This Week's Top 3 Must Reads on the Future of Work

These are my top three article picks for the week of April 10th on the future of work, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and humanizing work. This week's selection includes insights on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and the future of work, mitigating tensions between remote and non-remote workers, and why leaders must begin to rationalize behavioral norms for work in the metaverse. I hope the articles inspire and ignite your imagination about the future of work and provide insights and strategies that you can leverage to help your organization thrive and make work more human.

4 Reasons Decentralized Business Management is Booming

This article made the top of this week’s list because it speaks to the multiplicity of factors shaping how we will work as the future of work continues to unfold. According to the article, societal attitudes about work are driving the shift to decentralized management. Here is one of the most powerful quotes from the article. “Centralization is out, and decentralized management is in, reflecting wider technological trends. Cryptocurrencies, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and Web3 emphasize the benefits of a lack of centralized authority. Given the technological bent, every organization has these days, it makes sense to adopt these principles in workplace management as well.” Organizations also use decentralized management as a futureproofing strategy to improve self-sufficiency and leadership skills by promoting autonomy, intrapreneurship, and creativity. The author asserts that decentralized organizations also enable organizations to scale easier and drive efficiencies across the enterprise. A key takeaway from this article is that the corporate hierarchical structures of the past are not the future. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are the gateway to the future of work.

The simmering tension between remote and in office workers

This article caught my eye because I have been researching the impact of proximity bias on remote workers. This article is a bit long but definitely worth the read for leaders navigating the push and pull of repatriating workers back to the office. And yes, I used the word repatriating. “Companies are calling employees back to the workplace -but not all of them. This is stoking resentment among workers and employees.” According to the article, the disparity between who gets to work from home and who returns to the office is causing friction and giving rise to issues of fairness and equity. Issues of fairness and equity rooted in WFH policies can move engagement and productivity into the line of fire. The author described the experience of a software engineer that worked from home and was praised for his leadership and performance, yet he and his team were recently required to return to the office three days a week. The software engineer observed that “senior-level colleagues at the company still get to work remotely. Some of them doing so while they travel around the US.” He described company-wide meetings where senior-level employees were videoing in from vacation spots and how tensions began to bubble to the surface and impacted workplace dynamics. Other employees expressed their dismay with being required to return to the office simply based on their geographic proximity. According to the article, employers are now faced with dealing with a significant problem of showing “favoritism; bestowing flexibility to a select few workers, while enforcing restrictions upon the majority.” Remote work is a driver of the future of work. It is critical that leaders develop remote work policies that are fair, equitable, and inclusive and that enable organizations and workers to thrive.

The Metaverse Is Trying to Figure Out Your Comfort Zone

This article made this week’s list because all leaders need to understand what the metaverse is and its role in transforming business and how we work. The time to learn is now! “The metaverse, a layer of virtual worlds that the largest tech companies are betting is where we will hang out, spend our money and live our digital lives.” This article focuses on how and in what ways we will build connections in virtual spaces and what behaviors will be normalized in these spaces. What I found interesting was the point that mass adoption of the technologies and platforms that enable the metaverse means that organizations must “tackle the same challenges that social media is still struggling to figure out only this time with the added dimension of a virtual space that could be far more impactful.” The article discussed how tech companies realize that figuring out how to facilitate human connection and the things that make us most human in virtual spaces is one of the most complex challenges. Another challenge is linked to establishing behavioral norms. The author noted that, “Knowing what the norms of behavior are for most virtual worlds is hard because the rules of engagement are often looser.” The article includes a link to an interview that explores how we will behave in the metaverse, particularly as it relates to work. It is worth a listen. Establishing ethical norms and behavioral boundaries will be critical for tech companies and platforms and for organizational leaders as work continues to move into the metaverse.

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