WLP244 Big Questions Without Answers: Education and Perception
In today’s episode Pilar shares two interviews recorded before the pandemic (you remember, back when remote work was something intentional and strategic). We’re bringing you two guests to dig in to some of the big questions about remote work and the future of work. We’d love to know what you think about these broad topic-focused episodes like this one, and hope you find them thought-provoking and enjoyable.
Please note: Henceforth we are returning to our fortnightly episode schedule. Don’t forget to subscribe to our show in your favourite podcast player, so you don’t miss any of them
03:51 Robert Kropp: How education needs to evolve for the future of work
Robert joined us in Episode 230, when he and Rowena Hennigan introduced us to Remote Work Tree, and we’ve enjoyed his articles before in our What’s Going On segments (you can enjoy them all on his blog at Allwork).
The big question we wanted to explore was whether schools (back when they were open as normal) were really preparing young people for the future of work, and helping them develop the skills they’d need.
Robert Kropp
After all we learn best when we’re young, and create our biases - so the earlier we learn to collaborate flexibly the better. While we are all life-long learners, our general education in schools remains routed in the industrial era.
We’re still omitting the things dismissed as ‘soft skills’, like emotional intelligence - which are essential for navigating an uncertain future. This is more important than ever when we have no idea what the workspace of the future will look like in 10 years, what jobs our children will actually be doing. What we should be teaching is how to develop the flexibility and resilience to adapt and be creative.
Robert’s research is exploring how to address these complex issues, which present differently in different countries and cultures - promoting school exchanges is a simple way to start with this, and it can be done remotely, bringing young people together online to collaborate on a project and simultaneously learn about each other, and different strategies for problem solving and connecting.
He is advocating an agile, iterative approach - sharing ideas, setting up experiments to test them, learning from the outcomes and sharing that progress.
Do follow his work on the links above, and you can follow Robert on Twitter too.
John O’Duinn
20:50 John O’Duinn: Physical proximity and employment status
John joined us last month on Episode 240 to talk about how Vermont is incentivising remote workers.
He also wrote this really interesting article, Physical Proximity vs Employment Status, which comes with new resonance as some people are starting to return to the office. But he wrote it back in February, when this interview took place.
There has often been confusion about terminology in the remote work space, and John wanted to call out the conflation of the issues of physical closeness with people’s relationship with the company. Just because someone is in another location does not mean they are not colleagues and co-employees, and temporary contractors can often work together under one roof - so why are these concepts so often muddled?
Remote work does not mean being freelance, and different industries have always used different models and business structures anyway. Many companies are becoming leaner and hiring different kinds of professional support on an ‘as-a-service’ basis, and careers are becoming far more fluid anyway.
Millennials, and GenZ behind them, will never know a job for life anyway, so we need new vocabularies and mindsets to talk about the social contracts of work, before we can define the legal and societal ones (and address the ancillary consequences of this for things like health coverage and retirement planning).
As well as his highly recommended blog, John tweets as well, and wrote a great book about distributed teams.
We hope you enjoyed these explorations of a couple big questions in remote work, and we’ll be back soon with more news, information, practice, and ideas.
And don’t forget to check out all the different ways that Virtual Not Distant can help you, with every aspect of remote team leadership and practice, including our forthcoming ‘podcasting for connection’ service.
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