What will the office look like in 2030? Will that even be a meaningful question by then? The office has been on shaky ground for the last lap decade, since the pandemic proved it was no longer a necessity in many people’s working lives. Will we all be metacommuting to virtual offices in an AR space? Probably not, but real change is coming.

And it’s not just coming for the office. Even today, not all work is office work, and the past decade has proved that much of what we think of as “office work” doesn’t actually require the office at all. The internet is nothing if not information space, so anywhere you have access to the internet, you can do information work.

But, sat halfway between 2020 and 2030, we do feel like we’re trapped in a liminal state: Schrödinger’s office, if you will. When we open the box of the future, will we see a transformed office, or a waveform collapse back into our 2010s way of working? The latter seems unlikely; despite President Trump’s executive order, even if we do get everyone back to the office, the technology we have available to us has changed. Work won’t be the same.

The defining tech of 2030

Let’s go out on a limb, and suggest that two technologies that people have been playing with won’t — yet — be transformative in five years. Sorry, metaverse and AR/blended reality. You’re cool ideas, but the hardware to make you mainstream just isn’t there yet. And hardware iteration tends to take years. Maybe in 2030, you’ll be becoming more common, but you won’t be redefining the way we work.

On the other hand, unless an awful lot of people have made terrible bets indeed, Generative AI will have a massive impact on the workplace. And we know this because it already is. Given the speed at which the technology is moving, it’s hard not to envisage it as transformative by then, unless it hits some form of hard technological ceiling.

Sure enough, the World Economic Forum, in its build-up to the recently concluded Davos meeting, released an interesting report into the jobs of 2030, looking at those possible futures, based on predictions from companies themselves. And foremost among the factors it saw changing how we work was technology:

Robots and autonomous systems are expected to transform 58% of employers’ businesses, while energy generation and storage technologies are expected to transform 41%. But it is artificial intelligence (AI) and information processing technologies that are expected to have the biggest impact – with 86% of respondents expecting these technologies to transform their business by 2030.

That’s a lot of change in half a decade. As we keep saying, the only new normal is change.

Factors changing the future of work

All businesses will have to wrestle with what climate change and the energy transition means for them. The office will grapple with AI, and manufacturing and infrastructure will be dealing with increasingly sophisticated machines.

What, then, of the people impacted? Will we be all sat at home, twiddling our thumbs, while AIs and robots do all the work? Unlikely. In fact, the report predicts an increase in the number of jobs, with more new jobs than lost old jobs:

This skill shift is likely to be most critical in companies where decarbonisation is the most challenging: think automotive and aeronautic. While political shifts might ease some short-term pressure on net-zero targets, if the predictions about climate change are accurate, this can only be a brief respite, before the stark reality of a warming world becomes clear.

But we’re still looking at large-scale retraining, with the report predicting that up to 11% of today’s workers failing to make the transition, because of a lack of opportunities or capability to take advantage of retraining.

More jobs, fewer people

If the number of jobs does grow, and most of those jobs are dependent on new skills, that’s going to be a recruitment and a retention challenge. And if, then, something happens to impact the availability of labour, then we’ll see a big shift in the power dynamics of the workplace. Imagine, for example, that we started to see a population decline. Is that likely?

Well, hello demographic shifts:

The world is currently experiencing two fundamental demographic shifts: an aging and declining working-age population predominantly in higher-income economies, due to declining birth rates and longer life expectancy, and a growing working-age population in many lower-income economies, where younger populations are progressively entering the labour market.

Useful context from the WEF report there. So, given that companies in the global north are likely to have recruitment problems within the next few years, those back-to-the-office orders look increasingly short-sighted. As power transfers back to the employee, employers will either have to accede to their demands, or reshape their businesses to take advantage of the growing amount of working-age people in the global south.

A new relationship with employees for 2030

With a scarcer workforce, could raw skills cease to be the defining factor in hiring? If people are going to need to shift skills over time, could cultural alignment with the organisation, its structure and goals become more important, with retraining handled internally? Thus, you hire people for potential and fit, rather than just for skills. An intriguing idea, and very different from today’s pattern of firing/hiring to reshape a company’s skill set.

Companies might already be shifting towards that way of thinking, according to the report:

Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill among employers, with seven out of 10 companies considering it as essential in 2025. This is followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, along with leadership and social influence.

Money versus skills versus lifestyle

In this context, the tension between pay and conditions is only likely to increase. If talent is increasingly scarce, one thing that a company can offer as a competitive advantage is constant upskilling. It benefits both parties directly: the worker gains security, and the company has less recruitment to do in a competitive market.

There are signs in the report that this will be the case:

Seven in 10 respondents expect improvements in talent development within their organization by 2030. However, as noted in the report’s 2023 edition, 77% of businesses expressed a positive view on the outlook for talent development, suggesting that some companies are re-evaluating their expectations.

Is that slight decline due to misguided optimism about the degree to which AI can replace human workers? For some companies, perhaps. And it might even be workable for the sorts of tasks that can be automated. However, it also feels like harsh economic reality meeting corporate aspirations. I would not be investing in companies that don’t intend to invest in their workforces, would you?

Cost of living means cost of hiring

But that’s not going to be the only point of negotiation between employer and employee. Few companies are optimistic about any of us feeling richer any time soon, with the cost-of-living ranking highly as a change factor for most companies. This will impact hiring. That could take many forms: there could be pressure for wage growth, based both on competition for the best employees, but also because commuting remains a major cost for many employees. The balance between flexibility of working location and wages might become an interesting challenge for talent management. And companies want governments to give them more flexibility here:

In light of demographic shifts, companies are increasingly exploring policy interventions aimed at broadening the talent pool. Changes to labour laws related to remote work are highlighted as a priority by 36% of employers, with strong demand in particular from companies headquartered in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as, from an industry perspective, in the finance industry (both Financial Services and Capital markets and Insurance and Pensions Management).

Tellingly, policy interventions in these areas are considered less important than loosening up immigration laws. That is a relocation both of the technological opportunity of remote work, and the political reality of a global rise in discomfort with migration.

Office 2030: a vision

So, what does the office of 2030 look like? Less desk-and-computer based, for one. As more information processing tasks are claimed by automation and AI, human work interactions will be more centred around, well, human interaction. And workplaces will shift ever towards being attractive places to work, rather than enforced ones. Like the early days of the internet boom, companies will have to compete for scarcer talent with more attractive working conditions.

Quite possibly, these spaces will also have dedicated areas for training and learning, allowing workforces to develop, and saving companies the headache of the fire/hire cycle. And they might end up as cultural hubs, too, with employees from the global south, where the available workers will increasingly be brought there for induction and training.

Co-ordination between globally dispersed workforces will continue to develop from today’s Zoom/Teams models — and this might well be where metaverse and AR technology starts to come into its own, as technologies to enhance bonding and communication between dispersed teams.

2030: best case/worst case

This, of course, is something of a utopian vision. There’s certainly no guarantee that this is how companies will respond to the changing pressures of business. But so many of the alternatives are so much worse: a declining global north finds itself supplanted by the companies of the global south, and so unable to support its aging population financially. Or businesses prone to catastrophic failure because not enough has been done to address the climate crisis, and unexpected natural disaster having catastrophic impacts. One only needs to look at California over the past few weeks to see what could happen.

To rework an old cliché, a company that wants to survive AND thrive into the next decade must both prepare for the worst, and strive to create the structures for the best. You’ve got five years.

Time to get going.

Image by Bethany Legg / Unsplash.