We Do Not Want Another Employee Experience Revolution

A man born in the United States in 1870 was statistically likely to live to age 39. In 1970, this had increased to age 70. Many of these 31 additional years of life were due to improved working conditions.¹ Technology that enabled the shift from an agricultural to manufacturing economy vastly improved people's prosperity and well-being, but these gains did not come easily. The benefits of the industrial revolution were not shared equally across all segments of society. Benefits for the upper half of society often came at a cost of suffering for the lower “working classes.” Early factories had horrific working conditions frequently likened to the pits of hell where worker injuries and fatalities were treated as an operational expense. This led to massive social unrest as workers demanded better treatment from employers. This unrest fueled class-based revolutions in several nations and resulted in widespread, violent confrontations among workers, employers, and government forces around the globe. It also led to positive developments such as outlawing use of child labor, ensuring workers had safe work environments and living wages, and the right to take time from work without losing their jobs. The nature of the employee experience fundamentally changed for the better over the course of the 20th century.² But it is not the kind of violent transition we want to repeat.

About 150 years ago, technology started to fundamentally transform the nature of work, which in turn transformed the nature of organizations and societies. We are in the midst of another such transformation. There are many reasons to believe this transformation will involve far less turmoil than the last one. The industrial revolution replaced complex craft jobs with more simplistic jobs focused on repetitive tasks that emphasized rule following and physical stamina. Because these jobs tended to be easy to learn, workers were easy to replace, and job security could be ensured only through contractual obligations backed by the threat of worker strikes. The current transformation is having the opposite effect. Repetitive jobs are being automated and replaced by jobs that require learning new skills and capabilities. Job security in the digital economy is not so much about what you can do as it is about what you can learn to do. Skilled workers are much harder to replace, which gives them the ability to demand better employee experiences. But jobs requiring their skills may still be eliminated due to advances in technology. What is certain is the nature of work will change over the coming years. What is yet to be determined is what work will look like for the majority of employees.

This last chapter does not talk about what the future of employee experience should look like because we know what it should look like. It should look like what a good employee experience looks like now: people collaborating and supporting one another in a healthy work environment doing meaningful things that matter to them. This last chapter is a more philosophical discussion about what it will take for us to share this future across all employees and not just a lucky few. When I was in graduate school, I kept a workers' rights poster from the early 20th century on my office wall. It showed an oil-covered worker laboring in a dimly lit factory under a massive, bone-crushing machine. The face of the worker had been replaced by a clock, and the bottom of the poster read “Work: a prison of measured time.” That poster reminded me that I never wanted a job where my value was based more on my time instead of what I contributed. It shouldn't matter where I sit or how long I sit there, what should matter is what I get done. Second, it made me sensitive to how technology can be used to create inhuman work environments where people feel more trapped than enabled. The time clock is a great example. Companies need some way to measure the contributions of their employees. In an agrarian economy, this was based on what people produced. A worker was paid based on the fruits of their labor, often literally. But in the industrial age, development of technology resulted in work becoming divided into specific tasks. Workers became separated from the end products of their labor, so companies developed technology to track time as a proxy for contributions. The result was that work became more about “punching the clock” than achieving something meaningful. There are many jobs where it does make sense to pay people based on their time, but employees should not have to spend their large portions of their life stuck in a job doing something that is meaningless and unfulfilling just to get paid.

When technology vendors talk about the digitalization of work, they tend to focus on the benefits that come from work experience platforms, opportunity matching systems, collaboration spaces, virtual reality, and other technological innovations. Labor market economists often take a more dismal view, viewing technology as a tool for maximizing profits by reducing employee costs through automation or outsourcing jobs to countries with lower wages and standards of living. Depending on whom you talk to, contract management technology is either fueling the gig economy or creating the disposable worker economy, and chatbots are either artificially intelligent digital assistants that improve user experience or impersonal robots that replace people with machines. In my view, technology is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we choose to use it. Consider these two visions of the future of work:

• The utopian future of work. Imagine a world where there are no interviews, job applications, org charts, or paperwork. A world where work is efficient, engaging, and enjoyable. People can work when they want and where they want and engage colleagues around the world in ways that work best for them, whether it is video chats, in-person meetings, or virtual reality meetups. Finding a job is not about recruitment and selection but about matching interests to opportunities. Companies are not about reporting structures and contracts but about communities of people collaborating to achieve shared goals. In this world, layoffs and retirement no longer exist, having been replaced with ongoing career transitions and lifelong learning. People have a sense of stability and employment security because they are given resources that enable them to constantly develop new skills for the next generation of jobs.
• The dystopian future of work. Imagine a world where the labor market has split into two categories: highly skilled and everyone else. The highly skilled is composed of people who have mastered the art of lifelong learning. There is a constant shortage of these workers, which allows them to craft jobs so that they can do them when, how, and where they want, at a high level of pay. These professionals enjoy benefits associated with being in demand, but they work incessantly under the constant stress of knowing that their current skills may soon become irrelevant due to relentless technological innovation. The other labor market is composed of workers whose skills were rendered obsolete by technological advances. The supply of these workers greatly exceeds the number of jobs they are qualified to perform, so unemployment is rampant. Their world is a never-ending competition for low-paying semiskilled work. If they find a job, they know it is just a matter of time before it is eliminated with the next generation of cost-saving automation technology. These workers long to be part of the highly skilled workforce, but family responsibilities and economic constraints prevent them from getting the education needed to enter the highly skilled labor market.

Technology is creating both the utopian and dystopian worlds. On the utopian side, companies are using technology to match people to work opportunities regardless of where they live or who they know, enabling people to structure jobs to fit their interests and lifestyles, and proactively identifying and training people on future skills they will need before they need them. We are also seeing the dystopian world emerge as evidenced by growing wage gaps and chronically unemployed and underemployed workers. What we do not know is which world is going to dominate our future. The future we get will depend on choices companies make about how to use technology to reshape employee experience and how societies choose to adapt to a much different world of work.

To create a more utopian future, we must invest in technology to maximize human potential and not just reduce workforce costs. Technology will always eliminate certain types of jobs and create new ones. It can also help workers transition to new types of work. Reductions in workforce costs gained by automating work tasks should be reinvested to help employees develop skills for the next generation of jobs. Societies must also update work regulations and social programs to reflect the changing nature of work. We cannot effectively transition to the future without letting go of the past. Technology has the potential to create a future in which people no longer worry about having to “work for a living” and instead focus on living a fulfilling, purposeful life that includes work. But as history shows, technology can also create horrific working conditions and punishing labor markets. Technology is going to change the world of work, that is certain. Whether technology leads to a future of work that is more utopian than dystopian depends entirely on how we choose to use it. Let us choose wisely.

One final thought about managing employee experience and the future of work. Many words used to talk about work depersonalize what it really is. Terms such as human capital, surplus labor, headcount costs, applicant tracking, talent acquisition, and job shortages give the impression that workforce management is some sort of supply chain activity involving commodities instead of people. At its most basic form, work is someone giving their life in the form of time and attention to a company, and a company is at its core when a group of people collaborating to accomplish something they could not do on their own. Those of us who are privileged with the opportunity to shape the nature of work have a responsibility to our fellow humans to give them the best employee experiences possible. Employee experience is life experience.