[00:00:00] **Andrew:** Hi, I am Andrew. Welcome to the Work Unravelled podcast. In each episode, we break down a piece of the workplace puzzle, providing practical insights, fresh perspectives, and actionable solutions to help you navigate the ever-changing world of work. 

[00:00:15] **Scott:** And I'm Scott, whether you are a leader, a professional, or simply curious about what makes organisations tick, this show offers strategies to think smarter, work better, and lead boldly join us as we turn workplace complexity into clarity.

One episode at a time.

. So this week we're gonna talk about how work has significantly changed . We're gonna unpack the new world of work and talk about why we think the old rules, which some companies are still trying to apply to their workforce just don't work anymore. The world has changed in so many different ways in terms of technology, uh, hybrid working, how we think about work and how we approach work needs to. Change to adapt to that as well.

[00:01:02] **Andrew:** Yeah, that's right. Scott, before we start recording, I think we just. Briefly talking about in our experience of, of work, how, how different it it is. But even though things have changed, which we'll get into in this episode, we perhaps haven't changed how we work. And perhaps more importantly, we haven't changed our mindset to work.

And there's been so much change and turmoil and churn in the last maybe 10, 15, 20 years. That things are so different now, but we are still operating on the same paradigms. And if you think about just in the last sort of five years, I can't believe, can you believe it's actually five years since COVID?

It was 2020, wasn't it, when it all sort of started Five years since COVID. But we had COVID, which just turned things upside down. And then we come out of COVID and then we have that, um, what they're calling the great, the great resignations. Yeah. Um, and it's where people, I think they went through this really scary experience of COVID and they, they were sort of saying to themselves, what am I doing with my life?

You know, people really were scared that this was like the end of the world and it was like some sort of zombie apocalypse, do you know? Um, and then, and people thought, you know, my life's too short. I can't do this job. So there's this period after COVID where people like, were changing careers. They were resigning within that timeframe, since that period of like 2022 when we started coming out of, of COVID, we now got ai.

That's churning things up, which we're gonna talk about. And then economic uncertainty. We've got Trump's tariffs currently as we're recording this in, July, 2025. We've got the EU and the USA, you know, starting this economic, uh, trade war things are really, really difficult for people. And I think that's what we need to do is start examining how we work, our approach to work and offering people some ways and means of, of coping better, if you like.

So in terms of how you see work change, have you got a sort of a take on this then? What's your take on how you know, things have changed and the stresses that people feel in work these days?

[00:03:13] **Scott:** I think one of the biggest things is of course, COVID and as you said, the great resignation. I think part of that was as well, people had a taste of. Working from home, getting maybe a bit more of a work life balance where actually I can now pick my kids up and um, you know, depending on, again, the culture of the organization you worked in.

Some people obviously were struggling with that presenteeism where actually it was worse and they felt I cannot leave my computer screen to go to the toilet 'cause somebody is gonna see my dots change color on teams. But for many people they were able to strike that balance of flexibility. That meant actually I can pick the kids up and I can then come back to work.

I can do some work in the evening. And I think for many people after COVID, when their organization wanted to go back to, well, we're not doing that anymore. That was when, well screw that. I'm gonna go and find another employer that's going to support me. , So I think that was part of the shift as well. I think it almost feels like employees stood up for themselves a bit more and thought. I'm not just a slave to the machine. I'm not gonna go and sit in my car for three hours or two hours a day to come in and go into stupid meetings and pointless meetings. So I think there's, that aspect has played a part as well in terms of people saying, no, I, I can do better. But then. That means there needs to be employers out there that can help them do better and can support their employees in a modern workplace in the ways that we've talked about on previous episodes in terms of enabling technology to help them do their jobs better, not lose their jobs, but also not make their jobs more complicated.

Um, having things like wellbeing support. As if you touched on as well. 'cause actually modern life is incredibly pressured and stressful for people. So there's obviously that line in terms of where does the employee's responsibility start and stop versus the individual's responsibilities start and stop.

So I think there's a number of things there in terms of all those pressures. And of course we're also seeing because people are being expected to do more with less and also I think that there seems to be less jobs out there for people, you know, employers are holding back in the uk. Certainly we know that the national insurance contributions have had an impact for some companies.

I think some companies are waiting to see what happens with AI and how that will affect their workforce, . So it's a kind of perfect storm, I think, in terms of lots of things going on. Lots of pressures.

[00:05:41] **Andrew:** That's right. And I think, you know, in the UK certainly, and, and, and if anybody's listening to this and they're not in the uk, they may not be aware that in, in the UK recently we had a change of government, or it's a year ago now actually, of course, but the current labor government increased employers national insurance contributions, and there is some evidence that the number of jobs being advertised is down.

I think it's down lower than. At the start of COVID. So there were fewer jobs being advertised, and I think there's a pressure now for employers not to, you know, recruit new people and therefore people who are in jobs are now increasingly afraid of losing their job. So there's a huge amount of stress that's happened.

And I was just reflecting as you were talking about. The changes, we often forget how important work is in our lives. You know, it, it's fundamental to how people live their lives. We spend, well, depending on your, your job type, eight hours a day involved with your job, money to Friday. It, it, it varies. Of course, if you are a nurse or your, you know, a, a construction worker, you are a plumber or self-employed.

For many people though, they're spending like 40 hours a week. With that job, it's hugely important, but in the last sort of 20 years, we've had everything from. The development of the internet and the worldwide web. I remember this shows you how old I am, but I remember email coming in

I used to work as a, as a consultant back then, and I, I talked to companies and they said, well, we've never needed email before, so we don't need email now. And of course the one of the big challenges that people face at the moment is email inbox, is that they can't get through.

And, and the point I'm making really is. Work is so important to us, but it changes. But it changes in a way that o often none of us have any control over. It's just this constant churn, you know, this, this constant pressure to do different things, do new things. Social media came in and in terms of organizations, the way they communicate with their customers was, was just, now we need to do social media.

So I think this, this pressure, and I was reading about Dropbox for example, if you know the, um. You probably know the company Dropbox, but if anybody doesn't know the company, Dropbox, they're this cloud-based storage service and they went completely online, um, completely virtual. They had all their staff.

This is before COVID. Um, and there are ways to, to do things differently. You know, you can have teams that are hybrid and completely virtual companies are trying four day working weeks. We've talked about this in the past, but really what I would say is. We don't, as a society stop and have a conversation about how do we work?

It just sort of happens all at once, doesn't it? It sort of just, everything just hits you like a hundred miles an hour. So I, I suppose there's no, there's no surprise that people are, are super stressed and, and exhausted by it. I, I guess, would you agree?

[00:08:37] **Scott:** Yeah, and it, it's like. As we've said, things like lag behind, so it, it took COVID to significantly change and accelerate digital adoption for, you know, virtual calls teams Zoom. You know, they say that companies mature digitally twice as fast almost as they would've previously, so we rapidly accelerated.

And like the rest of the rest of things have to catch up with that. So what we're finding ourselves now is the slave to the virtual calls. So employees are sitting on a teams call or a Zoom call, click a button, and they're in another call minutes later. Well, it's not seconds later. And then you've got the impact of the context switch. And again, we've talked before about missing out on that downtime where you used to walk between meeting rooms and you would have a bit of a breather or you'd have that conversation by the water cooler, all that kind of stuff.

I think many companies have struggled to catch up with the way the world is now, and they're still stuck in not quite the dark ages, but the old ways of thinking about work and almost still stuck in the industrial age. You know, I've, I've helped a lot of companies with digital, and even now they're still a lot of companies playing catch up to that, to get to where they should be, let alone the AI stuff that's, that's here now and the stuff that's coming rapidly around the corner.

[00:09:59] **Andrew:** It's interesting you say that, and I think there's something about human nature where we're, we're so familiar with something that we, we don't see it anymore. Um, we become desensitive to anything around us. So for example,, the commute into work, you know, with that idea that psychologically if you do have a commute and, and still of course, lots of people do drive into work, so not everybody.

You know, work from home. Not everybody is all hybrid, but if you have a commute into into work, and let's say it's 45 minutes or something, it allows you, as you leave the home to sort of get ready for work, you start rehearsing what you're gonna do at work. You can start planning, and then when you leave work, that shift allows you to sort of switch into.

Away from work mode, into home mode, or at least ideally, you know, you then go to this hybrid world where you don't have the commute. Now, from an individual perspective, that sounds and feels great because you haven't got that cost, you haven't got that stress of the traffic and getting, you know, late into work.

But what you don't realize is you did lose something there. You gained maybe, but you also lost. And I also think is the same with organizations is in the past, like you said. Meetings were very much physical and they still are. Again, let's be realistic. Lots of meetings are still very physical, but if you are now switching from face to face to virtual meetings in the past, you could only maybe have one or two a day, let's say.

Okay, because you had a physical problem of getting from A to B in the building and so on. Now, well, hang on a minute. I can block out four meetings in a day, but they're all virtual. And what you then lose is you don't have that opportunity to walk with somebody down the corridor, just have a bit of chat.

You know, you don't bump into somebody either literally or metaphorically in the corridor that you haven't seen for a while. So what I'm saying here is, is technology and change superficially brings apparent benefit. You think, oh, this is gonna be better than it was before, but we lose something and, and also a lot of this technology, like, you know, we've talked about in previous episodes, there's very much a sort of always on mindset now.

Isn't there? It's almost like I, I can have a meeting with you in 30 seconds. If we wanna have a meeting, I'll send you an invite. Boom. Straight into the, the calendar invite and off we go. Whereas in the past, you'd say, when are you free? Well, I can't see you until tomorrow afternoon. So I think this multi, this multitasking, this always on, this always available is, is just, is is change, but not always for the better.

It's not always for the best. Don't you think? I think, I think we've gained some things, but at the, at the loss of other things that maybe we didn't realize how important they were.

[00:12:39] **Scott:** Yeah. I think something will give at the other end. There will always be pros and cons. I always like to say there's no right or wrong. There's always just pros and cons and actually. I, I'm sure I read that we're actually getting less smart.

I'm not gonna say stupider, but you know, things that we used to need to retain on our brain, we don't need to anymore. So because we know I can just Google that, I can just, well, or ask AI now for that answer. My brain doesn't need to store that, so I can just, I know it's accessible within seconds on my phone. Have you heard that? Mm-hmm.

[00:13:14] **Andrew:** No, no, actually the, the research suggests we are now retaining far less information. It, the, the, the simple one, the, the example. Everybody, anybody older than about 20 would, would remember his telephone numbers. I used to remember I could probably reel off about 20 different telephone numbers.

You know, my parents, uh, my wife's works different telephone numbers at work, and now I can't remember single one. There

[00:13:38] **Scott:** even remember your own

[00:13:39] **Andrew:** I can barely remember. I, I can remember my own, because I often have to quote that, you know, you check in at a hotel or something, you have to quote your own over and over and

[00:13:47] **Scott:** me about a year to remember my own number.

[00:13:49] **Andrew:** it really?

[00:13:49] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:13:51] **Andrew:** But everybody else is, I, I mean, they're in here, so I, I cannot remember people's telephone numbers. So I think you're right. I think there was definitely a sort of decline in. Intelligence is, is very much, totally debated in psychology, what we mean by intelligence. But we're not as, as switched on or as as aware now as we used to be because we just think I'll just Google it.

And of course, AI is gonna accelerate that and probably make that worse. We won't remember, we'll know anything. We'll just turn to our ai, uh, to tell us everything.

[00:14:20] **Scott:** It could be a threat to the pub quiz, couldn't it? You're like, well, no one would be able to answer any questions anymore.

[00:14:24] **Andrew:** I work in higher education and it's already threatening higher education. I think the point we're making is work has changed in so many ways, in such a short amount of time.

And what you would ideally would've done as an organization, you would've said, let's have a blank sheet of paper here, or blank screen of pixels and let's redesign work. Let's redesign it from the ground up. But we haven't, we've kept the same mental models, we've kept the same approach. You know, Monday to Friday, eight hours, nine till five, and then we've just changed everything underneath it.

Without having that strategic overview of what does work mean now, how do we do work differently? And coming into the future now we've got AI is gonna change it all again. So, yeah, I think anybody listening to this, if you feel stressed, if you feel frazzled, if you feel burnt out, it ain't no surprise really.

Do you know what I mean? It's just why are we surprised that people feel like, oh my goodness, what is going on?

[00:15:27] **Scott:** Yeah. And.

[00:15:27] **Andrew:** It's just exhausting.

[00:15:30] **Scott:** Yeah, and we should get onto AI now. 'cause we've mentioned it a couple of times. That is probably the biggest thing on a lot of people's radar. You know, if you spend any time on LinkedIn, it's like AI is going to destroy us all and take over the world and do everybody out of a job. Uh, I'm I, I'm saying that in a tone that sounds like I'm cynical.

I'm not because it is significant and. Is rapidly evolving and, but there's also, as with all these things as we're talking about, there's downsides to this. So I was reading the other day an article that was saying that recruiters are just getting swamped with applications written by ai. So CVS just, and it's very easy now, you can just go upload the job description too.

An AI chat bot and say, right, write me a CV that , makes me the best candidate for this role based on some extra things. You tell it about yourself. And of course that's then there's even tools that will automatically submit the application for you. And at the other end, the recruiter has employed AI to review those applications.

So what we've got is ai. Talking to ai and the term AI slop being described. , I sent you, uh, that cartoon the other day, and for the benefit of the listeners, it was, uh, about the. Chaos, really, of ai. Talking to ai, there were two characters, John and Jane. Jane had asked AI to write a report for her boss, John. 30 pages written by ai. She emailed it to John John's looking at that going, I haven't got time to read 30 pages that Jane's produced.

Uploads that to AI and says, AI summarized this into five bullet points for me. So you've literally got AI to ai and the workers just sat on the outside of that.

[00:17:18] **Andrew:** Well, yeah, and I'm sure John would then say, AI creates an email to respond to Jane. Then Jane gets the email and probably says, ai, read this email out and shorten it and get nobody's doing any work. And this is where ai, AI could replace us because let's be honest, a lot of work in organizations, AI can automate that mundane stuff.

It 

[00:17:37] **Scott:** Hmm. 

[00:17:38] **Andrew:** Replace a lot of the sort of non-work. I mean, you, I know you're a big fan of sort of, you know, adding value so AI can come in and replace, uh, all that stuff. That's why I think, as you mentioned, LinkedIn, if anybody's on LinkedIn, I mean on my LinkedIn feed now, it, AI is the only topic it seems.

People are talking about AI this, AI that ai the other, and there's a

[00:17:59] **Scott:** everyone's an AI expert.

[00:18:00] **Andrew:** Oh, everybody's an AI expert, which, you know, I wouldn't claim to be anything, anything, you know, close to being an AI expert. I use AI all the time as you do, and I think probably most people do these days, and it's a bit of an open secret that we're all using AI to do parts or huge chunks of our work.

Now, that, again, goes back to the point I was making. If AI can come in and replace a lot of what we're doing, what were we doing anyway? We were probably generating froth and we took people talk AI slop, which they mean AI generated poor low quality material. Well, let's be honest, that's what most people produce most of the time anyway.

I mean, how many emails are actually really valuable? How many meetings are really valuable? How many reports that organizations produce are ever read by anybody? And are any of any use. So, yeah, a lot of work, which is what we're talking about. I think in this episode a lot of work is made up work. It's, it's filling people's time, it's bureaucracy.

Sure. AI can come and replace that and it probably will. So that's why people are so anxious about it. 'cause maybe there was this sort of, you know, that story of the Emperor's new clothes. Everybody realized a lot of what they did wasn't actually that useful anyway. They were, you know, they just getting the salary, they're turning up, they're dialing it in to use that expression.

So yeah, AI is gonna threaten that, isn't it? Um, in a, in a hopeful sense, AI will come in, do the mundane stuff, and then what organizations in theory should do is they then exploit human creativity, human empathy, you know, human ability to. To come up with, uh, novel and innovative ideas. I don't think organizations will tend to do that with ai.

Do you? I think they'll just use it as a way to cut head count.

[00:19:46] **Scott:** Yeah, it's really, it should be freeing us up and it can do, if used correctly, uh, free us up to do the value added stuff that actually matters because yeah, as you said, and we talked about before, a lot of work is. Wasted bureaucratic busyness that delivers little to no value. So get AI to do that bit and then you're freed up to do the other stuff.

But the worry is, you've said is, is there other stuff for people to do, or have they just not been able to do that for so long that they wouldn't know how to do it anyway? Because their job has been dealing with the bureaucracy.

[00:20:18] **Andrew:** I, I think it links back to again, what we talked about earlier on, is that if you had an organization that could only have one meeting or two meetings a day, which is probably more than they needed to, now you can have four or five. You are forcing people to, I'll use the expression, I'm doing air quotes for people listening, cheat.

Because you've got so much stuff you've got to achieve. You've gotta send so many emails, you've got to read so many emails. You've got to show up and be busy. You've got, people can see whether you're logged in on your computer if you're from in hybrid working. So people are gonna use AI to do work that you've made them do.

That didn't add any value. So I'm not surprised people are gonna use ai. But again, going back to what we're talking about here is we've got yet another technology that's come in and has made the workplace just this very stressful, very confusing place to be. So how do we, how do we encourage people to sort of.

Cope with this 'cause we are gonna offer some suggestions over the next few episodes, um, on how to, to, to better navigate this crazy world of work. Have you got any sort of suggestions on how people can cope with this crazy world of work that we're in right now?

[00:21:23] **Scott:** So I think the first thing is trying to bring it back to what matters. And you know, we've talked on other episodes around delivering value prioritization, being clear on what our goals are. And this is tied into, you know, is the organization supporting you?

Do you know your direction of travel? Do you know what you should be doing? And actually what can. Digital tools do to help free you up to do the real stuff that matters, the value added stuff. So as we said, leveraging things like ai, leveraging tools that we've mentioned before, like Trello to organize your work, digitizing your to-do list, get it out of all the various places to try and get some sense.

'cause there is so much going on around us in the workplace that we need to calm the storm. That's probably going on in our brains

and the only way to do that is to start to. Get some visibility, start to get some structure, start to get some things organized. That'd be the first thing I'd say is try and get some clarity first.

Right? Like slow down is what I'm saying. In a nutshell,

[00:22:25] **Andrew:** Yeah, no, I love that. And, and I think, as I say, we'll, we'll talk about this in, in, in later episodes, but what we wanted to do in this one is just to flag up to anybody listening to this, and I think there are two possible types of people listening to this, that things have changed.

They've changed really dramatically. They've changed really quickly. Work has not evolved. And, and the, the title of this, you know, entire podcast series is Work Unravelled. We could probably have called it work Evolved 'cause we haven't evolved work. We're using probably 19th Century. Paradigms, 19th century, you know, views of the worker who is a worker bee.

They come in and they get told what to do. There's a whole, uh, way of working that is different. And what we're gonna try and do in the next few episodes is you, if you are a leader, is your responsibility is to redesign work to be more fit, better fit for the 21st century. You know, as we're going to the second, um, 25 years of this century.

How do you redesign work if you're a leader? But what we're gonna do in the episodes coming up is if you're an individual. What can you do? And you've mentioned some really great ideas. You know, looking at your task, prioritizing your tasks. I, I'm coming at it from a sort of psychological perspective about that sense of control.

Everything around you is out, out of control, you know, the economy, um, the, the technology, ai, you cannot control that. So what we need to do as individuals for that resilience is control what we can, which is ourselves, and we'll talk about this in, in, in later episodes about what can you do as an individual to manage.

You know, turmoil that we're all going through because yeah, the world is crazy and if anything it's getting more crazy, isn't it? I think.

[00:23:59] **Scott:** Yeah, , as we said in recent episode as well, it's accepting. That change is gonna happen and is happening around you and try not to feel threatened so much by it. And the only way to do that is, as you said, control what you can and realize what is within your control and what isn't.

[00:24:15] **Andrew:** Yeah.

[00:24:16] **Scott:** And focus on, you know, the things that matter.

[00:24:19] **Andrew:** Completely. Work is broken. For many people, work is broken the way we work. So what can we do as individuals, uh, to cope with this, this chaos? Um, and that's what we'll do. So next episode, I think we're gonna start with winning the morning. So how can you come in and start the day and be more focused, more, you know, secure and sort of have intentions about how you're gonna act that day?

So that's what we're gonna talk about in the next episode.

Thank you for listening to the Work Unraveled podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next one.

If 

[00:24:53] **Scott:** you'd like Andrew or me to help you or your business, 

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Thanks, and until the next time.