Rethinking ‘our work’
BY Millie P. Arora, Mads Holme, and Tamara Moellenberg
A look into how young professionals are re-imagining the future of their work and what it means for leaders.
Synopsis: For many organizations before the pandemic, the question of how work happens was largely shunted to the back office. Decisions such as upgrades to office spaces or revisions to benefits packages were often outsourced to specialized vendors. The pandemic as a ‘Big Reset’ has given leaders the opportunity to shape a future of work that is best for their organization, to develop and be the architects of this future rather than having it foisted upon them.
Over the past few months, ReD has conducted immersions with a dozen young professionals in Paris, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and NYC across a range of industries to understand their work attitudes, practices, norms, and expectations for employers. What we found is a set of continuing dilemmas and tensions: young professionals want the flexibility to work from home at their discretion, but they also want to overlap with their colleagues in the office to build warm, effective working relationships. They like the ability to focus and screen out distractions in their own space, but they also want more regular access and exposure to mentors to cultivate an on-the-job intuition of how good work is done.
The hopeful news is that, counter to popular narratives around the rise of slacker culture and young people ‘checking out’ of work, we’ve seen a renewed passion among young professionals for work, often spurred by a greater sense of autonomy with fewer office- or workplace-related distractions. For organizations, this raises questions about how to harness this passion and build a thriving company culture and community.
Part 1
The next chapter of work will be written, not read. The Big Reset: The pandemic transformed the world of work globally
Not perhaps since the two World Wars has the way we work been so fundamentally transformed. In 1916, Britain passed the Military Service Act, which mandated conscription for all medically fit men between ages 18 and 41, excluding certain groups.[1] Over the next four years, nearly half of alleligible men in Britain would go on to fight in the war.[2]
The industrial mobilization for war meant that a major portion of the British men who went to the front lines during WWI were social elites or skilled professionals. This had an enormous effect on the world of work, as on society more generally: many returned with a renewed awareness of the fleetingness of life, which the anthropologist James Suzman credits – alongside technological advances – with the steep decline in working hours in the years after.[3]
The covid-19 pandemic has not been nearly so cataclysmic, yet it has proven similarly transformational on a global scale. Seemingly overnight, established workplace norms and practices – many of which had gone largely unquestioned since WWII – were replaced by new routines, rituals, and habits which, as the lockdowns dragged on, gradually became a kind of ‘new normal.’
Organizations will have to decide what their future of work looks like
In this yet-to-be-written new chapter of work, it will be up to organizations themselves to take tough decisions about where, when, and how work will happen; to decide how this might look different across departments, teams, even individuals; and to choose what kinds of incentives and rewards, learning opportunities, and messaging will attract and retain the top talent in their sector or industry.
While the lockdowns affected many organizations in similar ways (albeit with key differences in length, timing, and severity across global regions), this new phase has no such clear unifying or standardizing characteristics. Now, organizations have been given – and must seize – the opportunity to shape a future of work that is best for their organization, to create and be the architects of this future rather than having it foisted upon them.
We’ve examined how professionals’ relationship with work is changing
But shaping this future won’t be easy. Over the past few months, ReD has conducted immersions with a dozen young professionals between the ages of twenty and thirty-five from Paris, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and New York City who are working in finance, healthcare, and creative industries. We met with primarily knowledge workers, those who have weathered the pandemic mostly from their homes, able to ‘do’ their work remotely when required. Purposefully excluded from the study was work on the ‘front lines’ or other forms of meaningful work at home – e.g., caring for children. Alongside this research, we’ve been tracking the discourse around work online, in the media, and in industry and management reports.
Much of the current discourse covers the future of work ‘by the numbers’: for instance, shrinking office footprints, or declining rates of business travel. [4] Our aim instead was to bring to life the ordinary experiences of young people, seeing work through their eyes: How are they feeling? What are they doing? Two-plus years of a pandemic is enough to set new norms, particularly for young professionals with little prior firsthand knowledge of how work played out during normal times. With more companies scrambling to attract and retain top talent in a tight labor market, it felt especially urgent to understand these professionals’ perspective – at least as a place to start. What has changed in their work attitudes, practices, norms, and expectations for employers? What has emerged is a series of tensions, contradictions, and blind spots with which organizational leaders must grapple as they attempt to map out the future of work for their organization.
Finding 1
The pandemic has created new fault lines within organizations. Tensions over mentorship, learning, and receiving honest feedback
The young professionals we met struggled to get timely, constructive feedback from managers in remote environments: one even went so far as to create her own spreadsheet for her manager to fill in, frustrated with the lack of direction. Without regular check-ins and face-to-face conversations, consumer goods manager Ying (not her real name),[5] who lives in Paris, similarly found it was harder to keep up with her manager’s evolving vision: his feedback thus felt ad hoc and contradictory. Young professionals worried they were misinterpreting managers’ non-verbal cues over Zoom calls and struggled with how to signal effort when not physically present in the office, visibly working.
Managers, no doubt, face their own difficulties working with teams in fully remote or increasingly hybrid arrangements. For example, Tony, a junior real estate executive in New York City, talked about his struggle to understand when his team members are unproductive or, conversely, over- whelmed. When his team is physically present in the office, “I always keep the door open because I like to hear the conversations that are going on...It’s good for me to take the temperature of the team, to understand what the pressing issues of the day are.” But in remote or hybrid set-ups, he must rely on his team to proactively flag issues or remember to check in with them. Even then, he struggles to read their body language and must trust them to be honest about how truly stressed or bored they are.
Tensions over applications of hybrid policies
Ying, in Paris, was visibly agitated. While executives at her company had made flexible remote working the official company policy, many middle managers still encouraged their teams to come into the office regularly for meetings. “It’s tricky,” she says, “the managers cannot say directly that they don’t like remote work – that’s not the public opinion of the company. But then they have this expectation that we all come in for meetings... You’re always in conflict.” [6] To be sure, the pandemic has heightened tensions between junior and senior staff, making it difficult to balance individual autonomy and organizational unity.
“When I talk to most other analysts and I tell them I’m hybrid, they immediately get jealous because they want to be hybrid too,”
This tension exists not only between managers and their teams, but also across different departments. For example, NYC-based investment banker Ian’s team is the only one working in a hybrid set-up. “When I talk to most other analysts and I tell them I’m hybrid, they immediately get jealous because they want to be hybrid too,” he says. When some teams are allowed to work in remote or hybrid set-ups and others are not, this can lead to simmering resentments and envy. We learned that over the course of the pandemic such varying work policies also led to divisions between geographies, not only teams. For instance, streetwear brand designer Bella felt “mad at everything that was happening” when her team was forced to work remotely during the Shanghai lockdowns, whereas her Hong Kong colleagues were able to arrange and attend a major showcase in person.
Tensions balancing casual vs. planned encounters
Moreover, even when hybrid policies are available to all they can still negatively affect working relationships between colleagues. Because the decision of when to come into the office, or how to apply the hybrid policy, is often taken at the team- or department-wide level, functional teams may choose to come on different days and without overlapping schedules. This then makes it difficult to meet up casually
or exchange information in the office, many young professionals told us. The absence of such casual unplanned interactions, in turn, threatens to solidify organizational silos [7] and can stifle creativity, which as Gillian Tett, author of The Silo Effect, has argued, is often a product of cross-functional encounters [8].
Some young professionals have sought to counter this silo effect by being more intentional about connecting with others when they are in the office. For instance, Ariane, who is employed at a work-from-anywhere healthcare company in Paris, intentionally schedules coffee chats and meetings well in advance. Ying, the CPG project manager, does the same: “I put a time slot in [my colleagues’] calendars, to make sure we do it,” she says. The irony is that such meet-ups are hardly ‘spontaneous’ – yet another reason, alongside ‘creativity’, many leaders have cited for why time in the office is superior to remote. For instance, in his 2022 annual shareholder letter, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon mentioned a “lack of spontaneous learning and creativity” as among the “serious weaknesses” of virtual work.[9]
While organization-wide hybrid policies may help to repair some intra-organizational tensions, leaders will likely need to create new company-wide structures and norms to foster a more vibrant, dynamic, and effective in-office culture.
Finding 2
Young professionals both want to work from home and see value in the office
The discourse around the future of work often leans into the disagreements across organizations and employee groups. But tensions around work practices are also festering within individuals. The young professionals we met were inter- nally conflicted about which work arrangements would be most helpful for them. They are quite self-reflective about the tradeoffs of working from home vs. being in the office and recognize that their own practices and values may not be fully aligned, nor even yet settled into fixed patterns of behavior.
Flexibility, including WFH partially, is table stakes for young professionals today
What is clear in our research is that young professionals today have become acclimated to and now demand work- places that allow them to work at least some of the time at home. This is primarily because working from home provides a way to amp up or dial down their work intensity, depend- ing on the type of work they are doing. For instance, when Rohan, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience in NYC, needs to speed through some programming and analysis, he stays home in his apartment rather than going into the lab. “I put my headphones on, zoom in, and focus.” For others, such as Mona, a filmmaker in Paris, it’s a way to recalibrate her energies. She multitasks by doing laundry or scheduling repairs. “I think I do better at work when I’m at peace with my personal life.” Without the ability to work from home occasionally, these life tasks – and the stress they generate – would pile up, making her work less enjoyable and sustainable.
“...many young professionals we met are deeply passionate about their work and eager to excel at it; a sense of greater control in how they work during the pandemic has made them even more invested, not less”
Many of the young professionals we met also cited trust as a big factor for why they enjoyed being able to work from home. “You don’t have to use it,” Ying says of her com- pany’s work-from-home policy, “but being able to choose it makes you feel you’re in control”. Similarly, Mona remarks, “You should trust that I can get my work done in ways that work best for me.” As we will go on to discuss shortly, many young professionals we met are deeply passionate about their work and eager to excel at it; a sense of greater control in how they work during the pandemic has made them even more invested, not less.
So, for an employer to tell them that they must be in the office to do their work well can feel patronizing and implies that by choosing to work from home, they are less engaged. Quite often, as in Rohan’s (the neuroscientist) case, the opposite is true.
Despite a desire for flexibility, young people today also crave or know they need collegial relationships
But even while most of the young professionals we met would like to WFH partially – they can see its limitations. While the people we met didn’t explicitly state this, we clearly felt a concern around the isolation of remote work. They are well aware that no other generation has ever been so socially isolated: 56% of surveyed Gen Zers (born 1997-2012) report they felt lonely at least once or twice a month while growing up, as opposed to only 37% of Gen Xers and 24% of BabyBoomers.[10] ReD’s wider research with young adults has revealed a distinct crisis in belonging: they feel a lack of social cohesion, cut off from friends and critical support networks, including at work.
Indeed, the young professionals we met crave warm collegial relationships and effective mentors, since personal growth is something they deeply value. But they also admit they struggle to build these collegial relationships in remote or hybrid settings for the reasons mentioned: the challenges of receiving and delivering timely feedback, the struggle to coordinate schedules for in-person meet-ups, not to mention the difficulties of interpreting social cues and building rapport over Zoom. As Ying, a self-identified “introvert in an extrovert’s company,” puts it, “It’s a paradox because I need those [moments] of small talk to feel part of this company. But I also need moments alone to recharge.” She finds it difficult to have quick, casual interactions out of the office.
The office is a place to build instinctive intuition
So, while some young professionals enjoy remote and hybrid flexibility, they also see its downsides. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than around training. Confident of their own ability to teach themselves formal professional skills (e.g., taking coding or brand design courses outside of regular working hours), young professionals primarily look to their employers to help them build instinctive intuition: how to behave, cope, think, and problem-solve in the moment, in highly creative and productive ways. As Ian, the NYC-based investment banker, says, “A lot of the learning comes from being able to sit with my manager, right behind them and ask questions about everything.” Intuition often relies on being able to observe how the work happens in real-time, with tangible guidance from experienced staff.
Yet direct observation, and thus a more embodied sense of how good work happens, can be incredibly difficult in remote environments. New hires at Ariane’s company in Paris, for instance, suffered from an outbreak of ‘imposter syndrome’ – a feeling that everyone had it figured out except them – when they were unable to see how the company’s shared memos were made. These memos functioned as the primary tool of decision-making at the company, distrib- uted, read, and commented upon widely in the company. But they arrived in the new employees’ inboxes perfectly polished. “Because there’s a lockdown, you don’t meet anyone, and you can only see people on Slack and GitHub,”she says.“They all look so intelligent, articulate, and hard-working because you only see written results and ideas from “ them.” There was no way for the interns to ‘look over the shoulder’ of their more senior colleagues, to get a sense of how these memos evolved from early drafts.
Similarly, Ian in New York gets a thrill from observing traders on the floor: when a client calls, how might a trader instinctually respond? What is their intuition or judgement? He tries to access their embodied or tacit knowledge through close observation. Ian thinks that by being in the office he can learn a particular disposition from more senior traders – to hold his nerve more, to be confident about a trade. It’s one of the few reasons he is willing to come in at least part-time. So, young profes- sionals do see value in the office. But they want access to office spaces for defined purposes, for instance, to focus (too many distractions at home); learn by obser- vation; and connect with colleagues, especially across teams and functions. They just don’t necessarily feel like they need this all the time.
“So, young professionals do see value in the office. But they want access to office spaces for defined purposes, for instance, to focus (too many distractions at home); learn by observation; and connect with colleagues, especially across teams and functions.”
Crucially, their need to focus, connect, and learn is especially high during on-boarding. As Ian says, “If I’m going to absorb anything, as a sponge, it would be right now.’ Young professionals often start off a new job energized. So, early on their need to regulate and recharge is low, making work from home less of a pull. Moreover, an in-office presence can be crucial for giving new hires a basic grounding in the workings of the company: it took Swedish architect, Ingrid, months to learn simple things like who to ask small questions to when she started her job while most of her office was remote. Ying, the CPG manager in Paris, had a similar experience to Ingrid’s, “For people who are new newcomers, it’s very confusing [to start in a remote set-up]. They don’t know what’s going on and must feel super lost.” She remembers her own first few weeks of beginning a new job during the lockdowns and constantly feeling like she was “missing out.”
Adaptable offices should not come at the cost of baseline efficiency
But while young professionals want to access the office for more defined purposes, they also want it to be a comfortable, predictable space where they can get down to work quickly. For instance, the architects at Ingrid’s office are supposed to be hotdesking, but informally everyone has their own space where they maintain a private set-up. “It’s supposed to be free, but we don’t follow that,” she says. Having a specific spot ready and waiting allows Ingrid and her colleagues to transition into work-mode efficiently, without a lot of mental and practical effort. As companies slash their office footprints to cut costs post-pandemic,[11] this then raises a critical challenge for employers: How can we design more flexible spaces that people can adapt for varying purposes, while keeping some baseline predictability and efficiency?
Finding 3
A reason for optimism: Young professionals have a renewed passion for work
So, these young professionals want the freedom to work from home when and how they want, yet they also want to overlap with their (similarly flexible) colleagues in the office and learn from senior mentors through direct observation. They want to access office spaces for more defined (and in- frequent) purposes, yet they also want predictability so they can get down to work quickly once there. The contradictions can be puzzling.
If these young professionals are still a little confused about how they want to work, the good news is they have exceptional clarity on why they want to work, which is increasingly, we’ve seen, for the work itself. Nadia, an NYC-based private equity analyst, says that despite earning slightly less than many others in her industry, “I really, really love the work that I’m doing, the people I’m talking to.” Ian, the investment banker, gets a personal thrill when making big trades. “It takes a lot of brain power to that stuff. I think it’s pretty interesting.” He feels he has more ability to achieve this level of focus at home: “That’s one thing I like about working from home is: you effectively trim the fat.” Conversely, when Ingrid, the ar- chitect, does come into the office, it’s so she can focus and be productive, not for the free yoga classes. Contrary to popular discourse, young people are still engaged and passionate about work, even having a more direct – if you will, ‘puri- fied’ – relationship to it.
To be sure, the pandemic moment pushed some young pro- fessionals to the edge, reminding them of their limits. They talked to us about feeling deeply alone during lockdowns, of being the “only living breathing thing in my apartment... I don’t even have a plant” ; of being bored and listless in a remote job where the higher-ups “forgot to fire me”; of finishing college and working a series of remote internships with very little interaction with colleagues; of very long and stressful hours amidst severe uncertainty. No wonder, as has been widely reported, burnout rates and mental health issues climbed steadily during the pandemic.[12]
Such difficult experiences have given young professionals new respect for their personal limits and a desire to preserve them. We saw people carefully setting expectations with managers about working hours and deadlines, being more vocal about protecting their energy and time. As Swedish architect Ingrid puts it, “The physical reaction of my body – it knows that this has happened before. I don’t often stand up for myself and demand things, but this time I thought I had to, otherwise I would never like it or enjoy it here (at work).” As her statement attests, the goal of this boundary-setting from young professionals
is not to dis-engage from the work, but quite the opposite: to protect the work and their relationship to it by protecting themselves – to not burn out by burning too brightly.
Meaning and purpose emerging out of feeling needed and driving impact
So where does that renewed passion come from? For the young professionals we met, it often came from a feeling of personal impact and purpose that they were able to find in their daily tasks. For instance, Mona, the filmmaker in Paris, likes feeling ‘essential’ in a company – meaning, for her, comes from having others depend on her. “What an amazing thrill to wake up in the morning and feel like if I didn’t wake up on time the whole production collapses,” she says. And yet for others, such as private equity analyst Amelia in Shanghai, meaning is in the challenge of the work itself. “It’s like a debate with yourself,” she says. “If you do the analysis right, eventually you truly believe that an investment can make money. It’s very exciting.” The thrill of the work, as well as its broader possibilities for impact, keep her going.
To be sure, some young people we met were driven by a broader social purpose and agenda their company had committed to. “I’ve forgotten to leave before,” says ESG manager Daniel, who finds deep meaning in his work leading sustain- ability efforts at a large Nordic healthcare company. “Where I grew up, pollution was making kids sick. If I can help emergency services avoid that, I love it.” Daniel also values the autonomy he has to direct and shape his work – it’s a chance for him to matter both within the organization and in society more broadly.
Meaning and purpose emerging out of greater autonomy
How can we explain why two-plus years spent in cramped apartments with little face-to-face interaction and few corporate ‘morale-boosting’ events have in fact made some professionals – at least those we spoke to in these industries – seemingly more, not less, excited about their day-to-day tasks?
“...the level of ‘meaningfulness’ in a job is equivalent to its degree of autonomy.”
One possible explanation may be found in Adina Schwarz’s 1982 theory of ‘meaningful work.’ [13] Taking a Kantian point of view, Schwarz, a philosopher, argues that the level of ‘meaningfulness’ in a job is equivalent to its degree of autonomy. Take, for instance, workers in an assembly line for whom “even the particular bodily movements they employ” – e.g., straighten, cut, box, label – “are determined by others.”[14] Contrast this to an independent craftsperson who has full control over when, where, and how she does her work, as well as the satisfaction of seeing the finished product and meeting the (ideally) happy customer. The former, most of us would agree, feels deeply un-meaningful, even inhuman, while the latter is often lauded as an (increasingly nostalgic) social and professional ideal.
The pandemic gave the young professionals we met almost unprecedented autonomy over where, when, and how they worked. Some of them hunched over laptops on sofas, while others labored from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. to “get in the flow,” as Min, a biomedical engineer in Shanghai, put it. Ian, the investment banker, blocked ‘busy’ in his calendar to focus on the core tasks of his job uninterrupted by meetings; this is more difficult when he is sharing an office space. While man- agers often weren’t available to help or give feedback, for people like Amelia, the private equity analyst in Shanghai, that means they also weren’t around to hover.
This greater control, rather than turning young professionals into disenchanted or entitled slackers, has enlivened their relationship to work. Ingrid talks with enthu- siasm about a project where her team had total control and creativity about how they delivered the product. Bella, a brand designer for a streetwear company in Shanghai, remarks that because “a lot of my satisfaction comes from work,” she thinks she’ll never stop. She is currently looking for even more ways to have greater ownership over her work, even considering self-employment. It turns out greater control leads to more pride and interest in the work, inspiring people to want to have even more control over it – creating a kind of virtuous cycle.
Conclusion
The future of work will look different for every organization
There has been a collective reckoning the past two years on the role of work in people’s lives and the work practices that best support what each of us wants as individuals. And while the popular narrative has focused on work becoming more ‘transactional’ and young people being ‘slackers,’ we found quite the opposite. The renewed engagement we saw looks different from what it did pre-pandemic: young professionals being particularly focused on ‘core work’, including activities that much more deliberately serve how they find meaning and purpose in their work. For organizations, this raises
the question of how to channel each employee’s source of meaning and purpose into a company culture – to foster collaboration across teams and create a sense of belonging, which leaders know can be critical during difficult times or for particularly thorny challenges.
In general, we feel this renewed sense of engagement with the work itself is good news for organizations because it points toward more opportunity to shape the future of work in collaboration with professionals rather than dictating it to them – or alternatively trying to cater to their, admittedly contradictory preferences. If anything, our investigation into work with young people has shown that they are much more reflective, nuanced, and deliberate in their approach to work than what surveys might suggest.
This revelation creates an opening, we believe, for organi- zations to define the future of their work – which will look different for every organization. Organizations operating across varying industries, sectors, and local or cultural con- texts will seek out divergent strategies, structures, expertise, and talent pools. They will thus likely have different internal power dynamics and corporate cultures. Even two ad agen- cies, for example, are likely to have significantly different concepts of work depending on their specific mission, assets, and competitive positioning.
This means that to navigate the new future of work successfully – to get the Big Reset right – organizations will have to look internally, not at what other organizations are doing or even at what their employees are saying.
Organizations will need to map out the kind of work their different teams engage in and grapple with how this mapping can facilitate different versions of work in a way that fosters not only individual meaning and purpose but also a broader collective culture. Key questions organizational leaders should be asking include:
What is driving meaning and purpose for different employee groups and why? How can we facilitate this collectively across the organization?
What tensions exist in the organization between our employees, teams, departments, and even geo- graphical regions and offices? Why?
How can we foster learning and development amidst changing work practices? What ‘old’ notions are we clinging to that may no longer be relevant? What kinds of learning moments are employees missing by not being physically in the office?
What is our philosophy and approach to provid- ing employees greater flexibility and autonomy in their work?
How can we get beyond what people say they want from a workplace, to understand the practices that will drive collective productivity and a feeling of belonging?
Mads Holme is Managing Partner of ReD Associates, based in Copenhagen. Millie P. Arora is a Partner at ReD Associates’ New York City office, where Tamara Moellenberg is a Senior Manager.
Ethan Simon, Nhu Le, Anya Eurwongpravit, Pinhsuan Huang, Linda Ma, Lewis West, and Niccolò Gismondi conducted research for this paper, which was edited by Lionel Beehner.
References
In 1914, ~24% eligible men enlisted, the share increased to 47% in 1918. “Conscription: the First World War,” UK Parliament, Accessed August 25, 2022.
Stephen Badsey, “Great Britain,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Accessed August 25, 2022,
From an average of fifty-six hours per week to forty-eight. James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (London: Penguin Press, 2021): 339.
Susan Lund and Anu Madgavkar, et al, The Future of Work after Covid-19, McKinsey.com, January 18, 2021.
All participants’ names have been changed to protect their identities.
All quotes have been lightly edited for clarity
Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Larson, Jonathan, et al. “Dynamic Silos: Modularity in Intra-organizational Communication Networks during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” arXiv.org. April 1, 2021.
Lananh Nguyen, “Wall Street’s Rigid Culture Bends to Demands for Flexibility at Work,” The New York Times, April 4, 2022.
Daniel Cox, “The Childhood Loneliness of Generation Z,” Survey Center on American Life, April 4, 2022.
Broughton, Kristin and Trentmann, Nina. “Companies Cutting Office Space Predict Long-Term Savings.” The Wall Street Journal. July 5, 2021.
Kristy Threlkeld, “Employee Burnout Report: COVID-19’s Impact and 3 Strategies to Curb It,” Indeed, March 11, 2021.
Adina Schwartz, “Meaningful Work,” Ethics 92, no. 4 (July 1982): 634-646.
Ibid. 634