This is a particularly dicey time to try to make predictions about the future, including predictions about what the workplace will look like. With the threats of tariffs and mass deportations on the immediate horizon, and the effects of ongoing wars and the climate change looming further out, it’s hard to know how the next year is going to go, let alone the next five or ten.

Rather than make predictions, the best we can do is look at some continuing and emerging trends while recognizing that things are going to change and the future is going to surprise us. In the face of such a fast-moving, changeable world, it’s imperative that we embrace uncertainty and build resilient organizations.

Attitudes Toward Jobs and the Workplace

Amid all of this rapid social and technological change, not to mention the effects of the pandemic, what we value and what we want out of life is changing. We spend more time at work than anywhere else, and our jobs (not to mention job title and salary) used to be one of the main drivers of identity. Starting at the bottom and climbing the ladder over a lifetime of loyal service to a single company was the dream of most American workers only a couple generations ago. However, the social and economic structures that support that arrangement have eroded over the past four decades, so it’s no surprise that workers are a little more jaded by the prospect of sacrificing every other part of their lives for a promotion.

Gone are the days where you could start in the mailroom, retire forty years later as a senior vice president, and enjoy retirement on a pension. As the doors of stability close, a new generation of workers is privileging mental health and social bonds over long hours at the office. The desire to devote less time to work manifests in two opposing movements: FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and what this Forbes article identifies by the hashtags #WorkLessLiveMore, #ActYourWage, and #RestIsProductive. FIRE advocates want to condense a lifetime of employment into a few years, making as much money as possible as quickly as possible so that they can enjoy a long retirement while they are still young and healthy. The inverse of this movement is an anti-materialistic lifestyle in which people work only to fill their basic needs and find fulfillment and identity in family, friendship, and community.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Ultimately, everyone has to decide what is best for them. There is a nearly inexhaustible supply of opinion that the prevailing attitude of young workers is to do as little as possible.  We believe that’s just the newest round of older generations bashing younger generations (same song, different era). 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live a more balanced life. Giving employees the opportunity to raise a healthy family without burning out leads to a happier, healthier workforce. Happy, healthy workers produce happy families. Happy families become part of happy communities, and happy communities give us healthy economies.

These specific “wants” of younger workers may differ from the wants of Gen X and Boomers, but some of these attitudes are also driven by Gen Z and Millennials seeing their Gen X and Boomer parents burn out at work and spend less time with their families than they would like. In the end, no matter when we were born, we all want the same thing: to live a happy, fulfilled life, where we can feel good about the work we do.

Are Gen Z worse workers? Is the future work one of laziness and “quiet quitting”? This isn’t so much a Gen Z problem as it is an onboarding problem. For many kinds of white-collar work, recent college grads of any generation did not have the tools to instantly master their job duties and seamlessly slot into an existing workplace culture. 

We cannot depend on colleges to do our training and onboarding for us. The demands and duties of any job vary so much from company to company, with each business having its own culture, processes, and division of labor, that a college education could not possibly prepare every student for every job. What college is good for is developing critical thinking skills, expanding your knowledge of the world, becoming a better citizen in a democracy, building a body of knowledge in a particular field, and simply learning how to show up every day and struggle with something difficult until you finally grasp it. We can argue how well colleges meet these goals, but we should not be expecting colleges to produce workers able to meet the exact specifications of a particular job listing.

The issue of worker preparedness is not unsolvable. What we can do is develop a business strategy that recognizes the rapidly changing nature of the workplace. From there, we can develop a hiring strategy and a training program aligned with our business goals.

Future Employment Trends

We are approaching a “silver tsunami” as a generation of older employees ages out of the workforce. This is happening even as many older workers see no choice but to continue working well into their 70s. The result will be an even larger labor shortage than we are currently experiencing, one that will have an outsized effect on the skilled trades, construction, and manufacturing.

These industries will see major demographic shifts as they welcome more women into the workforce. The effects of this shift will be changes to workplace culture, with new approaches to benefits and scheduling to accommodate these new workers.

The Future of Organizational Structure

The above trends outline some of the issues businesses will have to grapple with in the future. Workers will be more willing to change jobs if a better opportunity arises, and amid technological and organizational change, workers will require occasional upskilling and reskilling. Professional development opportunities not only make an organization more resilient and adaptable; they also reduce employee turnover and increase job satisfaction. An informed approach to onboarding and project management will also keep employees happy and productive on top of putting your business in a strong position no matter what changes come.

As big businesses fire their middle managers, they might find that they’re also losing a lot of organizational knowledge and efficiency. Employees will welcome having fewer supervisors—it has been, after all, 25 years since Office Space protagonist Peter Gibbons complained of having eight different bosses—but organizations do lose something when they lose the hard-earned and often difficult to quantify skills that management-level employees bring.

The organization of the future may have fewer “people managers,” but it will still need project managers. With fewer management layers, future organizational structures will be more horizontal and more flexible, with team members taking coordinating and facilitating roles when it suits their strengths, bringing institutional knowledge and organizational skills to projects.

As the nature of work continues to change, onboarding will become more important than ever. For employees to succeed in a given role, they have to know what’s expected of them. They need clear, well-designed processes, support from teammates, and a roadmap guiding them from new hire to expert.

In all of these situations, from onboarding to project management to upskilling, effective processes are key. The resilient organization of the future will constantly reflect on their successes and failures and create processes that root out inefficiency and make it easy to do your best work every time.

Be Ready for Anything

While major geopolitical and existential threats might keep us up at night, there’s nothing, really, that we can do about them and we cannot predict what will happen and when. At the same time, small businesses cannot follow the lead of billion-dollar corporations. Instead, we should focus on controlling what we can control and building organizations that are ready for anything.