Reimagining the way we work
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Hello, good evening. Thank you for staying for this panel. It's been a very full day and a very full festival, I believe. And we hope to live up to expectations. So some introductions to start with. My name is Oriana Bandiera. I'm a professor of economics here at the LSE.

And I'm joined on this panel by Nick Dalton, by Daniel Suskin, and by Nava Ashraf. Without hesitation, I'm going to start talking about the future of work, starting from the past. I'm going to do a bit of a Christmas cuddle. I'm going to evoke the ghost of the past to tell us

what to do, what was done before. Nick has a very long and very glorious career, mostly at Uniliba, where he's been a director of HR global for a long time. And his insights are priceless. I know because I benefit from them on a daily basis.

So, Nick, aka the Ghost of the Past. And it's great to be here with you this afternoon. I've been called lots of things, but the Ghost of Christmas Past isn't one of them. But now I can tick that off the list. So, in the time I had in Unilever, I must have managed many hundreds of different change initiatives around the globe.

And what was clear was that there were different ways of managing them, different worldviews, actually, that went behind how we managed to change. And often we didn't even realize we had these worldviews. And what was also very clear to me as I came to the end of my time in Unilever was that none of those worldviews

that I'd used and practiced for 35, 40 years is going to work with the change we're facing now with the paradoxes of AI that you've spoken about a little bit today. Typically, what I've seen over the years is sort of five or six different ways that leaders have tried to manage change. A historical one was paternalism.

My old company, Unilever, was one of the leaders in paternalism. I don't know if many of you have been to Port Sunlight Village up in the Wirral. If you go there today, it's still quite beautiful. When Lord Lever built that so he could control his workers, Liverpool was a running slum. And it is quite remarkable. But paternalism was the first change strategy. We'll look after you. That's what we did. We looked after people, so we persuaded them to change when we wanted them to change. The changes weren't as big as

as the changes that are coming now, and it was manageable. When lever and the like actually started to get short of money, the changes did become slightly trickier because they wanted to speed up production lines or reduce the rations of food or do whatever they were doing. That led to the rise of the trade unions. And the way people managed change then was through power. You do it or you go. Alternatively, we ain't doing it. What are you going to do about it?

And that's the way change is often managed today. It's a disastrous way of managing change. It never works. And if it does work, it's short term. But it's one of the ways and it's one of the old ways, the historical ways that ain't going to work in the future. After the Second World War, we all thought actually conflict and power probably wasn't such a good idea. And we decided we needed some more equity rules, regulations, process.

And so for much of my career, actually, particularly in European countries, the key to managing change was to stick with the process. You went with the process. I can remember when I worked in Grimsby. I don't know if anybody here knows Grimsby. Be careful. My wife comes from Grimsby before you make a joke of it. But in Grimsby, we had a book which was called The National Agreement for Humberside. Oxymoron there, but that's what it was called.

And that book, when I was there, must have been about 15 years old. But if it said it in the book, we did it. Even if it made no sense at all, we did it because that's how we manage change. We had a book, which was a procedural agreement, a substantive agreement. When Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came along, they killed personnel management. And I can remember, again in Grimsby, I got a phone call from my boss and he said, you're no longer personnel manager Humberside. I thought, that's not good news.

He said, "You're now HR Manager, Humberside." I just thought this was a flashy new title. I didn't realize it was deeply ideological because we were going to a different worldview of change. This world view was now about transformation and innovation and speed. I was taken away one weekend, went for a course in Paris for a week. When I left, I was a manager. When I came back, I was a transformational leader.

And that way of approaching change actually works very well if you're in an organization that's growing. But when you're in an organization that's mature, it's a tough gig because I'm going to share my vision with you. And if my vision means you're losing your job, then I've got to employ a load of communications people to spin to you. And that's what you saw happening. And then towards the end of my time in Unilever, after the great financial crash,

There was a move to actually start to ask people their opinion and involve them in change. This is when DEI became serious, well-being became serious. We started to meditate before meetings as opposed to not have lunch at all, which we did in the earlier periods. And this actually was quite an unstable period. And what you see now is a backlash against that. So these five or six different approaches to change, all out there, organizations are still trying to do them.

And now they're trying to do them against a change that's going to be so different from anything we've seen in any of those years before that we know they won't work. So something new has got to come. A new worldview has got to be born. But otherwise, we're just going to repeat that history over and over again. Thank you, Nick. But we also want to remember history, not to make the same mistakes.

So keeping in my carol spirit, maybe it's wishful thinking for the weather that it gets a bit cooler, I will go to our ghost of work in the future. Yes. Well, it's a real pleasure to be here and thank you very much for the invitation to be part of this. We live at a very strange time where...

Almost every day we hear stories of systems and machines taking on tasks and activities that until recently we thought only human beings alone could ever do. Making medical diagnoses and driving cars, drafting legal contracts and designing buildings, composing music and writing news reports. What does all of this mean?

for the vast majority of us for whom our job is our main, if not our only source of income. Yeah, I really do think this is one of the great questions of our time. And just as a bit of background, I'm an economist and a writer. My main interest is the impact of technology on work and the sort of running theme in my work over the years has been we're just not taking these challenges seriously enough. I mean, it's interesting, you know, in the last few years,

If you listen to the leaders of the large technology companies, whether it's Dario Amodei at Anthropic or Sam Altman at OpenAI or Demis Hassabis at DeepMind just down the road, all of them are saying the same thing, which is that, look,

What you see at the moment is remarkable, but within a decade, we are going to build systems that can outperform human beings at every cognitive task that they do. Now, you know, there are reasons not to take that seriously, not least the kind of, or at least take it with a pinch of salt, not least the sort of strong financial interest that the companies have in talking about the capabilities of their technologies. But, you know, we have, if you step back and think about it, you know, we have never invested so much in

I think the one exception is perhaps the Apollo project never invested so much in the pursuit of one technical problem as we are investing in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Um,

Something like, at the moment, we've invested something like 10 times the entire budget of the Manhattan Project in the pursuit of these increasingly capable AI systems. So it seems to me understanding what these technologies mean for the future of work is one of the great challenges of our time. All that being said, I do think, you know, the challenge that we face at the moment in the world of work and in the sort of medium run is not...

the stories that you read about in the popular press of robots taking everyone's jobs. That's not the challenge. The challenge is that there is work, but for various reasons, people are unable to do that work. And I think, you know, in, in the coming years, these, these trends are going to become more pronounced. The most common reason, and I call this the general idea that people might find themselves without work because of technological changes, um,

is known as technological unemployment. And I call this sort of frictional technological unemployment. There is work, but for various reasons, people can't do the work that has to be done. Now, the most common reason is

And the one that really takes up most of the oxygen in conversations among policymakers and politicians is skills. That people don't have the right skills and the right capabilities to do the work that has to be done. And I've lots of thoughts on that, and perhaps we can talk more about that in a moment. But I think that's the one that takes up most of the attention. But I think there are some other really important mismatches that explain why people can't do

the work that is increasingly being created by these new technologies. Another one is just quite simply the place mismatch, that people don't happen to live in the particular place where work has been created.

Now, what's interesting is that if you go back to the start of the internet era, people were writing and thinking as if these worries about place no longer mattered. People spoke about the death of distance. And there was that great book, The World is Flat. But actually, in looking for work today and looking for particular types of work, particularly sort of blue collar work, the place that you live and whether that place is thriving and flourishing matters more than ever.

And the third mismatch I think is really important. And I think it's, we tend to neglect it at the moment is, or are mismatches of identity where people have particular conceptions of themselves and they're willing to stay out of work in order to protect that identity. So, you know, one example of this is the United States where, you know, if you think of men

of working age displaced from manufacturing roles by new technologies. So there are some that say that these men would rather not work at all than take up, and it's a really unfortunate term, but take up so-called pink collar work, which is a term designed to capture the fact that many of the jobs that are

hardest to automate and many of the jobs in which people anticipate lots of job growth are disproportionately done by women. So in the US, more than 85% of preschool and kindergarten teachers, of nurses, of social workers are women. And there's some who would say these men would rather not work at all than take up that work.

And you can see these identity issues elsewhere as well. So, you know, the Korean story is really interesting too. One of the things that's quite distinctive about Korea is the extraordinary status they attach to education. So something like 70% of young people in Korea have a college degree.

Now, what's interesting is that if you then look at the unemployed population in Korea, it's incredibly well-educated. Something like half of the unemployed in Korea have a college degree. And, you know, one explanation for why these young people are unemployed isn't because there isn't work out there in the Korean labor market for them to do. It's because the sort of work that's available...

Lower status, insecure, inflexible, lower paid. It just isn't the sort of thing that they thought they were spending all that time and all that money training to be.

So, as I think about the future of work and as I think about the impact of technology on work in particular, which is my main interest, I think that for now in the medium term, the main challenge that we face is this frictional one. That there is work, but for various reasons, perhaps skills, perhaps place, perhaps identity, people aren't able to do that work. But...

I do think as we look further into the 21st century and with those sorts of claims by the leaders of the large technology companies in mind, even discounting them for their, given the interest that they have in talking up the capabilities of their systems, in light of that, we do have to take seriously the

in my view, a scenario where there might just not be enough demand for the work that human beings do full stop. And I think that's a far less comfortable idea. I think it's a far more, you know,

unfamiliar idea. I think it's worth saying that, you know, you don't need a world in which 50, 60% of people are unemployed to find that these sorts of what I call structural technological unemployment can be really quite significant. You know, look at 20th century European history, you know, 10, 15% of people unemployed and you can face...

really significant challenges to the social order and existing political system. I do think that although it's not the challenge for now, these issues, if we're thinking about the longer-term future of work, these issues around what we might do in a world where some people aren't able to make the kind of economic contribution to society that they might have hoped or expected to make

given the background that they came from, given the education that they had. How we respond to that problem, it seems to me, is also one of the great challenges that we face in thinking about the future of work. So I will finish there and end over. Thank you. Thank you so much. So now that we've seen the past and we've seen a glimpse of the future,

We want to understand how we should change the way we see the world of work today in order to make sure that we take the right path for a better future. And for that, I call my last speaker on the panel, who's Nava Ashraf, who is the founder of the Altruistic Capital Lab. Now, I stress altruistic and the fact that Nava is an economist. That's kind of interesting. Let's see how she makes sense of it all.

I guess I'm going to take the professorial role and ask us to question all of our assumptions. Our assumptions of what gives fulfillment in work, what good work is, what meaningful work is, what makes us happy in life. And I'm not going to ask us to just question those assumptions in theory, but

I think we have now just a growing body of evidence and a deep understanding of what makes us happy as humans, as well as a possibility of reimagining work, all kinds of work, in a way that is so different that it would allow us to overcome the very frictions that Daniel talked about. And so I'm going to also talk about the work in our lab, how we've been able to think about, for example, overcoming the identity friction.

But let me start from the beginning of, you know, yeah, being an economist. And you all are very familiar with homo economicus and the assumptions that we learn, which are simplifying assumptions. Everybody knows they're not true. But ultimately, we kind of are raised with this idea of atomized agents who are looking out for their self-interest and maximizing their self-interest. That's one big assumption, right?

And another one is that work is something that is really painful. It should be painful. And then you get rewarded for it by money. And maybe your employers have a deeper understanding of you, so they try to reward you for that difficult, costly effort with things other than money, like a corner office or more status, or even, let's say, some kind of social impact that you feel you can get connected to.

whatever is the fashion of the day. But in the end, they're trying to make you do something that they believe would bring them some kind of benefit as a company, and you are facing the work that's costly. But any of us who have done anything that we love, that we know has meaning and contribution to others, know what it feels like

to be doing that work out of some kind of real deep intrinsic motivation. And the proposition I'm going to put towards you today is that this moment of difficulty, this moment of challenge that both Nick and Daniel talked about, is our moment of opportunity to reconceptualize what this is for us. And in particular,

Let me just give you a couple examples. I'll talk a little bit about why Altruistic Capital and why the Altruistic Capital Lab, and then maybe give you a couple examples of what we've seen in working with companies and large-scale organizations.

in terms of both the happiness and productivity gains, including people who, let me say one other thing, which is Daniel's exactly right, that actually we are going to be in situations where some people may not be able to switch, even if we're able to overcome the identity frictions, because we've reconceptualized the purpose and meaning of work for many people, so they're willing to open up to other professions that they wouldn't otherwise see.

Even then, there may be some people that are going to, you know, be on universal basic income and they won't be able to find other work. But does that mean that we are not then part of the community in which we're contributing? No. So we are going to have to face this question regardless. And the idea of altruistic capital came from the premise that we, every individual among us, has even to a very small degree the desire and craving to contribute.

And this becomes an ability, not just a preference, not just like a type of person, but truly an ability, a capacity that we can develop in ourselves, an ability to internalize the impact we have on others, both the positive externalities and the negative externalities. So altruistic capital is like a form of human capital.

And I would argue it might be even the most valuable asset you have as an individual, because you can grow it through being in environments where you're kind of doing repeated actions and learning how to make this contribution greater through the best use of your talents and through a greater awareness of what the world needs. But you can also deplete this human, this altruistic capital, and you deplete it through many, through a sense of dissonance. If you think about the

The degree to which people in the workforce feel demeaned by the work that they do, feel alienated by the work that they do, that even when they don't drop out, as you might know, if you think about, so we've also started working with the Department of Works and Pensions, thinking about unemployment. And so not just with companies, but thinking about also unemployment. And there's been this huge increase in medical leave, all coming from mental health.

And coming from people dropping out of the workforce because they've had these very bad experiences often. But even the people who stay often report being in this kind of low performance, low meaning world that has been called quiet quitting, where you're on the job, but you're really not present. And there's been a lot of quantification of what that costs productivity.

So this productivity stagnation that we see in the UK and everywhere in the world is a challenge of motivation, but that challenge of motivation is not going to be overcome by more and more financial incentives or finding out other things that we can make people do. Instead, it has to come from a much deeper understanding of human nature.

And so that's where, you know, the idea of building altruistic capital comes from. But then we can't do that alone. We can't do that sitting here at LSE in our offices trying to figure out how to build altruistic capital. We do it in partnership, generating knowledge together with large scale firms and organizations, like thinking about how we help men who are who have always seen their identity coming from factories to think about what providing for their community really looks like.

And rather than seeing care work as nurturing or nourishing, we see it as something that is helping them provide for their community. Or, for example, helping white-collar workers at every level think about how to discover their own purpose and their own meaning. This is a randomized trial we did with individuals who helped to understand where they find meaning and then whether their work gives them that or whether they need to find other jobs elsewhere.

That program alone led to a large increase in productivity that was then shared between workers and the company. That tells you that it's not a zero-sum game, but it does require a radical rethink of how we prioritize purpose and meaning as human beings.

and how we can design work to give those the prominence they deserve. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nava. So I think, you know, we have plenty of food for thought. We organized this session so that it's a conversation rather than us keep blabbing about. So now that we've heard from three leading experts on these issues, I would like to give the word to you.

So there are roving mics. Please, could you please, sorry, just rules of the house. Could you please just say your name, what you do and keep the question short? Yes, Gabriele Temin. I'm here out of curiosity. I'm not affiliated with LSE. And I have a question that it's a bit of an objection for Daniel Susskind. You mentioned that

Many men are unwilling to work in child care, for instance. And I'm afraid it's not just a matter of not being willing for them, but there is some gender bias on the other side from parents. Many people don't want men to take care of their child. And if a man says that he loves spending time with children, some people might always imply that they might be sexually attracted to them or so.

And this is the elephant in the room in many cases, I believe. Hope my point is clear. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think there are...

in all directions, interesting issues of identity. And that's the point I'm trying to make. Rather than sort of point out, you know, particular reasons that identity might get in the way, I'm just wanting to make the case that in thinking about work, thinking about why people do certain jobs, why they don't do other jobs, exactly as we're hearing, you know, it's not simply about, you know, earning an income. It's also about the nature of the kind of meaning and purpose or not that that work gives you.

And let me actually, I think one aspect of this is that for sure we can't deny that there are gender norms in society. And there are all kinds of levels of, for example, in social care, thinking that maybe women would be better at it or not. And so I think we all have to question, not just job seekers, but everyone has to question our own biases in that and think about what is it about the gender norms that constrain both men and women at the same time?

men from doing things that would actually give them meaning and women from facing the burden of it. One other thing I wanted to say that I didn't get a chance to really focus on is that there's one aspect

of work, which is about contribution to society, which I think is kind of, you know, universal and across genders. It may be framed differently as providing for men versus nurturing for women, for example, but I think that's a very common. The other aspect of work that people don't really talk about very much, but I think is there, is work as devotion. I know that sounds very strange to talk about devotion in a scientific setting here at LSC, but

But if you think about a craftsperson who's just really into the work that they're doing or someone who's creating something with their hands or someone who's just connected to the person they're caring for, there's a devotional aspect to that work. That if you get into that, what that could potentially open up is the possibility that any work works.

could have that quality if we approach it in the right way. And, you know, my own motivation comes from this quote from the high writings that work done in the spirit of service is worship. All work, any work, any work.

I would like to thank you for asking this question, because typically we think of gender norms as preventing women from being engineers. And it's all this rhetoric. Everybody should be an engineer. Let's do STEM programs here and STEM programs there. And we never mention the other side of the coin, which is men who would like to take care of the families and they can't.

Interestingly, the anti-discrimination law, which is sadly kind of set aside for the time being in the US, came out precisely of a case like that. A man who was taking care of his mother, I believe, who was not recognized for social support because he was a man and this is a woman's job. And that's how it all started. So thank you for asking that. So the lady at the back and then the gentleman in the middle.

Hi, my name is Shi and I am an interior designer. So I would like to know your insights about the future workplace. Do you think the future workplace is necessary? We already know about flexible layouts and hybrid working.

Anything else you think will impact on the future workplace in terms of the technology or anything, wellness? How do you think about?

I think to reduce frictions, I'm going to take another question. So the gentleman in the middle. Thank you. I am Bekhtiar Salmanov, MPA student here at LSE. My question is specifically for Daniel. Your book, The Future of Professions with Richard Susskind, was one of the main inspirations for my dissertation. And while I was writing a question that I kept asking myself, and I would like to hear your view on that. So

Like how should governments balance the efficiency gains of automation with their human costs such as job displacement, particularly in professions that traditionally seen as stable, let's say in civil service? Thank you very much. Yeah.

um well thank you uh for the question and um delighted to hear that the book was an influence so the the book the future of the professions was a book it's not a coincidence that richard susskind and i have the same surname he is in fact my dad uh and we um we wrote a book together called the future of the professions which was looking at the um

at the impact of technology particularly ai on white collar workers on lawyers and doctors and teachers and accountants and so on and um one of the tensions that we were interested in or sort of troubled by exactly as you say is this tension between the fact that um

One of the motivations, although when we talk about technology and work today, many people in 2025, the kind of question at the front of people's minds, if we're thinking about white collar workers, what does this mean for the future of lawyers or doctors or teachers or accountants or architects? In other words, what does it mean for the worker? What does it mean for the producer? But what really motivated us to write that book back in 2015, and when we started thinking about it in 2020 was, 2010, sorry, was a...

was actually a slightly different question, which was, or a slightly different way of thinking about it, which was a feeling that the traditional professions were creaking, that not enough people had

a good insight into how to manage their financial affairs. They didn't have access to a good education. They didn't know how to look after their health. And it was actually a kind of a feeling that from the standpoint of the consumer, from the users of the professions, they were getting a raw deal that actually the very finest expertise in society is a very scarce resource that only a very privileged and lucky few people have access to. And so we were...

While we saw the kind of challenges for what this meant for professionals in terms of technology, we were very excited about what it meant for users of the professions, the promise of a kind of liberation of expertise. But what that meant was it prompted a very difficult question, which was, if you ask the question, for instance, what is the purpose of the law?

is the law there to provide a living for traditional lawyers or is it to provide access to justice? Is the purpose of medicine to provide a living for traditional doctors or is it to solve health problems? And one of the, speaking about meaning and purpose, one of the challenges that

that we write a little bit about in the book, but over the last 10 years, I've seen again and again, is that professionals, white collar workers get a very strong sense of meaning and purpose, not only from that problem that they solve, you know, in medicine, solving medical problems, in law, solving legal problems, but also the way that they do it. You know, lawyers like the wigs and the oak paneling, you know,

Doctors like the stethoscopes and the white gowns. Teachers like the chalk on the blackboard in the traditional classroom setting. And so there is often a lot of resistance in the professions to changing the ways that they work. And so you have this tension between...

in many cases, between kind of consumers, between improving access to expertise and on the other hand, from the point of view of producers, protecting traditional ways of working. And, you know, the view we reach in that book and it's, you know, and I, I, um,

I stand by it today is that the purpose of these professions who are responsible for such important functions in society is not to provide a living for traditional professionals. The purpose of these professions is to solve some of the most important problems that we face in society. And if other people can do it, working in very different ways, or if we don't require people at all, we ought to embrace them. Now that's quite a sort of...

controversial and challenging argument, but it's one that over the last 10 years I've stood by. So interesting, because I was thinking that

This is where an orientation towards service and contribution, if people have it from the beginning, and that's how they decide to go into whatever profession, it gives you the chance to change as circumstances change. And I say that time and again to sort of aspiring young professionals who are setting out on their career. And I say, look, if you go into medicine because you want to be the sort of doctor that you saw in Haas,

or the lawyer you saw in suits, you're going to be disappointed because the way in which these professions work is going to look very different in years to come. You know, already many of these professions look very different to how they did 10 years ago. But if you go into these professions because you're interested in solving medical problems, because you're interested in proving access to justice, and you're far from this, exactly the sort of, you know, focus far more on kind of outcomes rather than the way in which you might do the work. Then I think the...

The story of technology in many professions is a very exciting one. But it requires, I think, a bit of a shift in mindset when young people are setting out in their careers about how they think about the work that they're going to be doing. It has so many implications for how we think about this in schools. Yeah. Right? I mean, we had in the lab, we started working on school curriculum because we realized we were working with workers. And then we realized, why are we starting so late with people who've ended up in jobs that they don't like? Yeah.

And instead, we started looking at how are schools treating this? And here's what schools do. They have one thing, which is you probably remember your test of like what profession you should be and your different qualities and what the end. And as you say, most of those professions will not be there anymore. And then some schools have volunteering, which you do separately, kind of on the side to maybe get into a good university.

But there isn't this orientation towards, okay, well, if I'm oriented towards how can I make my biggest contribution? Where are my talents? How can I make my contribution? And you learn even as a 12-year-old to start thinking in that light. Then you can change with as times change, as you understand what the needs of society are and your own skills are, those evolve and you evolve with them to find new jobs too.

And Nick, I think also about the workplace changing would be really interesting. I was a bit worried I'd get that question because it was about interior design, wasn't it? I know nothing about interior design, but what I can do is maybe brief you as to what you might think about, given how I could see workplaces emerging in the future. I think, first of all, if we're going to get through the types of changes we've spoken about,

We're going to move away from employment contracts that are transactional to ones that are developmental. So I think employment workplaces will become areas where people won't have jobs for life, but they will be continually developing the skill sets to ensure that they can develop livelihoods moving forward.

So I think that transactional to developmental piece, workplaces as places of industry and productivity, but also really places of learning, I think will come through. I think also what we'll see in many workplaces is that the silos will have to disappear. I think to manage the type of change, the paradoxes we've spoken about now, companies aren't going to manage that change. Organizations aren't going to manage that change on their own.

It's going to have to be managed systemically.

So to the point that was made about what governments could do, I think now the type of change we've got to manage in the future has got to involve a very proactive skills agenda from governments. I dream about them making training on skills 100% tax deductible. That would make a difference. I can tell you when you're talking to your CFO about wanting to train people to realise their purpose as opposed to not spending the money.

That helps. So I think that whole training piece is going to become very, very important. And I think governments are going to enable that. And then a third piece around the system, I think control. So if you're going to workplaces today and all of you will see offices and factories and things, you can see and smell the control in the buildings. They're there, it's obvious. I think managing the type of change we've got to see our way through means that we've got to give up control.

Because if we speak to employees about purpose, whatever language we use, in other words, about how people are going to navigate the future that's going to hit us, that's got to be an adult-to-adult conversation, not a parent-child conversation. And all the ways I've spoken about change, even the nice do change with people, it's very parent-child. That's how we've done change. An adult-to-adult conversation means you've got a workplace that genuinely is more democratic.

where leaders do give up control, where some of the work we did in Unilever, we wanted to talk to employees about purpose in factories. But the supervisor wasn't going to do that. Their peers are going to do that. The shop steward's going to do that. It's not going to be us telling people. So I think the workplace of the future aren't going to be as top-down as they are today. Now, all of that sounds great, but getting there,

is going to be hell, I suspect. But if you could design workplaces that meet that criteria, I think that would be brilliant. Thank you. So there's three questions or four questions. No, we can't take four at a time. We take two. I think, okay, go ahead. You were first. Thank you so much. Thanks. My name is Guy Ennes. I run a company that is focused on career wellness and I'm currently supporting the London School of Economics Entrepreneurship Programming Schools.

I'd love to explore a little bit more the last point just made there. A very enthusiastic article came out in the New York Times today, you might have spotted it, that lists 22 jobs of the future. And one of these is, I kid you not, a legal guarantor. That's somebody who goes to jail so that AI doesn't have to, because they can't. So on the provision that I think we all in this room believe that that's not the ideal future work, what are some of the practical things

It's there, so you can read it. What are some of the practical things that you have seen, the shift narrative? What are some of the things that bring the Unilevers of the world to reward fulfillment alongside productivity and not for productivity? So that the pink collar jobs for men or women or any actually are rewarded at par with financiers because they are absolutely crucial and still absolutely irreplaceable.

So what practically have you seen that shifts the narrative? Good question. Sorry, it's going backward, but it's fine. It will come to you. We have time. Everybody's been very good asking short questions. Please continue like that. Sorry, second question. We pick up two questions at a time. Maybe you can come here at the front.

Eva, Jessica, I work in Strategic Foresight. And that's actually my recent transition that was driven by purpose. And I must say, there's my personal experience of making a career change in extremely difficult now. And I think that's regardless of whether this is driven by purpose or by risk killing. And especially that's not done within one organization. So my question is, what can we do to make that transition easier for employees? Very good questions.

Who wants to start? Yeah, I think it's interesting what you said, because when the discussion was going on about the gender norms in care work, what was going through my mind, well, it just doesn't pay enough anyway. And that's probably the fundamental issue here. So I think very practically, I think very practically, the adult to adult conversations, the giving up control is key, because you don't know what you don't know. And you don't know what jobs are going to exist in the future.

And you don't know what people can make for themselves. So having those conversations is the start. Then putting funding aside to give people the opportunity to try things is important. And when I think about the amount of money companies spend on restructuring, it's huge. Now, bringing that money forward is a slight change in the financial rules. You can still charge it underneath the line if you bring it forward, hopefully.

you could then use that money to allow people to experiment. So the money is not dead money. It becomes productive money. And then I think the third very practical thing, and we tried this in Unilever and we tried it in a number of countries around the world, it runs into all sorts of legals, but it's very interesting, is you allow people to work for you and someone else at the same time. So in the UK, we introduced a contract called YouWork, which is basically you...

You get a retainer with Unilever and that allows you to do work for Unilever and it allows you to go and do work for someone else if you want to go and try something out. And we have that in the UK. Now, my disappointment with that

is I'd envisaged that as being a vehicle for blue-collar factory workers and a big uptake has been for white-collar workers. But that's because there hasn't been enough conversations with the blue-collar workers yet and building the confidence that they can trust the business to take that risk.

And I think that comes to your point about transitions. You've got to make the transitions as easy as you can. And this sounds like it's soft and it's woolly, but it's not. It's hard-nosed finance because you're going to save on restructuring money by doing this.

The business cases are clear if you do them, especially when you've got people providing data and people are happier for it. And it's not a destructive experience. It's productive experience. And we've got the ability to do that for people, but we're locked into these old mindsets of control. So I think this is doable. It's not easy, but I think there's very practical things you can do. Does anybody want to add anything?

I guess one thing I'll say just leading on what Nick had said around, you know, subsidizing training to some degree is that I guess a lot of what we've talked about and there's a standard paradox in economics and in labor economics, I'm sure many of you are aware of, which is that the employer may not want to invest in training that the worker could take somewhere else. Right.

And a lot of what we've talked about in terms of really understanding what gives you meaning, where you're best, what you get excited about, you could just leave the organization. Indeed, that's what we find is that some people decide to leave or you could just and then you bring that with you. That's what we call general human capital, right? That is transferable rather than job specific human capital, which the employer has a very strong incentive to invest in.

And so given that actually in this new world of work, a lot of what we need people to build is this more generous human capital. Part of it is starting younger in secondary school, getting people to think about it like that.

But part of it may well be some form of collaboration with government to be able to think about those other aspects. Very good. I'd like to add that the idea of having many different jobs at a given point is just not experimenting, which is super valuable. But also the fact that it would make jobs more equitable, because if professors were

you know, bakers for two days a week and then professors for two days a week and then drummers for two days a week. They would experience so many different things that there wouldn't be a hierarchy of jobs where people get stuck in doing jobs that they don't like just because they're on top of the hierarchy and that's why they keep doing them. To you again, yes, that one at the back and then over there. We haven't been there yet.

Hi, I'm Roz and I work in mining. And it seems to be that everything we've been saying is about flexibility. And my question is, how do we make the workplace flexible enough for people who are nearing retirement to stay engaged and make a valuable contribution? Very good question.

We take another one. Take the main topic. Hi there, my name is Carsten Jung. I work for IPPR. It's a think tank here in London.

My question is about if you've seen any studies that look at the psychology of work, but during disruptive transitions, because I think you're talking a lot about, you know, how the meaning of work can shift and people can find more meaningful work in different, you know, as it's shifting. But with the generative AI developments we're seeing,

it might not be a smooth shift. It might be quite disruptive. You know, we estimate like two thirds of white collar tasks could in theory be done by existing generative AI. And like somebody who's, and I think Daniel mentioned this, somebody who's trained to be a lawyer, you know, and, you know, has the expectation for the meaning that comes out of that and the status that comes out of that. If that is disruptive, disrupted, you know,

How can the transition of meaning to something else be achieved? Have you seen any studies on that? So we have a paper called Meaning of Work, and it is on 3,000 entry-level white-collar workers discovering their purpose and finding the productivity gains across 14 countries.

What's amazing is that right now we can look at what happened during the transition because it was just, we have the last data just before generative AI started. So our hope is that soon we'll be able to tell you how going through that process because it was a randomized controlled trial. So we really have causal evidence of how having this type of compass could help you navigate big transitions. But

But the other aspect that we've looked at this is with blue-collar workers in factories where they were at risk of redundancy and looking at the way in which thinking about purpose, but in their way, thinking about community contribution could actually shift how you understand the fear of the future. Because one thing psychologically that's really important is if you know that you might lose your job,

your amygdala becomes hijacked to such a degree that that fear keeps you from being creative. We know this from other studies where even if you ask people to look through job ads, okay, in a newspaper, count the number of job ads. So imagine if I were to ask you to count the number of job ads in a newspaper. And in one group, I prompt them with some telling them, imagine that you had like an accident and you had to fix your car so you have a big,

financial shock, that group counted fewer job ads. Same number of job ads, but they counted fewer job ads. So in a world like that, you've got to recognize that that fear can keep us from thinking creatively. And that's where some of the stuff that Nick had been saying about having peer-to-peer adult conversations about this, being still rooted in how you can find meaning across a number of professions and how you can find contribution across a number of professions can help.

Yeah, I'm on the point on flexibility. I mean, I think flexibility is so important and not just at the end of someone's career, but I think...

I think all the way through and it's becoming more and more important. So the lady a couple of seats in front of you mentioned the New York Times article, which was really interesting. And my work was quoted in there as well. And I had one of the jobs and it may not myself, but there was a job based on some of my ideas. And it made me smile because I think it's

It's entertaining and interesting, but it's just not possible to do the sort of exercise that that writer was doing in that piece. Just two examples, go back to the pre-internet era. If you had said...

uh, that many people in a few years time are going to find workers search engine optimizers. It just wouldn't have made, it's not simply, it would have been hard to understand. It just wouldn't have been possible to understand, you know, the technology didn't exist. The ideas didn't exist. The, you know, none of it similarly, you know, pre generative AI, if you would have said that, you know, you're going to find work as a prompt engineer, you know,

It just wouldn't have meant anything back in 2021. These jobs that become more and more important and more and more valuable and sort of rise and fall and rise and fall are just very, very difficult to anticipate with the kind of scientific precision that those sorts of... Now, but this is a problem because...

It's not simply people writing articles predicting what jobs are going to exist in the future. That view shapes how many policymakers and politicians think about how to respond to the future of work. The idea is let's try and anticipate what jobs are going to have to be done

and then work backwards from that to think about, okay, what skills and capabilities are going to be valuable and important? And in my view, that's a sort of impossibly difficult task to do. The challenge that we have to find a way to respond to in the sort of technological turbulence that we're talking about is the challenge of uncertainty. How do we prepare people to

to flourish in a world where the sorts of jobs that are going to have to be done and the sorts of skills and capabilities that are going to have to be done are just incredibly difficult to predict. And the best response, it seems to me, is flexibility, a willingness and a capacity to retrain and reskill throughout life with the sort of intensity with which we engage in education at the start of our lives. Now, I know today people with corporate backgrounds will know about

things like you know lifelong learning and and ambitious governments around the world like you know singapore has some personalized learning budgets where people can tap into a pool of resources to retrain and reschool later in life but the point is if you look at the resources that companies and countries put behind these sorts of initiatives it just completely pales in comparison to the scale of investment that we make in people at the start of their lives and that and that just can't be right um and this this is something that's very much in my mind the book i'm working on at the moment is uh

called, what should my children do? How to flourish in the age of AI? Because it's the question I get asked more and more over the last sort of 10 years or so in light of exactly the sort of the uncertainty that I think many parents and many young people setting out in their careers feel. And this is why this has to be a bottom-up process. The change worldviews we've had in the past has all top-down.

I had that virus in 2019. I was working on a project in South Africa to train loads of people up to be coders. Now, that's very worthwhile now, isn't it? Because the demand for coders has gone through the floor. We just don't know. But as a community...

Using everyone's knowledge, we might be able to generate things that will just be sort of emergent. I know that sounds woody, but I think it's the only way of riding these waves. And that's, I would call that more like flexibility. And there's lots of practical things I've said you could do because I used to, I worried towards the end of my time in Unilever about the factory worker who was my age, who couldn't bend and, you know, twist anymore.

And what would they do? Well, you need to phase those jobs out. That's why you need different forms of contracts. That's why you need to think about pensions differently. Pension funds that could actually be used at different parts of your life. All of these things are easily doable, but they need a mindset shift. We need to trust people more. We need to engage people more. And the final point is it has to be systemic.

People top down can't do it on their own and one organisation can't do it on their own. We have to bring the system together, which is what things like the lab do. Thank you so much. Thank you for your participation and thanks to our wonderful panellists for their contributions. And, you know, AI, after all, has a big advantage over us. It can remember passwords. So with that, I would like to thank our panellists. Thank you to our chair.

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