Four-day weeks, on-demand pay, “rural” talent, digital workers… in recent times, we’ve heard these ideas accompanied by seemingly teleological questions about work as a construct.
The timing is understandable given the confluence of factors at play – the rise of digital, labor pyramid issues, and the after-effects of a global pandemic, including a desire for more meaning in work and convenience through remote work. After years of navel-gazing, society is finally waking up to the fact that our jobs, the way we do them, the time we spend, and the very fundamentals of the nature of work itself are perhaps incongruent with the world we now live in.
This realization opens up the very promising possibility of re-examining and perhaps reconstructing work for the new era. But, beyond the clarion call, what exactly does it entail, how do we understand the future of work, and how do we design for it? Fundamentally, we can break it down into three distinct components: the how, the where, and the who.
