated decades of their careers to their organizations. Meanwhile, some of the companies that directly contributed to this disaster were quickly bailed out by their respective governments using taxpayer money. Feelings of loyalty towards one’s employer would be forever altered while questions began to arise regarding the appropriateness of governments rescuing big businesses with public funds in these supposedly “free-market” economic systems.

Socio-Cultural Factors

As if one “once-in-a-century” type crisis wasn’t enough (see section above), the first truly global pandemic since the Spanish Flu took the world by complete surprise in the early months of 2020. In the name of public safety, most countries instituted some level of lockdown measures that significantly stunted key sectors of their economies (e.g., indoor dining, live entertainment, tourism, etc.). Of those individuals fortunate enough to keep their job, many found themselves working remotely (i.e., at home) on a full-time basis for the first time in their careers. Some of them still don’t know when, or if, they will return to a traditional workplace setting.

Which begs the question… What’s going to happen to the office?