Is the Knowledge Workers'​ Revolution Brewing?

As I’m getting deeper into writing for my upcoming book “Tech-led Culture” I find myself, once again, deploring how difficult it is to attempt to emulate hindsight and perspective when in the very middle of the history-making eye of the storm as we are now. I felt this way before when during the pandemic I wrote “People Before Tech” and had to reliably speculate what will transpire after. With the book written in 2020 and published in 2021, I agonised for a long time as to how I had gotten the final chapter entitled “What Happens Next - the Post-Pandemic World of Work” supposedly “wrong” by spending too long analysing the possibility of a serious financial downturn which was a fate that seemed to have evaded us until very recently. In other words, an outcome I was sure will be coming, took longer to arrive than I anticipated and had made me believe it will simply never materialise and that my prediction was wrong. This is a rare instance where I would have loved to have been wrong indeed but sadly, at least when it comes to the UK (and I would further presume the rest of the world will follow), I was right and the recession arrived after all.

What I hadn’t anticipated - how could anyone?!?- was the massive backtracking and sheer u-turns some have done on remote work or big trends such as the great resignation, disengagement and quiet quitting not to mention this absolutely shambolic Twitter spectacle. I was far more hopeful in that book than I should have been. I even said at one point:

“With the exception of the segment that the “Accelerate: State of DevOps” report classifies as “elite performers - those who were digitally native and already nearly fully “remote” and who therefore had a strong foundation of people-first mentality and of a genuinely Agile DNA with cultures so strongly infused with Psychological Safety that they were best poised for this new reality, everyone else will struggle to retain their gains in the ”Wot for WOW” (Ways of Thinking for Ways of Working) arena.”

And nowadays I don’t know that I’d repeat that and still maintain there was any exception as the likes of Twitter or Meta - who would have been part of that “digitally native elite performers” group- turned out to have had nothing to be proud of eventually. But these are only the more evident examples of issues, the ones we ought to worry about even more are the majority of all other enterprises where there’s an abundance of lip service still but we see it all slipping away - the genuine care for employees, the preoccupation with societal and environmental matters and the permission to be human itself. Unfortunately, that’s the bulk of everyone. Places where the culture is barely survivable leave alone not conducive to thriving; where people only carry on for necessity; where passion and purpose are on every plaque but utterly non-existent; where good principles are slipping and everything from flexibility to agility itself are slowly withering away.

How do I know that it’s that bad? Because more than 1 in every 3 employees wouldn’t wish their present job on their worst enemy. That’s what a recent study found.