Trends in Hybrid Working

Starting this fall, trend watcher Adjiedj Bakas will tour with this brand new standard lecture, which can be booked in 30-, 45- or 60-minute versions.

He gives his comprehensive “Grand Vision” on hybrid work and the portable lifestyle of Humanity 4.0 in this lecture based on his book of the same name

Corona achieved what would normally have taken eighty years of poldering: we started digital learning, meetings and even flirting. This movement was already underway, but was accelerated by corona. Even after corona we will continue to do so. That is why we have to relearn how to relate to hybrid working. What does that mean for leadership, collaboration, innovation, the content of the work and the work-life balance? And how does the heady rise of new technologies like AI affect it? Will the robots take over from us or will we remain at the wheel ourselves? And then the key question: is hybrid working primarily a threat or an opportunity? In his well-known holistic and light-hearted way, Adjiedj Bakas addresses these questions and sketches a current picture of something that even the plumber can no longer ignore: hybrid working. ‘An enrichment for every bookcase’, is what former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende calls the book in his foreword.

Highlights from the lecture:

• We are now experiencing the transition to a hybrid or portable lifestyle. Almost everything in our lives becomes hybrid. With this blended lifestyle, hybrid working fits in ideally.
• Employers will soon require employees to come to the office more often because teams that work together physically are more productive and because slackers are slacking off at home. Working entirely from home seems to be becoming purely a thing for the self-employed. Although they too will have to keep going out to acquire new assignments.
• Workers at the peak of life (30s, 40s) like to work from home, if they can combine it with (informal) care tasks for children and elderly (grand)parents and other sick relatives and friends. This leads to deprofessionalization of care, a growth in multi-generational living and, in time, a cheaper care sector.
• People who work hybrid live in communities of vramilie (=self-selected family of friends and selected blood relatives) and vrolleagues (=colleagues with whom they are friendly). Hybrid working also allows them to meet at each other’s homes for informal sparring and meetings. So the portable meeting place is on the rise. For managers, by the way, friendships between employees are a pain point when people need to be held accountable for something.
• Young people like to work in an office set up as a meeting place, a kind of work café. This, because they want to out themselves, because they are too small housed to work comfortably at home, because the corona years have made them lonely, because they want to flirt and socialize with other people.
• During the two corona years, according to McKinsey, the digital workplace advanced five times faster than before.
• You can confirm yourself from home as a hologram in the office soon. At a company like Deloitte, this is already happening. My late husband and I stand like holograms in the hall of the Almere City Hall and address the Almere natives from there. Such a life-size hologram cabinet can be bought for as little as 2,000 euros. Employers, what are you waiting for?
• The rise of artificial intelligence and, of course, robotization is bringing about the end of 1 million zombie jobs. Those workers are being retrained for meaningful work: AI for Good!
• More people are (re)combining a permanent job with self-employment, and slashing jobs is becoming normal.
• Working Dutch people increasingly have psychological complaints that cause them to absent themselves from work, reports the Trimbos Institute. 1:3 Dutch people call themselves lonely, half of physiotherapists’ patients come there for a massage because no one touches them anymore. Half of Americans have no friends at all. The number of people without friends is also on the rise in the Netherlands. In the past 12 months, about one in four adults (26%) had one or more mental illnesses. This corresponds to nearly 3.3 million Dutch adults aged 18-75. Anxiety disorders are the most common, occurring in 15% of adults. Of all specific mental illnesses, depression s are the most common (9%).400,000 people have PTSD of which 90,000 are under treatment for it. Military personnel, police officers, train drivers and security personnel most often contract PTSD on the job. The fact that so many people are absent for this reason means that in the coming years, all sorts of things are being done to cure PTSD and depression. Australia is already experimenting with magic mushrooms, truffles and MDMA to address mental illness in working people. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently called such treatments “breakthrough therapies” after successful medical trials. International studies increasingly show that mushroom therapy is effective in treating depression, anxiety and addiction, while MDMA (methyl enedioxy methamphetamine) is said to be effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder patients. These can return to work as a result. Reintegration of these people into the labor market through hybrid work also seems to be catching on well.
• But the Jellinek Clinic reports that 2 million Dutch people are addicted to drugs. Amsterdam’s Zuidas is therefore also known as the Snuff Axis. The next few years will see more research on the relationship between drug use and work. Hybrid workers find it somewhat inconvenient to have the drug courier deliver the coke to their home, while the neighbors peek from behind the curtains. For them, this is a reason to go to the office more often. There, drug scooters are less conspicuous.
• Seniors are reporting back to the job market in droves. We are moving toward the end of retirement, according to the WRR (=Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid).
• Life expectancy is getting shorter. People are going to escape the last 5 sickly years of life, in part because of the rise of do-it-yourself euthanasia on the Swiss model. Working until you die is becoming normal. Care savings for the last arduous 5 years of life are no longer necessary. So during your working life you are going to spend more on Leisure. Working one day a week for retirement, which is now the norm, many are no longer going to do. We are moving toward a portable pension that can also be used for a sabbatical or retraining program
• We also get virtual colleagues, even the surgeon can operate from home online, translation software makes working in multilingual teams easier.
• Craft and restoration work is growing and thriving, and office workers are more often combining their work with craft or restoration work or volunteer work.
• Generation Z, according to the CIA in all Western countries, is exchanging liberalism and capitalism for socialism and communism. So leftist times are coming when a portion of youth will have their career and employer choices influenced by political views. Employers should take that into account. However, GenZ-ers, of course, also have to pay their bills. They can mask a job at a capitalist company they detest in part from their friends by quietly working at home or hybrid and slashing that work at work with a more left-wing employer, or self-employment for NGOs.
• Sustained inflation is going to lead to savings, a barter and sharing economy and a portable lifestyle. A Dutch accountant can serve his Dutch clients from a low-cost cottage on a Thai beach, much cheaper than here. Digital nomads flee inflation and leads to residential communities. Also, more people are choosing to live/work from abroad. This also becomes a reason to exchange salaried employment (in part) for self-employment.
• We go to a 3-day work week. The extra free time goes into caring responsibilities, friendships, love, boyfriends, sex and volunteer work. CBS reports that those over 50 are having more sex than those in their twenties.

Hybrid work will also affect working conditions and laws and regulations. So we have to start changing the law. Fodder for lawyers.