Shaping The Future Of Work: Flexibility Is The New Currency & We Must Catch Up

Flexibility is the new currency in the world of work. Shaping The Future Of Work by Chandrasekhar Sripada explains why and how firms and governments must rethink the conventional work, organizational, and leadership practices, provides fresh insights to engage the next-gen workforce, and recommends practical strategies to make India’s world of work inclusive and future-ready. 

An Excerpt From Shaping The Future Of Work

The Rise of the Remote and Flexible Work Order 

People have always wanted flexibility at work. And the twin forces of digital technologies and the Covid-19  pandemic showed us that rigidities around time and place of work are not mandatory for productive work. But our pandemic-induced work arrangements, at best, have been rather tactical and emergency responses to a health crisis. Whether our choosing to work from home or, later, after missing the socialization at the office, our return to the workplace in some measure (hybrid work)—both are afterthoughts and coping mechanisms.

As we wrestle with the post-pandemic world and experience new crises due to climate change, we will refine our choices about how and where to work. Further, as access to far more seamless and immersive video and digitally enabled work tools becomes possible, more flexible options around work will emerge. The big picture is clear: future work arrangements will be underpinned by ‘flexibility’ and ‘virtual’ work. 

Flexibility will inform the new work order at three levels: i) Individual preferences for work models and arrangements, ii) Team arrangements for collective work, and iii) Organizational coping, with the new demands for flexibility in terms of employment models as well as workspace design. 

Several different surveys in recent years have been suggesting a clear preference for flexibility among millennials. 

The statistics are similar the world over. Clearly, flexibility as to place, time and modes of work is what an entire generation of workers across borders are asking for. For employers, flexibility translates into widening the pool of talent, retention of staff, bridging of critical skill gaps and a lot more. Importantly, as a Gallup study noted,  flexible work also drives employee engagement, which in turn results in enhanced productivity, including but not limited to lower absenteeism and higher profitability.

The demand for flexibility has been further enhanced by the growth of automation and AI. Capgemini’s Fluid Workforce Research says that as much as 71 per cent of organizations rely on fluid workers because of the ever-changing skill requirements presented by AI and automation. Further, more than 60 per cent of organizations agree that AI and automation have created new job roles that are undertaken by fluid workers.

While we tend to speak of the rise of a flexible work order in the post-pandemic world with broad brush strokes, what we are referring to are at least two broad facets of it: 

I. How flexible work is tactically contracted and delivered, both from the individual as well as organizational point of view. 

II. How organizations need to be strategically redesigned to accommodate this flexibility. 

It will be worth looking at both these aspects in some detail. 

Contracting and delivering work 

The new changes to how work is contracted and delivered are best described by the emerging expression ‘fluid workforce’. This new work format is characterized by personalized working hours, the employees’ ability to choose to operate from anywhere in the world, and their defying of traditional hierarchical structures. 

To put this in context, we must refer to Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, who coined the terms ‘liquid modernity’ and ‘liquid society.’ Applied to employees, they signify a workforce that avoids stagnation or unjustified stability and flows instead, on account of its distinctive liquidity. These concepts break several decades of tradition, where organizations had come to rely on full-time employees alone, with tightly defined roles and skill sets.

Importantly, what liquid work allows corporations to do is to find professionals not only with highly specialized skill sets but who also work in a distributed manner to deliver at speed. What it offers is an ‘agile’  workforce, contracted differently—as full-time employees, as professionals working on output-based contracts, as virtual teams and in many other different forms. 

In terms of the individual, flexible work can take many forms, covering the axes of both place and time. Formal full-time employees can move from being place-constrained (read: work from the office) to place-unconstrained (read: work from anywhere); as also from being time-constrained (working 9–5, working synchronously with others) to being time-unconstrained (working asynchronously).

Simply put, with the advent of flexible work, work is no longer restricted to a time and a place but is an activity you can undertake any time and anywhere. 

In addition, flexible working, from the individual point of view, can take the form of part-time work, compressed hours, flexi-time and job-shares, freelance work, gig work, contracting and portfolio careers, paid crowd work, moonlighting and more.

Excerpted from Shaping The Future Of Work, written by Chandrasekhar Sripada; published by Penguin Random House India.