employment

ICT’s disruption of traditional employment relationship basis of RTO tensions

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Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over recent decades are fundamentally altering our perceptions of knowledge work: what it is and how and where it’s performed. Particularly in the context of the employment relationship between knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

As legally defined in the United States, employment empowers the employer to determine when, where and how employees do their jobs. For knowledge work, that has traditionally meant 8-5, Monday through Friday in a commute in office setting owned or leased by the employer.

ICT advances have virtualized and decentralized knowledge work to the point that arrangement makes less and less sense. Knowledge workers can increasingly get their work done outside of those constraints of time and location. That gives them more ability to choose when and where they work.

Having that agency – the ability to decide – is at the heart of the return to office tensions between knowledge workers and their employers. To employers, it appears to undermine their traditional role to direct how, where and when work is performed.

Knowledge workers are now claiming agency over those domains, recognizing going through the motions of commuting daily to an office to use computers and phones in a sea of cubicles during a set time frame no longer makes much sense.

It really hasn’t since the dawn of the commercial Internet in the 1990s. The social distancing public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic broke the habit of the daily commute to the office for both knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

Habits change when behavior changes. The pandemic forced a change in behavior, making knowledge work less dependent on transportation of knowledge workers to commute in office locations. Modifying habits is how change fundamentally begins and becomes the new norm.

Tipping point: Virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work disrupting traditional concept of employment

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Under the traditional concept of employment, an employer sets the conditions of employment: When, where and how the work is to be done by employees. That is colliding with the virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work. Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over the past five decades have rendered time and place far less relevant. Knowledge work can now be done most anywhere and at any time.

This shift didn’t happen overnight but over the past five decades. Its sudden acceleration since the 2020 pandemic follows a pattern where meta change grows slowly and then reaches a tipping point. That tipping point is now at hand. Some knowledge organizations are navigating it without much trouble while others are struggling to adapt as the former centralized office-based model gives way.

Employment in knowledge work as it has been understood will likely be reformed. That understanding included an expectation that because knowledge work was confined to a particular time and place, knowledge workers must expend their own time and resources in order to physically occupy that designated space and time.

That expectation is naturally now being questioned. Knowledge workers owe a duty to perform their work to the best of their ability for the organizations that retain them. Nothing more can be reasonably expected of them. And that includes a school/classroom like attendance policy that does nothing to further their efforts or the missions of the organizations they serve.

Shift toward self employment presents socio-economic challenges

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Supporting both stability and flexibility is good for workers, business and society. New platforms are providing workers with the flexibility and mobility that many have wished for but not found in the traditional labor market. However, self-employed workers choosing to engage in flexible work may also encounter unforeseen work disruptions or other hardships without the protections and benefits that may be provided through full time employment. We are in agreement that flexible work should not come at the expense of desired economic security.

Source: Common ground for independent workers — Medium

The above is from an open letter titled Principles for delivering a stable and flexible safety net for all types of work. It calls for a framework initiating a conversation on taking a new look at employment and benefits as more people become self employed, working on discrete, set duration assignments and projects versus being indefinitely employed by organizations with a package of compensation and benefits.

As I discuss in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century, the transition offers substantial benefits such as giving people more control over their professional and daily lives while affording them the freedom to both live and work in their communities rather than commuting to a centralized commute-in office located elsewhere. The primary challenge, however, is remaking the economy so that stable self employment opportunity exists for skilled, educated people versus the so-called “gig economy” wherein people attempt to patch together various forms of low income micro “gigs” that contributes to personal financial instability and impedes the economy as whole.