Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore the changing relationship between work and our personal lives. Every week, I share something I’ve written, a few things I’ve enjoyed reading, and something great to listen to. If you find it interesting, please share it!
Many businesses are still struggling to determine whether people should come back to the office. If they do, how frequently and what they should be doing when they get there?
With that in mind, I’ve got a podcast double-header this week.
Tomorrow, I’m speaking to Lynda Gratton, London Business School professor and author of several books, including her most, Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organisation and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone.
Lynda is one of the world’s most well-respected thought leaders on the future of work and has been named by Business Thinkers 50 as one of its’ top 15 business thinkers.
On Thursday, my guest is Tim Oldman, Founder and CEO of Leesman, the world’s leading organisation for measuring and analysing employees' experiences in their places of work. Leesman has created the world's largest independent benchmark of employee workplace experience - be that in their offices, their homes, or the spaces in between.
If you’re wrestling with hybrid work and reimagining how to use digital and physical workspaces, make sure you tune into these conversations.
The Writing:
Stepping away from my last business had a profound effect on my identity.
For over ten years, it was easy to answer the question that people tend to pose when you first meet them: "what do you do?". It felt good to share the industry I worked in and my 'status' in just a few words. "I run a digital advertising agency," I'd say.
Fast forward a couple of years, and responding to that question is far trickier.
There've been plenty of moments when I yearned for that easy answer rather than spend a few minutes explaining the various bits and bobs I'm up to and why they're connected. However, now I've (finally!) reached the milestone of handing in the draft of my book, I've had some time to reflect that this isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's the reason why I'm enjoying this new phase in my work/life so much.
Rather than share a job title, I can now list a collection of things I love doing.
So, here it is. What I do, is enjoy:
Writing
Being creative
Keeping fit and healthy
Helping people share their ideas
Spending as much time as possible with my family
As I've shared some of these thoughts over the past few weeks and months, it's clear that I'm not the only one going through this transition. I've learned that it's ok to evolve and change your identity. More than that, it's a vital part of life. The critical thing is to be clear about what's most important to you in your work/life and to check you're doing enough of it.
We're in the greatest work/life transition ever, forcing everyone to rethink their identity and reconsider what matters most.
Up until now, it was easy. You'd follow the same path as everyone else.
Study
Work
Retire
The three stages of life.
No more. Even before Covid, we were knocking this idea on the head. Now, it just seems ridiculous.
Reimagining your identity isn't easy, but now is the perfect moment to do it!
In her book, The 100-Year Life, Lynda Gratton, described how we'll now all experience a multi-stage life. As life expectancy increases and the world of work changes rapidly, we'll continually reimagine who we are and what we do. Rather than following a linear trajectory, we'll be continually reskilling and following new paths. Crucially, you can now be the author of your own life, making choices about your future that ensures you can make an impact your way.
If you're unsure where to start, keep it simple and try doing more of what you enjoy.
The Reading:
As I mentioned at the top, with so many trying to work out what to do with offices and hybrid work while also embroiled in a ‘talent war’, businesses are reassessing what they offer employees as benefits and perks. This Bloomberg article explains why ‘from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, companies fearful of losing talent are tweaking or scrapping dictates around how often workers need to be at their desks’.
Goldman Sachs’ latest initiative is to allow unlimited holidays to their staff. Well, to more senior staff, at least.
I’ve always been fascinated by this idea. I’ve seen it work well within companies in which it’s just one of a range of cultural principles. Not so much where what starts as a nice soundbite results in people taking fewer days off than they would normally. That said if it’s a genuine attempt at creating more autonomy and flexibility for the workforce, that’s got to be a good thing, right? I’d love to hear what you think about this, particularly if you have experience with an unlimited paid leave policy.
I also asked this question on LinkedIn and received some interesting responses.
Here’s one for any parents reading. According to the author, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, writing in The Atlantic, ‘almost none of the choices you make are as fraught as you think they are.’
A couple of standout quotes:
“The only way to scientifically determine just how much parents affect their kids would be to randomly assign different kids to different parents and study how they turned out. In fact, this has been done.
What the scientists found was that the family a kid was raised in had surprisingly little impact on how that kid ended up. Unrelated children adopted into the same home ended up only a little more similar than unrelated children who were raised separately. The effects of nature on a child’s future income were some 2.5 times larger than the effects of nurture.”
With that in mind, what decisions do make a difference?
“When it comes to parenting, the data tells us, moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.”
The Listening:
I’ve been writing a lot recently about the importance of sharing our ideas with the world, and storytelling is an essential skill in helping us do so. This conversation between Mike Maples Jr and Nancy Duarte - legendary TED speaker and leading comms expert - explains how to use storytelling to help grow your business.