Daan van Rossum – CEO at FlexOS | Flex Work: The Key to Career Freedom.

Daan van Rossum [00:00:02]: I think it’s really going to be much less about work as we do it today, which to me is really Nick Bloom told me in my interview with him. There’s a reason why we have to pay employees, because work is typically not something you would do if you wouldn’t get paid for it.

Frank Cottle[00:00:58]: Daan, welcome to the Future of Work podcast. I’m really excited to have you with us today. You and I have chatted back and forth and corresponded a bit about the future of work. And gosh, we’re on different sides of the world today. I’m in Texas and you’re in Ho Chi Minh City. So good morning to you over in Vietnam.

Daan van Rossum [00:01:20]: Good day to you, Frank. Really great to be here.

Frank Cottle[00:01:23]: No, it’s my know we’re going to be talking about remote work and hybrid work today, and we’re both supposed to be experts, by the way, so we’ll have to take it. But I think for our audience, let’s define what hybrid work is and remote work so that everybody’s on the same page so you and I don’t overcross each other. So how do you define hybrid work versus remote work?

Daan van Rossum [00:01:52]: Yes, I know there’s a lot of terminology there, and I always like to remind people that this is not one thing or another. This is really a spectrum. And basically, if you think about the hybrid remote spectrum, you have, let’s say the good old fully in office on one side and then you have the fully remote on the other side.

Frank Cottle[00:02:12]: Correct.

Daan van Rossum [00:02:12]: And there’s obviously a lot in between. And hybrid or hybrid remote is basically where you spend a few days at home and then a few days in the office, and even that can be broken down in a couple of categories. Is it that the employees choose which days they go to? The office and the management or the company just chooses how many days? Or do you actually get told which days you should be in the office? There’s a couple of variations on that, but that’s basically hybrid work.

Frank Cottle[00:02:39]: Okay, basically let’s say that it’s a half and half show between remote work, working from your home, or I’ll say a third workplace, and I’ll add to your spectrum a little bit. I’ll say that I believe hybrid work is the combination of our individuals who combine working from home, working from a third workplace, and also working from a fixed office. Fixed office could be corporate headquarters. We’ll just call it that for the moment. Because I think the third workplace is a critical element because so many people don’t have the facility at home with which to work fully and productively. So I think you’ll agree, include all three of those together. I know you’re in your office today. So that side of the hybrid work, I’ve spoken to you in your home also, I know that side. Your office happens to be in a co working center. So a third workplace for other people. I’m kind of boring. I’m just at my house.

Daan van Rossum [00:03:52]: You’ve collapsed all of them into one.

Frank Cottle[00:03:54]: My home office. But it’s funny, I’ve worked remotely for 25 years, probably built companies that are scattered all over the world, everything. But I’ve almost always worked the great majority of my time from my residents. And it’s just a personal preference.

Daan van Rossum [00:04:16]: And it’s worked well.

Frank Cottle[00:04:18]: I’ve been happy. It makes me happy. I’m in surroundings I enjoy and I don’t have a lot of interruptions. Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:04:28]: And you can do the work that you like and you can do that in the way that works for you. And I think that’s like the part that often gets overlooked in this whole debate of hybrid or remote or in office and the whole return to office debates is that at the end of the day, if you just give people the ability to work in the place where they do their best work, that’s really what you want, right? Because if you want people to be productive and creative and collaborative, you want to give them the space to do that and letting people choose and giving them that autonomy and agency to pick the place that works best for them to do the tasks that they have to do. That’s really what this is about. It’s really just about that choice and about what works best.

Frank Cottle[00:05:08]: I agree. And I’ll use again, I’m going to come back to myself as an example. I’ve been a hybrid worker for 25 years, let’s say mostly remote. But I had 25 years of experience in business before I made that decision. When we talk about the spectrum of work and the decision making that goes into it, the decision making that one would use for a mature business person, let’s say, even with ten years of experience versus a new teammate that maybe was just joining an organization hired to work remotely, that landscape of work is changing so rapidly. How do you see organizations adopting to that and the trends emerging from that change overall? Because it’s not just me and you and how we do it. We’re really cool and we do it great. Right. But it’s. How do you get a top to bottom working in an organization where you can have all of that productivity that you talked about?

Daan van Rossum [00:06:22]: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think one thing we have to really say upfront is that, yes, we would be terrible examples. If there was a study and they took just us, then it would look very lopsided. But if we think about how companies do this successfully, the thing you really see first and foremost is that it has to be done on a team level, because you don’t really work in a company. You work in a company, but you do your work in a team. And so the decision about where you do your work and when you do see your teammates or when you don’t see your teammates, that really has to be done at a team level. And I think the most successful companies really leave it to the direct manager or maybe a department head to say what works best for our team and the very best companies, as the data is showing, do that by letting the team have a say in that and make a collaborative decision around when are we going to be in the office? When are we going to be at home? And so when you do it at a team level and you have all these teams basically having their own policy, their own team agreements, then it also works as a company. I think the thing that would be the wrong way to do it, and we’ve seen some examples there, too, is that someone very high up in a company says, everyone has to work like this, and that typically doesn’t work.

Frank Cottle[00:07:35]: No. It’s funny. If you look at senior executives, whether they say, everybody work remote or everybody come back to the office, senior executives don’t do it.

Daan van Rossum [00:07:47]: They don’t. They’re notoriously amongst many places at Morgan.

Frank Cottle[00:07:53]: Is famous for get back to the office, you’re going to all be fired. Whatever. He says, okay. He spends most of his time on a private jet.

Daan van Rossum [00:08:04]: Exactly.

Frank Cottle[00:08:05]: So come on. Really? So many executives, unless they’re walking the walk, talking the talk, so to speak, they really don’t know what works. And I think that everybody has this image, this fantasy of how someone else should do something. My wife’s a good example. She tells me exactly how I should dress in the morning.

Daan van Rossum [00:08:32]: Right.

Frank Cottle[00:08:32]: Okay. Whether I like it or not. So she’s got this image of the way I should be doing something, but it doesn’t make it right.

Daan van Rossum [00:08:43 ]: Yes.

Frank Cottle[00:08:44]: Can’t tell her that. So we’ll take that all back.

Daan van Rossum [00:08:47]: And there’s a lot of what we call executive nostalgia there.

Frank Cottle[00:08:51]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:08:51]: Because it’s really about how people that are now in executive functions, how did they come into the workforce? Well, for them, it was, you have to spend 40, 50, 60 hours in an office. You have to slave away at your desk, and you have to basically deal with all the bad side effects of that. And they kind of feel like, well, I went through that, so why wouldn’t you?

Frank Cottle[00:09:11]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:09:12]: And so it’s really difficult sometimes to kind of bridge that gap between what their experience was and what young people coming into the workforce now are experiencing. But again, going back to the manager, we surveyed managers last year of hybrid and remote teams, and the managers themselves who manage those individual teams say productivity went up, collaboration went up, team cohesion went up. When we gave people the chance to, like you said, spend two or three days at home to do focused work, because the office is typically not that great for focused work. There’s a lot of interruptions.

Frank Cottle[00:09:45]: I think you need to add one more word to that, and that’s responsibility went up. That people, I notice in our work environment that if we have a due date on something and everybody’s coming in to a Zoom meeting or remote, let’s say to the meeting, there isn’t anybody that shows up that’s not prepared. It’s not just our company. I think it’s the human nature. No one wants to be the one person that wasn’t prepared. And I think there’s more pressure in a remote environment because it’s more awkward to have failed to meet your responsibility. So I think that actually works. It’s funny, I went through the. I’ve got a little gray hair. In fact, just a little. Actually, I wish I had more, but I’ve got a little gray hair. And so I remember when work was done, we used to use manual typewriters and carbon paper. My first office didn’t have a copy machine or a fax or anything like that. They didn’t exist. Well, copy machines did, but they were mimeographed machines. They were so ridiculous. So I’ve gone through the technology revolution.

Daan van Rossum [00:11:11]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle[00:11:12]: Okay. And the words then, and they are now the most Daangerous words in business are what? Come on down. What are the most Daangerous words in business? I don’t know, because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Daan van Rossum [00:11:25]: Oh, yes.

Frank Cottle[00:11:27 ]: Okay. That’s an old cliche. It’s been around probably since the first business was built. I’m sure the Egyptians did that on the second pyramid. Why are you doing it? That’s why we did it last time.

Daan van Rossum [00:11:39]: Yeah, look over there.

Frank Cottle[00:11:41]: But having gone through the technology revolution and a few social revolutions in between, what we’re going through now with remote work is nothing but the way we’ve always done it. We always evolve. We always have a revolution of sorts. And that change that comes out of it, artificial intelligence will be our next or our current, most even more groundbreaking than remote work overall. So evolution, revolution, those are the trends that we’ve seen time and again, and I don’t think they’re any different this time. That’s my own opinion. Do you see organizations in general? And I know you do a lot of writing, a lot of research and work with many, many others around the world. Are you seeing a true adaptation of the remote work model and an effort to put it into place, or are you seeing, I guess we got to do this model.

Daan van Rossum [00:12:42]: I think companies, smart companies, at least like you said, see the opportunity, right? And there are a lot of opportunities because we know from the data that people who at least have some flexibility, who have some autonomy, some agency in how they work, they perform better. Right? So again, managers say that people are more productive. People self report that they are more productive. In that same study, I think there were only two managers in that entire sample that said that people are less productive. So everyone is seeing the benefits of remote work, of hybrid work. And so therefore, we’re seeing that that’s what companies are doing, right. In the US right now, one in three work days are done from home.

Frank Cottle[00:13:23]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:13:23]: That’s at an all time high. It never really peaked above 5% before the pandemic. Right. The majority of people want to keep working in that kind of working model. Right. The latest getup data shows that only 6% of people want to work in an office full time. Now, again, that’s not to say that people never want to go to an office.

Frank Cottle[00:13:41]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:13:41]: A lot of people do prefer the hybrid model where you are in the office sometimes and at home sometimes, because there are certain things that maybe people find easier to do in an office. It’s just not all the time. Right. And so therefore, you see companies follow that.

Frank Cottle[00:13:55]: Why do you think that is, though? Do you think it’s people don’t want to be in the office all the time, or they don’t want to go to the office all the time? That it’s the commuting is more of the issue than the being in the office, because I think those same studies would tell us that people don’t want to spend the money on commuting. They don’t want to take the time. They don’t want to have to dress. There are several elements that have nothing to do with work or even the workplace. A lot of people love being in the office. They just don’t want to get on that damn train or freeway or whatever it happens to be for an hour each way with a whole bunch of smelly people they don’t know and worry about it being on time and the stress that goes along with that. Do you think that’s more of it or less of it? Do you think people don’t want to be in the office? They really prefer to sit at the desk in their house?

Daan van Rossum [00:14:55]: Well, that’s, again, similar to the spectrum of hybrid. That’s where we can break down that one kind of phrase of people don’t want to be in the office. Like, well, why?

Frank Cottle[00:15:04]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:15:04]: We know why people want to be in the office. Right. People typically want to be in the office to reconnect, to socialize, to do certain collaborative tasks. They’re typically very human in nature. And then there’s a group of people, including myself, that want to be in an office because they cannot work from home, as you said before. Right. So they want to go to that place where they can record a podcast in peace or where they can just sit down and do some focused work or do a bunch of Zoom calls without their family running around them. Right. So we know why people want to be in an office, and why people don’t want to be in an office is. Yeah. First and foremost, because there are many tasks that are just easier to do at home. It’s easier to kind of weave together the things that you need to do in your personal life and the things you need to do for work when you are working from home. But there are also other reasons. And commuting is obviously one of the big ones. I think on the top ten of the things that people hate most in life generally is commuting is number two.

Frank Cottle[00:15:58]: Right.

Frank Cottle[00:15:59]: Because it is that sort of why am I getting dressed, getting in a car, on a train, paying a lot of money, right. The Owl lab study showed that people spend on average, like, therefore, it’s a huge cost to me. And the benefit isn’t that great if I then end up in an office where I’m basically doing the thing that I’m doing at home.So for all those reasons, the main thing that you see smart companies like Atlassian do right now is to really think about what do we then offer in the office, or what do we offer in the many offices that we offer that is compelling enough for people to kind of go over that barrier. And then you really have to think about the intentionality, which with we design those work days, those office days, right. Is it decided on a team level? Do you decide with your team that, hey, guys, let’s actually meet together in person on Tuesdays, which is my office day, because then we can quickly sync up with each other. We can have sidebars, we can have a lunch together. Maybe that’s the day we do training. But now I have a great reason to come in, and then it may surpass all those barriers to coming into the office. But if you don’t do that, if you don’t set a clear reason for being there, you’re going to hate that commute even more.

Frank Cottle[00:17:15]: No, I think your term intentionality is important here. And I think it’s also important, if you think about it, people that wanted people back. Let’s pick on Elon musk for a minute. Remote work is immoral.I’m not sure comes into it, but I’m going to take your number for a second and do a little jungle math. In the United States, we have 150,000,000 workers. You just said $30 a day. 30 to 50. I’ll go down to 30. So now I’m at a big number, 100 million times 30. So I’m at, what, $30 billion a day spent by people that have to commute? Now, if that’s the case, and I could be off on my jungle math, but if that’s the case, the employer ultimately has to pay that in wages, right? If that’s the case, the consumer ultimately has to pay that in services.

Daan van Rossum [00:18:20]: Right?

Frank Cottle[00:18:21]: So returning the office is responsible for all inflation.

Daan van Rossum [00:18:25]: There you go. That’s your TikTok clip for the episode.

Frank Cottle[00:18:29 ]: Yes, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. No, the cost that one person has isn’t that one person is my point. It’s the entire food chain or service chain, if you will, that’s involved. And ultimately, whether I work from home or not, I’m paying your share of commuting in the goods and services that I buy if everybody is forced to that model. So there’s to Elon’s morality comment, and I like many of the things he does. I don’t want to pick on him, too. Hardly hard. But you really have to think through the whole chain of events. And I think that’s it, because when you talk about scheduling and intentionality, dude, you’re in Vietnam. I’m in Fort Worth, Texas.It took us a little effort to schedule this meeting. You had to show up early. I had to stay late. Okay. And that’s good. That was intentionality, something we wanted to accomplish. But I think that when you cross borders or more importantly, time zones, you really have to rethink how you’re going to organize a company. So go back to Morgan, a massive global financial institution. How do you organize intentionality, return to office in a globally distributed company overall, and how do you break that apart? How do you just culturally keep things together when you cross borders as well?

Daan van Rossum [00:20:16]: So I think that is such a big part of it, right. Frank is about how do you run those kind of companies, right? And we can easily look at some of those really famous remote first examples, right? We can look at those companies like Dropbox, who are fully remote or remote first, where they offer some office space, but it’s really kind of on demand, and it’s really up to the employee if they use it. We can look at that and say, okay, all the companies should model themselves after the dropboxes and Atlassians and buffers of this world. But that’s obviously not very realistic, right? Like a bank of America or Morgan is not suddenly going to be fully remote because there are reasons why people still want or need office space. And again, we want to offer that to people. And so you really have to go back to, first of all, how do you lead companies, right? If you lead a remote first company, you lead very differently. So you lead a fully remote company. And so you already talked about trust. You talked about responsibility. You talked about basically working much more transparently, right, where you don’t want to be that one person that shows up and you haven’t done the work. Right? So then you really start to talk about culture. You really start to talk about, what is the culture of this company and how do we work together. And so in the couple of key pillars of running a really great hybrid or remote company. I always talk about, like, you start with very different fundamentals, right. I think that’s really number one. Then you really focus on collaboration as a very specific pillar of how you run those kind of companies. You think about how do you run teams so well that there’s performance and productivity, and then finally, how do you do learning and development? And I think learning and development is kind of overseen. But I’m sure you see this in your company. You do this in your company. This is now the ultimate retention tool, right. Because if people don’t feel that connected to their company because they’re just working from home and switching a job is basically switching logins on the Microsoft Teams environment that they use, what is going to really connect you to their company and it’s going to keep you there. I think learning and development is going to be that major tool to keep people in the company. But companies really have to be built a little bit different. And I think that’s the shift that you now see. And we cannot expect companies to go from zero to 100 in just two years, right. Because this is a very new phenomenon. But you see companies really adjusting what I call those new fundamentals. And so that really goes back to, is there a culture of trust? Is there psychological safety? Do we have team agreements in place? Do we really think in new ways about things like onboarding, for example, you talked about new employees. How do employees come into the company?

Frank Cottle[00:22:57]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:22:57]: How do I understand the company culture and the kind of unexpected expectation or the unwritten expectations. Right. So onboarding becomes a huge thing. Continuous listening.

Frank Cottle[00:23:08]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:23:09]: So if you don’t have those moments in the office where you kind of have a sense for how things are going because you can see people either really energized or kind of demotivated. So listening, surveying becomes a much bigger thing and then also measuring and building that stronger culture. So those are the new fundamentals that every company will have to put in place. And I think that’s what companies are transitioning to now. And obviously, a lot of it is fueled by technology as everything with hybrid.

Frank Cottle[00:23:34]: And remote companies, that’s a good segue over to artificial intelligence. The impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace is going to be. It already is phenomenal. New game in the workplace. It was a whole new game in the industrial revolution. It was a whole new game when labor got power as a whole new game with technology, it’s always a whole new game, but this is the game we’re going to play. For the next season, two or three or five. Pretty soon, remote work might mean holographic meetings, because tech’s there, it’s just the cost isn’t there. So we have all these things coming along. But how do you think artificial intelligence will impact the creation of jobs? Need for a person to be in the office or not as a result of maybe have everybody has a personal bot, let’s say, and the ability then because of that, to cross borders more effectively, which obviously always dictates remote work. If you’re in your office and my office, we are remotely working together. So where do you see artificial intelligence playing in this spectrum, as you called it, and the changes it will cause in the way we work physically, not just the way we’re going to work productivity wise?

Daan van Rossum [00:25:16]: So I would look at AI in sort of two different timelines. I think there’s a short to near term, and the near term kind of depends on how fast the technology is going to evolve further. And we’ve seen some examples like, as we’re recording, OpenAI just came out with Sora, they just launched Croc. And so we see kind of now evolutions in AI that are so much more, the velocity is so much higher than what people ever could have expected that it’s kind of hard to say, when does that midterm stop and when does the longer term start? I think longer term it will replace most jobs. I think that’s my firm belief that longer term AI will replace most jobs. And that’s just extrapolating from where we are now. If we can do our work on a laptop from everywhere, and basically it’s us inputting things into a computer and getting things back from the computer, then eventually an AI can do that, right? Because AI can basically simulate all of that. So I like to focus more on the shorter term, which is really where AI can be that great assistant to really unburden us of this huge digital overload, which obviously we have created for ourselves, because every time we think we invent something to make life easier and to make work easier, we just create more work for ourselves, right? So we went from typewriters and physical mail to email, and we said, oh, that’s so great, because now you can know all that time you spend on writing a letter, you can do it much quicker in an email. But actually what we ended up doing is just send a lot more emails and communicate a lot more. And then we went from email to slack or teams, and then we basically did the same thing all over again. Oh, I don’t need to write long emails anymore. Now I can just send a quick, slack message. What is the result? It’s like when you widen the highway, you don’t actually suddenly have more space, you actually get more cars, right? So we just get more messages, we get more communication. So in the shorter term, AI can solve a lot of that because there is no longer a need to communicate as much and to be as much busy with all the kind of digital busyness that we’re doing every day in terms of writing and reporting and meeting, because an AI can do that for you, right? So in a lot of the fundamentals of what we do on a daily basis, AI can help. And so that means that from a manager’s perspective, from a leader’s perspective, I may assemble a team very differently. And I think the big shift you’ll see in organizations that you really look at, not so much like which people do I need, but which tasks do I need to get done? And if you look at it on a task level, then you can tap into people, full time people, of course, part time people. But you can also tap into talent marketplaces, right? Internal or external. You can look at what we do now a lot. We look at platforms like upwork and fiver and basically find that person for that one task that we need to do, right. That is now something that remote work is allowing us to do because I can hire someone from anywhere in the world, but the extension of that is that we can now also add AI agents, right? So now we can look at all the tasks that the team needs to do or that we need to get done and we can basically split that and say, oh, actually an AI can do that. And so that’s going to be another accelerant in this sort of the move towards digital work.

Frank Cottle[00:28:28 ]: Yeah, I think that I keep keying on words you’re using and I’m going to key on accelerant because to me, AI is not a replacement. It’s not going to replace my job. Just like email didn’t replace mail, okay. It accelerated communications. Slack Asana teams, they accelerate communications, they condense it overall. And again, I come from the days of handwritten letters, so my capacity to get information now is 1000 times better than it was 50 years ago. So I think AI will be first and foremost and always short and long term an accelerant. I don’t think it will be a replacement. The reason I say that is that we as human beings will find new tasks that allow us to guide how AI is used to accelerate all of our learning for ourselves, all of our work. It won’t mean I don’t have to work anymore. It will mean that the way I work will be more productive and accelerate overall. And I’ll use our own company. We just started deploying AI in little applets, I guess I’ll call it utilities inside of our own company last year, and we’re doing 25% to 30% more volume at a higher standard of quality. I’ll use our service department as an example. The number of outstanding tickets, the time to response to resolution of the tickets, all that has improved by a factor of eight to ten. And we’re doing it with the same number of people. It didn’t replace anybody’s job, but every person not yet got ten times better at their job because, and we didn’t have to hire more people. Now, maybe that is replacing jobs in that regard, but those people we didn’t hire. Our biggest problem in hiring is finding enough people.

Daan van Rossum [00:31:09]: Right now?

Frank Cottle[00:31:09 ]:Yes, right now. And that could be a long term issue. Certainly it’s always difficult to find the right people and the strongest people. I don’t think that’s going to go away. And I say that because I’ve seen a number of cycles, one of which was supposed to be revolutionary and change, and I was supposed to be replaced 25, 30 years ago probably would have been a good idea. But I see these cycles, and we always find new things to do to maybe we conquer food scarcity with AI, maybe we conquer communications here on this planet in AI. But maybe it takes us to the stars. Maybe we find new things to do that AI hasn’t created for us, that we have to create so that AI can help us. So that’s my belief.

Daan van Rossum [00:32:15]: This is the future of work podcast.

Frank Cottle[00:32:18]:So we’re going to do what I say, right?

Daan van Rossum [00:32:20]: Yeah, it’s your future of work podcast, therefore.

Frank Cottle[00:32:24]: Exactly.

Daan van Rossum [00:32:24]: But I’ll just build on it and say I totally believe in it. Right? A lot of people would take the analogy of there are now so many people who make money building software or building mobile phone apps, right? We would never have been able to predict that before the iPhone came out, right? Or before App Stores existed. So there is that to a degree. But I think I would take it more from the perspective that, yes, we will always find things to do, but they won’t be work as we currently see it, because the work that we currently do is really showing up somewhere, whether it’s in person or digitally, and then basically working for 40, 50 hours a week. And I think that will be over at some point in time because you already see, in Europe, people can already compress their work into a four day work week. And it wouldn’t really be that difficult to see how you can move to a three day work week and then shorter and shorter and shorter, because the moment you can imagine it, you can give an AI agent the task to do it. Right. And so I think we will find things to do, but I think it will be a little bit outside of what we currently call work. And also I think the other part, and this is one of my predictions for this year, is that people will start to have to decouple their identity a bit from work. Right. Like in the past decades, we’ve always, and I’ve been working for 25 years and we’ve always very much made work our identity. McKinsey data shows that 70% of people, their main identity comes from their job, from their work. And I think as people realize that AI can do a lot of what we do, there will be that sort of question of, who am I outside of work? Like, what am I passionate. If I had more time in the week, what would I do? Who am I, uniquely, as a human being? And I think we’ll see a lot more of that finding of purpose and identity outside of work.

Frank Cottle[00:34:11]: Well, I have a tendency to kind of sort of almost maybe agree with you.

Daan van Rossum [00:34:17]: I’ll take it.

Frank Cottle[00:34:20]: The reason I say that is the moment you say four day work week or three day work week, I start thinking, just as you said, well, what the heck am I going to do with those other, if I have a three day work week, what am I going to do with those other four days? Well, I’m going to ride my bike an hour more. I’m going to take a hike, maybe. No, I’m going to do something productive so I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get another AI program and start something different. And damn it, I’ll be working seven days a week again. But I’m going to do something different. Human beings want to strive to be productive. We always strive for balance. Otherwise we wouldn’t sleep, right? Yes, we always strive for balance. We have a workday, a family time, and a rest time. That’s our physical nature. But I don’t believe that people will just say, oh, cool, three day work week. I’m just going to go on vacation four days. No, it ain’t going to happen. And it won’t happen, especially because Vietnam is a good example of this versus other cultures. Why is Vietnam so successful right now after having been kind of had a lot of problems for a number of years, going back to colonialism and then war years, internal, external, et cetera. And yet it is, it’s because people worked really hard to accomplish that. They had a cultural identity with productivity. So if you have one group that has a. When you say, oh, we’re going to have a four day work week. Oh, yeah, in India. Really? Sounds good. In, you know, it ain’t going to work in India because they want to get ahead of the american, of everybody. They have that desire. Oh, darn it. They’re competing with the Chinese. They want to get ahead. They’re competing with the Vietnamese. They’re already ahead. So you run into this competitive issue also of accomplishment. Whether you’re a remote worker or an office worker, remote workers are just as competitive to accomplish and strive to progress their career, let’s say, as people that work in an office. Why would anybody want to say, well, I’m only going to work three days a week and let the other person across the street get way ahead of me? That’s not human nature.

Daan van Rossum [00:37:05]: There definitely is a component of competitiveness, and our human nature is that was it. Charlie Munger’s quote of like, people are not driven by greed, they’re driven by envy. You always want what other people have and therefore a country looks up to.

Frank Cottle[00:37:19]: It’s the same.

Daan van Rossum [00:37:22]: So you always look out for, I want to be better than other people and that’s why we still do, even though they don’t deliver us anything. We still do olympics and we still do sporting tournaments and all those kind of things. Right?

Frank Cottle[00:37:38]: Mating rituals. You’ve got the same thing. Get real caveman on conversation. And when you go to mating rituals, it’s, I have to prove that I am the better mate, male or female, in order to advance the species. So anyway, we’re getting way off target. Or maybe we’re on target, I don’t know which.

Daan van Rossum [00:38:05]: I think this is the target. I think this is the philosophical discussion of, like, what is work, really? Because I think what you were talking about, if I don’t have to work as much anymore and I’m not going to go hike for four days a week for the rest of my life, right, I’m going to pick up something productive. But would we then consider that work or would that be something that you just like doing? And I think this is what we’re already seeing with younger generations where there is already much less of that sense of, like, I’m really aiming for one full time job and doing the career ladder kind of thing, I’m really focusing on who am I? What makes me unique? Can I find something that pays the bills? But then alongside that, can I do a passion project? Can I start my own little company? Can I do fractional work for other companies? Right? Can I do freelance work? And so I think it’s really more packaging together a couple of things that you really need to pay the bill and then things that you like to do and things that are meaningful to you. I definitely believe that in all these ways, we will always try to find ways to be competitive, to be better than other people, to find something that motivates us, that gives us a sense of meaning in life that we don’t feel like, why are we here? So I definitely believe that that’s there. But I think as we look at work right now, and maybe we should start with the definition of work, but if we look at work right now, really as the exchange of I do something for you and you give me money in return so that I can do the things that I want to do, I think that will definitely be disrupted significantly by AI. And we also have to really remember a lot of people that have invested a lot of time in building a career in a certain industry where now that skill is completely obsolete. Right, so you talked about help desk. There’s no way that they’re still a help desk person in five years from today, right? Because AI can do exactly what they do. They can reference a knowledge database and give it back in human language. And we’re not that far off anymore from an AI doing that. Like this, like on a Zoom call, doing it as a fully digital avatar.

Frank Cottle[00:39:58 ]: We’ve all seen the demo.

Daan van Rossum [00:40:01 ]: And then you look at Sora, which just came out last week, but basically shows that from text to video, you can prompt something, and there’s a fully realistic video playing in front of you. You extrapolate that out. And I was spending some time in the discussion groups amongst filmmakers, amongst graphic artists. And people really say, I have invested 15 years to get to this level, to be one of the 100 people that delivers that video. Right? So those industries will be disrupted and those people will have to find something else. And that’s where basically you will see real impact of AI in that longer term vision.

Frank Cottle[00:40:36 ]: In one short paragraph, tell me where you think the future of work is going.

Daan van Rossum [00:40:42]: I think it’s really going to be much less about work as we do it today, which to me is really Nick Bloom told me Stanford’s Nick Bloom told me in my interview with know there’s a reason why we have to pay employees because work is typically not something you would do if you wouldn’t get paid for it. I think that part of doing work to get money to then use that money to do what you want to do, that will be compressed and there will be more time for maybe still working, still being productive, still doing, spending our time meaningfully, but spending it on things that are not necessarily going to work. And I think that’s really where we will see that sort of sense. For I need to find out who I am and what I really want from life so that I can do that, so that I can choose something that I can spend my time on. And I really think that will be the new definition of work.

Frank Cottle[00:41:34 ]: Boy, that was a long damn paragraph, by the way. I’m going to flip this on Nick, who you know him and I know him. The most successful people in the world financially are doing something they really like to do and want to do, not something they’re forced to do.

Daan van Rossum [00:41:54]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle[00:41:56]: So if I’m going to be financially successful, and I’ll look at yourself as an example, no one forces you to write your blog. No one forces you to do your podcast. No one forces you to be an entrepreneur and start a facility and a digital media company. Those are things that intrigue you, that excite you. No one’s forcing you to work a 50 or 60 hours week and you do, right, okay. No one’s forcing that. And you will be more successful because of that. But it will be a success of joy, not a labor of something that you’re being taken advantage of in the future of work. Perhaps our successes and our productivity will come from more variety, more ability to be productive, doing a broad array of things, which is part of what you said. But it won’t be through backing off. And it won’t because we don’t have skills, because educational skills will be available much more readily to everybody, and they are already more. So as our world becomes more educated, we’ll be crossing borders, we’ll be doing all sorts of amazing things. So I don’t know if that’s a good segue back to what you said, but I really believe that people that will be the most successful doing things that are joyful to them overall because.

Daan van Rossum [00:43:37 ]: You made that switch.

Frank Cottle[00:43:38 ]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:43:38 ]: Like, you know, the incredible benefits of entrepreneurship.

Frank Cottle[00:43:43]: Right.

Daan van Rossum [00:43:43 ]: Which is that, in a way, you’re still working for something or for someone, but you get to be more of the captain of your own ship, right? You have more autonomy, you have more agency. And the reason why I always come back to those concepts, I think those are really key to our happiness, to our flourishing, that we feel that we have control over our lives. And I think the status quo of work today is that people really feel like work is this thing that I have to do and I have no control over. And someone will boss me around and tell me what to do, and I execute those tasks and I get that little reward in return, right? And I need that reward because otherwise I don’t have the things that I need. And of course, we can debate on what people really need, because if we look around us here, that is a lot less but that palada.

Frank Cottle[00:44:30]: I apologize for interrupting, but I got to laugh. I would just look at that person and say, dude, you’ve made some bad choices, right? You’ve made bad choices in how you’ve structured your own life. No one structures your life for you. You’ve structured your own life poorly because you didn’t care enough about, you weren’t thoughtful enough or didn’t know that those.

Daan van Rossum [00:44:54 ]: Options were there, right? So that’s what I truly believe is that for a lot of people, they kind of, and you see this here a lot, and you see this in a lot of countries where people just follow this. Like you said, the most Daangerous words, it’s always been done like this, right? So if all their role models, if all their examples are people who basically just went through a career, basically spent 25 years in a company to get to a certain level, to get to a certain income, to get to a certain status, and they just followed that blindly. But I think that’s not where we are today anymore. And I think that’s really the wake up call that a lot of people are seizing, which is basically, I don’t have to live that life, I don’t have to work that way, I can actually tailor it to what I want to do. And therefore, smart people would sacrifice, as I did coming from a corporate career, going into founding a startup, like, I took a 60% pay cut, but I do things that make me happy, right? And I think people see that more now that maybe I will sacrifice maybe the excessive part of the income that I don’t really need for the basics that will let me live, but then I get to do something that I like, and I think that’s that renegotiation of what is work and what is work to me and how can I design my life in a way that it fits naturally with what I want to do.

Frank Cottle[00:46:12 ]: Well, I think, Daan, that we can cover this for days overall. And I’ll leave one last somewhat insulting, not to you, but to the concept of that’s the way we’ve always done it. That’s a matter of bad parenting. If you can’t bring your children up to be creative, to look outside of what you did as a parent, then shame on you. So I’ll leave my part as a father.

Daan van Rossum [00:46:46 ]: I’ll just say, agreed. Agreed. It’s our role to obviously not just train a robot like human that’s going to follow what everyone else has done before, but basically open that aperture and show all the things you could do and understand who you are and who you uniquely are as a human being. But that’s not there for everyone, which is why we have these conversations. Why hopefully, we can put that word out into the world that the next generation doesn’t have to be like us, the next generation doesn’t have to be like us, at least for the first couple of decades of our career.

Frank Cottle[00:47:23]: Everybody should be better. Continuous progress, we hope. Well, Daan, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. I’m very grateful to you for participating in the future work podcast today. If people want to reach you and get a hold of you to pick on you like I’ve been doing, how would they do?

Daan van Rossum [00:47:42 ]: So people can find me on LinkedIn, where I post occasionally. If you google my name or put my name in LinkedIn, you’ll find me. And then obviously I write on my website, flexos.org, where I cover all these topics, human happiness, work remote, work AI, and the future of work.

Frank Cottle[00:48:03]: Perfect. Well, Daan, we’ll make sure that we include that in the podcast notes, and we’re again very grateful to you for your time today.

Daan van Rossum [00:48:10]: Awesome. Appreciate it.

Frank Cottle[00:48:12 ]: Take care.

Daan van Rossum [00:48:13]: Cheers.