Transcript: What will work look like in 2024?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘What will work look like in 2024?’

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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Part of my job on Working It is keeping you informed about the ways in which the world of work is changing and how to thrive as it does. With that firmly in mind, this episode is all about how we expect working life to change in 2024. I say we because I’m joined today by two excellent colleagues, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the FT’s US news editor, who joins us from New York.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Hello, Isabel.

Isabel Berwick
And Andrew Hill, the FT’s senior business writer, joins me from London.

Andrew Hill
Hello.

Isabel Berwick
For an easy life, we’ll call Andrew in New York Edge. So, Edge, tell me about the way you think the world of work will change this year.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
It’s the obvious one. It’s staring us in the face. But I think this is the year that all of the stuff we’ve read about AI turns into something that actually affects our working lives. I think there’s been an awful lot of pontificating about it. We’ve all been to far too many conferences, read too many white papers, etc. This is the time, I think, that our bosses are now planning how to put all of those ideas into practice. And a lot of that is gonna be driven by attempts to flatten the bottom line.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew Hill, would you agree with that? I mean, where do you see AI going in 2024? What are people telling you?

Andrew Hill
Well, certainly I haven’t chaired or moderated or done a panel or done an interview this year where that topic hasn’t come up in some form. And I mean, that’s pretty amazing in itself, because it was only just over a year ago when the latest version of ChatGPT suddenly exploded on to the scene and we were all experimenting and seeing what it could produce for us. And it’s already much more sophisticated than it was then. So I agree with Edge. I think 2024 is the year in which you start to see ways in which it is actually, as the techies call it, we’re finding use cases for it in the workplace. I’m just a little sceptical only because I think there’s an inclination to go much faster in speculation about it than the tool itself can cope with. So time for experimentation in 2024, I think.

Isabel Berwick
Yes.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
There is that quite mixed message. Even very recently, Accenture just reported its results and said that it had racked up $450mn of revenues from AI-related work. At the same time, the chief executive of Accenture told one of our journalists that she didn’t think that most big companies were ready yet for the large-scale rollout of AI. And so I think this is gonna be largely in slightly smaller-scale stuff like the way we interact with the HR department, the way we file our expenses, the way we just manage our sort of personal assistants and, you know, organise our days.

Isabel Berwick
Is it gonna free us or is it gonna put us out to pasture? Andrew Hill, what do you reckon? What are the CEOs telling you?

Andrew Hill
I think, and I hope, in a way, that in the workplace it will deal with quite a lot of the mundane things that chew up time for us rather than wiping us out. But every time I have written about any kind of automation and how it’s going to work best when it’s paired with humans in the loop, I have worried that it’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I really hope some AI comes for our expenses system. That’s all I can say.

Andrew Hill and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Yeah.

Isabel Berwick
So moving swiftly on, when I was talking about this subject this time last year, the big thing was remote work versus return to office. Edge, what are you seeing in New York? How full are the offices? 

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Well, there are a couple of statistics that have caught my eye. You know, nationally, in the US, public transport or public transit ridership is still only at about 77 per cent of what it was pre-pandemic as of November. So about a quarter of the people commuting into workplaces four years ago are no longer doing so. There’s also quite a useful data set collected by a group called Castle Systems, which makes building access systems, so they kind of swipe cards to get into offices. They put out a weekly barometer of office occupancy, and it’s still hovering around 50 per cent of what it was pre-pandemic. There’s quite a bit of difference actually, between different cities. So it’s only 40 per cent in San Francisco, but it’s 60 per cent in Houston. But those have been pretty static through the year, I have to say. So I don’t think this has changed radically. One thing that I did learn about the subject in 2023 is the term the “coffee badger”. Are you familiar with coffee badgers?

Isabel Berwick
Tell me about the coffee badger.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
It basically means an employee who comes into the office purely to have coffee with their colleagues. They swipe their badge so they get the kind of credit for being in the office that day. But all they’re doing is using the Nespresso machine and maybe having an amiable lunch with their colleagues or what the bare minimum, doing one meeting and then dashing back home again. And I think that is the mood among much of the workplace here. But I sense that there may be a new breed of worker in the wild as well, and that’s the holiday lunch badger, because I noticed quite a big spike in the Castle Systems occupancy data in sort of mid-December, where across, you know, 10 big US cities it actually hit a record high for the year. And I have a hunch that’s people coming in for the holiday lunch. So I think if CEOs and employees spend a bit more time in the office, they might need to subsidise more lunches.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I’ve always said the free lunch or the free breakfast is the key to return to office. Andrew Hill, what do you think are the latest trends now in RTO versus work from home?

Andrew Hill
Well, I endorse what Edge says about the commuters. Pop spoiler, I’m working on a project with a colleague, Emma Jacobs, about commuting and we’re seeing the same data worldwide. Some places have come back more than others, but very few have come back, if any have come back to the commuting levels of pre-pandemic. So I think that is a permanent change.

The other point, though, is that we’re still not very good at hybrid working. There’s still a lot of friction and additional issues. All that talk about asynchronous working, I mean, essentially involves quite a lot of grumpiness, I’ve noted, from people saying, well, X is uncontactable; I don’t even know where Y is and how do we get this work done. So I think there’s a long way to go.

I mean, the other point is commercial real estate. Clearly, there’s a lot of vacant office space, but I think generally, certainly in London and I think in Manhattan and other big cities, the general sense is that there’s a bit of a sorting of the sheep from the goats with better offices being built now and eventually gradually opening to people. But still a bit hard to tell on this, how it’s going to shake out. And as I say, we’re still bad at the work stuff that goes on as a result of hybrid working.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. On that point, I’m really interested in the idea of trust and I think increasingly, perhaps in this year now this will become explicit that, you know, you can work from home, but you’re gonna have to be monitored more closely because I think CEOs just haven’t seemed to be able to lose their, you know, they want to see the people in front of them. And if they can’t see them, they wanna know what they’re doing. Edge, do you think I’m right? Is that something that’s gonna persist, the sort of lack of trust in remote workers?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Yes, and we’ve seen some high-profile examples of that this year, like Amazon saying it was going to sort of track and target its US staff, you know, if they were failing to work three days a week in the office. And I think there is a broader push happening as employees lose patience, frankly, with the employees they’ve never seen. There’s always been, I think, a question mark in some employers’ minds over whether people working from home were slacking off. That wasn’t really supported by any of the productivity data they were looking at early in the pandemic. But I think those suspicions have persisted, and I think that sort of ripples through different layers of the organisation.

We did a really interesting callout to FT readers who work in consulting. One of the things we heard is that, you know, quite senior partners feel a lot of pressure now to be in the office for culture’s sake, you know, from their bosses. So that sort of middle tier, that sort of senior middle tier even that were quite enjoying the flexibility of being able to come in when they wanted are now being told by their bosses, look, it’s really important that we form an office culture and we can’t do that if the people the more junior people are looking up to aren’t there.

Isabel Berwick
So it’s interesting that you were chatting there about younger workers, Edge, because I think they’re at the heart of one of the big battles that I can see playing out in 2024, which is, you know, culture wars, identity politics. And you’ve got an election coming up in the US. What do you think’s gonna happen? Because a lot of the sort of conservative policies that have started in terms of university selection, they seem to be coming into the corporate world as well. What’s going on?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Put simply, if 2020 was a wake-up call with the, you know, police murder of George Floyd, with Black Lives Matter protests around the world, I think 2023 was the year that a lot of organisations actually hit the snooze button on diversity. We saw some big sort of politically driven protests push back a backlash over, for example, the pride-friendly promotions at Bud Light or Target. Obviously, Disney has been fighting with the government of Florida over the so-called “don’t say gay” laws, and we’ve had a huge furore on campuses over the Israel-Hamas war to end the year. And I think this has made a lot of organisations, both companies and different kind of workplaces like academia much, much more cautious about sticking their heads above the parapet.

Now, we are, as you say, going into an election year. It’s pretty clear the culture war issues are gonna be pretty central to the next election. There is also a very strong feeling about the prospect of a second Biden administration or a second Trump administration, depending on which voters you talk to. And so I think a lot of employees are going to be shouting for their CEOs to take a public stand. I think the mood is very, very different going into 2024 than it was back in 2020 at the time of the last election. I think the idea of the activist CEO who’s tweeting every other day about some political issue, it has really disappeared.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew, what do you think is the view from this side of the Atlantic? You know, how will workers react if their employers don’t make statements about what’s going on in the world?

Andrew Hill
Well, that’s interesting. I mean, I’ve long thought that this is the big challenge for lots of CEOs, that they need to make statements. And if they don’t make statements, then that is in itself a statement, a declaration. But of course, in the US, companies do have a sort of default during election years of neutrality. That in itself would put the lid on some more inflammatory declarations or perceived as inflammatory declarations. I think in Europe it is different. I mean, I chaired a meeting at the beginning of 2023 with CEOs and other senior executives from European companies where they all agreed that they were continuing to push through on everything in the ESG agenda and they weren’t going to let up. Of course, that is different from making public declarations, and they might well take their lead from the US on this.

And the other point is that there are 70-something other elections around the world, a record number coinciding in 2024. And of course, that might also push many companies into thinking they want to take a slightly more neutral line on the elections that might be happening locally, whether that be in India or South Africa or the US.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, I mean, we did an episode with a very well-known US DEI consultant called Lily Zheng and they were saying that actually, those companies that are committed to DEI will actually be more committed. You know, what’s happened has sort of taken the froth off it and the people who are not actually serious about it or indeed, you know, don’t want it have been exposed. Edge, do you think there is a positive to take from this that, you know, we can learn more about what companies’ true intentions are?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I think the positive is that we’re increasingly measuring companies by their actions rather than their words. I remember when the Supreme Court was just about to overturn the Roe v Wade abortion ruling in 2022. I spoke to the CEO of a large American business. I said, what are you gonna do if this does go the way that at the time had been reported was expected? And he just smiled quietly and said, competitive pay and benefits. And what he meant was, we are going to update the terms of our healthcare policy to make sure that women who need abortion access, need abortion care, can travel to a state that provides it. We will fund that. We will not tweet about it. We won’t put out a press release, but we will.

We’re seeing a lot of CEOs learn the lessons of groups like Disney who’ve been wrongfooted by their own employee resource groups, who felt that the leadership wasn’t doing enough for them. And so they’re often moving much faster to just get people in the room, to reach out to people quietly saying, I hope you’re doing OK. Is there anything practical we can do? You know, we’re not gonna make a big noise about this, but if there’s something we can actually help with where we can use our resources, then we’re up for it.

Andrew Hill
Edge raises a good point there about the employee resource groups, of course, because over the last three years or more, in a vast superstructure of internal groups has sprung up at the biggest companies, wherever they are in the world. And if that is mishandled, there are, you know, strong internal lobbies now, named lobbies that can push back. So I think, you know, it’s quite risky, I think, not to say anything at all externally, and as Edge suggests, also to go quiet internally. It’s a little bit of a juggling act that I think CEOs have to make.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be trickier for CEOs. And actually, that point about employee activist groups brings me on to the other big trend. Obviously, the labour market may cool or is cooling off and workers have been able to sort of dictate terms for a while, you know — remote work, higher wages, better benefits and also a lot of this activist agenda. Andrew Hill, do you think a tighter labour market is going to see us rolling back on that, or how do you see the future? And also, what’s happening with Gen Z?

Andrew Hill
Well, interestingly, I think this links all the things we’ve spoken about so far. For example, on gen AI, I think that is feeding into something that we’ve seen recently with consultancies cutting jobs or letting junior roles, leaving them unfilled or even laying off junior consultants in some cases. That’s not something that big consultancies have done much because they were generally expecting attrition and they were going to need to go on filling those positions. But I think they’ve made some calculation there that the labour market loosening the advent of gen AI to take some of the strain off those more humdrum jobs at the beginning of long careers allows them to take this bet.

And similarly, some of the benefits of remote work and flexible working, you know, you can tighten up on that if you’re an employer now and you can start to give a little bit more pushback to some of the requests from the workforce. Of course, they’ve got to be careful that they don’t, you know, simply drive Gen Z out of the workforce into other roles. I mean, I’ve spoken to a few people in that generation who’ve echoed this general sense that, you know, the 9 to 5 job is not for them. They want flexibility. Of course, keeping food on the table will be a very strong incentive not to kick up too much of a fuss. But there is a very interesting balance to be struck here between benefits and pay in an inflationary world. Again, another juggling act for CEOs in 2024.

Isabel Berwick
Edge, who’s got the upper hand, the bosses or the workers? Because the unions have been very successful in the States.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
They have in some areas. I mean, we’ve seen some big wins for them — for the Teamsters at UPS, the delivery company; in Detroit with the auto workers, some notable wins. At the same time, we haven’t seen some of the union wins that I think many might have predicted a year ago. Starbucks, you know, things got a little quieter in their labour relations under a new CEO. Amazon, again, the unions haven’t really cracked it. And yeah, there is a push coming in other parts of the workforce. The UAW is trying to unionise Tesla and a lot of Japanese and German carmakers now having had its successes in Detroit.

But I think, you know, to your question about who’s got the upper hand now, it has shifted. I think it is not quite so clear that employees have the upper hand in a way that they did earlier in the pandemic and even before that when the labour market was already so tight, particularly in the US. So some pandemic trends really ended this year, like quiet quitting — we haven’t heard so much about in recent months. I think more people are quietly holding on to the jobs they have. But one thing I would add is that, as Andrew says, this all ties back to where we started, you know, this discussion about artificial intelligence, how it’s gonna change our working lives. I think one of the things that will differentiate the companies that managed to hold on to Gen Z from those that don’t, which ones are actually offering the training to bring a new generation up to speed in the skills they will need to actually win in this more AI-driven workplace.

Isabel Berwick
What’s your wild card prediction for this year, Edge?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
My wild card hope for this year is that we see an end to what I call software as a disservice, which is that suite of employee software, HR software, which you nodded to in your remark about our expenses system earlier, Isabel. I can only assume that our friends at Oracle designed it to deter us from ever claiming a bus ticket. And I think one of the things a more demanding new generation of workers is gonna insist on is something better than iExpenses.

Isabel Berwick
Oh, hear, hear. Andrew Hill, what’s your wild card?

Andrew Hill
I like that. I like that wild card very much, although I know that things that I’m working on suggest that actually, it’s a proliferation of new software and new apps, probably many of them created by AI, that might drop on to us. I suppose my wild card prediction would be, and this is clearly self-interested, that companies suddenly realise that they’ve got a whole lot of older workers with institutional memory and experience that they can draw on, rather than saying that’s where we’re gonna draw the line now and push that group out. By the same token, that those workers start to realise, actually, maybe if I ease off here I can get a better deal and stay connected to the workforce and share my experience with Gen Z.

Isabel Berwick
When we did this same episode last year, I had no idea how quickly AI was gonna be upon us. And it’s quite clear from our predictions this year that 2024 is going to be the year of AI, but it could also be the year of the older worker, and it could also be the year that we see a lot of change internally in companies in terms of, you know, backtracking on diversity initiatives or just keeping quiet about them. So there’s a huge amount to think about. Thanks so much to Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York. Thanks, Edge.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
What a pleasure. Thank you, Isabel.

Isabel Berwick
And thank you to Andrew Hill.

Andrew Hill
Thank you.

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Isabel Berwick
This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

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