[MUSIC] Let's move to the second one, which is about where we work and about the hours that we keep. Now again, some very obvious changes going on. First of all, we have technology makes it possible for us to work on a virtual basis. In other words, if I want to work from home and I want to phone in or I want to Skype in or I want to be on email all day, you know, for the large part, I can do that. When I'm teaching my students I can't do that but obviously the whole purpose of a MOOC like this one is to some degree, think about ways of doing things which used to be done in person. Online. Generation Y employees are also, have a point of view on the, kind of, the future workplace, you know? Generation Y employees have, have many many different, sort of, concerns and challenges, one is they expect much greater freedom in the workplace than perhaps their predecessors in previous generations. They also are wrapped up in this whole sustainability agenda and this notion that everybody should commute into a big city like, like London, is somehow not, not as attractive as perhaps it used to be. So, we're going to see enormous pressure on organizations to allow people to work. From home more, to work in different locations, particularly away from big cities and some companies, IBM is famous for this, have for many many decades actually, encouraged some level of telecommunication, telecumminc telcecom. I'm sorry, excuse me, telecommuting and virtual work, where people choose the place they work, where people choose the hours that they work. That is going to continue to happen. However, it is worth acknowledging, as with all these things, that there are also tensions or forces pushing the other way. Just last year, Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo! Made quite a name for herself. Not all in a good way. For basically forcing a lot of the Yahoo! employees to come back to work. She found that they've actually taken this notion of telecommuting too far. An awful lot of them were working away from the office. And she said, look, for the moment anyway, we need to bring you back because we've lost the ethos of this company. We've lost a good sense of how to collaborate and work effectively together. So, she said, essentially. That Yahoo! had taken this notion of virtual working too far and that people were no longer talking to each other. So as with all sorts of things, a balance is required. It's definitely easier nowadays for all of us to do at least part of our work in a place and time of our choosing. But there's inevitably going to be some coordination required. So there is definitely room for more virtual working, but it won't take us a long way away from the model that we've known in the past. Third and finally, how is work going to vary over our working lives? Well again, look at the forces we've been talking about, particularly. The rise of the so-called Generation Y employees, the people who were born after 1980. You know, I'm from the Baby Boom, Boomer generation. You know, our, our point of view was essentially that, you know, you, you joined a company. You stayed with that company, if not for life, for a, a big chunk of time. And you expected that company to more or less. Sort out my career for me. What do Gen Y employees expect? Well, certainly they don't expect a job for life. They certainly don't expect to work for one company for more than a, a few years. And of course, a large chunk of them expect to work for themselves. Certainly, they want to work for themselves. So, working for a company for a long period of time is. Decreasingly likely to be happening. What does that mean? Of course it means that companies have to think much more creatively about making work exciting and interesting rather than assuming that they are going to hold on to people for the majority of their working lives. Gen Y employees also expect meaningful work, often linked to the sustainability agenda. So, a lot of companies are deliberately creating particular initiatives and activities programs where people can spend a portion of their jobs actually working for charitable causes alongside their day to day work. So, we're starting to see some experimentation from companies to try to make work. A little bit different. Experimenting with slightly different career structures. Not necessarily working on the basis that people will join in age 21 or 18 and stay in a kind of a traditional career all the way through. And of course we're starting to see people saying to themselves well why would I, why would I. Sign up for a company for, for 30 or 40 years. I want to have what's sometimes called, a portfolio career. I want to have a career where I do different things at different parts of my job. I want to, perhaps, have multiple jobs at the same time, and, perhaps, contract with three or four different companies for doing different parts of it. Now, all these trends are happening. But, all of them are happening in opposition to the way that companies historically have structured and in opposition to the way that, I think, the educational system has traditionally worked. So it feels like we're in the point where we're starting to see some adaptation being made. So that these alternative approaches are, are being made more possible. But I will be honest with you, I don't think we've really kind of nailed this one yet. I think a lot of companies are just scratching the surface of what is possible here and it may be in the decades ahead that we start to really see some fundamental changes. In the nature of the work that we do. The hours that we work, the places in which we work and how our careers will be managed.
