Workers around the world are in search of a better deal. The ability to work from anywhere has arrived. According to Lisa Taylor, President of Challenge Factory, “one in three Canadians would rather quit than go back to an office.” Where and when we work is just one of the many disruptions impacting employees around the world. Automation and augmentation, globalization (or a resurgence of locality), the war for talent, and post-pandemic health and safety protocols will change everyone’s relationship to a job (or many jobs), whether we own an enterprise, manage people, or precariously hop from gig to gig. Looking ahead, I think that the future of work is cooperative, too.
Futurists, economists, and policymakers alike calling for structural and human changes to pretty much everything about work. The science is clear that we will have the opportunity to make work more equitable, interesting, and human in the years ahead. Here are three reasons why the future of work is cooperative.
Cooperative economics
The global pandemic is surfacing systemic inequalities that the science tells us can be mitigated and, perhaps, influenced by incorporating more cooperativism into how work happens in the new economy that will emerge on the other side of the global pandemic. In 2018 I was part of the Vancity Credit Union study tour to the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, which is one of the most affluent and equitable communities on Earth. It is also, perhaps not surprisingly, the most socially-networked place in the world and, within these vast networks, home to one of society’s greatest collections of cooperative enterprises.
Stefano Zamagni, the world’s leading cooperative economist, illustrated how disruptive forces like automation, climate change, and precarious work will impact the global workforce. Below is my sketch of a key concept from Zamagni’s lecture – to summarize, the more emphasis we put on the industrialization and automation of work the less opportunities there will be for skilled workers to apply their talents (this idea is represented by the middle of the “hourglass” on the left side of the image below). According to Zamagni, highly specialized and low skilled workers will continue to find employment (Amazon needs engineers and machine learning developers to design mostly automated warehouses and front line workers with dexterity and problem-solving skills to complete the tasks that technology can’t).
In addition to cultivating learning agility and developing more neo-generalists in the world, the conditions and purpose of work are being influenced by cooperative values and principles. This means that, while technology might take over or change most transactional and menial tasks, organizations will have an opportunity to prioritize and invest in previously untapped potential of people.
Humanity
To work is to be human and, I think, we should bring more of ourselves to work everyday. As uniquely people-centered enterprises, as opposed to being focuses on capital, cooperatives, according to the International Centre for Cooperative Management’s Karen Miner, assume that “people are intrinsically motivated social beings, balancing their personal and group interests in accordance with general moral principles. Organizations, in this view, embrace a balance of objectives (including financial), and tend to involve key stakeholders in their decision-making process.” Nearly every leading organizational psychologist and workplace futurist highlights the need to design employee experiences that are deeply human and, as nearly 50% of the global workforce is currently reevaluating what work means to them and considering a career change, employers of all types will be forced to respond to this trend with human-centric solutions.
In their annual report on workplace engagement, Workhuman found that employees around the world are craving connection, personalization, and appreciation: “More than pay or free food or a fun team, workers are looking for meaningful work at organizations where they feel recognized and respected.” Think about how you might make your workplace more human so that, get this, you can find, engage, develop, and keep more humans in your workplace.
Work is better when it is human.
Ownership
Cooperatives are owned by their members, as opposed to shareholders of a publicly traded company or investors in a startup. The rise of employee ownership is one of my favourite workplace trends and, according to EllisDon’s CEO, Geoff Smith, Canadian companies, like many American ones, need to adopt an “employee trust structure” because the model “drives innovation, generates prosperity, and places employees in the driver’s seat.”
For smaller, family-run businesses, worker buyouts, which involve the business owner selling the enterprise to their employees who transform the enterprise into a worker cooperative, are a viable, but relatively unknown option. As millions of baby boomer business owners seek options for transferring their wealth to different stakeholders, such as their children or private equity firms, as they prepare for retirement, the cooperative option presents a novel solution for employee ownership. This type of ownership could see trillions of dollars in wealth transferring to worker-owners across all sectors and geographies.
Cooperative and community ownership of sports teams is popular across multiple European leagues and the Green Bay Packers represent the application of this model in North America. Jason Concepcion and Rene Montgomery highlighted the opportunity and trend of athletes joining ownership groups across major sports on their podcast, Takeline, which, according to Montgomery, a former basketball player and co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, enables teams to better understand what it takes to be an athlete and the unique talents and needs of these employees.
Perhaps empowering employees to literally own their organization is not a realistic goal for your enterprise, so consider how you might encourage and enable employees to own various aspects of their experience. From personal development to recognition events to open innovation projects there are nearly limitless possibilities for organizations to facilitate ownership amongst their people.
Work is better when employees own more of it.
Democracy
Cooperatives value solidarity and demonstrate democratic principles by giving each member one vote (regardless of how much capital someone has in the enterprise). Enhancing democracy at work is well under way. According to Fast Company’s Frank Weishaupt, our transition to remote work might be making meetings, among other things, more democratic: “Hybrid meetings took a bit for employees to get the hang of, but now that we’ve had nearly a year of practice, we’re leveling up our ability to make them impactful—not just for your traditional office leaders or personalities.” Meetings, the much-maligned staple of the knowledge economy, are being democratized, which begs the questions: what else about work can use a democratic refresh?
The New Economics Foundation argues that “the rules and institutions that shape our economy are not forces of nature beyond our control, but have been designed by people.” Zamagni agrees, proposing that the value humans create in a “civil economy” represents a way for democracy to perpetually flourish around the world even if it sputters, flounders, or fails in our politics: “It is a fact that the majority of criticism put forward by civil society in recent years and initially dismissed by governments and mainstream academics – on issues such as the rise of inequality, too-big-to fail banks, the impact of austerity policies, etc. – are now increasingly shared by mainstream organizations, think-tanks and government agencies….Bridging the chasm between the institutional dimension of a country and its social dynamics is one of the major challenges facing our societies today.” Leaning on organizations that are independent from governments and that run on values such as human rights, democracy, freedom, solidarity, and equality will ensure that work, as well as our communities, are more equitable and resilient.
Including employee councils within an existing governance structure or co-producing products and experiences with customers are two examples of how investing in democracy can drive innovation while mitigating risks.
Work is better when it is democratic.
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This article was originally published in April 2021.