Covid-19 brought a structural change to the future workplace [physical] and modern workspace [online]. The post Covid-19 focus will be on individual workers rather than groups of employees. If we look for it we will see that there is a massive conceptual change on around us; the primary shift is from collaboration to cooperation.
Cooperation demands trust. Trust is both present, and absence, within a workplace or a workspace. Those employees who can not be trusted soon become a massive drag on cooperation. The reason this is that cooperatives survive and thrive with weak social ties. When a workplace [workspace] has weak social ties the work flows inside networks rather than as batches handed from one team to another. In essence we have lived with batched work forms for the past one hundred years [think Ford factory and the time motion theories of Frederick Taylor] which relied upon strong social ties. Strong social are the requisite for collaborative teams and this sense of solidarity is usually reinforced by hiring practices. Thus one real change for the new workplace [workspace] will be that hires must be able to work alone, and yet, be trusted to cooperate with others. Future employers must find new ways of hiring people, training staff/employees, remunerating workers, etc.
The future of work will focus on trust and cooperation as people learn to work as nodes within networks not as collaborative team mates... And so and so on...
Richard.
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