The Future Of Less Work with Nirit Cohen

Frank Cottle [ 00:00:01  ]:
Welcome to the Future of Work podcast. Today we’ll discuss the shifting workplace landscape with Nirit Cohen, whose three decades of experience as a senior global HR leader at intel and her many contributions on the future of work to Forbes magazine make her the ideal guest to redefine success. As we explore workforce transformation and the future of less work, we’ll discuss what it means to work less in a world where time, productivity, and success are being reimagined, and how organizations measure and lead with traditional metrics no longer apply. Join us as we explore these trends with Nirit, whose leadership experience and insightful expertise offer a powerful lens into the future. Nirit, welcome to the Future Work podcast. Really excited to have you with us today. And, gosh, all the way from Israel, all the way from senior positions at intel, writing for Forbes. An amazing background that you’ve got. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and I’m really interested. You write a lot on the future of less work. I’d like to know a little bit about that.

Nirit Cohen  [ 00:01:07 ]:
Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting to see how this concept really resonates with people. Yet obviously, organizations less work. Well, organizations struggle still. I think when you look at the trends of what we’re seeing develop over the past decade into maybe the next decade, there’s some combination of the technology that we always talk about, but it’s also very big demographic shifts in terms of maybe sociology, how people relate to work and life and everything in between. And it started way before COVID We talk about COVID Right? But you could see these trends developing. You could see workations and digital nomads. So the tools that let us get disconnected and move away from the desk and work stopped becoming a place you go to and became something you do. And for a really long time, we just did more of it. We went to the office, we did our office hours, and we went home, and we stayed connected on our BlackBerries and our laptops and our cell phones and. And then over time, you kind of see how people realized that that also meant they didn’t necessarily need to be working wherever they lived. So they started reaching out, and you could. You could see, you know, the more kind of global teams, and we learned to be a little more mobile. And then Covid hit, and it was a. It was, you know, a realization that life is short, and every day we go to work is a day of our life that we trade. And so people woke up just asking some questions, and they were wondering whether this is what I want to do. So you take These, you take these trends and you’re watching what’s going on today and you see how people are really negotiating between work and life and everything in between. And I call that the future of less work because I think that we’re going to see success redefined and work redefined and being a successful person redefined.

Frank Cottle [ 00:03:26  ]:
I wonder, you and I are in different parts of the world today. I’m in Texas, you’re in Tel Aviv. Is this a first world issue, country issue? How does this concept impact developing nations and third world nations? Can someone afford the future of less work if they’re in a subsistence society? Are they willing to afford the future of less work if they’re in a developing economy where the government and every aspect of life is about bootstrapping themselves and moving themselves forward?

Nirit Cohen  [00:04:10  ]:
It’s a really good question.

Frank Cottle [ 00:04:12  ]:
I really think that, like, we’ve just had an election in this country, as, you know, the world knows, and it’s all about competitiveness. I mean, a lot of the election was around the competitiveness of the United States on a world stage. And if countries are like large corporations looking for market share, are they really going to allow their employees, their population, to work less?

Nirit Cohen  [00:04:47  ]:
You know, I think there’s. We need to unpack a number of things in the question. Right. First of all, there’s an assumption that, that working less is about not being able to live the life that you need and want. And again, go back to history. Right. People used to work more than eight hours a day, more than five days a week. In fact, I came into the workforce, we were still working six days a week. And yeah, so it’s not that long ago. And the whole idea of the eight hour, you know, workday is an industrial revolution kind of concept that talked about unionism. Exactly. So and the fact that you’re not allowed to employ kids and, you know, they have to go to school is again, one of these things that we take for granted. But wasn’t once upon a time, you know, the normal situation? So what does it mean in terms of what’s the standard, you know, normal amount of work? If you actually go back to history, the successful people in, you know, think about the, you know, England society didn’t work. They had people working for them, but they went from tea room to tea room. Right. So the definition of success, talking about wearing a badge of honor and saying things like, oh, I had an 11pm meeting. That’s something from the last, you know, few decades. But it wasn’t maybe the last hundred years.

Frank Cottle [ 00:06:22  ]:
Well, I Think that’s true. When you talk about British society in the 17th, 18th centuries, you’re really talking about, we’ll refer to as landed gentry or people that had capital. I have a friend who inherited, he’s a Londoner and he inherited from a family company. And his comment is, well, I don’t need to work, I have capital. So his investments was his work managing his investments. And he’s done reasonably well, not amazingly well, but reasonably well. He sustained his capital, which as a third or fourth generation is, you know, always kind of, kind of shaky. And so capital works on behalf of individuals a lot of whenever possible. And I think that if you look at retirement today in the United States, or the concept of retirement is you achieve enough capital so that you can live off of that capital in your supposed golden years without having to work, which is again, an entirely new concept for an individual to accomplish that as opposed to having accomplished it through a hereditary system of the proverb, the landed gentry, so to speak. And that’s a global thing. It didn’t matter.

Nirit Cohen  [00:07:50  ]:
Right, right. But, but if you, if you stick with these trends, by the way, movements like fire, which is, you know, retire early concepts, right? So, so, you know, let’s. How much is enough and how much do you need to live in and what does success mean? So let’s shift to. You asked about the world, right? So you look at Asia and you have cultures where the one child needed to take care of two sets of parents, or you had Japanese culture where work is really, really important in a person’s life. It’s actually almost to the degree of family. And you see hashtags come up by the younger generation that talk about work less, lying flat. So all these hashtags that talk about what is enough and where does work fit into what I want to do? So I’m not suggesting that the future of less work, literally in the sense of we’re all going to, you know, just work less and somebody will or will not pay for it. But if you go watch the trends, things are getting cheaper. So if you go back to the basics, why do people go to work? They want food, they want shelter, they need clothing. The cost of food, the cost of shelter, the cost of clothing. When you look at technology, technology, right, and you look at what’s become part of what the government gives you, right? So once upon a time, school was not given to everyone, right? Today it’s. It’s a public service and we expect it. So who says that if you fast forward, you know, a decade, there will not be more things that will become expected. And I don’t want to, you know, throw around terms like universal basic income because they don’t sound right. But if you think about the concept of, you know, do you really need to work for your very basic food, shelter, you know, or you work for something else and you put technology in there and start watching what it does to our lives and how it enables us. I think we’re looking at, you know, this trend here.

Frank Cottle [ 00:10:01  ]:
I get what you’re saying and that, and I don’t disagree with it necessarily, but I’m curious what your thoughts would be in today’s, how this relates, especially as it relates to government support in today’s aging society and in a society where we’re not keeping and sustaining, I’ll say a diminishing or a shrinking society where we’re not sustaining in 2/3 of the world, birth rates that are sustainable, we’re having a shrinking population in two thirds of the world as opposed to a growing population and it’s an aging society. So how does that relate to the future of less work or the interdependence upon government programs to help support because you’ve got a diminished workforce and tax base?

Nirit Cohen  [00:11:00 ]:
So it’s a really good question. And I actually would, I would suggest to think about these trends as feeding the same trend. So the way we work today, right, is you study up to your end of your 20s, you kind of, you get your definition of who you are professionally, then you work for 30, you.

Frank Cottle [ 00:11:18 ]:
Forget it all, because that’s not the real world.

Nirit Cohen  [00:11:21 ]:
Plus it’s no longer, it ages very quickly. But you know, historically, that’s, that’s the deal they made with us. You know, go get a new, a good profession by the end of your 20s, and you got about 35, 40 years of work. So, you know what, Go into the workplace, you look up, you see your manager, their manager, their manager. That’s your career, you know, right there. And then you’ll retire one day and go do all the fun things you never got around to doing. That was a model where work cycle and, you know, life cycle got intertwined in this, in these three periods. Well, you look at it today, and if you start understanding that you can come in and out of degrees of work like you can, you can go up and you can, can also, you go down and it’s, it’s. Retirement doesn’t need to be, you know, 100 to 0. It can be, I’m, I’m going to do things I like. I’m going to do less of them. I need less because I have maybe some savings and maybe less expenses, but I’m going to do it longer because I’m going to live longer and I’m healthier and I don’t want to just not do anything and only volunteer, you know, stay at home. And then when you realize that, and you realize that organizations are going to need to be able to work with people who aren’t regular full time employees and this whole unbundling of employment and ownership and even the idea that people work for you, they’re just yours and that’s the only thing they do and we see that unbundling and once that unravels, it can unravel earlier. You don’t need to wait to retirement. You can say, you know what, I have my kids now. I want to work and have kids or I want to go study something new because whatever I studied in my 20s is no longer relevant. So I want to take some time for that and you know, reduce my workload a bit.

Frank Cottle [ 00:13:12  ]:
Well, no, I think, I think that’s right. You know, we have all companies hire interns and they’re college students or graduate students and you hire interns and you bring them into the workforce, etc. Let’s create the terms as external people that are accomplished but don’t want to work permanently or don’t want to work in a singular position overall. And instead of hiring, in addition to hiring interns, let’s hire a workforce of externs and think through that concept and that comes with your unbundling. I think what you’re really talking about, and I shouldn’t say it like that, I apologize, but I think it’s really simple. It’s just work, life balance and that has to start when you’re young. I also, and this is a personal belief of mine, I think as human beings that we should be productive until we are no longer able to be. And that productivity can be what you would traditionally think of as work, or it can be charitable or it can be any number, number of things. But our productivity shouldn’t be diminished just because we’ve had a certain number of birthdays. Yeah, and, and take yourself. Will you ever stop writing?

Nirit Cohen  [00:14:45  ]:
Why would I? Oh, you know, unless I no longer want to.

Frank Cottle [ 00:14:49  ]:
That’s that, that’s my point. That’s a form of work.

Nirit Cohen  [00:14:53  ]:
I agree.

Frank Cottle [ 00:14:53 ]:
Stop doing what I do. A lot of people would like me to, but I’m not gonna. And I mean, have you ever seen Did Picasso retire?

Nirit Cohen  [00:15:03  ]:
It’s exactly. It because it sits on this idea that work is a very boxed definition that includes going to a place, doing this thing, the same thing all the time, it has a shape, and we’re seeing that unbundle. Right? So who says that if you’re doing a bit of writing or podcasting and you’re making money doing, you know, some business on the side, and then you’re studying something. In fact, I say these days that every one of us probably end up with about four careers in parallel. So you’re going to have the remnants of your previous career, which you’re still milking somewhat, Right?

Frank Cottle [ 00:15:50 ]:
Well, hopefully you are, because you’ve gained a ton of knowledge. You don’t want to give that up.

Nirit Cohen  [00:15:55  ]:
Absolutely. And then you have, like, whatever it is that you’re, you know, living off and putting most of your time and attention to today, which is your current career, you know that that current career is going to down cycle at some point. It’s not an if, it’s a when. And so you’re. You’re keeping your eyes on what’s that next thing. And it could be, you know, just thinking, looking, going to meetings, but it could also be studying or learning something new or actually actively starting something. So kind of the beginnings of your next career. And on the side, we have this activity that we don’t consider career, but if you stop thinking about careers as employment and think about them as accumulation of skills and experience, your hobbies, your volunteer activity, those are careers. And a lot of people, we know that with data, right. In sometime in kind of midlife, they turn into something that actually you want to do full time or a lot of your time.

Frank Cottle [ 00:16:51  ]:
Well, you know, it’s funny, the concept of a career didn’t really exist until the late 19th, 30th, 20th century. And I would say if we have something to escape people probably not like this comment, but I think it’s our educational system, our system of education today. Get good grades in high school, be extracurricular, get into a good college so you can get a good job. You go to a good college so you can get a good job. It’s not really a whole man teaching theory or a whole person teaching theory. Say you go to college. I said this when I was going to college. I got kicked out of college, by the way, and or asked not to return. There is a difference, I think. When I was in business classes in my first couple years of college, I thought, all you guys are doing is teaching me to go to work for IBM. You’re teaching me how to go to work for someone else. But you’re not teaching me how to think and create exclusively for myself. And I actually had to, I had to leave college. I wasn’t happy. I ended up going back and that was okay. But I went back an English literature major with a philosophy minor. Figure that out in business, which somebody.

Nirit Cohen  [00:18:23  ]:
Would say to you, but that’s not a, you know, what would you do with that?

Frank Cottle [ 00:18:26  ]:
What would you do with that? Well, you learn how to communicate and think. Yeah.

Nirit Cohen  [00:18:32 ]:
That’s the difference between professions and skills. And we’re seeing that today.

Frank Cottle [00:18:36  ]:
And well, and I guess my point is that if we look at our educational system and the values that we structure that around, it should be to not work for someone else, but to create a lifestyle that’s balanced for yourself and your family as well. You don’t necessarily have to get the good job at the big company to be successful.

Nirit Cohen  [00:19:05  ]:
Yeah, you’re right. And we see that by the way, with data. So if you watch the number of people that are self employed, even part time. Right. Or the 1099 economy, the idea that you’re making money off of something, in addition to a lot of these people are salaried employees, but they’ve got this other thing going. And you watch the number of people who went self employed and those numbers are consistently growing. And the idea that stability comes from profession or employer, we realized a lot of that’s not true. And people are building, in fact, stability comes from staying relevant in the job market. And you know, at some point you talk about, you know, life cycles. At some point you don’t want somebody deciding whether you can do this or not. You want to be able to pick and choose what you do, how much you do when you do, because you do want to work on whatever it is that you want to, you can, you can afford to do it to have a different balance. So we’re actually seeing the numbers there. And I think there’s this generation that started out with a different context around work is having a hard time letting go. But if you actually look at the young people, they’re not confused. They’re not confused about the idea that they have to do just one thing.

Frank Cottle [ 00:20:28  ]:
I, this is maybe goofy. I would much rather hire a Gen Z than a millennial just because of the different processes of the way that people think overall, that the youngest generation right now is thinking much more independently than the previous couple of generations. One is more group think than independent individual think. And you definitely see that. It’s funny, when we have A little onboarding. You know, every company has an onboarding or orientation process. And in our, is one of the management speeches when someone joins a firm is, hey, here’s the one thing we will fire you for. Absolutely no question about it. Pay real close attention to this. If you don’t make your own decisions, if you can’t make decisions by gathering enough data to put yourself in the right direction, you slow the entire organization down and you just don’t belong here. And when they make wrong decisions, we’ll stand behind it because everybody makes wrong decisions. I sure do. But if you can let your good ones run and shut your bad ones off short, quickly, but you just make lots of decisions, you will go forward more quickly, you’ll learn more, you’ll grow more, you’ll help more, you’ll contribute more to whatever you’re doing.

Nirit Cohen  [00:22:03  ]:
Yep.

Frank Cottle [ 00:22:03  ]:
And so that’s to us working less or working from anywhere or not climbing the corporate ladder, but instead, as you say, climbing the corporate rock wall. All those things really come down to in our company of decision making. How quickly and how often and how collaboratively can you make decisions?

Nirit Cohen  [00:22:31 ]:
Yeah. And they’ll circle back to the education system. Right. So the idea that there’s a right answer. I’ll teach you the right answer. I’ll test you to see if you remember and you’ll get an A. And then you come out in the world. And the whole point is there isn’t a right answer. And I’m not even sure I know what the right question is. And that’s what you need to figure out.

Frank Cottle [ 00:22:51  ]:
Thrown out in the woods and tell them to get, to get to the other side. A lot of times that, that’s a much better learning experience than the classroom experience.

Nirit Cohen  [00:23:00  ]:
Yeah. And I think we’re seeing that slowly and we’ll, we’ll figure it out. I mean, the, it’s almost like you’ve got this, you know, I don’t know, 100,000 piece puzzle and it’s, we’ve, we’ve kind of disintegrated everything we’ve known about what’s a profession and content and knowledge and how do you accumulate it and then all the way to how do you, you know, build an organization? We’re seeing this fragmentation in jobs and professions and skills and even the definition, like I said, of, you know, what is a good worker and what is success and how does that fit into my life? And we’re trying to put it back together again. And we will figure it out, but right now it’s a Bit scattered, and we’re still trying to put the pieces back together. And the interesting thing is different people are putting them back together in different ways, which is different from the mold that we’re used to, where this is what it looked like.

Frank Cottle [ 00:23:55  ]:
Well, you know, it’s funny, I often think historically that we say a good worker is a person does this and that. And my simplification of it is a. A good person, a good worker, whether it’s myself or anybody else, is a person that masters and continually remasters the tools that are available for them to make progress. Yeah, today we’re faced with the opportunity of artificial intelligence. And I say the opportunity rather than the issue, I think is artificial intelligence, in my view, is. Is a tool. It’s nothing more, nothing less. And the opportunity of how to utilize that to advance civilization, our society, certainly our individual careers, every aspect of our personal life as well, is pretty interesting right now. And those people that master those tools, like a trades person who becomes an apprentice and then a craftsman and then a master of some discipline, are the people that will be able to have the future of less work effectively because they’ll be creating using the tools rather than just their time. And time is God. It is the one equalizer. You know, we all have a certain number of hours in the day and a certain number of days in a year and probably a certain number of years with which to accomplish things. And so learning to be the master of all the tools that are available to you is critical.

Nirit Cohen  [00:25:49  ]:
Yeah, I think, you know, there’s two really interesting things going on in this space. One is, and you’re right, changes, though, are so quick that you cannot rely on learning as we were used to talking about learning. Right. It’s not. Somebody will teach you what you need to know. So we’ve been talking about lifelong learning for years now, or, you know, learning organizations now it’s here. And you cannot, you cannot know what you need to know if you’re not learning all the time. So to taking time, budget, attention, putting it aside, owning it, being responsible for it, and learning what you need to know. Right. So that’s. I mean, that’s one of these things is you take your eyes off the ball for, I don’t know, 24 hours and 15 new tools, you know, that are relevant to what you’re doing just came into being. And you didn’t even know that.

Frank Cottle [ 00:26:43  ]:
Well, you have to define which tools are good, too. There are tools that are just fluff, and then there are tools that are important. You know, it’s interesting. You’re talking about lifelong learning and I mentioned Picasso earlier, never retiring. A good artist. No, I shouldn’t say a good artist. The greatest artists that we are aware of have gone through a progression of lifelong learning. And when you look at the style, if you want to call it that, of what they produced in their earliest years versus the different transitions they went through by association with others, by experimentation, by perception, sometimes by pure ego, welcome to the world of Dolly. That’s really what you’re talking about, is the progression of learning through experimentation and association, right.

Nirit Cohen  [00:27:45 ]:
And ownership, self ownership. So it’s not going to be taught, Right. And then the second aspect of this is you talked about time, right? So historically if an, if an employee became more effective because you put in a new machine, right, they made more product and the company owner of the machine made more money and the employee worked the same amount of hours for, you know, same amount of pay. What we’re seeing these days is negotiation over who gets the benefit of the time that gets created by AI. So organizations are still acting as if I’m giving you the tools, you do more work more effectively and I’ll give you more work to do that goes back to the future of less work. People are actually saying, I’m not sure I agree with that. If I figured out how to use these tools and now I’m making more with less. Right. I want some of the benefits of that myself. And I might want to go either study or, you know, take a trip or just, just not do anything. I’m not going to give you back all my time. You don’t own my time. So we talk, you know, we get wrapped up in words like hybrid number days in the office. And that’s not interesting conversation. The interesting conversation is are you looking at input, as in, you know, showing up, getting paid for having shown up, which is really what salaried employees are. Or the other side is, are you looking at, you know, output, which is you’ve contracted with me to deliver my value, my expertise, whatever we set is my goal and how fast I get it done, as long as it’s what you need, is none of your business. And there’s just too extreme conversation going on right now.

Frank Cottle [ 00:29:34 ]:
You know, it’s, it’s funny, we’ve been talking about employees, let’s talk about management, let’s talk about the most senior executives at the largest corporations of the world and the outsized compensation they receive, in the view of many for their actual contribution or sometimes the out sized compensation they receive just to get kicked out because they’ve done a bad job, et cetera. How do you rectify the value of those types of contributions with the value of the contributions of the proverbial employee that you’ve been talking about?

Nirit Cohen  [00:30:18  ]:
You know, it’s actually really interesting because I think before you touch on the pay of executives, watch the RTO debate, which is really like a tug of war between leadership who gets their power and knows how to yield it from the office building full of people, the meetings, the presentations, the travel. Right. And people who are saying, I’m not going back to that way of work and life. Right. I will deliver, but I’m not going to show up and mark my hours in a building just because you want me to. And I think that one of the really interesting things going on is that senior leadership, they’re smart people, they know how to read the trends. Right. They’ve been doing it for years. It’s not that they don’t understand the world of work is changing, but they really don’t understand how to lead corporations to success and deliver shareholder value without the office buildings full of people and the processes that come with them. And so one of the biggest challenges in the next, you know, few years is actually figuring out how do you lead an organization where the right people are working on the right things at the right time with the right tools, regardless of time and place and space. Right.

Frank Cottle [ 00:31:42  ]:
Which is going to be really interesting in that regard. I’m kind of a data freak, so I’ll relate things to that that an organization today needs to be have a methodology by which they can measure those things one against the other in order to determine whether they are making real progress or whether they’re just shuffling things around. And it’s a feel good activity almost. Because if everybody has the same freedom, think of a sporting team. We’re in the football season right now and if everyone just ran their own play, well, not, you know, scoring would get kind of confusing. Well, let’s see, you want to run and do this, I’m going to run and do that. You know, you’ve got to have a way of managing that organization to a single end point of productivity. Yeah, I think that’s what a lot of companies, because we deal with a lot of HR organizations or large companies putting together hybrid work programs and things of that nature from through another company that we have. And boy, they’re confused. They don’t know how to track the data on productivity. And there’s a big, we’re in this area where that’s very challenging right now, and everybody wants what they want. But unless you can take the data to become information, to turn into knowledge, to allow action, unless you’ve got that string working for you, then you’re just going to have chaos in all of this. Yeah, I think that’s where certain executives today are saying, okay, we’re going to do it all this way. Everybody back the office because they don’t have a way of collecting enough information to know that they are productive.

Nirit Cohen  [00:33:50  ]:
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I would add something slightly tweak to that. First of all, you’re right, because like I said, we used to pay people for showing up and suddenly you need to do something different. But then on top of that, you know how we talk about AI? It gives you the right answer, but if you don’t know how it got there, you’re uncomfortable, Right?

Frank Cottle [ 00:34:12  ]:
Yep. You gotta know the right question.

Nirit Cohen  [00:34:13  ]:
Actually talk about explainable AI these days. Right. So that we wanted to explain how he got there. So I think that’s another piece. So even if the organization’s functioning as a manager, you don’t understand how it got there because it’s not doing what you’re used to doing. It’s almost like back to the sports metaphor. You take a player from NBA and a player from football and a player from tennis, you put them together and you say, play. It’s like, what game am I playing? Right. What. What’s. What’s winning in this game?

Frank Cottle [ 00:34:44  ]:
Well, the tennis player should win because it’s the only thinking sport. No, it. I think that’s right. And sadly, I think we brought up more questions today than answers. But maybe that’s the challenge that we should be laying with our audience, is.

Nirit Cohen  [00:35:04 ]:
We must have done something good. I think that means we did a.

Frank Cottle [ 00:35:07  ]:
Yeah, a little bit. And progress themselves and not rely upon others. Overall, the. I really want to thank you for your time today. You’ve been delightful and we’re very grateful to you for your insights, particularly on the trends and God, I’d love to stay in touch and work on this as a team somehow.

Nirit Cohen  [00:35:29 ]:
Oh, I’d love that. Thank you for having me. You have a wonderful podcast. I always enjoy listening to it. So glad to be here.

Frank Cottle [ 00:35:37  ]:
Thank you very much. Take care.

Nirit Cohen  [00:35:39  ]:
Have a great day.