The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton

Our work becomes a place where we feel angry, under-appreciated and wound up. It is these negative emotions that we bring back home, and it is these caustic emotions that can have such a negative impact on our capacity to find happiness at home. Or the caustic cycle can start with our home – perhaps it becomes a place in which we feel insecure, guilty and overwhelmed by the demands of others. So it is these that become the emotions and feelings that we bring into work.⁸

      There has also been a spillover in how relationships are developed. Over the last couple of decades, relationships at home have become increasingly ‘negotiated’ and worked out. In part this reflects the growing economic independence of women, and also profound changes in the roles of men and women. The point here is that as we develop more relational ‘muscle’ at home, so we use these same relational muscles at work. If future generations become increasingly skilled at negotiating their relationships with their partners, so we can expect them to become more skilled and indeed inspired to negotiate their relationships with their co-workers, managers and businesses.

      Work and home are also intimately connected in other more physical ways. If you have work that takes you physically away from the family – in overnight trips or longer projects – then this impacts on the family. If you leave early in the morning and return late at night after a long commute – then this impacts on the family. And of course the decisions you make about where to work will be influenced by the impact it will have on your family and your own personal goals for them.

      So, if we want to really understand the future of work, we also have to at least acknowledge, indeed understand, the ways in which home and family are likely to change over the coming decades.

      This endeavour is not as difficult as it might at first seem because what constitutes a ‘home’ and a ‘family’ began to change significantly from the time of the Industrial Revolution, and this transformation in many ways set the scene for what is to come.

      Rewinding to the past: changes in family structures

      To get a feel for the magnitude of the transformation of family life, rewind to the past by taking a look at your own family tree for the last two generations. As you do so, you may want to ask the following questions. How many children did my parents and grandparents have? Did any of them or their parents divorce? What is the current family structure?

      For myself, both my grandmothers, Annie Evans and Minnie Stanwell, came from families of seven children. Their own childhood was interrupted by the First World War, and as a consequence in both families a number of their sisters remained spinsters because their sweethearts were killed in the early battles of the war. Those that married had smaller families than their parents – Annie had two children, one of whom, Barbara, is my mother; Minnie had only one child – my father David. None of my grandparents’ brothers or sisters was divorced. Sure, there was much family gossip about a couple of marriages that had obviously hit a sticky patch – but in the main these families stuck together through thick and thin. The unravelling of families began in my family in my own generation. Of the four children that my parents Barbara and David had, only one stayed with their first partner. All the other three children divorced, and two had second families.

      Perhaps your family history reveals a steadier matrimonial environment. But if it has, then it will be in the minority. In much of the world divorce is becoming the norm, not the exception, and even in countries such as India, in which divorce is still very much frowned upon, some of the old ways of staying married are breaking down.

      So let’s take a closer look at how Rohan and Amon relate to their family members, particularly when their daily work is complete. Like the majority of people in 2025, both live in cities – far removed from their parents and from their childhood friends. By 2025, families, even those in India, have shrunk in size. Amon has one sister, and Rohan an older brother who moved some years ago to Brazil to set up an internet trading company. They get to hook up their holograms on family birthdays, but it’s been years since they actually met. Neither Amon nor Rohan has parents who live in the same city. Rohan moved from his home town of Jaipur to study at the Mumbai Medical School and left his parents there. Amon also moved from his home town to be educated.

      And like many other people around the world, both Amon and Rohan have parents who live far away from them – so surely they can come and stay? Here is the other reason why Amon and Rohan see so little of their parents. Both their parents have been caught in a series of demographic trends which has meant that – even though they are now in their late 60s, early 70s – to some extent or another they continue to work. It’s not that their parents wouldn’t love to see them, it’s just that they are still working and they live hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Rohan’s parents are now in their mid-60s and both work full time; his mother teaches at the local primary school and his father mans the family store. The same is true for Amon’s parents. They divorced when he was a young child – his mother moving back to the home town of Luxor in southern Egypt, while his father moved to join the extended family in Canada, and while they are now almost 70 both are still engaged in work.

      So when Rohan closes down his avatar station and Amon switches off his computer, both are on their own. They are far from their family, and from their working colleagues and peers. Theirs are isolated lives with very little human contact.

      So one of the real potential downsides of this steady erosion of real (rather than virtual) relationships that could be the case in 2025 is that the positive energy flow from home to work ceases, and with it some of the opportunity to tolerate work-related stress. My guess is that if we took a closer look at the health and well-being of Rohan and Amon, both will be suffering from anxiety and possibly also depression.

      The forces that created isolation

      When you look at Rohan and Amon’s working life, at first glance they look interesting and meaningful, and in many ways their working lives are. However, as we peel back and observe their working lives in the context of their whole life, the extent of the gaps becomes apparent. And it is not just Rohan and Amon. Around the world we can anticipate that many billions of people will live isolated working lives. How did this happen?

      Some of the clues can be drawn from their stories. Did you notice that Rohan and Amon both live in one of the many megacities of the world in 2025? Like billions of others, in the course of the last 100 years their families moved from rural villages to urban sprawls. Isolation came in part as a result of the world becoming urban. Another clue is that both of them have family members that migrated, Amon’s father to Canada, and Rohan’s brother to Brazil. The migration of vast numbers of people has also served to break up the family ties that can be so important to reducing isolation. But it is not just the globalisation forces of urbanisation and migration that are impacting on the lives of Rohan and Amon. It’s also the increasing cost of energy and fuel. Two decades earlier, and Rohan would have flown to spend time with his colleagues in China and Amon may have made the trip to his clients in Brazil. But with a strong focus on the cost of carbon footprints and the rise of virtual technologies, they are both more inclined to stay at home rather than to commute or indeed to fly to meet others.

      There is also something deeper going on in the working society of 2025 that we can glimpse in the stories of Rohan and Amon. Perhaps the most obvious is that the traditional families that Rohan and Amon’s grandparents grew up with have been replaced with rearranged families in which divorce has become much more prevalent. In the case of Amon’s parents, once they had separated his father remarried in Canada and Amon now has three stepbrothers and sisters in Toronto. But it is deeper than this. Perhaps some of the loneliness and isolation of both Rohan and Amon is that they are the members of a global society that simply does not trust each other. Amon notices how cynical people are about ‘big business’, and that’s one of the reasons he decided to work independently – he did not want to line the pockets of one of the ‘fat cats’. Rohan, as a surgeon, is in the world’s most trusted profession, but like Amon he distrusts the government and is worried about corruption and sleaze.

      Another general emotion in the societies in which Rohan and Amon live is a feeling of unhappiness. Rohan notices this in the patients he treats, and Amon knows himself the quiet desperation he can sometimes