In my house, the work of childcare and chores is split pretty evenly between my husband and me — if anything, I am the one who contributes less. I thought about this a lot during the month of March, as we got our usual influx of gender equality content in honour of International Women’s Day. Why is my experience such an outlier?
Surely, it is partially about the individuals: my husband is a generous and fair-minded man, who grew up without stereotypical gender roles1. He also loves to cook, so it was natural for him to take on the job of feeding the family. Perhaps less natural is the way he completely owns every aspect of the job, from meal planning to grocery shopping to cooking to cleaning to managing leftovers to packing recess snack boxes2. That is to say, he doesn’t just carry out the task of cooking, but carries the mental load of planning and organizing meals. In turn, my responsibility is all the non-food-related organizing and planning — make dentist appointments, sign up for swimming lessons, text the babysitter, buy new socks, register for camp, organize a birthday party, arrange a car repair, return the library books, send an eTransfer, give away the outgrown clothes…
“Feeding the family” and “organizing a household” are enormous, relentless jobs. Because we each have one, our division of labour doesn’t feel unbalanced.3 We think of it in terms of “always jobs” and “never jobs.” It is always my job to book an oil change, but in exchange, I never have to think about whether we need milk. I might still pick up milk, and he might still take the car in for service; but we’re not carrying any mental load in the other person’s domain.
Because we have balanced out the mental load, the day-to-day stuff doesn’t matter so much. The garbage and laundry and general household detritus get dealt with by whomever has a spare moment, and if it’s not exactly even every week it doesn’t matter, because the baseline responsibility is equally shared.
Part of me thinks there’s nothing remarkable here. The person who is better at cooking does the cooking and the person who is better at organizing does the organizing! But what is perhaps a bit revolutionary is our explicit shared recognition that planning and organizing a household constitutes an enormous undertaking — one that can’t be balanced by having the other person cook dinner some/most/all nights. It’s not enough to take on the execution of household chores. Both partners need to have a roughly equal allocation of “never jobs” — important household responsibilities that get taken care of by the other person without you ever having to think of them. Home-cooked meals are wonderful, but it is the reprieve from some portion of the mental load that is the real gift, and the thing that makes our partnership feel fair and balanced.
Negotiating a New Bargain with Work
This month, the Workomics team attended the final presentations for the Rotman Design Challenge. It was a fun-filled day with eight teams of graduate students presenting their solutions to a future of work challenge:
Interconnected forces are shaping the future of knowledge work:
Remote/hybrid models are continuing to be tested and taking root
For the first time in history, five generations will be active in the workplace.
Employees are looking to forge a new compact with their workplace.
Against this backdrop, how might we help organizations actively create engaging, economically sustainable remote/hybrid work environments for today’s knowledge workers?
More to come about the challenge and the winning ideas in a future post, but this month, I wanted to share the talk I gave to kick off the day of final presentations and judging.
Rotman Design Challenge — Opening Keynote
Let’s start by taking ourselves back in time, to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. A confluence of new technologies is emerging: new materials like iron and steel, new energy sources like steam engines, and new machinery like the spinning jenny. Together, they are fundamentally changing how we think about work. People are leaving agrarian life and heading to cities in unprecedented numbers. They stream into new workplaces and new jobs.
However, a lot of our social and cultural infrastructure is poorly equipped for this new industrial age. Whether it’s workers’ safety, living conditions, wages, or sanitation, the state of affairs generally ranges from awful to appalling.
But as the industrial revolution unfolds over decades, we will develop norms and institutions to better suit this emerging industrial world. Everything from publicly-funded schools to trade unions to the concept of a 2-day weekend will emerge during this era.
Which brings us to today. I don’t know whether our current era of remote work constitutes a paradigm shift on the order of the Industrial Revolution. But I do know this: it has all happened much, much faster.
For knowledge workers, our economy literally shifted to 100% remote work over the course of a weekend in March of 2020. It happened simultaneously, all around the world. We spent decades adapting the social fabric to better meet the needs of the industrializing economy; we’ve had four years since COVID-19 sent us all home. Given the speed, it should be no surprise that individuals, organizations, and society as a whole are still struggling to thrive in a new reality.
We are still living in a world optimized for most adults to congregate to work in central locations five days a week. Everything from how we fund public transportation to how we design our communities is maladapted for a world where many working-age people spend more waking hours at home than at any time since the 18th century.
An existential challenge to the employer-employee compact
For organizations that employ knowledge workers, I believe this era presents an existential challenge. Remote and hybrid work is only a catalyst that crystallizes other, slower-moving forces that have been unfolding for a long time.
Traditionally, companies have offered a tradeoff to their knowledge workers: Give up a large measure of your autonomy and flexibility and in return, we will give you three things:
Stability
Structure
Resources to make you more productive.
Coming out of the Industrial Revolution, that was the fundamental bargain: come work here and you will have a stable income. We will give you structure, in the form of objectives and a ladder you can climb for promotions and raises. And finally, we will invest our capital in machinery and know-how so you can produce things that would be impossible on your own.
For today’s knowledge worker, does that still feel like a good deal?
Companies stopped offering stability in the 1980s when mass layoffs replaced jobs-for-life. Without stability, long-term career structure isn’t meaningful. Who cares about the career ladder if you’re unlikely to be around long enough to climb it?
More recently, remote and hybrid work have disrupted the day-to-day structure of work, such that it’s almost unrecognizable. If we’re not spending most of our days in the same physical spaces:
How do we coach and provide feedback?
How do we create camaraderie, transmit culture, and foster belonging?
How do we build collective, nuanced understanding of the complex strategies we’re executing?
How do we separate work time from personal time when everyone is constantly connected and working across time zones?
How do we keep our common humanity when we mostly see our colleagues as 2D boxes on a screen?
None of these questions is unanswerable, but to date, organizations haven’t found good answers.
Meanwhile, the value of capital has changed. Once upon a time, computers were mainframes only large companies could afford. Now, we all walk around with a powerful computer in our pockets. I don’t want to overstate the case — you can’t build a car without machinery and you can’t build Large Language Models without compute. But with a laptop and a few hundred dollars for software subscriptions, knowledge workers can access most of the resources they need to do their jobs. Their need for physical capital has diminished. Organizations still rely on human capital, but large companies need fewer and fewer workers to generate each dollar of revenue.
Given all these changes, it’s perhaps not surprising that knowledge workers are demanding a new deal. Why would they want to surrender their autonomy and flexibility when corporate offerings are so paltry? They want something different in return — something that goes beyond those stale old promises of stability, structure, and resources.
Companies need to bring a new compact to the table. Of course, that was the focus of the design challenge you’ve all worked so hard on these last six weeks. But it’s also something your generation of knowledge workers will have to continue to grapple with over the years ahead. You need to advocate for new bargains and experiment with new models.
But — just as the places we work have expanded, so too must our ambitions for improving work. Our Victorian forbears created schools, labour codes, townhouses, and weekly garbage collection. So too must we create the social institutions and cultural norms that will enable broad-based prosperity. Knowledge workers comprise only about 25% of the economy. The 75% of workers who can’t work at home in front of a laptop — they need a better bargain too.
For this challenge, knowledge work was the focus. But I hope you’ll take what you have learned and apply it more broadly, so that any new compact isn’t just for your own jobs and workplaces, but for society as a whole.
And with that, I’ll wish good luck to the students presenting today. We are looking forward to thinking alongside you and learning from you.
Workomics Staff Picks
We discussed this article in the Guardian, outlining new research showing declining well-being amongst under-30s. The article posits social media as the main driver. But we had just read this article that ascribed Finland’s “happiest nation” status to its Flexible Work Act, and wondered if rigidity in the workplace might have an equally large role to play.
We were bemused to learn of an Australian lawsuit about an interactive art exhibit that is only open to women. Up until 1965, women couldn’t frequent bars in Australia. The Ladies Lounge exhibit inverts the concept by barring men from the opulent exhibit. While the lawsuit claimed that men were being barred from experiencing the artwork the museum argued that the experience of rejection from a desired space is the artwork. *chef’s kiss*
We enjoyed the Globe and Mail’s long piece on the Vancouver biotech scene. It is exciting to see so much exciting science springing out of the University of British Columbia, but somewhat disheartening to see so much of the commercialization activity happening south of the border.
And now, the Easter long weekend is very much upon us. I’m looking forward to restful and restorative few days, interspersed with an Easter egg hunt, some swimming lessons, and the kids’ dentist appointments — and an Easter dinner that I didn’t have to plan!
In comradeship,
S.
Shout-out to my mother-in-law for navigating investment banking as a young mother in the 1980s.
I do wash dishes and pick up groceries and otherwise “help.” But I don’t think about feeding myself or the kids, which is the key thing. And also? If it’s 9:30pm and there’s a giant pile of dishes next to the sink and I am dead on my feet, he will always, always say, “You go to bed. I’ll take care of the washing up.” Greater love hath no man than this.
To me. If my husband has gripes, he can get his own Substack.