Rewinding to the past: a day of easy companionship in 1990
To let the extent of this sink in, let’s replay the 1990 memory experiment again – but this time look at the day, not through the degree of fragmentation, but rather through the lens of human interaction. In my case I will go back to the consulting practice I worked for – but this time view it as a series of social conversations. As I track my day, what’s interesting is that I spent most of the day in an office with my colleagues. Sure, I have my own room – but I can glance down the corridor and see others working in their offices. The place has a feeling of easy companionship. Not that we were all friends, by the way – there were certainly people I could not stand and I am sure the feeling was mutual. The place was riven with politics, power play and hierarchies – it could be infuriating, but it was also real. You may recall that in the day I described earlier I went in the afternoon to a meeting with a group of prospective clients. Again, this was a physical meeting, and we talked for an hour or two. In the early evening in the pub, the team comes together to chew over the events of the day, share more gossip and continue the marvellous power plays.
It might have been frustrating, annoying and at times downright irritating – but I never actually felt lonely during the working day. This was a world of easy companionship. Rohan and Amon have working companions whom they know well and whom they trust. However, they rarely actually physically meet these people.
What’s missing in the working lives of Rohan and Amon is the possibility of simply pushing your head through an open door and saying ‘Hi’, or wandering down the corridor to goad people into having another cup of coffee. Or even inviting a group out on the spur of the moment to a curry down the road.
The death of easy companionship
It could be that this loss of easy companionship, which was so much a part of working lives in 1990, will be one of the dark sides of the future of work. We humans, in the past, in the present and I would imagine also in the future, are intensely affected by the state of our relationships with others. For many of us, the aspect we value, above all other aspects of work, is our relationships with our co-workers.1 It is no surprise that when asked why people chose to stay at work, one of the top predictors is ‘I have a friend at work.’2 And we should also not be surprised that longitudinal studies carried out by researchers at the Harvard Medical School of the lifetime health and happiness of thousands of people reveal a similar effect. Those who are the happiest in their lives are not the richest, or indeed those who have achieved the most. The researchers found consistently that the single greatest link with lifetime happiness was the extent to which people have close friends in their lives, while loneliness was associated with ill health – and was, interestingly, contagious, rapidly spreading to others. That’s why easy, close, relaxed friendships have been described as such a key part of human mental health and happiness.3
I cannot imagine this being different in 2025. After all, across the whole history of the human race we have been intensely social, clannish people. Yet the coming forces of technology and globalisation could impact on this natural sociability in a way never experienced in the history of mankind.
So where does that leave Rohan and Amon and billions of others who in 2025 could spend much of their working day interacting with others in cyberspace rather than establishing physical contact? The simple truth is that we simply don’t know. Perhaps humanity will adjust to these cyber relationships to such an extent that they will bring the positive effect that face-to-face relationships do now. After all, the early experiments with Sony’s PET computer AIBO suggested that, with its puppy-like appearance and mischievous way of behaving, people rapidly learnt to enjoy it as a companion and as a playmate. Even in 2010 in Hong Kong and Japan, ‘virtual girlfriends’ can be downloaded to your 3-G mobile. In cyberspace and in chatroom salons a gigantic world of relationships has been flourishing. In the future we can imagine that avatars won’t simply be the mainstay of the sex trade, but will also be the logical development, from call centres to financial advisers.4 Perhaps one of the outcomes of advancing technology is that we humans will be able to substitute virtual, avatar relationships for real, flesh-and-blood relationships. Or perhaps technological developments will be such that, as some have predicted, by 2025 brain implants will ensure positive relational emotions – whatever the situation.5
However, I’m going to assume that by 2025 neither of these ‘transhuman’ adjustments has taken place. Instead what we can imagine is the slow but continuous disappearance of face-to-face contact at work, bringing with it the possibility of deep loneliness and isolation.
The dark side of the future is a working world of isolation. Advances in imaging, holographs and virtual technologies, combined with developments in the Cloud, have put the most sophisticated techniques into the homes of people like Rohan and Amon. They no longer have to go into the office to access information – it’s all available to them on their handheld device or through their personal home computers. Theirs is a virtual, global existence. Their clients, patients and teams are scattered around the world – their colleagues are not in the next office cubicle, and they may not even be in the same city, region or country.
It’s not that their colleagues are strangers. Ask Rohan about his peers in China and he will tell you much about them – after all, he has been leading the Chinese team in these specialist operations for more than a year and has twice spent a week with them. From his encounters over the year he has learnt whom to trust at certain times, whom to keep an eye on and who will need the most counselling after the operation. As fellow professionals he has a keen eye on their strengths and weaknesses and in the case of a couple of them has even gone so far as to mentor them outside the operating theatre. He knows them pretty well and would count a couple as friends.
However, like Amon, Rohan’s relationships with his working colleagues are more often virtual than face-to-face. In the past he went to conferences around the world to meet up with other specialists in his field, but increasingly the carbon tax on flights is such that these are now being held virtually, so he simply briefs his avatar about whom he wants to meet. In his own hospital there are few people with his deep expertise and so he does not spend much time there. For Amon, his work is completely virtual. He works from his home all of the time and has never met the other programmers with whom he routinely collaborates.
Taking families out of the mosaic of work
Our relationships at work are an important part of the mosaic of our whole life relationships. However, they are only one part. For many people, what compensates for the possible lack of relationships at work is their relationships with their family members.
Work and home life can spill over in terms of energy and emotion.6 Our work and our lives outside work are rarely hermetically sealed from each other. More often, there is a spillover between the two that can be an emotional spillover, or could be the spillover of networks and competencies.7
On occasions the spillover between the two is positive. Our family home can be a place where we feel relaxed, authentic and loved. These are the positive feelings and emotions with which we enter our working day and they create the emotional foundation that plays an important role in helping us deal with the stresses and strains of working life. This positive cycle between work and home life can also be reversed. Instead of positive home emotions spilling over into work, it is our positive experiences of work that spill over to the home. We leave work and enter the home feeling positive and uplifted. Work is a place where we can gain valuable networks, develop new skills and deepen our knowledge, and these are competencies and connections that can be brought back to home as we enter it in the evening.
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