Will a 60-year career change approaches to work and what measures will business take in the near future to adapt to new conditions of life – in the chapter from the book “The New Longevity”
During the XNUMXth century, life expectancy increased markedly and technological progress accelerated. It would seem that these achievements should be a reason for optimism and pride. However, humanity is faced with a serious problem – society does not have time to adapt to new conditions and create relevant structures and norms. Will there be enough jobs for everyone if we live to be XNUMX years old? Will most of our work be given to machines? Is the pension system and economy in danger of collapse due to an aging population? What measures will businesses take in the near future to adapt to technological progress and human longevity?
Trends publishes a chapter from the book The New Longevity: How Human Well-Being Will Be Built on in a Changing World. The material was prepared in collaboration with the Alpina Publisher publishing house.
Creating a Culture of Flexibility in Labor Relations
Most of today’s employees find their work schedule not flexible enough. Because of this, under certain life circumstances, there is often a clear discrepancy between the hours of work assigned to a person (both in number and distribution) and the schedule that he would like to have. According to studies, people who are forced to put up with such inconsistencies at some point in their lives then simply change jobs in order to be able to satisfy their preferences.
For most corporations, the fight for flexibility is an almost impossible task, because this very idea is fundamentally contrary to the long-standing and very employer-friendly corporate policy of standardized working hours and agreed-upon operating procedures. As a result, those employees who want to have flexible and autonomous work are simply paid less. This leaves people in an obvious dilemma: flexible work makes it easier to start a family or care for parents, but it also means lower incomes. Thus, the corporate policy of penalizing flexible hours indirectly creates a conflict between economic success and the desire to have strong family and friendship relationships. Since flexible work comes with a loss of income with this attitude to pay, it does not solve the problem of financial inequality between men and women. At present, however, there are good reasons to believe that firms and corporations are already ready to start solving these complex problems.
The first incentive to change old policies stems for corporations from the ubiquitous alternative of supply and demand. As more and more people begin to perceive their lives as a multi-stage process, flexible working hours will gradually become one of the most sought-after characteristics when choosing a job. The choice of working time planning is necessary at different points in life: older workers will want to have a retirement strategy that allows them to reduce employment gradually; parents with small children need more time for a full family life; those who have elderly parents will want to look after them. Finally, since people simply want to work more or less at different times, they will also need flexible working hours. As the demand for less tightly regulated jobs grows, the number of those who are willing to continue working “from and to” will decrease, and this will sharply reduce the availability of talent pools from which companies operating in the old way will be able to recruit employees. If the majority of employees really want to work full-time, the cost to a firm of flexible working hours can be significant, but in a situation where everyone needs flexibility, better business management practices can be developed with this in mind.
The second reason to believe that changes in corporate policy are just around the corner is the upcoming transition to a four-day work week. In our opinion, this will be a natural consequence of the higher productivity created by new technologies. The four-day work week provides employees with many more opportunities to spend time with their families, as well as to plan various combinations of periods of work and free time.
The impact of technology will also affect this process. Artificial intelligence and robotics will change the nature of work in any position by automating continuous or routine work, as well as offering new ways to manage data and plan complex operations. With this in mind, new technologies should reduce costs for precisely those firms that seek to provide a more flexible approach to employment.
Empirical research by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz explains how the transition to more flexible working hours can be achieved and what role new technologies will play in this. Flexibility is known to be disadvantageous for corporations because many jobs require the same person to perform a particular task continuously for long periods of time. In other words, in such a situation, it is not possible to replace one employee with another – this reduces the number of options available when reshuffling the workforce. However, there are industries where technology has made it possible to freely replace employees. Goldin and Katz, in particular, considered the situation in the pharmacy business in the United States. For several decades in this sector, the hourly wages of men and women have become equal, as well as the hourly wages of those who work full-time and those who work part-time. This has increased the ability of people to switch to flexible working hours and through this to plan various partnership strategies, in which, for example, both spouses in a family can devote equal attention to both career and home. The achievement of this equality was not the result of planned regulation or a conscious gender policy, but was due to significant changes in organizational structure, technology investment and product standardization. From a structural point of view, there has been a consolidation of the pharmacy sector – from many independent stores, it has become a smaller number of large retail chains; this made it easier for employees to move from one store to another, as well as to replace workers on vacation. In addition, investments in accounting automation have grown strongly in this sector, which has dramatically increased the ease of access of pharmacy workers to the customer profile, and thus employees began to work with the same customer at different times. Products were also standardized, at least within each network, which again allowed employees to replace each other. It became clear that factors such as improved organizational structure and redefining workplace responsibilities could play an important role in increasing flexibility.
One experiment conducted at the British telecommunications company BT more than two decades ago showed that flexible hours are not necessarily an alternative to high productivity; employees who worked on such a schedule were more productive and remained loyal to the firm for a long time. Since then, numerous initiatives have emerged to support flexible working hours, such as the Anytime Anywhere program introduced by Unilever. In addition, current trends towards reducing office costs provide more and more opportunities for working from home, as well as individual planning of working hours.