We are having the wrong conversation about work

We are having the wrong conversation about work. The remote work conversation is so 2020. It was a thing long before that too. I keep seeing articles like “Why companies should embrace remote work” and “How remote work makes employees more productive.” Those articles are fine, but they are talking about something already cemented in our work consciousness, even if many bosses haven’t figured that out yet.

The next conversation about how we work is more interesting. It’s about the diversity of tasks and asynchronous communication. The next conversation is also about freedom and trust and how these come together to create a very different work culture than we have seen before.

How work worked 20 years ago

I recently hired a young, smart, twenty-something to help run my new company, and her preferences and approach to work are entirely different than they would have been 20 years ago. In the early ’00s, a professional would start with:

• A fixed job description.
• Set hours of work.
• The expectation to be on call and available at all times for the boss.
• The expectation to work more than “just 40 hours,” including nights and weekends.
• Limited trust with a lot of oversight and…