By Sara Fogarty
As society has evolved over time from a hunter-gatherer and agricultural experience to the modern age, the employee-employer relationship has evolved as well. Our work experience has progressively moved from a communal and self-sustaining existence to “working for someone” and being dependent on that relationship for our survival.
This relationship continued to evolve as we entered digital transformation and now, the emerging Intelligence era. There are a few forces of change occurring now that will impact whether the relationship employees have with their workplaces will have some slight adjustments or if it will completely transform.
PRODUCTIVITY AND WHERE WORK IS BEING DONE
I’ve worked in Silicon Valley for 25 years. The majority of time I’ve lived here, companies have focused on perks that not only attracted potential employees, but also incentivized them to stay on campus longer. A by-product (or possibly the real intent) of those perks was to encourage employees to spend longer periods of time at the workplace, presumably resulting in increased productivity for the company.
During the pandemic, knowledge workers realized they could do their jobs quite well when not in the physical office. They found there were more meaningful perks in the flexibility of working from home — less physical and financial stress from hours of commuting, juggling transportation and supervision for their school-age children, spending quality time with their pets, more time for sleep and exercise to care for their well-being. For example, see the photo I took of my recent commute on an in-office workday, something many of us do not want to return to five days a week.
Now it has become a tug of war about returning to the office in the name of productivity. In fact, Amazon, which is not in Silicon Valley but influences big tech, just recently announced that all employees must report to the office five days a week. Many people believe other tech companies will follow now that Amazon took the initiative.
The office is a core component of Silicon Valley’s history. This article wonderfully tells the history of the corporate campus, a model from universities, as well as the research “park” to attract people to work and want to spend time there. The place which is Silicon Valley was called “Valley of Heart’s Delight” until roughly the 1960’s. As the technology era began, buildings housing tech companies slowly started overtaking the lush fruit orchards and the agricultural centered way of life that existed here.
The technologists replaced the natural vegetation and agricultural industry with their academic, manicured green spaces. Beautiful acreage of blossoming fruit trees were replaced by designed corporate “parks” that incorporated sleek modern structures with a few pathways between buildings lined with trees and water fountains. According to The Urbanist, the term “hermit crab campuses” was used to describe the act of new tech companies inhabiting the shell of a former tech giant’s home, such as Facebook refurbishing the former Sun Microsystems campus or Google inhabiting what used to be Silicon Graphics — companies that have had a profound, lasting impact on Silicon Valley.
Office parks dominate. In Silicon Valley the median price for a home is two million dollars. This is primarily due to job growth exceeding housing availability. As of 2019 there were ten entities that owned $59 billion worth of property in Silicon Valley — making them the largest landowners in the region. The ten entities included Stanford University, Apple, Google, Irvine Company, Jay Paul, Cisco Systems, Essex Property, Intel, Sobrato Organization, and Prometheus, all of whom have a significant stake in commercial property ownership in Silicon Valley. If companies shift to supporting more remote work and home offices, commercial real estate investors will be endangered and the companies who lease from them will want to avoid sunk cost from the long-term commitments they are often forced into with the lease agreements.
This concern about less demand for commercial real estate spreads far beyond Silicon Valley, however. For example the CEO of Blackstone, the world’s largest commercial property owner, has said remote workers “didn’t work as hard,” but that comment could have been an attempt to sway opinions in the return-to-office debate since Blackstone’s profits from sales of commercial real estate declined 54% between 2022 and 2023. Many commercial real estate investors also own significant numbers of housing rentals in the same markets, furthering their interest in preserving the tether of workers to a physical location.
What does being physically in the office do for productivity? The answer to that is debatable. Productivity is a result of leadership, measuring outcomes, and as this HBR article outlines, engagement of employees. Just because you are in a room with your employees does not equate to them being engaged and committed. There is also the question of how much productivity should be expected. In 2023, California produced $3.86 trillion in goods and services. There are four national economies greater than that in the entire world: United States, China, Germany, and Japan. How much more productive do we need to be?
The upcoming workforce (Gen Z, Alpha Gen) are digital natives. They are able to adeptly communicate and learn via digital channels. They graduated from high school and college virtually as a result of the pandemic while watching their parents work from home. Those experiences have shaped them and their view of what is necessary when it comes to work.
This brings me to the next force of change…
SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE
There is a shift occurring in what the masses respond to when it comes to a leader. Again the access to information we now have makes it much easier for employees to know the truth about the character of their leaders as well as how the company they work for impacts the community and world around us. Gen Z and Millennials now make up 46% of the workforce and there are things they don’t just want from their employers, they expect them. Ethical behavior is one of the top items in their expectations and is important to Gen X and Baby Boomers as well.
The image of the leader pontificating in front of an audience, a cult of personality, the loudest person in the room, taking up the most space, dominating and controlling, is fading away. After recent events in the Valley such as the Theranos scandal and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the investor community has sent a strong message. There has been a major climate shift here — they want to see results, not theater, particularly in SaaS companies. The days of wild exuberance has been replaced with skepticism and “show me the money” before I commit to you.
Additionally, social movements over the past several years have highlighted the desire of the workforce to include a variety of voices and people to be represented in leadership and decision making. I’ve had colleagues say they want women or other underrepresented people in the workplace to “get in there and fight” for what they want. Most people I talk with don’t want work to be a war or feel like they are going into battle every day. They want to trust their leaders and team they are working with, and be able to collaborate, bringing their unique contributions to the work at hand.
TOUGH LOVE IS OUT, EMPATHY IS IN
The one positive aspect that occurred during the pandemic was empathetic leadership was suddenly respected. Exhibiting vulnerability and caring for the people who work at your company is not a common trait within capitalism.
This concept, like the other forces of change outlined above, has been in a state of ebb and flow. The recent viral video of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who criticized his former employer about work-life balance, and later tried to dial it back, illustrates the priority put on competing, winning, and being first over the well-being of employees. The same Gallup article reporting that workers want ethical leadership also highlighted that well-being is the number one priority of Millennial and Gen Z workers’ wants and needs.
Change can be hard for any human, but ironically Silicon Valley, viewed as the global hub of technology innovation, is quite resistant to change when it comes to a social construct. I challenge Silicon Valley to branch out in the ways it innovates — in how physical spaces and infrastructure need to evolve, as well as societal norms.
Instead of encroaching on more natural space by creating a new city in farmland like the California Forever initiative is evangelizing, how about affecting change at the source? There has been innovation since the 1960’s in technology. Physical workplaces, our existing communities, and the way we view our relationship with work is what needs the overhaul.
Tech companies and investors could think differently about the engagement with the community around them. If they are not using their state-of-the art buildings, how about sharing with local non-profits that need space and equipment? Or the neighborhood schools that have portable classrooms. Silicon Valley, the 5th largest economy in the world has students in portable buildings where they learn because the school districts do not have the money to build permanent structures. Or can we improve transit systems to travel around the Bay Area and throughout California. Many countries have this available, surely in the cradle of innovation of the tech world, we could come up with some solutions to make work and life more sustainable.
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
My ideal future would be an equilibrium of Silicon Valley and Valley of Heart’s Delight — a return to more natural green spaces, a place where diverse ideas and dreams are encouraged, and a place where all are invited to thrive and have our human needs respected.
As a Futurist I won’t predict the future, however, from my research and observation, I believe the next ten years in the workplace will be amazing. The emergence of AI will shake out and we will figure out how to leverage it in our work lives and beyond. Productivity has been the goal since GDP was created as a measure of modern economic success in the 1930’s, so we are due for a shift. Personally, I am excited to shed work that is time consuming and unfulfilling to AI. Humans were not created to do repetitive tasks — our brain is an enormous organ in our body. If those in power will loosen their grip, we can become extremely efficient and spend time being creative, human.
If women and other underrepresented groups continue to not see themselves in the leadership of capitalism, they will venture out on their own. Especially if the disparity between CEO pay and the average worker continues. Since 1978 CEO pay has increased 1209% compared to the average worker’s 15%. If tech workers can’t keep their flexible work schedule, they may trade in their free meals for freedom.
The RTO movement is tied to our GDP, the never-ending chase for growth. The next ten years could very well be the catalyst for our generation to finally hit the finish line — to raise our hands, let out a loud sigh, and surrender to mother earth — we won and we can’t abuse our home any longer, or make our humans run ragged. So now, we will embrace AI, succumb to degrowth, use less resources, be our whole selves instead of primarily a “worker,” and “gulp” work less.
Sara Fogarty is a trained futurist with an M.S. degree in Foresight from the University of Houston. She has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for two decades. Her experience in working at a number of tech companies combined with her foresight training gives her a unique insight into the Future of Work.
תגובות