Translator: Marília Correia Reviewer: TED Translators admin
There are two things you should know about me.
The first, well, yes, I am an elder millennial.
Second, I'm also a social scientist.
And these two things matter to the future of work.
You see, as that elder millennial, I remember when the hashtag
was still just a pound sign on a landline phone.
(Laughter)
And as a millennial, I also represent the largest cohort
currently working today.
We've been in the workforce now for the last 15 to 17 years
and just beginning to enter into middle management
and leadership positions.
Eight-six percent of us are asking, if not demanding
that the purpose of business be more than simply making a profit.
So I think we are on the cusp of change.
As a social scientist, I study human behavior at work.
You might ask, why work? And why does this matter to me today?
The fact of the matter is we're working more, not less
than we were 30 years ago.
And not just that, I don't need to show you data,
you intuitively know,
if you are not happy and satisfied in your work lives,
it spills over into our personal relationships.
And so I became obsessed with understanding
what is it that makes some people so engaged and so passionate in their work
versus those who are not?
And also, I must warn you, as a social scientist,
trying to fit a 4-hour lecture into this 15-minute Ted Talk
is going to be like trying to serve a five-course meal over happy hour.
So let's get started.
I've researched in three different capacities.
I've been studying the future of work now for over 10 years.
And I've looked at survey data coming from people just like you and me,
trying to understand what is it that motivates us,
what's the temperature of our workforce today?
I've looked at thousands of data points over the last decade.
I also have the privilege within my role to take the top floor of the elevator
all the way up to meet with the executives
of the world's largest organizations.
And I meet with CEOs, and I try to understand,
what is it that keeps them up at night?
How are they using technology?
What do they think of their workforce?
And other times, my work takes me to dusty old libraries
where we look at archival research
that hasn't even made its way on the internet yet.
And I look at worker diaries and journals from the 1920s and 30s
to try to understand what is different today,
if anything.
And I have to tell you this one thing:
as a social scientist studying business, I'm a bit perplexed.
You see, other disciplines, let's take medicine, for example,
constantly upstage their practice based on new-found knowledge
and assumptions.
We haven't done the same in business.
So while this might sound a little absurd today -
because we've made so much advancements -
but there was a point in time when the medical field did not realize
the impact of germs on patient outcomes.
So hand washing was about 50/50 before a doctor when into surgery.
As soon as we figured out germs impact patient outcomes,
doctors immediately change their practice
and started washing their hands.
And so, today, in business,
I think we need to update our assumptions around people at work.
But let me explain why I think we're stuck in the industrial era.
See, if we were to go back and see what work looks like over 100 years ago,
most of us would be working in a factory.
We'd be on the assembly line,
we'd be doing the same task over and over again.
This would never really be considered a good job
but as a trade-off decision the ways of society made
to come off the farms and really have all boats rise
as we engaged in new work.
But you see,
when you look back at the data,
people were never really fulfilled and satisfied.
These jobs weren't built for humans, they were built for robots.
And so Henry Ford famously said during this time,
"I don't want workers' hearts or minds, I just need their hands.
How do I just have their hands?"
And so we have an entire field of scientific management birth
by Frederick Taylor,
that really focuses on how we can manage people
to work faster and work harder with their hands.
And let's leave the heart and emotion at the door -
it's too messy.
And so, today, we've updated our offices.
Forty-five percent of us now work
in some sort of business administration office professional job,
and we superficially have changed the way that work looks.
And I'm going to be honest, [as the] entitled millennials came down,
and we started asking for a lot more than those cubicles.
We needed sunlight, we needed colorful walls,
we needed playful furniture.
But I think we asked for these things because we didn't realize,
we knew something was amiss, we knew there was a disconnection.
And so, instead, we focused it on something that was easy to change.
But here's the paradox of where we are today,
and this is something that keeps me up at night.
Economists today would tell us we are in the most agreeable jobs
of mankind human history.
We have air conditioning, some of us have ping pong tables
and craft beer kegs when we walk into work.
We have all of our creature comforts.
And my question I have for you today is,
are you healthy in your job?
How does work make you feel?
And here's the thing: 45% of us today
have a negative attitude towards the future of work.
And most times, generations come up and they actually think
it's going to be positive as we look forward,
there's a sense of optimism.
We saw that during the industrial era.
Today, not as much.
Forty-four percent actually foresee a decrease in the standard of living.
And something that keeps me up at night,
and that's something that I hear from my friends and family,
and it's much more than just a data point to me,
is the fact of the matter that 40% of us are highly stressed in our workplaces.
And how could this be?
As economists tell us, these are the most agreeable jobs.
What is the matter?
And not just that,
when people realize that I study the future of work,
the number one question I get is, when are the robots coming?
But they are here, the robots have come.
And just today, when I was watching the news, I saw a headline -
50% of job elimination over the next 20 years because of robots.
So let's talk about artificial intelligence for a second.
Let's talk about what it's good at and what it's not so good at.
You see, Professor Thomas Malone at MIT has told us
that artificial intelligence is really good at specialized tasks.
Specialized intelligence is those things go back to the factory line.
It's those things that are routine, that are efficient.
It works within a very set context.
So think of your Netflix.
You're watching Netflix.
The algorithm behind that
is really good at looking at your viewer data and history
and determining what movie you should watch next.
Most of us probably have some holiday films this season,
and they're getting ready to recommend it.
It's not so good at doing anything else besides taking that data that you provided
and then making predictive outcomes.
What artificial intelligence is not so good at and where humans thrive
is in generalized intelligence.
The ability to be creative, to be playful, to make sense of context,
to take knowledge from one domain and apply it to another.
And today, any five-year-old, including my nephew,
is much more generally intelligent than any AI machine that's out here.
But herein lies the problem.
We have designed our workplaces today
that work for specialized intelligence tasks.
Most of our jobs today
are designed to do that routine efficient specialized task.
And what we need, organizations need, and what individuals need
is generalized intelligence.
And so my research has found four things,
because I've noticed, as we talk about the future of work,
so many people want to focus on fixing the human.
If you're dissatisfied in your job today,
maybe you thought, "Maybe it's me, maybe it's something I've done."
And I'm going to be honest, as the entitled millennial,
we've talked a lot about pursuing passions and finding our dream job.
That's not what this is about.
This is about actually fixing the system so that it works for people.
And there's four ways that we can do that today.
And these four things, it doesn't matter if you're a janitor or you're a CEO,
it's doesn't matter if you're a Gen Z or a Baby Boomer,
we need all four of these functions in order to function healthy
in the workplace today.
These are at the systematic cultural level that we as a people
have to make an intentional decision to put back into the workplace.
So the very first thing is we need a sense of stability.
Now, stability can come in many different forms.
But stability often shows itself in three particular manners
in the workplace.
The first is income.
And too many of our workers today who really support our economy
are unsure whether their next paycheck is going to come.
The second is around your working hours.
Do you have a predictable schedule?
Do you know what your workload is going to be like?
Any sort of variability in that brings on a state of stress.
And the third and maybe most pronounced today
is a lack of stability in our relationships
that we have at work.
So many stories I hear of people just not knowing
what they're going to expect when they walk into the workplace.
How will they be treated?
And we have these relationships that are no longer stable.
And we've accepted this.
And this creates scarcity thinking.
Not too far away from here in New Haven, Connecticut,
students were an entire year behind their colleagues.
Researchers were brought in
and did just like what we're doing in our workplaces -
they painted the walls, they moved their furniture.
Nothing worked.
They realized at that moment that the school faced the train tracks.
And the train, every few minutes came buzzing by
and that interrupted the students' ability to engage in learning.
The same thing is happening in our workplaces today.
As adults, we have hidden trains as a result of this lack of stability,
whether it's income, hours, or relationships
that we have buzzing, distracting us.
And then we're told to go learn and go create and go innovate.
Those are really hard conditions to do so.
So a question we have to grapple with and ask ourselves is,
how do we bring a sense of stability back into our organizations and culture?
The second thing we need as humans,
we need intellectual stimulation.
When I look at the data, it shows us that 33% of us today
are actually underemployed.
That means we have skills, we have education,
we have capabilities that we can bring, but it's not being utilized.
And this actually creates a lot of boredom,
and something that's just as dysfunctional as stress is boredom in the workplace.
And so, there's two reasons why this happens.
One, when we go back to the industrial era,
we still have this mentality of butts in seats -
8 am to 5 pm, no matter whether or not you have something to work on.
And so there's many of us that choose to spend that time
scrolling through Facebook feeds in order to keep ourselves engaged.
The second thing is we don't have enough psychological safety
within our cultures to speak up and accept a diversity of thought.
And so, we have people who are quiet,
and who when they do go to challenge the status quo are told,
"That's just the way things have always been done around here."
We have to change our system, we have to change our culture
to allow people to speak up, to have diversity of thought,
to create psychologically safe environments
so people are intellectually stimulated.
The third thing, and I chose this word very intentionally for this talk today,
is a sense of dignity.
As people, we need a sense of dignity through our work.
For right or wrong, we have so much of our identity today through our work.
I told you before we're spending more hours, not less, in the workplace.
And so the question is, as we talk about dignity,
the question you have to ask yourself is,
do you feel worthy because of the job that you're in,
because of the profession you have chosen?
And, you see, economists have told us for many years that work is a bad thing.
People, by nature, don't want to work.
We're self-interested, we're not going to do what's right for the organization.
But after a decade of studying and meeting with people face to face,
looking at the data, people need work, people actually enjoy work.
And I'm going to say nine times out of ten,
they're more likely to act on behalf of others than themselves.
And so the question is,
how do we bring our sense of our dignity back to the workplace?
AI is not going to solve this for us.
This is not a technology problem, this is a human-to-human problem.
Today, do you have a sense of dignity in what you do?
And maybe, even more importantly, as a colleague or as a customer
as you're interacting with employees,
how can you give them a sense of dignity in your interactions with them?
The third thing that we need
in order to have healthy adult functioning in our workplaces
is meaningful connection.
You see, as people, we are wired to connect, not to compete.
We've evolved as a species
because of our ability to cooperate and collaborate.
We are hardwired for connection.
And the reality is our cultures
and our organizational performance management systems
are wired for competition.
You see, again, going back to the industrial era,
you could understand why we measured people as an individual output.
It was very easy to quantify what that one person did.
Today, if we're honest, all of our work is interdependent.
We need each other.
We're much more collaborative in the way that we accomplish work.
And yet, so many of us are unable to do so.
It was interesting, I studied this company who experienced a lost decade.
Technology company, well-known,
10 years of lost performance.
Every other technology company in Silicon Valley
was increasing in their value, but this company.
They realized it wasn't a technology problem,
it was a human behavior problem they had.
They'd created silos,
they'd incentivized people to work as individuals.
They kept the engineers apart from the technologists.
They actually competed rather than collaborated.
And so knowledge wasn't being shared.
And so they went ahead and redesigned their performance management systems
to ask this one question:
How is it that you make other people better in this workplace?
And that question changed everything.
It changed behavior.
People were incentivized to collaborate
and to make others around them better.
And this is a very important question as we think about the future of work.
And so, today, I'm here to tell you, as a future of work researcher,
the robots are coming, and they're here, and we have a decision,
a very intentional crossroad right now in human history.
We can choose to use that to double down in efficiency,
continue to create colorful walls, and yet eliminate jobs;
or we can use artificial intelligence
to unlock the innately human side of work,
to bring back a sense of stability,
to engage people in much more intellectual creativity work,
to create meaningful connection, and to bring a sense of dignity back.
Truly the choice is ours.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Cheers)