Latest news with #knowledgeworkers
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why China's 996 Work Culture Won't Win The Future Of Work
Some U.S. tech companies are now hiring for '996,' a schedule imported from China's startup scene that means working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. The idea is to compete harder, move faster, and win the AI race. That's an odd pairing. AI represents the future, while a 996 work culture — like return-to-office mandates — belongs firmly in the past. It's a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding about what the future of work is really about. More Hours Don't Equal More Innovation Let's be clear: there's nothing inherently wrong with working long hours. Some of the most passionate, high-performing people work more than 60 hours a week. But they don't do it because someone told them when to show up. Not for 9-to-5, not for four-day workweeks, and certainly not for 996. You can't manufacture commitment through structure. Today's best workers don't thrive on hours. They thrive on alignment. They'll give you their time — even a lot of it — when their work helps them accomplish what matters to them: purpose, learning, growth, or financial security. That's not idealism. That's strategy. Your best people, the ones you most want to keep, are the ones who have options. And those people measure work in value, not hours. Stop Measuring Time. Start Measuring Trust. 996 doesn't allow for that. Neither does return-to-office. Even well-meaning models like four-day work weeks still focus on presence over impact. These are systems built for factories, not for knowledge workers solving complex problems in an ever-accelerating future. When leaders fixate on hours, they signal the wrong priorities. They manage for control rather than commitment. They assume performance can be engineered through pressure. But the math doesn't hold up when people burn out, disengage, or simply walk away. Gen Z and millennials are already demanding work that's humane, flexible, and values-aligned. They've watched their parents sacrifice everything for companies that gave nothing back. They won't repeat the pattern. If your message to them is that working for you means trading away autonomy, agency, or health —essentially giving up control over their lives — they won't just quit. They won't apply. What Actually Drives Performance In a recent episode of The Future of Less Work, I spoke with Tamara Myles and Wes Adams, authors of Meaningful Work and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research, based on thousands of workers across 25 industries, found that nearly half of our experience of meaning at work comes down to what leaders do. As Myles put it, 'If you think about meaningful work less as what you do and more as how you experience what you do, leaders have a huge role in shaping that experience.' Building on that, Adams emphasized that meaning isn't reserved for a select few in purpose-driven careers. 'Your job doesn't have to be your life's calling for your work to feel worthwhile,' he said. 'Meaning actually comes from these discrete moments of community, contribution, and challenge that can happen in any job, any day, if you know where to look.' These three elements form the foundation of meaningful work: These are levers every manager can pull. They don't require a budget or a policy change. But they do determine whether people bring their full selves to work — or quietly check out. As Adams noted, citing Gallup and Workhuman research, 'One thank-you once a week is enough to cut disengagement and burnout in half.' That's the lever. Not longer hours. You Can't Fit the Future Into an Old-Timecard So what does 996 really say? That work is defined by presence. That commitment is demonstrated by time. That performance is forced, not chosen. And that's the biggest mistake of all. If you're enforcing hours to drive output, you're measuring the wrong thing. And you're sending the wrong message — especially to Gen Z and millennial workers who already lived through a pandemic that taught them time is finite. Every workday is a day they won't get back. If that day isn't meaningful, they won't stay. The old social contract assumed life began where work ended. The new one recognizes that people want integration, not balance. They want control. They want their work to reflect their values, not consume them. Here's the irony. While some companies are doubling down on control in the name of the AI race, AI is removing routine tasks allowing people to focus on creativity, resilience, and innovation — the very things automation can't replicate. But only if leaders design for that — and a 996 work culture doesn't. You don't win the future by working like it's 1996. You win by building organizations that understand the world has changed. And that the people building the future want more than a paycheck or a performance review. They want a reason. Your best people work not because they have to, not because you tell them to, and not because you measure them on it, but because they want to — because working for you is their way of achieving their purpose in life.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Youth Is Losing to Experience in This Job Market
Every time there's fresh evidence of labor market softness, as with the July jobs report, an obvious question is raised about the health of the US economy. Now, increasingly, economists and employees are asking a second question: Are we seeing the impact of artificial intelligence on knowledge workers? There are plenty of signs that AI is making the job market tougher for young college graduates, but for the 22 million people with jobs that are categorized as professional and business services, wage growth has actually accelerated over the past year to levels solidly above pre-pandemic rates. This suggests that the state of the labor market for white-collar workers is best described as bifurcated — one where there are both winners and losers rather than one where most workers are worse off.
Fast Company
01-08-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How to unlock creativity in the hybrid workplace
Despite some high-profile pushback against hybrid work, with many companies eager to fully return their workforces to the office, hybrid work remains the preferred working style of a majority of knowledge workers worldwide. It is the work style for the majority of U.S. knowledge workers. Although there are many benefits to a hybrid work environment, one drawback is that it can reduce social ties and connections between employees. Companies and employees at all levels recognize the importance of maintaining strong relationships with their teammates. However, we also need to support 'weak ties,' those casual connections we feel with colleagues who are not part of our teams or immediate social circle. Weak ties bring benefits to the workplace that are often underappreciated. To maximize those benefits, it's vital to understand why weak ties matter, some risks that hybrid work presents, and what team leaders and organizations can do to overcome those risks. Why Weak Ties Matter In 1973, a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter found that strong ties, although essential for trust and emotional support, are less effective in obtaining new information. Weak ties are what provide us with new ideas and new opportunities. While weak ties are more likely to lead to a new job, it is how they drive creativity and innovation, through exposure to those new ideas, that matters most to companies. Duke University sociologist Martin Ruef found that groups with networks made up of both strong and weak ties innovated at three times the rate of networks with only strong ties. The diverse perspectives we gain from interacting with colleagues from different functions, teams, or levels of seniority through weak ties expose us to new ideas, approaches, and knowledge. Everyone benefits from this, as knowledge and information are shared across organizational boundaries and silos get broken. The organization can develop a culture of transparency, inclusivity, and new opportunities. Knock-on effects can include career development, friendships, and increased workplace satisfaction. By encouraging employees to cultivate weak ties, organizations can create an environment that fosters creativity and unlocks untapped innovative potential. How Hybrid Work Can Diminish Weak Ties During the COVID-19 pandemic and the height of the work-from-home era, many employees reported a greater sense of connection to their workplace and colleagues. Employee engagement levels and feelings of belonging improved during the pandemic, as companies and team leaders made a more intentional effort to reach out to their teams and let them know they were not alone. Strong ties improved during the pandemic. However, as 2021 research by MIT on 61,000 Microsoft employees found, this greater connection to our strong ties came at the expense of our weak ties. The MIT study concluded that lower levels of innovation and longer project completion times resulted from focusing more on strong ties, with a 25% decrease in time spent collaborating with weak ties. Our weak ties suffered, and with that, so did levels of innovation. We worked more strongly with our usual teammates, which led to fewer interactions with our weak ties. With hybrid work, we should have more opportunities to meet with our weak ties and encounter them more frequently for those watercooler conversations and chance meetings that might lead to increased innovation in the workplace. But does this happen? To 'justify' the in-office part of hybrid work, many teams rightly choose to prioritize that in-office time around the kind of work that is well-suited to being physically together, such as team-building, socializing, brainstorming, or ideating. Structuring back-to-work days around the team is the right approach, but this overemphasis on strong ties can reduce the diversity of views and creativity that comes from weak ties. How To Nurture Weak Ties For hybrid work to effectively leverage the benefits of weak ties and boost innovation, we must be more intentional about structuring in-office days to focus on building and maintaining these connections. Here are five steps that individuals, team leaders, and organizations can take. 1. Make Time to Socialize with Weak Ties Look at your go-to crowd for lunch, coffee break, or after-work get-togethers. Do they represent weak or strong ties? If weak ties are underrepresented, spend more time with them, rather than your usual lunch and coffee friends. Reach out to weak ties in your division or department, or from another group, especially if they represent different functions. If you work in sales, engage more with those weak ties in HR, for example. The more diverse, the greater the possibility of learning and innovation. And don't just limit this to people in the same company. Most of us can only maintain strong connections with between 150 and 300 people, so your LinkedIn network, which is likely a larger number than this, is mainly comprised of weak ties. Use LinkedIn to reach out and socialize with those weak ties. 2. Encourage and Enable Employees to Connect with Weak Ties If you are a team leader, leave time in people's schedules to meet with others outside your team on those days when everyone is in the office. Or, go one better and build 'weak tie connection time' into the calendar. Make this a dedicated time when everyone arranges a catch-up or 30-minute call with someone outside the team. Have the team report back on what they learned so everyone can benefit from those weak tie meetups. This eliminates the randomness of chance meetings or impromptu water cooler conversations, which are often used to justify returning to the office. Intentionally build time and opportunities for such encounters rather than leave them to chance. 3. Involve Weak Tie Connections In Brainstorming When doing in-person brainstorming or ideation, invite people from outside the team who represent weak ties, especially those from a different department or who may otherwise bring new perspectives. They could represent the view of the customer or end-user, but they don't need to be experts, as their fresh point of view triggers new ideas that matter. They can be briefed on the basics of the problem you are trying to solve. Bringing in the perspective of weak ties, who may have different ideas that are not immediately apparent to team members working on the problem every day, can help surface assumptions that are not apparent to the team. It can prevent the team's discussions from falling prey to groupthink. 4. Implement Mentorship and Buddy Programs for New Hires One group of workers who often struggle with remote or hybrid work is new employees who need to integrate into the company culture and form connections. Look to mentorship and buddy programs to connect new hires with experienced colleagues outside their team or department. Matching new hires with such weak ties can not only help better integrate them into the organization but also expose them to new ideas and form new networks of weak ties that can evolve into valuable professional relationships. If you practice reverse mentoring, experienced senior employees can also benefit from the insights gained from new hires, with whom they would not typically interact. 5. Create More Cross-Functional Teams to Work on Projects Cross-functional teams—those comprised of members from different departments and job functions—are inherently more creative and innovative due to the diverse perspectives they bring to problem-solving. They are also, by their nature, collections of individuals with weak ties to one another. I experienced this regularly in the project teams I led for over a decade at a multinational firm. The project teams, composed of global HR colleagues—my function—were quite creative, but those comprising colleagues from HR and other functions, such as sales, marketing, communications, and ESG, were far and away the most innovative and came up with the freshest ideas. When building project teams, don't just rely on the usual suspects. Reach out to other functions to recruit members and build project teams made up of weak ties. Such a team's output will represent a more holistic view of the company, enhance problem-solving capabilities, and lead to new working relationships and connections that last beyond the project's life. With hybrid working style becoming the default for many of us, organizations must encourage employees to leverage the power of weak ties. By doing so, companies can better leverage the innovative potential of their workforce and position themselves for success in the era of hybrid work.
Forbes
24-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
AI vs. human beings: do we have any lasting advantage?
Participants at an Advanced Robotic Capabilities for Hazardous Environments event. Last Thursday's announcement of OpenAI's new ChatGPT agent, which creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, deepens the concern that AI will replace large numbers of white-collar jobs. Do knowledge workers have any lasting advantage over AI? This is an important question, and particularly for educators, who need to know how to prepare students for durable career success. Gian Segato, of the AI company Replit, has a convincing answer: 'It's no longer as important to know how to do something. It's knowing that it needs to be done and then just doing it.' AI appears to be highly effective at knowing how to do things. But in the highly uncertain world we are living in, the really valuable skills are deciding what needs to be done and then making sure that it happens. Who does that better, humans or AI? The Habits of Human Excellence The ancient Greeks and Romans identified a set of habits of human excellence they called the cardinal virtues. These have been honored in almost every major civilization and religion as representing peak performance in human thought, action, and feeling, and give us a unique human advantage, as Dr. Jay Richards has argued. The cardinal virtues of practical wisdom and justice are the habits for deciding, fairly, what needs to be done. Practical wisdom is the habit of making wise decisions; it involves setting goals, gathering information, and reasoning. Justice is the habit of treating others fairly and with respect, ensuring that the needs of all are addressed. How does AI measure up in these two areas? AI can gather and process vast amounts of information. Some AI models can even set their own goals, derived from a hierarchical set of 'value functions' programmed into them. AI also conveys respect, and particularly empathy, very well. Blind evaluations tend to find the bedside manner of AI to be more empathetic than that of human doctors. Many people are comforted by talking to AI, and some have even married their chatbots. In tests of moral reasoning, people tend to prefer AI-generated conclusions to those of humans. Human beings nevertheless retain a decisive advantage in the exercise of both practical wisdom and justice, because our goal setting and sense of fairness come from within—we are complete. We have free will and an innate sense of fairness, evident even in toddlers, while AI is incomplete: its value function has to be programmed into it, by us. It is unable to be self-reflective, as we are, examining and updating our own values. The other two cardinal virtues (there are four in all) are courage and self-discipline. These are the habits of excellence for dealing with our feelings, particularly our fears and desires. Courage is the habit of moving forward despite fear, and self-discipline is the habit of following our desires only when it makes sense to do so. They are the virtues for making sure that things get done. Having no feelings may seem like an advantage for AI, in getting things done. Without any fear, robots can enter dangerous situations that would deter humans. Without desires of their own, AI agents should be completely focused on their assigned tasks. And yet, human emotion is a vitally important source of our success as a species. Emotion drives motivation. It is our desires that keep us moving towards better ways of living, while our fears move us away from worse ones. AI or Unvirtuous Humans? One might observe that many people do not appear to exhibit free will, that their sense of 'fairness' is heavily biased in their own favor, and that their emotions, far from driving them on to greater things, are dragging them down. People seem to respond only to external stimuli, and can be unrelentingly selfish. Fear paralyzes them, and desires lead them to all sorts of abuse, degradation, and violence. Where's the superiority? 'Whether humans can be durably superior to AI depends on which humans we mean—those living from their best selves or those mired in their worst.'Here lies the key: whether humans can be durably superior to AI depends on which humans we mean—those living from their best selves or those mired in their worst. Our distinctive human strengths emerge only when we cultivate the best in ourselves: the virtues. From a virtue perspective, those who are not currently their best selves are not doomed to that condition. They just haven't developed their virtues yet. The virtues are analogous to muscles, which need to be exercised regularly in order to grow. Daily practice of the habits of wisdom, justice, courage and self-discipline are what it takes to build each virtue, and we need them all if we are to be excellent at deciding what needs to be done, and making sure it gets done. Educational institutions, and companies, should foster these virtues. This is traditionally done through a liberal arts education, where students can study the various virtue traditions throughout history, learn from virtuous role models and mentors, and are expected to practice the virtues. Companies likewise can offer education in the virtues, mentoring, and opportunities and expectations for their practice. We have been upgrading our AI models at a breakneck pace. Instead of worrying about AI overtaking us, it is time to give ourselves an upgrade, by cultivating the virtues to become our best selves.
Fast Company
17-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Silence isn't golden
The era of the invisible CEO is over. In 2025, silence equals irrelevance. Today's audiences in the attention economy don't wait for press releases. They're actively engaged on LinkedIn, exploring niche podcasts, diving into Substacks, and sizing up leaders not just on what they sell, but what they stand for. The crucial question then becomes: In a landscape filled with tech skepticism, debates over 'hero leaders,' the influence of cancel culture, dwindling newsrooms, and widespread misinformation, is a public voice essential for CEOs? According to recent data, yes. You can't afford for them not to have a public voice. The days of direct influence Forget billboards and banner ads; direct communication is more effective than almost every other source of information in terms of trust and influence. According to Mission North's Brand Expectations Index: 84% of knowledge workers and 81% of the general public trust direct communications from companies, including podcasts, long-form articles, and videos, more than national news, social media, or even academic journals. Among knowledge workers, technical articles (72%), practical explainers (69%), and human-interest stories (66%) are especially effective in building credibility and deepening knowledge. 75% of IT decision makers report increased trust when they encounter real-world stories of people using or innovating with AI. These aren't just content preferences. They're strategic cues for how—and where—audiences want to engage. Thought leadership is the new due diligence The 2024 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report adds more urgency: 73% of decision makers say thought leadership is more trustworthy than product sheets or traditional marketing. 70% of C-suite executives say high-quality thought leadership has made them question whether to stick with a current vendor. 90% say they're more receptive to outreach from companies that publish insightful content regularly. In short: If your brand wants a seat at the table, it needs to consistently say something smart—and human. Your content is your strategy. And your CEO is your sharpest edge, or your most prominent blind spot. The CEO effect: Reputation as a trust multiplier A company's brand is increasingly a reflection of its leadership. From vision and values to risk tolerance and resilience, executives are expected to show up and show their work. According to the Brand Expectations Index, 67% of knowledge workers and 57% of the public believe the CEO's reputation directly influences their trust in a company. That number climbs in innovation-forward sectors like AI, healthtech, and climate. And the message can't be all features and forecasts. Today's audiences, especially in tech, seek techno-optimism: forward-looking, hopeful stories that focus on human possibility. It's a mindset: 'Don't just tell me what the technology does. Show me who it helps, and how.' When CEO visibility is a must In B2B industries, credibility is paramount: Buyers want to know who's behind the product—reputation and reliability matter. Emerging industries demand clear leadership: In industries like AI, climate tech, or biotech, trust is still being built, making it a prime opportunity for CEOs to shape the narrative. Investors invest in people, not just products: Pre-IPO or high-growth phases magnify the equation where visibility equals credibility, which in turn equals valuation. Values-led brands require visible leadership: A silent CEO can signal apathy at best, evasion at worst. Attracting top talent depends on engaging leadership: The next generation wants to work with leaders, not just for them. If you're in one of these categories and your CEO is nowhere to be found, that silence speaks volumes, not in your favor. The limits of CEO visibility There are real limits to putting the CEO front and center: Authenticity gap: Not every CEO is a natural communicator, and audiences can smell a ghostwriter. Brand-led companies: In some B2C or community-led brands, the product or movement is the hero, not the leader. Crisis optics: When a company is under fire, CEO visibility can sometimes inflame rather than reassure. If the CEO can't lead out front, who can? When the CEO isn't the right messenger, companies still have impactful options: Other executives: Elevate functional leads, from CTOs to CHROs, who can speak credibly to their domains. Structured editorial formats: Launch a company podcast, Substack, or LinkedIn series that features a range of internal voices and customer stories. Narrative clarity: Shape a strategic story arc that anchors all content, from founder essays to customer case studies, even if it doesn't come from the CEO directly. Owned platforms: Use LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, and even internal newsletters to showcase expertise in ways that feel transparent and consistent. The key? Tell real stories. Lead with humans. Don't just spotlight innovation—show how it solves problems that matter. The bottom line Today's business landscape favors the bold. Not the brash, but the brave. That doesn't always mean having the loudest voice, but it does mean having a meaningful one. Whether through the CEO or a broader bench of leaders, companies must find a way to lead in public: to show values, expertise, and vision in a way that feels honest and human. Done right, executive thought leadership isn't vanity PR — it's strategic infrastructure for brand trust, market leadership, and business growth. And in the age of AI, authenticity, and algorithmic noise, your CEO's voice isn't just a nice-to-have; it can be your most significant differentiator.
