In 1930, the British economist John M Keynes predicted that over time, technological developments would make us so much more productive that the working week would be reduced to 15 hours.
We’re still not there. If His prophecy is to come true, there must be a fundamental change in the way we work.
Keynes’ prediction of technological development was accurate. Unfortunately, the ways in which we collaborate and organize work have not changed. With industrialization, we started counting working hours. It became normal to arrive at factories and offices at fixed times of the day, and still is. But society has changed and we have technologies that enable us to change the way we work.
COVID-19 interference
COVID-19 was a disruptive force. It allowed us to organize more flexibly. This is not just a question of whether we can sometimes work from home. Keep in mind that organizations structure themselves to solve the tasks to be solved and that a flexible organization is not the same as a boundless organization.
The boundaries or necessities that need to be kept in mind when we organize ourselves will differ from company to company. The nature of the tasks may require some employees to be in the office from nine to three o’clock, while others do not. Our jobs and functions are different, and the organization must take this into account.
Let’s experiment
The pandemic enabled us to test new structures and processes, including work from home. Our processes and tasks do not need to be reinvented. Instead, we should experiment with decorating ourselves. Making changes requires an experimental state of mind with trials that run for short periods of time. Then we further evaluate, adjust and experiment.
We tend to fall back on the ways we have always done things. Otherwise we would now be working 15 hour weeks. But I expect that when my children enter the labor market in maybe 10 years, they will laugh at the thought that everyone in their parent generation went to work at the same time, every single day …