A mini-manifesto for the next stage of work

How should work look like at the current stage of human progress?

Come to the office, work 9-to-5, don’t laugh too much and stay practical.

The assumptions behind the way we work belong to less-advanced times – including in many tech companies.

How should work look like at the current stage of human progress?

Work should be:

• Efficient. Nobody wants to waste time. Not the employer, nor the employees. We should commit to do our best with the resources we have to achieve what the firm wants us to achieve. The firm shouldn’t waste the team’s energies with vanity meetings, ungoverned workspace politics and an unfair division of labor. We work first and foremost to get things done.

• Intellectually stimulating. We cannot invest an average of 8 hours a day for about 50 years of our lives doing something that is merely technical. If there’s not a challenge or a powerful idea wrapped around what we are doing, our neurons will get bored, retire and we’ll find ourselves vegetating for the second half of our lives. We work also to make progress as individuals.

• Emotionally satisfying. Most of us work together with other people, which means that work cannot be separated from our social life. Friends and family are essential to life, but our career plays a part too. We got used to the idea that until university we are heavily invested emotionally in almost everything we do – then we get a job and we develop a “healthy detachment” from our professional life. I am not sure it’s actually healthy. We deserve to experience strong emotions, and not only from the little time we have before and after work. We work also to enrich our lives with meaningful experiences.

Who should shape the labor market?

• You. Make the right choices. Avoid toxic workplaces and give a trajectory to your lifelong learning.

• Firms and organizations. In most cases we can be intentional about who we hire, how we manage and how we relate to them.

• Governments and local institutions. Checks and balances, when needed.

• Universities and educational institutions. If adults stop caring about their personal and professional development, that means that the learning experiences we had were poor, dry and ineffective. Shame.

Yes, that’s pretty much everyone.

We all work, and if we don’t care about how work, we’ll end up working only because we have to.

This post was originally published here, on Masters of Babel.