OFFICES OF THE FUTURE WITH REAL ESTATE EXECUTIVE DAVID MARINO OF HUGHES MARINO - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we’re looking to the future to examine the big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond. Today, we’re focused on the future of work and specifically the future of the office and corporate real estate. We have a great guest to help us do just that. Today, I’m joined by David Marino, executive vice president and cofounder of Hughes Marino, a San Diego corporate real estate advisory firm helping companies develop strategic solutions for their real estate needs — workspaces that work. David, thank you so much for joining me today.

David Marino: Thanks for the invitation.

Kornik: David, I’m excited today to get into the future of the office and corporate real estate as part of our Future of Work initiative. We still have to start with the pandemic, unfortunately. I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to be still talking about this in March 2022, but it looks like we do. I’m curious: How has the pandemic impacted your business, and corporate real estate in general?

Marino: There have been incredible amounts of content produced by industry experts, architects, landlords and brokerage firms about what’s going on, and my lens that I see the market through and this activity through is a personal one. Even though I’m a cofounder of the company, I’m 100% client-facing in what I do. Since the pandemic started two years ago, I’ve spoken to over 800 business owners and CEOs and CFOs. And in my career, I’m out working with clients looking to move their headquarters facilities and their research and distribution facility. In my daily activities, I’m in the market looking at buildings, looking at spaces and firsthand witnessing what’s going on in corporate America.

My perspective is a little different than that of a lot of the pundits, who are maybe looking at some data and some trends, and have an agenda in terms of their presentation. Given that we only represent tenants, there’s really no spin. We’re not advocating for landlords and building owners, and so we’re calling balls and strikes as we see them.

And the reality is, it’s a very mixed story out there. If you’re a biotech company or manufacturing or distribution company, the commercial real estate market has never been better because, even during the pandemic, all of those industries have to be present to conduct their business activities. But if you’re an office tenant, it’s a quite different set of affairs. As everyone knows, everyone that occupies office space in the United States essentially went remote two years ago. The question is, what are they doing now? The reality is, in the market, companies generally have yet to reoccupy their facilities. If you were to walk through most office buildings that were 90% leased pre-COVID, the occupancy levels in those buildings are anywhere from 15% to 25%. Generally, people still have not come back, and what business owners are still struggling with is, will they ever?

Kornik: That’s a good spot for me to ask, “Will they ever?” When you think about corporate offices of that future, workspaces that work, what are some of the big factors to consider when you think about the transformation that offices will undergo in the future? Let’s start with that first question, though: Will they ever come back?

Marino: What I’ve learned is that there are three buckets of employees. It’s different company to company, but employees fall in one of these three categories: There are employees who are desperate for engagement, who only work well when they’re present, who really want to be back in the office at least three days a week, but as much as full-time. Generally, there aren’t a lot of employees who said, “I want to be back five days a week and have a normal workload like I did before including the commute, all the other things involved,” but most people in this category do want to come back at least three days a week.

There’s a second category of folks who want to come back never. There is this work-from-anywhere program where employees have moved away, changed states and left the location where their home office was previously located. So, you have a tremendous amount of people who aren’t even in the same community than they were pre-COVID. Those folks aren’t coming back. Or people who had an hour of commute each day and have simply said, “Look, I’m just never coming back. I’m happy at home. I can see my kids. I have a better relationship with my partner. I’m healthier, I’m happier. I’m saving money not commuting, paying for parking.” So, there’s a whole category of folks that are just never coming back. The reality is, the employer can’t make them. The employer today is effectively powerless in the job market.

Then there’s this third category, what I’ll call the hybrid. Those are the folks who have said, “Yes, I’ll come back for a meeting once a week” or “I’ll come back a couple of times a month, but I don’t really want to be managed. I generally want to work from home or from anywhere, and I’ll see you a couple of times a month.” I’ve talked to companies that are 25 people and 500 people, and everywhere in between, and employees fit cleanly into one of those three boxes. The challenge is, for each business owner, what percentage of your employees fit into each of those boxes?

This is where employers need to move quickly to the acceptance stage of the five stages of grief. The last stage is the fifth, which is acceptance. It is acceptance of the fact that if 30% of your employees say they’re never coming back, well, that’s just true. You can’t wish it to be something different. You can’t say, “Gosh, they’re going to miss out on promotions and culture and communication, and all these other things.” Yes. They’re willing to forgo all that stuff and the beautiful office to live their new life.

Then there’s this other category that want to come in once a week, once a month, that you have to provision some community space for, or co-working space or hoteling space, whatever you want to call it. It is now to the point where employers have to get religion around this. We’re in year two, moving into year three, and it’s not going to be different a year from now.

I’m working with companies real-time that have given up. I, in the last 30 days, have eight different clients that have chosen to sublease their space, that have anywhere from two to six years left on the lease, where they’ve said, “We now have come to acceptance. We have 65,000 square feet of space, and we only need 12,000.” “We have 8,000 square feet of space. We only need 3,000.” “We have 33,000 square feet. We only need 15,000.” I could tell that story thousands of times around the country, and the latent effect on this is huge.

The potential in the market for companies to go through radical downsizing is right in front of our faces, because everyone is now starting to move to acceptance. The CEO and business owners are showing up and seeing that they have five people where they had seats for 50, and they’re not going to continue to pay the rent. They’re not going to continue to carry these liabilities until the terminal point of lease. If they’re silly enough to do so, then they’re going to downsize when that lease expires.

Kornik: What does that mean for the market? Are there opportunities for them to sublease, and what happens to those spaces? What does it do in terms for your business? When you think about strategic planning and design and architecture, functionality, what does that tell you about the future and how it will work? What happens to those spaces, and what does it do to the market ultimately?

Marino: Another question that could have an hourlong answer. I’ll try to keep it brief, though. First, for us as a business, we’re very fortunate that we represent a lot of manufacturing companies and distribution companies and biotech research facilities and office tenants. Certainly, the office sector of what we do is sluggish, but we’re very busy in this other industry sectors taking care of clients, representing tenants and renewing, downsizing, renegotiating, subleasing, relocating. That’s what we do for a living. There is always activity. So, even though a tremendous amount of our clients are office tenants, for us, we’re still going to represent a lot of tenants moving around the market as they downsize.

If you look back at what happened in the prior recessions — let me walk you through. I’ve been doing this for 33 years now. The early-’90s commercial real estate meltdown was a supply-side problem. The market was overbuilt by a lot of speculative real estate and a lot of capital that flooded the market. If you look at the tech rec, you had a demand-side problem. You had the capital markets implode, which caused companies to mostly fail, and therefore default on their leases. Then, if you look at the mortgage crisis of ’07–’08, something similar — again, we had a capital-markets problem that spilled over into the tech and other business sectors that caused a demand-side problem.

It’s different this time. We now have structural change in how corporate America uses office space. The initial shock in 2020 was, everybody vacated their space. But we thought this was going to be over in about six weeks, back in March 2020. So, here we are two years later. What happened are two phenomena in 2020: First, tenants who had leases expiring in 2020 let those leases lapse and didn’t occupy any space. The secondary thing that happened is, tenants immediately started putting space on the market for sublease. In most urban areas, sublease inventory went to record levels: New York City, 22 million square feet of space on the market; Seattle, Denver, 8 million square feet; Boston, 8 million square feet; San Francisco, 10 million square feet — and those numbers have been static since 2020. They haven’t shifted down.

What’s happening is, as tenants that vacated their space in 2020 looked to come back in 2021, a lot of those companies occupied sublease space because they wanted plug-and-play, cheap, low length-of-lease term options. What’s happened simultaneously is, more and more companies every day come to the conclusion that they’re never coming back, so the inventory keeps getting added to each day. It’s stuck in neutral. You’ve got one that comes off and one that comes on. Just as I described earlier, these eight clients of mine in the last 30 days that have dumped space, that is what we’re going to see a lot of this year: Companies that have remaining lease liabilities of two years or more are just going to throw in the towel, because they’re only occupying 20–30% of what they have. I forecast that sublease overhead inventory is going to persist and probably get worse in a lot of markets before it gets better.

But the punch line on all of this is, availability rent rates went crazy in 2020. Some markets, like San Francisco, doubled. Other markets went up 30%, 40%, 50%, and so we saw this incredible spike in 2020. Twenty twenty-one started to flatten off, but we’re going to see over the next three to five years, as more leases expire, that the remaining companies that have yet to address their lease-expiration date are mostly going to get smaller.<>We call that in our industry, Joe, negative net absorption. It’s when a 50,000-square-foot tenant becomes a 20,000-square-foot tenant. That’s negative 30,000 square feet of absorption. We’re in a negative-net-absorption cycle that is going to persist for three to five years, and this is going to end badly for owners of office buildings.

Kornik: I was going to ask you about new construction. I imagine that the construction market is probably thrown into complete upheaval and disruption based on this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you think there’ll be less need for offices in the future. If you were to project and look out five to seven years, would you say that we will have a lot fewer corporate offices, or a lot less square footage, at least, being dedicated to that market?

Marino: I would be so aggressive to say that, with a few exceptions, within the next 10 years, no one will need to build another office building anywhere in the United States. In fact, what you’re going to see is a general repurposing of office buildings. Already, people are having the conversation about “How do we convert these things into multifamily residential?”<>You can look at certain situations and certain markets like San Diego County. In the central-county area, where the biotech industry is so robust, the biotech industry has signed 4.5 million square feet of leases in the last two years, and most of those tenants are going into former office buildings.

In these submarkets, there are 30 office buildings that are being converted into biotech wet-lab research facilities in San Diego right now. Something similar is happening in Boston in the Cambridge area, in Lake Union in Seattle and in South San Francisco. As the life science industry changes, these companies are going into three- to six-story office buildings being converted to biotech research.

You have conversion for different industries happening. To give you some crazy examples, in the South Bay, in Los Angeles County, industrial space is now at a record-low vacancy rate. You can’t find it, because of the supply chain activity coming in through the Port of Long Beach and Los Angeles. So, those companies, to find warehouse space, have to move out to Ontario or Riverside or Corona to get a building.

Developers are going into the South Bay — the Long Beach and Torrance area — and they’re going to be tearing down one- and two-story office buildings to build warehouses. This class B, class C, generic real estate that’s 30, 40 years old, that doesn’t have a lot of value — office buildings with big parking lots — a bunch of those things are going to be coming down in the next three to five years around the port area of Los Angeles, and you’re going to see warehouses pop up. We’re definitely in a cycle where people don’t need these office buildings, and everybody is scratching their heads long-range on what we’re going to do with all this excess inventory.

Kornik: A disruption like this, we haven’t seen in a long time in this market. David, I’m interested in those corporations, those firms, that do plan on keeping a substantial footprint. They’re all trying to figure out what the footprint should look like, how should it be different, how it should function differently than it has in the past — the design, the layout, how many floors they would need versus whether there’d be collaboration spaces or whether there’ll be offices that look like they did a decade ago. What’s your take on that from an architecture and functionality standpoint — of the offices that do remain? As firms move into trying to think about the next five to 10 years, what those offices of the future will look like?

Marino: There are definitely going to be some trends coming out of this. The first trend you’ll see is less of what we call bench seating. It was in vogue pre-COVID: Internet and tech and software companies would have this face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder, very small workstation to try to encourage collaboration. Yet, at the same time, everybody was sitting around with headsets on because it was so distracting and so noisy. That’s the funny thing about those work environments: They didn’t actually work that well. They saved a lot of rent because you could pack a lot of people in and they looked cool, but they weren’t particularly humane.

In the post-pandemic reality, with social distancing, employees, to come back, are going to need to feel safe. That means giving them adequate separation among their coworkers, and so we’re going to be looking at a minimum of a six-foot-by-six-foot module going forward for proper safety, or perception of safety and health and welfare. You’re going to see an untangling of the workplace — less of this bench-seating culture and environment.

The other thing you’re going to see is a lot more conference rooms — particularly, small conference rooms. It used to be that people would gather in groups of 8 or 10 or 12, and you had a lot of medium to large conference rooms. What I see in the future is a lot more conference rooms, but smaller: two people, four people — six people, max. That will also help support remote workers that want to come in once a month or once a week, because they can jump into a conference room with a laptop. As people continue to do more video calls and more small meetings and more remote activity, more small conference rooms are going to be the norm, and what I’ll call community space: bigger lunch rooms, bigger social spaces, where someone who comes in once or twice a week with a laptop can sit in a kitchen or lounge area and not need a dedicated workspace or an office. You’re going to see that.

Most companies we’re talking to are trying to figure out the hoteling component. Do they have 10 or 20 workstations in two or three offices that are the remote-working area, where folks can either reserve a desk or come in at their discretion and know that there’s a workspace available for them? A lot of companies are going to be talking about how to accommodate the remote worker, and how to try to get people back to the extent they’re willing to come back — with that point that you can’t make them come back, but you can encourage them.

The last thing, Joe, I’m seeing is companies looking to top-grade. As you’re trying to bring your employees back, if you’re going to bring them back to the same generic office space that’s in an R&D park in a suburban area, that’s nondescript and has no amenities, I don’t know that that’s very exciting for people. The companies I’m working with that are trying to get their employees back, we’re talking about walkability of amenities for food and retail. We’re talking about on-site fitness with lockers and showers. We’re talking about having nicer buildings in a class A location, perhaps closer to mass transit to minimize the commute.

As employers, we’re going to have to bait these people back. We’re going to have to have incentives and inducements and create a work environment that’s exciting and better than they had pre-COVID to encourage them to come back to. That’s what we’re working with our clients on right now — counseling them to spend a little more per square foot, because chances are, you’re going to take less square footage. In other words, moving from a class B building to a class A building might cost 20% more, but if you can shed 40% of your space, you’re still saving money. That’s where I think this is going.

Kornik: David, you’ve given us a lot of amazing information and great insight into the market and the office of the future. We call our program Vision by Protiviti because we like to bring smart people together and have them give us their vision of the future, which you’ve done here a great deal. I want to ask you to look a little further out, and ask if you have any bold predictions. Take me to a decade out or more even, if you could, and what’s possible? What haven’t we mentioned? What haven’t we thought of?

Marino: These trends that I described can potentially even become exacerbated. Look at what’s happening from a technology-backbone standpoint. Entire technologies are being developed today to support remote working, whether they’re online communities — beyond video, beyond Zoom or Riverside and all these tools that big tech like Cisco and these other companies are providing, Webex. There are all of these dashboard management tools for executive teams and business owners to understand what their employees are doing when they’re remote working: Are they logged on? What are they logged on to? How many calls do they have? What are they doing on the internet?

Between management tools, communication tools, community tools, all of the technology that we have yet to even deploy and understand yet, the future is being built on how to support the remote worker — how to make this reality not have to pull people back into the office, So, if you look 10 or 20 years out from now, we have a whole generation of college students in their 20s and young professionals in their 30s who are now being trained to remote work. Those young people, who, 10 and 20 years from now, become the CEOs and CFOs and business owners, they’re going to have been raised with their careers on how to do this well.

I fear it’s here to stay. Most people in my industry who would be on this call want to talk about this being temporary, and everybody is dying to come back, and everybody can’t work from home. That’s wishful thinking, because they want to see these office buildings fill up. That’s in their economic agenda, to see full office buildings. For us, it is what it is. If they’re full or vacant, we just, like I said, call balls and strikes. The reality is, these people aren’t coming back. If anything, 10, 20 years, from now, we’ll see more virtual companies, more hybrid styles of working, that we can’t even imagine today. Unfortunately, the horses are out of the barn, and this trend is here to stay.

Kornik: It sure sounds like it. David, I can’t thank you enough for that look inside the market. Your insights are valuable. You gave us a lot to think about today, so thank you so much for joining us today on the Vision by Protiviti interview.

Marino: Joe, thanks for the opportunity. It’s a real pleasure. Great seeing you.

Kornik: Thanks, David. That was such a wonderful discussion. For VISION by Protiviti, I’m Joe Kornik, and we’ll see you next time.

DIGITAL DISRUPTION: FUTUROLOGIST AND PROFESSOR DR. STEFAN GRÖNER ON LEADING THROUGH RAPID CHANGE - Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we look into the future to examine the implications of big topics that will impact businesses worldwide over the next decade and beyond. Today, I’m joined by Dr. Stefan Gröner, a renowned German futurologist, professor, speaker and consultant who helps business leaders set their company’s strategic course for the future. He is dean of studies for digital management and corporate communications at Fresenius University of Applied Sciences, where his research areas are in the fields of digital transformation, digital communication of the future and business technologies of the future. Doctor, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Stefan Gröner: Yes. It’s a pleasure having me.

Kornik: I’m excited to speak with you, as your unique background as both a professor with expertise in the future of tech and your role as an adviser to C-level executives gives you a very unique perspective to talk about the future of work. Let’s start on the tech side. You talk a lot about digital disruption, its role in the future of work and why it’s so difficult for companies to adapt to all that disruption. Can you expand on that and talk about some of the common mistakes executives make and how we can avoid them?

Gröner: First, it’s important to know that disruption is nothing really new. Disruption was basically true all the time. Just think of the letterpress versus the handwritten letter, or the CD versus the audiocassette, or the smartphone versus the Nokia 3210. It’s, simply spoken, meaning that old business models are going to disappear or be less attractive due to new technologies of competitors which meet the customers’ need in a better way. It’s nothing new, but it is still so hard for companies, for the old players in the market, to adapt to the changes.

Out of my experience, competitors in the market usually tend to focus on their own products and less on the solutions and ecosystems. Take the example of the stagecoach: If you ask the stagecoach owner what the customer wants, they’ll probably say, “Improving my stagecoach — meaning more horses or more comfortable seats,” stuff like that, but was it really the true customer need? The true customer need was mobility, getting faster from A to B, and with the invention of the automobile, stagecoaching was out.

It’s always the problem for players in an existing market to say goodbye to their old business model, to say goodbye to their own products and become more focused on the real customer needs and solutions for the customers. This is not an example just of the past, it’s also true for the automotive industry at the moment, because when digitization arose, what did they do? They tried to put new features in their cars, improving their existing models. When new technologies came — like AI, like sensor technique, like platform technologies, stuff like that —new competitors with other skills came to the markets: Waymo, Uber and so on, they have new competencies. What I usually recommend is thinking more broadly of customer needs and having the courage to forget about your own product, but that’s hard. That’s super hard.

Kornik: You mentioned AI, and I wanted to stay on the tech side for the time being. It would be tough to have a discussion around the future of work without discussing AI. It’s obviously going to be incredibly impactful and important. What is most important when we talk about incorporating AI into our work lives of the future? What advice would you give?

Gröner: That’s a huge question. Simply speaking, what can I do with AI, or what can companies do with AI? First, they can increase their efficiency. They can automate processes. This is very important. This is the cost side, but on the other side, that is even more important. With the help of AI, you can predict your customer needs in a much better way — your customer needs and your customer actions — and you can learn much more about your customers. If you can do that, you’ll be able to adapt to changes way better.

This is pretty much what you can do with AI, but what do you need as a company? There are four important ingredients: First, it’s computing power. That’s why AI is so hot at the moment, because computing power increased dramatically over the last years. It’s algorithms, of course. You need algorithms. It’s data, and then it’s people. What is most important? Everything is important right here, but the most important is data and people. Why? Because you can buy computing power and you can buy algorithms. There are companies that provide that. You still need a couple of specialists to adopt that, but that’s a task you probably can do.

What you can’t buy is data. If you don’t have data about your processes, your market, your customers, then you can’t set up a working model. I usually recommend that it’s overdue to set up a data culture, which means collect all data possible and make it universally accessible to everybody in the company. Even if it’s through a department of your competitor as being a CEO, it’s super necessary. You have to do that if you don’t have data, and this is the most important factor of digital disruption: You probably can’t catch up anymore, because if you don’t collect data right now, your competitor is way ahead, and there is no chance of catching up.

The fourth factor is people, the human factor. At the moment, it’s still true that, of course, you need specialists. You need data analysts, you need software engineers, people like that, in order to set up AI, but I’m pretty sure that in a couple of years, once your AI works, you need another type of employee: people who have a broader interdisciplinary knowledge, for instance, or who are more creative in order to think ahead, in order to think about new markets. And that’s at the moment lacking, because even at university, we produce specialists right now. It’s getting way more important to produce generalists in order to face the challenges which are ahead.

Kornik: It sounds like there are some opportunities when it comes to jobs in AI, but what a lot of people think about when they think about the future of work and AI is, what impact will it have on their current jobs? Which jobs may go away with AI? Specifically, when it comes to jobs in the future and looking, let’s say, in 2030, you touched on it there, but how else do you think AI will impact the jobs that we’re doing right now, and how different those jobs may look in the future?

Gröner: There are a lot of fears around at the moment. Of course, there are new technologies, and nobody knows what’s really happening. If you want to put it positively, the happy news is, first, with the help of AI, you can get rid of boring, routine jobs. That’s the good news, definitely. There are a lot of studies, but in a huge percentage of all the jobs that are purely routine, with AI, you can get rid of that. On the other hand, you probably have to evolve other skills which are needed, and these other skills are more human skills like empathy, like creativity, stuff like that which I mentioned earlier. That’s probably the hardest challenge for people who are not used to think in that way, and only work their routines. There are chances — there are huge chances — but there are also some risks if you don’t want to adapt.

Kornik: I think we’d all agree that we’re in a time of rapid change. The pandemic accelerated some of the changes that were already in place, but all this change and all this technology has a profound impact on human beings. When we’re talking about the future of work, it’s how it’s going to impact those human beings. I’m sure this comes up a lot when you talk about strategy in your conversations with the C-suite and executives. What is crucial for executives to be focused on right now when it comes to leading through these times of rapid change and disruption?

Gröner: What I usually recommend are two things. I mean, there are two main challenges. First, you have to think, what kind of employees do I need in the future? As I already said, are these specialists at the moment for the next two or five years? Probably, yes, but then this is the kind of workforce you need in order to think of new markets, in order to think ahead and stuff like that, and I doubt that. It’s mainly necessary to start thinking about recruiting people with other skills than you have, like creative skills, broader knowledge and so on, in order to be prepared once your AI is set. That’s the first challenge. The second challenge is the leading challenge. If you want to work with more creative people who are at some points annoying or even demanding and stuff like that, you have to change your leadership style.

What is important is, the times of top-down leading are definitely out. There are couple of reasons: First, the world is way too complex in times of AI. You can’t get through all the algorithms with business analysts, with software engineers. It’s just not possible, first. Second, If you have an open mind, if you’re thinking new markets, you don’t have experience on that, and then you just have to trust. You have to trust your team. You have to lead by trust and not by hierarchy — that’s super important. First, attract more creative people, and on the other side as well, in order to be competitive in the future, trust and flexibility are probably the most important leadership skills in the future.

Kornik: Those leaders are the future, and leaders of today, ultimately, are going to be leading multiple generations. That’s one of the trends that we’re seeing as we look forward. People will be taking potentially second careers, or people may not actually retire at the same age as they have. Maybe they’ll work part-time. There’s a lot of that that’s going on. When you look at the younger generations, what stands out to you in terms of their style or their priorities for what they’re looking for, attracting them, retaining them, recruiting them? You talked about that in your last answer. What will fundamentally be different about that generation in their working style and then, ultimately, as they become leaders down the road?

Gröner: First, I need to break a lance for this generation. I’m an oldster, and I have a lot to do with younger people — that’s basically why I’m at the university. I have to break the lance because stereotypes are, they are egocentric, they’re only leisure-oriented, stuff like that, but almost every one of my master’s students, they have a 30-hour-plus job in the industry, in addition to a very demanding curriculum. That’s much more than I was willing to do when I was studying. They are pretty focused, but the main difference is, when I started working, it was more like, “Here’s the job — do it,” and I did it because that was ordered at some point, and I just did it, because I wanted to make a career.

The younger generation — and I don’t think it’s a bad sign — they are purpose-oriented. They want to see a sense of what they’re doing. They want to see some kind of purpose. They want to understand why they’re doing something, and they’re much more critical. That’s a good sign.<>On the other hand, if you’re not willing to listen to them, then probably it’s hard to retain them, then they are just gone, and then you lose a huge opportunity in order to get other perspectives in order to learn more about new skills. They are digital natives. I learn every day at the university. I teach them a lot about strategy, of course, but I have no idea of some stuff they are doing, and I learn. Listening is an important task for leaders of the future, and then, if you listen and if you build up trust and if you explain stuff, if you say, “This is the purpose — that’s why I’m doing that,” if you try to put empathy on them, then you can attract and retain them.

Kornik: A lot of interesting insights. We’ve covered a lot. I know there’s probably a lot more that we could cover, but I would like to wrap up here by asking you to look out with me to 2035 and give me a couple of predictions about, what will be different when it comes to the future of work? What might surprise us? What are we not anticipating? What shall we be expecting in 2035?

Gröner: I always tend to think positively, so I only want to bring some happy news at the end. I’m pretty sure that we’ll have a much more flexible and a much more satisfying work life. We’ll get rid of routine jobs. We’re going to be encouraged about more job enrichment and more time spent thinking ahead, stuff like that. It’s going to be definitely more interesting to work, and less boring and more satisfying. What you need — and that’s super important — you need more empathy. You need more creativity.

This is not only true for leaders. It’s crucial for leaders, but it’s also crucial for employees, because if you don’t have that and you don’t try to get some kind of creativity in your life, if you don’t try to think ahead, if you do not try to be open-minded, if you do not try to make your own decisions, and just follow, then you’re going to be replaced, most likely, by algorithms or robots in the near future — probably not only in the workspace, but also in your private life. That’s what I’m saying to my students: “Try to be creative. Open your mind and think on your own — then, everything is going to be good.”

Kornik: Excellent. Thank you so much, Dr. Stefan Gröner, for the time today and those insights — really valuable from the two different perspectives that you’re able to bring to the discussion today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Gröner: Yes, thank you. It was a pleasure.<>Joe Kornik: For you at home, thanks for watching. I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.

FROM TALENT TO TECH WITH FUTURIST AND BUSINESS STRATEGIST, GRAEME CODRINGTON, CO-FOUNDER OF TOMORROWTODAY - Audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of VISION by Protiviti, where we put megatrends under the microscope to examine the big topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work. I’m joined by Graeme Codrington, an expert on the future of work, a bestselling author, an award-winning speaker, and a board adviser who works across multiple industries and sectors. Graeme has a particular interest in disruptive forces changing how people live, work, interact and connect with each other. Speaking internationally to over 100,000 people in more than 20 different countries every year, he lectures at some of the world’s top business schools and has written five books, including Mind the Gap and Futureproof Your Uncertain Future. Graeme, I am so looking forward to this discussion today on the future of work with you. Thank you so much for joining the Vision by Protiviti podcast.

Graeme Codrington: This is one of my favorite topics in the world to talk about, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity. Thanks, Joe.

Kornik: Graeme, I think you may agree with this premise — that the pandemic was not only a disruptor but also an accelerator of change. Changes that may have taken maybe the rest of this decade, even, to impact the world of work are now already evident. As a result, what might have felt like conversations and decisions that we could have put off perhaps for many years are more important than ever today. Does that sound about right?

Codrington: That’s spot on, Joe. You asked me to think about the world of 2030 for this podcast, and I think the world of 2030 has already arrived — at least what we thought 2030 was going to be — COVID-19 is the cause of that. A lot of things that were going to happen over the course of the rest of this decade are now already in play. Quite a lot of that has got to do with the workplace and hybrid and flexible working. Quite a lot of it has got to do with technology. That’s the easiest to point to — that some trends in ecommerce and digital supply chain management and things along those lines have been accelerated. People are being forced to accelerate those, but those are the easy things to think about.

For me, what’s more fascinating is the shift in people’s expectations. This is looking more at the people themselves rather than the physical location of work or the technology that we use. For example, people want more autonomy. They’ve gotten used to working from home. They might tell themselves they don’t really like it or they want to get back to the office, but they’re going to come back to the office with an attitude and an expectation of a lot more freedom and autonomy.

Automation is going to be a big theme over the rest of this decade, as people realize that there are technological tools. It is really as simple as Zoom, for example, and Microsoft Teams. Now people have realized, “We can all do this. We can all have virtual teams. We can all work globally.”

That leads nicely into a third theme of personalization. People are expecting things to be customized even if it’s just your Zoom background, but obviously a lot more, and we can get into some of that in the conversation. That’s leading to an integration, or a blending, across functions and across industries. And then finally, it’s no surprise to me that Facebook has shifted into the metaverse and the meta realm in this COVID-19 world, because extended and virtual realities are going to intersect with the workplace maybe faster than we expected.

That is a mouthful response, but a great question to get us going. A lot of these trends are going to be in play and are going to move faster than we expected, which means that 2030 is tomorrow, and maybe we — you and I, Joe — should be talking about 2040 instead.

Kornik: Feel free to look out as far as we can, Graeme, because that’s what we’re trying to do here with Vision by Protiviti — look far into the future. We have a hard time getting people to look a year or two out, so, typically, 2030 is a big enough challenge for the leadership that I talk to. Let’s start where you did — the idea of autonomy, which is a really interesting one, and how that’s going to be a key component of the employee experience over the next decade and beyond. What do you mean by that, exactly, and how will that manifest itself in the daily working lives of employees?

Codrington: We don’t want everybody to switch the podcast off after just five minutes because they hear the words hybrid and flexible again, but that’s where it starts. We all know that flexibility and hybrid working is now the name of the game, but when your employees ask for flexibility, what they really want is autonomy. They feel that it manifests in “Can I be a little bit more flexible with the hours I work?” “When the working day starts?” “Can I work from home a day or two?” But if we play that out for another eight or nine years, that’s not just going to be a little bit of flexibility that people are asking for. People are going to deeply want more control over their world — not just over their working world, but over all of their lives. That’s going to push us well beyond the old work-life-balance conversation.

This is shifting — and Joe, tell me how much detail you want us to go into in some of these contexts. Some of them are on the edge of familiarity, but they’re going to be important — things like outcomes-based working, where we are no longer measuring people inputs. No more time sheets. No more tracking hours. No more measuring people’s contribution to the business by whether they worked overtime or how many hours they put in, but shifting to being able to measure people by their outputs only.

Realizing that some people might work a four-day week — and we know already, where we are talking here in 2022, Dubai has made that shift to a longer weekend. Iceland has been experimenting. Probably 15 countries around the world are putting real money into experiments with four-day working weeks, which might sound anathema to our American listeners, but it’s got to do the shift toward measuring productivity, effectiveness and output in different ways. I want to get beyond the buzzwords of hybrid and flexibility and realize there’s a deep shift coming in the world of work.

Kornik: To think about a four-day workweek almost seems counterintuitive considering that even the five-day workweek has morphed into this six-day workweek, or 5.5-day workweek. We could say that we want to potentially move back to a four-day workweek. I’m worried that it’ll turn into 15-hour work days. That’s my big fear.

Codrington: Joe, that’s exactly right. What we haven’t done, and what we will do, by 2030 is, we’ll have a lot more data, a lot more science, that is going to show us that you reach a point as a knowledge worker where you’re not adding value anymore. We know this for the physical labor, because your body literally gives up. Your muscles say, “I can’t do any more.” Then, injuries happen, and it’s a health and safety environment, and in the next 10 years, we’re going to work out what that looks like for your brain, which then is linked to your mental health, which then is linked to your physical health and your well-being.

People who have heart attacks and strokes and stress-related illnesses, which include cancers and others, we’re going to track that back and realize that our bodies can’t cope with a 15-hour workday, six-day weeks, and then the conversation will be around peak performance versus recovery. It will be about contribution, not just measuring inputs. That’s the conversation. We can probably spend the whole podcast on this. Let’s not do that — we’ve made the point — but this is huge, and it signals probably the biggest shift in workplace practice in 100 years.

Kornik: That’s fascinating. That whole idea that you brought up around measuring productivity, or what is productivity, or how do we redefine productivity, is really interesting. Clearly, there’s the whole technological revolution that’s happening at the same time, and automation was your second topic that you brought up in the beginning. I don’t think we can possibly talk about the future of work without discussing AI and its impacts. That’s what everyone is focused on.

Codrington: Yes, the question that’s obviously normally asked in this space is, how many jobs will disappear? How many jobs are we going to replace? By 2030 — here’s a bold prediction: none. Now, stick with me. There was a comma at the end of that statement. There are very few jobs that can be 100% replaced by a machine. There are hundreds and thousands of tasks that can be replaced.

That might sound like I’m just playing with words, but I’m not. Too many C-suite leaders are thinking in terms of head count and thinking in terms of function. When you do that, it’s quite difficult to visualize and imagine how artificial intelligence will make its way into your workplace. You tend to then think you have to have a million-dollar supercomputer in your basement, and until you’ve got that, we don’t have AI. I like to think of IA instead of AI — IA being “intelligent assistance.” And then, if you think of your job, it has a hundred tasks associated with the job, and how many of those tasks can you get intelligent assistance for? Once you begin to think in this way, you move a lot faster into much cleverer automation.

Again, an hour’s worth of conversation, but maybe that’s enough for people to realize that a mindset shift is maybe the biggest thing that’s going to happen in the next 10 years into looking at tasks and how those tasks then get assisted in a variety of ways, including very clever algorithms and machine learning and all those things, but not necessarily. Very clever might just be a simple chatbot or a little Excel spreadsheet that helps you. As long as you’re thinking about intelligence assistance, you’re moving yourself nicely into the future.

Kornik: Graeme, I’m going to quote you on that: “We’re not going to lose any jobs to AI.” That could be the headline from the podcast.

Codrington: Let’s put a pin in that for about five minutes, because I think that conversation is going to come back to that. I didn’t say that no one would lose their jobs, but we’ll come back to that.

Kornik: A big part if this is, obviously, data and how we are constantly capturing data in all of this, and throughout all these technologies, we’ve got more data than we know what to do with. That’s one of the challenges that we have going forward. Talk to me about data and how that will drive the future of work, and what it will look like in 2030.

Codrington: For data, we’ve got to take two steps back, and people forget this. The first thing is the Internet of Things. This was all the rage — ten years ago, every conference had an Internet of Things breakaway session, and we’ve forgotten about it. It starts with instrumentation. It starts with gathering data and getting as much data as possible.

I see three I’s: instrumentation, interconnected and then intelligence. Maybe an example is useful here. We know the theory, but let’s give an example: Right now, we don’t have healthcare systems in the world. That’s not me as a South African being rude about America. I know that’s a big political debate. That’s not what I’m talking about. Nobody has a healthcare system, because you don’t get into the system until you are sick. We have sick care systems — you don’t get a message from your doctor saying, “Graeme, you are going to be sick by next Tuesday unless you do the following things.” We only get a message from our doctors saying, “That test you did yesterday, I have the results, and I’d like to see you.”

So what we can do — we’ve all got these fitness trackers that we wear, these smart watches. They’re measuring our steps, but over the next few years, they’re going to be measuring heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature. We could obviously measure what we eat and what we drink. We can measure our sleep. Three or four years ago, nobody would have believed the next thing: We can measure who you’re meeting, who you plan to meet, who you did meet, where you went and what the implications are of that.

Before COVID-19, everybody would have thought I was crazy and said, “Nobody’s going to give you that data.” Now during COVID-19, we realize the value of getting a message saying, “Graeme, you met somebody earlier today who exposed you to an infectious disease.” Wouldn’t it be better if they said, “Graeme, you’re planning to meet somebody tomorrow and, data privacy, we can’t really tell you why not, but we highly recommend you go virtual with that meeting rather than face to face”? People understand that now.

Again, this is the point we’re making in the podcast, that there’s a shift in understanding that’s going to bring the future closer. Now, you can imagine a system where we’re gathering a lot of health and well-being and medical data about you and me, Joe, and now a supercomputer somewhere can analyze that data — can, using big data pools and predictive data analytics, then see that, “Graeme, you’re heading down the road: You’re not sleeping well. You haven’t drunk enough. You are meeting people who are exposing you to things. Graeme, unless you change the following three things, you might be sick by next Tuesday.”

That’d be remarkable. Everybody would sign up for that system. There’s an example of what a data-driven analytics system might do. And now, pull that into the world of work, where you’re trying to predict and understand how to get the most out of your employees. You’re trying to work out who to hire and what you should be offering them, and peak performance, and who should get promotions, and which groups of people would work best in teams, and who should work from home and who should not. You can just see what data is going to do to that and to the future of work, and there’s going to be a lot of data science coming into our HR functions, into our finance functions, into our strategy functions. I’m excited about it.

Kornik: You mentioned hiring, and I’m interested in skills and capabilities of the future — what will be required. You talked about the integration of skills and jobs and industries and how they all interact, and how that evolution will accelerate in the future.

Codrington: There’s two things to say here, and the one is, I neatly sidestepped to your earlier question about no jobs disappearing. We come back to that now. This is where I wanted to talk about it. Some people will lose their jobs, but what I meant by saying that no jobs will disappear entirely — that was the word that I left hanging in the air — is because jobs will begin to fuse with each other. Right now, we very much break the world down into fairly neat siloes.

Let’s go back to the medical environment: There’s a surgeon. There’s a nurse. There’s a doctor. By 2030, those doctors are going to be integrated with robotic operating theaters where they’re going to have to be working alongside robots to do surgery. They’re going to be using big-data analytics to try and predict the diseases and the diagnoses of their clients. So, is there any pure doctor in the future, or is it a doctor/data specialist? Is it a doctor/robotic specialist?

If we bring it into other places of work, are there going to be pure accountants in the future, pure HR specialists, pure engineers, or are we going to see — well, let me not frame it as a question, because by 2030, the traditional careers, especially the traditional professions, are not going to exist anymore. You’re going to have to have overlapping sets of skills. Some of those are obvious already — robotics, automation, AI, data analytics — but you can look at pretty much any career and profession and realize there’ll be integration. Maybe if we think about it at industry level, it’s a little bit easier to conceptualize.

Think about it now: Even in 2022, as we recall this, what industry is Apple in? You say technology, but technology is too big a word. Are they in computers? Are they in telecommunications? Mobile devices? You haven’t forgotten, of course, that they are the biggest music company in the word. They’re in entertainment. Of course, then you’ve got Apple TV, so they’re in different types of entertainment as well. I’m sure you’ve all worked out what an Apple Watch is: It’s a fashion item, so they’re also in fashion.

Of course, they’re in retail, because their stores are magnificent, if you like that kind of thing, but their watches are actually their health play. Apple has employed more doctors in their Apple Watch team than engineers in the last few years. They’ve seen that coming. There are rumors — and by the time you listen to this podcast, the rumors might be reality — of an Apple car. Nobody’s going to be surprised if they come out with EVs — electric vehicles — and the list goes on.

Can I go back to my question? What is Apple? You could pretty much pick an industry — pick a company. Banks are becoming lifestyle companies. Insurance companies are becoming banks. They all tack on mobile devices. What is Amazon? It’s not a shop. It’s a computer warehouse. In every industry, in every business, you’ve got these overlapping or integrated systems, and that makes it fascinating, Joe, for us.

I realize I haven’t answered the question you asked me, because you’ve asked what skills are required. Again, we spend three hours giving you the list. All I would say is, you need different and more integrated skills than you ever needed before. That’s going influence between now and 2030. It has to influence who you hire — must influence who you promote. It certainly should be influencing what chairs — not as in chairpersons, but, literally, what are the seats at the table at your C-suite? Head of data, or chief data or chief officer of the future, head of the future or something: There are going to be titles that emerge because the skill sets that will take us to 2030 are not just better skills of the skill sets we’ve got today. They’re different, and I think integrated is the right word there.

Kornik: One thing I’m interested in — and you mentioned, in your introductory comments, the metaverse, which we’ve heard a lot about, and these alternate-reality spaces — I’m curious about where we’ll work. Not so much like hybrid and remote, but the future of the office is a big topic when we’re dissecting the future of work and where we’re going. I’m curious as to how you view the future of the traditional corporate office and how much we’ll actually be doing in that space and if we are in that space, how it will be used, and how it will be most effectively used in the future.

Codrington: The four words we’ve used so far help us here. We want flexibility/autonomy, which means that your buildings have to be built in a way that says, “This week, the office can look like this, but next week it needs to look in a different way.” That’s not just open plan and hot seating. It’s a lot more complex than that. Then you want to incorporate artificial intelligence — that instrumentation, interconnectedness, intelligence — into the system. We’re going to have to have smart buildings, smart offices, smart desks and so on.

Then, we want the integration. You don’t want finance sitting on the second floor and HR sitting on the third floor and IT in the basement. You got to have to have the integration for the buildings to physically allow for the future of work to manifest itself. Then you can take it a step further, of course, and say, “What if the future of the office is no office?” Not that we’re all working from home. That doesn’t work for many people. You’ve got to have a nice, big home and a setup for home working to really work for you. It’s possible for some, but for most people, we want the connectedness, the engagement with people.

Not just virtual reality, but all forms of extended reality, won’t be part of the workplace by 2030. I don’t think it’s the metaverse. I think that’s a bit of a gimmick to get us going, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and by 2030, we’re going to be engaging with a — hybrid is the word — massive set of tools available to us. The question is not going to be “Should I work from home, or should I come to the office?” The question is going to be “Given the work that we have to do as a team, given the work we have to do, under what conditions will we do our best work?” Then, the flexible spaces and tools to help us maximize the effectiveness of our answer to that, that’s the future of work.

Kornik: Interesting. You’ve given us a lot to think about so far today, and I’m curious about what we can act on — or, more specifically, what business leaders and corporate executives and CEOs can act on. What’s the call to action for them to be prepared for this?

Codrington: There are probably three things that jump to mind immediately. The first is, you have to switch a radar on. If that image is useful, the radar is the machine that helps you look beyond the horizon through the clouds. Too many companies are too short-term-focused at the moment. We understand this coming out of COVID-19 — everybody’s working. They’re not thinking that we can plan six months in advance or a year in advance. But that’s going to hurt you. You’ve got to at least give yourself some time each week and each month to lift the horizon a little — look a little bit further out than you are now.

The second thing that you need to do is, you need to unlearn. If I can make a specific recommendation, Adam Grant’s book called Think Again is probably the best book written in the last five years. It honestly is a masterpiece of capturing the moment where we are now. It’s all about this unlearning. This ability to say, “The way we used to do it was fantastic. We’re not looking back on ourselves and saying, ‘We were wrong,’ but we are looking ahead and saying, ‘It’s not going to work.’” You’ve got to teach yourself, and you’ve to develop the skill set and the attitudes that allow you to be confident to say, “Let’s unlearn. Let’s do something different.”

That leads to the third thing. A lot of C-suite people, they’re all clever. You don’t get promoted — especially in larger businesses, you don’t get promoted — without being smart, without being clever, but the problems is that a lot of those C-suite people get in their heads. They think that we can spend just a little bit more time thinking about this — we can have another meeting. We can talk this through, and then we’ll find the answer, and then we can do a budget and we can do return-on-investment analysis, and we can build a project plan, and we can get the project management guys in place, and we can hit the green button, and we can minimize the risk and it will all be great.

It won’t be. Not in the world that we’re living in now. Too many disruptions, too many variables, too much uncertainty, too much volatility. These things make it impossible for you to think yourself into a safe and certain future. So, what do you do? You experiment. In a word. Single word. There’s a lot behind experimentation — the ability to innovate, to capture ideas, to filter what’s right and wrong, to risk-mitigate so that you don’t do experiments that will blow the place up. This culture of accepting failure. It’s not failure — it’s learning.

There’s a lot, but if it’s one word, if you can build, as a senior leader in a business today, if you can honestly build a genuine culture of experimentation where every single person in your business is confident and competent to say, “I’m trying something right now” — every day, every week, every month, everybody’s trying something. They’re learning from it. They’re sharing their learnings. If you can honestly say you’re building that system and it builds, you will have done the best thing you could do, and you’ll make it through to 2030 — and when you get there, you’ll discover you’re ready for it.

Kornik: Fantastic. Now that we’re 2030, maybe go to 2040. We’ve hinted about it a little bit on this podcast. Any bold predictions about 2040, or what haven’t we thought of? What’s going to surprise us? Anything outside the box that you want to leave us with around 2040?

Codrington: This is a fun way to end this. Yes, we’re looking at the future. Let’s push ourselves. World of work 2040. How about this one? It has to do with travel. One of the dumbest things human beings have ever done is invented rush hour traffic. It is a great example of everything we’ve been talking about: Everybody trying to get to the office at exactly the same time. Repeat at the end of the day, to all go home at exactly the same time. Solving traffic and commuting must be something that we can do and should be cleverly done.

By 2040, not only will we have driverless cars, they also won’t just be legal, they’ll also be compulsory. Traffic systems work better when every vehicle is driverless. We’ll have flying cars, definitely. It’s already there. The traffic police in Dubai already use drones to fly above the traffic, so that will have happened by 2040, but then it gets bigger and bolder, as you asked. By 2040, there won’t be any long-haul destinations. I know what the billionaire space cowboys are doing at the moment.

They’re trying to get into space and play astronaut and all the rest, and Jeff Bezos is genuinely wanting to build a hotel in space, etc. But the financial model is about putting normal human beings into a space shuttle and throwing them across the planet in half an hour: New York to London is 20 minutes in a spaceship. San Francisco to New York is 22 minutes in a space shuttle. It’ll happen by 2040.

It won’t be for everybody. You won’t be able to go coach yet, but if you can afford a first-class ticket, there might be point-to-point anywhere to anywhere in less than an hour on the planet, and that might change everything about who we collaborate with, how we work together, what a multinational organization looks and feels like, logistics, supply chain. Travel has got to be on our radar as being very, very different by 2040.

Kornik: That’s interesting. I can’t get to my office in midtown Manhattan from northern New Jersey in an hour — not even close — so what a welcome change that would be. Graeme, thank you so much for your time today and for joining us on the podcast. We really appreciate it.

Codrington: It’s my pleasure. I love taking people to the future, and I hope that this vision of what might be has inspired a few people to build it.

Kornik: I hope so as well.

Thank you for listening to our VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to visit us at vision.protiviti.com. Thanks, everyone, for listening to the podcast. We’ll see you next time.

CAREER DESIGN AND THE FUTURE-FOCUSED WORKFORCE WITH ERICA SOSNA, CEO OF CAREER MATTERS - Audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the Vision by Protiviti podcast. I’m Joe Kornik, director of brand publishing and editor-in-chief of Vision by Protiviti, where we put megatrends under the microscope to examine the big topics that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the future of work, and I’m happy to be joined by my guest, Erica Sosna. Erica is the founder of Career Matters, a boutique consultancy that empowers employees to own their career and designs leadership programs and career development for CEOs for top global companies such as Amazon, Capital One, HSBC and MasterCard. Erica is an award-winning speaker on career design and the future-focused workplace, and her powerful and practical career-equation method has become the go-to career-design model for her clients. Erica’s thought leadership on the global trends for virtual teams, digital-nomad lifestyles, and the end of the world — rather, the end of work — as we know it, has been featured in leading publications and on LinkedIn. Erica, I’m thrilled you are with me today. Welcome.

Erica Sosna: Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

Joe Kornik: I just mentioned there in that intro that it’s the end of the world as we know it — and I feel fine. I just couldn’t resist that. I’m dating myself a bit, of course, with that reference. And would I love to say it’s the end of the pandemic as we know it. Maybe we’re getting there, little by little, but I wanted to start our conversation today around how the pandemic impacted our idea of career and career choices — the idea that people have become less willing to settle for work that doesn’t work for them.

Erica Sosna: I used to have a slide at the beginning of my big keynotes, which had the up-and-coming cutting-edge future trends in work, and the pandemic has blown my slide. All of the things that seem to be emerging trends have now accelerated, as so much does in crisis environments. Let’s start by unpacking what has accelerated, what’s changed, why it’s the end of work as we know it — hopefully, not the world, but work — and then we’ll look at the pieces for reconstructing out the other side.

One of the things that was always going to be a major trend, that I was just waiting for everyone to pick up on, was the flexibility that technology has facilitated about where people are working from. Now, of course, there are still plenty of instances and plenty of roles where being in person is indispensable, and for a long time, I’ve been wondering, how long are these big offices here in London, in the City, how long are they going to be filled?

Prior to the pandemic, there were already plenty of companies globally doing telecommuting, outsourcing, remote working and virtual teaming. I know that, because I was part of those — I haven’t worked full-time in person for 20 years — but also, because my clients were telling me that. How do we build an effective virtual team with people across different cultures, different locations, different time zones, who may not have the chance to meet in person very often? So, it’s no news to people that, of course, people are now expecting to be able to have a conversation where appropriate about the hybrid model — about what that looks like for you.

One of the first pointers for the C-suite is to say, “You need a point of view. You don’t have to have the whole thing worked out, but you do need a point of view.” There will be some companies that are saying, “We are an in-person, very collaborative business, so wherever possible, we do want to see people with a higher level of frequency.” There’ll be other companies that say, “You know what? We’re pretty established at our remote-teaming collaboration, and it’s worked well for us in many ways, and so we’re going to move more in that direction.”

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all. There isn’t a rulebook and playbook that says, “It must be this way,” but it’s therefore a very exciting time to redesign what is the ultimate environment for high performance for the work we do now, for the folks that we have and for the things that they want. And will there be, as a result of that, migration and changes? Sure. Some people will say, “Losing the commute has made all the difference in the world to me — I’m never going back to that,” and therefore, looking for something that they can walk to, or something they can work remotely in. Others will be saying “I’m so desperate to spend time with people — and see their feet for the first time in the last two years — and have that connection and conviviality, but if you tell me that you’re going to 100% remote indefinitely, this is probably not the fun for me.”

Joe Kornik: You mentioned the office, and I feel like that’s an interesting aspect of all this, and I’ll continue on that earlier theme: Is it the end of the office as we know it? What are your thoughts about the future of the office, its functionality, its design? What will the office look like in a decade?

Erica Sosna: So many different things to think about here. The first thing is that collaboration spaces of various kinds have been in existence and running very successfully, particularly for freelancers and the self-employed. But increasingly, before the pandemic, I saw that the organizations were outsourcing where their developers lived to a co-working collaboration space, for example. We’re definitely going to see more of those custom-made, drop-in, flexible spaces, and whether those are owned or leased or subcontracted on an as-and-when basis, or your people have a pass to pop in, a lot of things are going to happen around the different places that I might go to leave home, but not necessarily be in HQ, because HQ might be miles away, or even the local office might be miles away.

But there might be great value in meeting a client in person or certain members of my team in person, and so that kind of flexibility about where the office is located is definitely going to shift. A lot will be drawn from those collaboration spaces and the lessons learned from those, aside from the controversies of the big names around collaboration spaces recently. But, that aside, there have been a lot of best practice established about, what makes a nice vibe? What makes people want to come in? What makes the space a place people want to share and connect across

That has been much neglected — not in every office, but in many. Particularly, once we move to open plan and cubicle life and Dilbert-style working spaces, people are now starting to say, “Well, what’s the incentive to come back in? If I’m going to come back in, let’s have a space where we get a chance to connect, to hang out, to have privacy, to do quiet, head-down work,” which is one of the main arguments we have for working from home, if your home is conducive to that. So, you want to make some soundproof pods that people want to do quiet work in, but you also want to make it a more sociable space than we traditionally think about in terms of the architecture of an office.

My encouragement would be, do this in collaboration. It’s a great opportunity to ask your people, “What is the future of our office? What is the function of our office? What is the purpose of gathering a large number of people together, and is that space an office, and for what reasons?” It might be security. It might be collaboration. It might be brand identity. It might be convenience. Getting into a design conversation that says, “In what instances and at what moments in time is it useful for us to function as an entity or a collective, and what resources and geography do we need around that?” — that conversation is going to be huge.

One of my biggest clients here in the U.K. is a real estate firm that has huge presence within the commercial-property space, and development continues in commercial property, but of course, developers are very interested in what you as a client organization might want or need. That would be my other consideration: When you are thinking about what you need, be in communication with the people who might construct that for you, whether that is developers, whether it’s office buildings that are being redesigned. They want to be in that conversation — the landlord wants to be in conversation with you about how to make it right.

I feel excited about that. There will continue to be value in getting together, but I am curious about some of those buildings that are built in a way that is so functionally designed for optimizing the previous working environment. Here in the City, there are lots of fabulous skyscrapers, Manhattan, elsewhere. Is it going to be easy to repurpose those if you don’t need all of that space, and what will they do? But what I do know about humankind is, we’re very enterprising and creative. We’ll find our way of making even better use of the spaces that we have in a way that works for everyone.

Joe Kornik: I want to switch back and then tie in — it goes nicely with this conversation that we’re having, this notion of careers that we started this conversation with. I’ve heard you say that most people don’t choose their careers, they fall into them. The pandemic has accelerated this idea that you don’t necessarily have one career for life. It’s given people the opportunity to step back and think about their career, their life, their working life. How do you see all that playing out?

Erica Sosna: Great question. Let’s ask ourselves, “Considering that most of us will spend 80,000 hours of our lifetime at work, isn’t it surprising how little we think about that decision?” I always found that was an amazing number of hours. It’s probably more time than you spend with the people who are most important to you, and yet, through our education system, wherever you got within that, and then even within employment, there is rarely a live discussion that says, “This is your lifetime passing by, and are you in the best fit? Are you making the most contribution that you could to the things that matter to you? Are you playing within your skills and strengths?”

And that’s of interest both to the employer and the employee. It’s not just a purpose- and-meaning-driven discussion. It’s also about value-add. We all want to feel that that time is counting, and that we’re in a good fit where we can do good stuff in whatever way we define success. That’s a trend that’s going to continue to grow, and I’m fortunate to be in a space where we’ve been thinking about that for a long time. But the reason we’ve been thinking about that for a long time predates the pandemic too: Most people fell into their careers rather than chose them. We know that most people didn’t know what they were going to be when they grew up, and they’re still trying to suss that out and feel their way into something where they can do a good job and find a match for their skills. My time in employee engagement tells me that too.

When we’re looking at employee-engagement surveys at Blessing White, which was an American company that I used to work for, you would see that companies that are very committed to employee engagement, to the relationship, to valuing their employees would still get a big dip when it came to a question like “I know how to navigate the next steps in my career” or “My manager takes an interest in my career development.”

So, while all sorts of companies might have had career-development programs, as in an accelerated program for high potential or a great program for minority talent, what they didn’t have was a way to talk to a person on an individual basis about their career, what they mean by a career and how they define success in that career, and to have a way of doing that that was scalable across the business that regardless of the industry, the seniority, the tenure, everyone could have the same method.

And that is what the career equation has given for so many of the companies that we work for, and, on a very individual basis, it has given that clarity about what matters to me, one of my criteria, on an organizational basis. It’s enlivened the employee engagement by accessing that missing piece of the discussion about “These 80,000 hours, this is how I define a successful use of them. Can I talk to you about that?” That’s what people were telling their employers that they wanted to do for a long time previous to the pandemic.

Joe Kornik: Yes. I’m glad you mentioned that. One thing that’s interesting about your background is, you have insights into employees empowering their own careers, but you also advise CEOs about leadership programs, career development. You’re in the corner offices, so you see it from both sides. I’m glad you brought up your career-equation method. I’m curious how you see that evolving? We’re trying to focus on, let’s say, the work in 2030. Can you talk about that career-equation method and how that will play in the future of work down the road?

Erica Sosna: Let me give you a quick tour of the equation as it stands, because that will help us to know what we’re framing the conversation around, and then I’ll tell you about where the trends around employment are going to take us.

The equation is a word equation. It doesn’t churn out a nice, tidy number and tell you what to do with your life, which is sometimes disappointing to the quants that we work with, but everyone else finds it a helpful way of understanding their key criteria. I worked with thousands of people, and many of them were quite burnt out around what they were doing and looking for a change, and I heard from them a consistent set of concerns — buckets, if you like, of focus area. Because career is a very emotional issue — it’s something we identify on a very personal basis — one of the first questions we ask people is, “What do you do? Tell me about what you do.” It can easily become very overwhelming: People think about a lot of different things when they try to make a decision around career. I wanted to reduce those, and I turned that into what we call the equation.

The equation says, first of all, everyone wants to work in an area of strengths. We all want to play to our skills and our strengths, and we tend to enjoy and be good at things that play to our natural strengths. When you look at employee-engagement data, the key question that drives fulfillment is more opportunities to do what I do best. Of course, what’s interesting and what Joe has a strength at will be different to what I have a strength at.
The first part of the equation says I need to understand where your natural disposition and strengths are, and I need to be able to notice where, perhaps, we might have pigeonholed you, according to one particular strength, when actually there are five, six others that you’re excited about developing, and that may be a flight risk if we don’t know what those are. Part one of the equation: play to your strengths.

We add, play to your strengths in an area that you’re enthusiastic about, and in the equation, for shorthand, we call that passion. Passion is a very overused word in careers, isn’t it? What we mean is either a subject area that you enjoy, you find interesting — travel, economics, entrepreneurship — but also sometimes a way of being, like solving tricky problems or learning stuff and explaining it to others. The kind of behaviors that get you naturally into flow.

We say you want you to take your strengths and apply them to something you care about, something that you’re into. And you want to generate — and this is the third part of the equation: skills plus passion plus impact — an impact that you feel proud of.

Different people will define success in different ways. They were bombarded with the idea that success is primarily about more money, more power, more responsibility. If you ask the question — and this is probably the most useful question you’ll ever ask any of your employees or friends — “How do you define success?” they will tell you a whole other spectrum of measurements that you may not have thought about.

So often, when we think about talking about careers in organizations, we avoid it because we think it’s only going to be about “I want a raise.” “I want a promotion.” But if you ask, “But how do you define success? What are you using as your measure?” you get a fantastic insight into the huge range of things that matter to your people. The more you understand what matters to them, the more you can tailor what they’re up to, and the environment that they’re in, and the targets that you set and the feedback that you give, so that you understand and make the most of that person.

The equation says, “Skills plus passion plus impact.” Then, it says those things are all divided by the conflict between the environment that helps Joe do his best work and the environment that they’re in. So, we want to reduce as much as possible the friction between where you thrive and what’s going on around here. We call that — for shorthand, again, on the equation — environmental fit: We say that you want to maximize understanding the environment in which a person does their best work, which covers hybrid, flexibility, remote, contract, independent, indoors, outdoors, specialist, generalist, fast-paced, slow and detailed, all of that range of the soil in which someone can grow. And so the equation says you need to understand what your environmental fit is, and then you need to try and reduce the friction or disparity between what’s right for you and what you’ve got.

That’s, in broad terms, what the equation is, and explainable, as you see, in just a couple of minutes, but of course, the output from that will be different for each person. In the work that we do, we help them to narrow down their criteria to just between two and four elements of skills, passions, impacts, and as many things as they like on environmental fit, because the more that you can tailor the environment to suit the person, the more likely they are to be completely unpoachable, because it’s environment that makes a difference.

We’ve all had the experience of looking like the perfect fit for us on paper, but then you come into that team or you come into that culture, and it’s just a fit, not a synergy. So, it’s important to be able to understand, what is it that helps your people do their best work, and how much can you be flexible and accommodating towards that, and which things will be harder to find alignment with?

Joe Kornik: Part of VISION by Protiviti’s goal is to push the envelope and be compelling. So, when you think of 2035, 2040 — think out as far as you’d like — is there anything that we haven’t thought about, or anything that comes to mind that you think will be surprising?

Erica Sosna: I see more of some of the questions and some of the challenges that we were exploring already. You’ve got that experience of the mature economies, say, starting to ask the question “Do we even have employment for everyone?” As we continue to outsource and to access expertise in other parts of the globe, what’s going to be the outcome? Where is that going to end up in terms of employment of our own talent? And we still have work to do about salaries, about equity, about the ways in which expectations around education or the way that education is designed make it easy to globally integrate, and access and make use of global talent.

Those were questions before. They’re still questions now. My big prediction for the western economies for the next 20 years would be the introduction of universal basic income. Universal basic income is the idea that instead of expending a lot of energy on both taxation and welfare distribution, we instead reallocate that as a basic income.

So, here in the U.K., it will be around £25,000 per person, irrespective of their current level of wealth and whether they are currently working, because there is going to be a shortage of roles, and that is definitely going to be something that happens in the western economies. It has to, because talent acceleration is exponential in some of those exciting emerging environments, and the appetite there, also, for ambition around work, it’s a fresher opportunity, the same way that for women, in the last 100 years, it was a fresher opportunity. So many things had been outside of one’s reach, no matter your level of talent and ability in education. You see that globally too.

So, it makes sense that the mature is the dropping side of the curve is in terms of opportunity. I do think that’s going to have a massive impact, and so we will introduce universal basic income. You will see a move toward even more senior and strategic roles, a move to different global locations outside of HQ environments, and the skillful use of technology and of connection — not spending all day on Zoom meetings, but also not returning to gadding about on flights every five minutes around the planet. The planet can’t sustain that. We know it’s not necessary to do for business, but there are times when it is important to have that sense of collegia and connectedness, and that will continue.

My other prediction is a bit retro, in a way, which is about humanizing the workplace and scale. For example, W. Gore, the creator of Gore-Tex, they’re into this: Once a division heads beyond 300 people, they swarm like bees and set up a new division. They do this because 300 is about the number of people in a community in which we can all know each other’s names and have a sense of connection. For a lot of time, over the last decade or so, I’ve been looking at the enormity of the organizations that I work with. Yes, they’ve got their entity divisions, and then they’ve got their divisions by activity area, but still, it’s very impersonal.

Part of why you’ll see an attrition — whether it’ll be a Great Resignation waits to be seen — certainly over the next decade or so is because people decide that those environments are hostile to their humanity. They’ve been hostile for quite a long time — and I don’t think that’s deliberate. It’s just the way in which business has evolved, and many through merger and acquisition, floats and PLCs, and all that stuff — the short-term focus on shareholder value, etc. — has meant that we haven’t been paying attention to how that affects the human.

A lot of people will be opting out because of environment, and here, already, we see this enormously, and a particularly interesting community around that is women and ethnic minorities, both groups that have not been involved in the design of these whopping big firms but are now encouraged to be represented and have a presence and a seat at the table, and yet they’re opting out in droves to become self-employed and set up their own businesses. Why? Because even though the seat is there for them, they don’t want it.

My prediction would be that the companies that are going to thrive, the brands we’re still going to know in that 20-year, 25-year time frame that you’re looking out on, 30 years, are those that find ways to humanize, because that’s something now that people have found to be something they can’t live without. How they’ll do that? What that will look like? I’m not at the table making those decisions, but where I am is across the table on a very regular basis with people telling me, “I just can’t carry on like this.”

Joe Kornik: Interesting. I typically end these with a call to action for the C-suite, and it sounds like that might be it. It sounds like what you just laid out, that might be the work that they need to get working on. Is that accurate?

Erica Sosna: Yes. I would get curious. Get curious about your people on a very individualized basis. Bring that call to action. You can’t speak to everybody all the time, so leverage the cascade of that. But also, the conversations across the organization — you don’t have to be senior to someone to take an interest in asking what experiences you’re looking for out of your work. How could we help you get that? How do you define and measure a successful life and career? How could we help you align even better with that?

A career is a series of choices, and in those choices, we explore how we align our gifts with how we spend our time and how we make our money. Career is a series of choices where you explore how to rely on your gifts, how you spend time and how you make money. So, getting curious about, what are the gifts untapped here, what are the criteria on which people are making decisions about their careers? We might be wrongly assuming, or making succession plans based incorrectly.

That would be my call to action: Get curious about the experiences they’re looking for, where they want to do that work, where their best work happens, what they think the future design of working life should look and feel like, to be right by the customer, right by the climate, right by the corporation and right by the team in themselves. There is the possibility to find something that wins for everybody, so get asking the question.

Joe Kornik: Erica, thank you so much. I’m out of questions, and we’re out of time. Thank you for that insightful discussion.

Erica Sosna: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Joe Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to check out all of our content at Vision.Protiviti.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.