The digital future of work Is the
9-to-5 job going the way of the dinosaur?
Independent
work is on the rise, thanks in part to new digital platforms that allow people
to find work and offer their skills. What will this do to traditional work
routines?
The traditional 9-to-5 job has taken a beating in recent years as more people have
worked from home and as independent work has increased. With the growth of
digital platforms, which enable people to offer services and find new work
opportunities, non-traditional work arrangements will become ever more common,
even as automation reshapes the traditional workplace.
Is the 9-to-5 job dead? Experts from academia and industry joined McKinsey partners
to discuss changing work patterns and what they may mean. The interviews were
filmed in April at the Digital Future of Work Summit in New York, which was
hosted by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and New York University’s Stern
School of Business.
Interviewees include Carl Camden, former CEO
of Kelly Services; Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork; NYU provost Katherine
Fleming; Diana Farrell, president and CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute; and
MGI partners Susan Lund and Michael Chui.
Interview
transcript
Carl Camden: We will look back and think that the 9-to-5 job that was
the majority work style in this country was a nice experiment. It lasted for
about 70 years, and it’s coming to an end.
Susan Lund: The
number of jobs where you need to be present at an office 9-to-5, five days a
week, is going to continue to decline, and more variable forms of work are
going to come up. Now, some of those people are not even going to work for the
company. They’re going to be independent contractors, people who decide to
freelance and put together a series of different gigs or jobs and earn income
in that way. But that’s only one step more extreme than what we’re already
seeing evolve in the US workplace within traditional companies.
Michael Chui: There are a lot of people who have remarked that this
idea of fulltime employment, being paid by a single employer to come to work
eight or seven and a half or however many hours per day, is an industrial-age
notion. Will that change? One of the things that technology enables is more
variation.
Stephane Kasriel: It’s just very exciting to see these changes picking up.
We see the next generation of tools, things like augmented reality and virtual
conferencing whiteboards. There are all sorts of things that are being designed
right now to facilitate this transition from a world where everybody needs to
be in the same office and everybody’s constrained by a traditional 9-to-5 job,
to a world where people can live closer to their communities. They can live in
a place where the cost of living and the public school system, or whatever
other considerations, allow them to live where they want to be.
But
the 9-to-5 job may not disappear overnight
Katherine Fleming: The 9-to-5 corporate job may well go the way of the
dinosaur, but I don’t think it’s going to do so as quickly as many people are
predicting. For one thing, we’re social animals. And people like to get out of
the house and go somewhere and be with other people. For another, all of the
structures that we have in place are structures that support the 9-to-5 work
life.
Diana Farrell: It’s an overstatement to say that it will go away
completely. Changes of the scale that move an entire labor market the size of
the US, let alone the global economy, will have many different aspects to them
over time. There will be holdovers of things that existed for a long time. So
there is an important role for large corporations that would seem more
traditional. But they themselves are evolving dramatically. So I think we will
see a lot of change, but we will probably see more permanence than most people
realize.
JUly 2017
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/future-of-organizations-and-work/the-digital-future-of-work-is-the-9-to-5-job-going-the-way-of-the-dinosaur?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mgi-oth-1707&hlkid=7f1e2cf01e9542f699dc85f7d70903aa&hctky=1627601&hdpid=f3889f06-b02f-4e3a-8a36-8d3c718408cf
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