In Working assumptions, Julia Hobsbawm explores the impact of Covid-19 and Generative AI on the future of work. Hobsbawm examines debates about how flexible working is impacting productivity, the rise in managerial roles, and how big a threat Generative AI poses to job security. Hobsbawm’s book is a timely and incisive examination of workplace change, writes Martin CW Walker.

Working Assumptions – What We Knew About Work Pre-Covid and Generative AI, and What We Know Now Julia Hobsbawm. Whitefox Publishing. 2024.

What will be the ultimate impact of the Covid-19 era and the rise of generative AI on the future of work? Management gurus and management consultants often have a soft spot for making sweeping predictions about the future. Making grand statements that play on fears of missing out on the “next big thing” or tapping into more general fears about the future is a great way to get attention. Whether the message is fear or optimism, the implicit message of many business books is that you should pay for the advice of the right guru or consultant. Julia Hobsbawm’s new book Working assumptions avoids such sweeping predictions. Instead, the author works hard to understand the reality of how things have changed, and looks pragmatically toward the future.

Hobsbawm has previously written six books on work and writes for Bloomberg‘s “Work Shift” column. Her work often finds itself on the fringes of new trends in work. Her previous book, The Nowhere Office was one of the first to explore the impact of the widespread shift to hybrid working and how it led to a questioning of the basic assumptions underlying working life. In Working assumptions she broadens her analysis to the post-Covid world, a world that now includes the sudden impact of generative AI. The first theme she addresses is how the combined impact of a general desire for greater flexibility in the workplace and new technology are changing the fundamental nature of work. Boundaries in work are blurring, whether between blue-collar and white-collar roles or work and life. This has led to heated debate about the impact of flexible work on productivity, revealing differing worldviews between many employees and employers. It also points to a deeper problem: how do we even measure productivity? For many professions, it’s not an easy task.

Boundaries at work are blurring, both between the roles of blue-collar workers and office workers and between work and private life.

Another theme is the changing nature of the tasks that make up work and the skills they require. Hobsbawm isn’t proposing that we all become “prompt engineers” who cue ChatGPT to do our jobs for us. She also calls into question the value of many business schools. Does the MBA, the gold standard for management education, really add value? Surely managers should prioritize improving their understanding of technology, not to mention critical thinking (she suggests that companies introduce a “Chief Critical Officer”). The chapter “The Commuter Triangle” places the impact of hybrid working in the context of the evolution of “the office” and “the commute” as routine parts of work. While she advocates for more flexible working arrangements, she recognizes that employees need to connect with their colleagues in person, a need driven both by a desire to get the job done and our social nature as humans.

Hobsbawm points out that toxic workplaces caused by poor management existed long before the Covid era.

The theme of recognizing the “human” in both employees and managers continues in “Culture Clubs and Clashes,” one of the more difficult chapters. Hobsbawm points to the existence of toxic workplaces, caused by poor management, long before the Covid era. Virtual or hybrid working seems to have created an even greater divide between managerial and employee attitudes, both about the nature of work and about the ordering of broader cultural issues. She cites a study that found that only 12 percent of leaders are completely confident that their team is productive, while 87 percent of employees say they are. Hobsbawm recommends that managers spend more time listening to staff. While this is a reasonable suggestion, decades of work by companies on “employee engagement” seems to have yielded little tangible benefit.

One very real issue that Hobsbawm highlights is mental wellbeing. Boundaries between work and personal time were already blurred by email and smartphones before Covid. For many people, those boundaries now seem largely gone. Hobsbawm’s advocacy for both flexible working and proper work-life demarcation is well-intentioned, but the two can work in contradictory ways. It’s easy to say that the focus should be on “getting the job done”, but as acknowledged earlier in the book, productivity (i.e. how quickly the job gets done) is hard to measure for many jobs. The confusion about when people are and aren’t working isn’t just a problem that can be blamed on employers.

Despite the serious problems mentioned in this document, Working assumptions, the overall conclusion is optimistic. Hybrid working should mean focusing on the real human connections that come from working together in person. She believes that new technologies such as ChatGPT should emphasise the “need for the human” in the workplace. Generational cohorts are dominating the workplace that are better equipped to work flexibly and adapt to change. She calls this the “AMaZing Generation”, of the Millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alphas.

But rapid changes in the workplace are not a new phenomenon (…) Automating repetitive tasks such as bookkeeping/accounting has been discussed for decades

But rapid change in the workplace is not a new phenomenon. “Nothing is simple anymore. Nothing is stable. The business environment is changing before our eyes, rapidly, radically, astonishingly.” A familiar post-Covid sentiment? James Champy wrote that in 1993 in Redesign management. There has been talk for decades about various iterations of information technology wiping out managers, automating repetitive tasks like bookkeeping/accounting, but in fact the data shows an increase in the number of managers. In 2002, there were 14.5 million managers in the United States, 10.6 percent of the workforce. By 2022, there were 20.2 million, representing 12.76 percent of the workforce. Business and Finance Operations (the category that includes accountants and bookkeepers) saw similar growth. All of this combined with an explosion in the number of people working in computer science, from about 2 million to 6 million. Modern economies seem to be adept at absorbing new technologies without necessarily increasing productivity in the promised areas.

Perhaps what keeps us so busy despite technological advances is the inability to measure individual productivity.

Perhaps it is true that despite technological advances, many of us are preoccupied with the inability to measure individual productivity—not that measuring productivity is easy in many areas of what is commonly called “knowledge work.” Hobsbawm writes approvingly of many of the innovations that Henry Ford introduced into the world of work, such as the five-day workweek. The advantage Ford had in implementing his changes was that his workers produced a highly standardized product. That made it easy to experiment and see whether changes in working conditions had an objective effect on productivity.

The idea that the world would fundamentally change because of Covid was rejected at the time by the controversial French writer and philosopher Michel Houellebecq: “We will not wake up in a new world after the lockdown. It will be the same, just a little worse.” The alternative hypothesis for the lack of interest in work is emphasized in Working assumptions: cultural clashes in organizations and the growing dissatisfaction of many employees can simply be explained by the increase in working from home, which promotes the so-called “obsolescence of human relations”, as Houellebecq called it.

Whether you agree with the specific conclusions of the book or not, it’s hard to disagree with her perspective on how the last few years have changed the way we think about work. Her philosophy is probably best summed up by this paragraph:

…when the whole world stopped at the same moment and started again under different circumstances, things were revealed that could not be unseen, unfelt, unheard. Much of what we do and how we do it will not change with technology, because we will remain the same: we feel things, we corrupt easily, but also have moral cores, and these two human states will always have to coexist.

It is to be hoped that the reality of work will not be ‘unrecognized’ again.