266: Rethinking work with Josh Drean

25th July 2025 • Happier At Work • Aoife O'Brien

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:00:02

Josh, welcome to the Happier at Work podcast. I'm so thrilled to have this conversation with you today. Do you want to let people know a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you're doing today?

Josh Drean [: 00:00:13

Yeah. Aoife, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be on the pod. I've been listening avidly and I absolutely love the work that you're doing. I think our ethos are completely aligned. I love employee experience, design, employee engagement. I like to refer to it mostly as workforce experience, but how do we design an environment and a work process that brings happiness and satisfaction to employees? So I'm happy to dig into my own little flavour of that and how emerging technologies can facilitate that. I am co-founder of the Work3 Institute, where we marry emerging technologies with workforce strategies.

Josh Drean [: 00:00:52

I am co-author of the book 'Employment is Dead: How Emerging Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way that We Work' , published with Harvard Business Review Press. I am father to three children, which keep me very busy. Three boys. They are my main work that I do. Yeah, I think how I fell into this space is while I was a student, I was building a startup out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. And what we wanted to build was, we called it pioneering sentiment analysis in real time. Me and my co-founder looked at these, you know, employee engagement surveys and we're like, this just doesn't make sense. You run a long survey that employees don't want to fill out, don't want to be honest on, it's only once a year.

Josh Drean [: 00:01:40

So it's only one touch point once a year to see how employees are feeling, how they're doing at work, and it didn't seem like anyone was doing a good job turning those results, that feedback into action, and so we wanted to kind of get ahead of it by, let's ask a non invasive question once a day and see if we can't get more granular on the feedback. Like, what time of day are people most engaged? What meetings do they probably disengage in? What are the cycles? What are the patterns? We got really excited about this tool and we started, you know, piloting it with these companies. And as young students, you know, we just naturally thought that companies really cared or really wanted to know how employees are feeling, and unfortunately, we learned the hard way that a lot of times companies don't. We had a pilot group one time, you know, just decided they were going to drop out. They didn't want to run the surveys because they were afraid what they were going to hear from employees.

Josh Drean [: 00:02:42

They kind of had a gut feeling, right. Of how employees were feeling at the organisation. They didn't want to, you know, crystallise that into feedback. We had another company who ran the survey and then saw the results and buried them. They didn't want anyone to see them. They didn't transparently share them with employees, and we started to notice, like, the message you're sending to employees is detrimental. You're,

Josh Drean [: 00:03:06

you're asking for honest feedback and you are burying the results, and unfortunately, it gets even worse that some companies would use that feedback against employees, right. It's an anonymous survey, as employees truly don't believe. And then they go out and they are afraid that if they say how they really feel, that it will be used as means for termination. So it was my first as a young student, you know, ignorant and happy, realising that, like, there are companies doing it right, for sure, but the vast majority of companies seem to not want to know how employees are feeling because it can feel threatening.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:03:46

It's like there's so much that I want to unpack from what you've just introduced there, and I think for me, it's taking a step back to what you spoke about a second ago. This, how you describe it as the workforce experience, in your words. Why do you think it's important?

Josh Drean [: 00:04:02

Primarily because if we can't design an employee experience that employees want to have, AI will do it for us or they will leave for alternative work ecosystems. You look at the younger generation and they are interested in entrepreneurship. They don't trust the social work contract that seems less secure than ever before, as they're seeing mass layoffs as they are, you know, watching AI potentially take their job, watching pensions dry up, not being able to afford a living, not being able to afford a house right there, there are a lot of challenges that especially the emerging generation, the emerging workforce is facing. And if we are just using these old, traditional ways of engagement, the carrot and the stick, if you will, it's like that doesn't serve them. And so if we are not intentional about the employee experience, they will leave.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:05:00

Yeah, yeah. So in a nutshell, they'll leave. And as an organisation that's going to cost your money, basically. I'm really curious about what you're saying as this young graduate student in Harvard and realising that actually, from the sounds of it, companies don't actually care that much about this, you know, and they want to either hide. Why do you think that is? Like, what's going on there?

Josh Drean [: 00:05:28

Yeah, it's. It's Pretty simple. Took a while to kind of uncover, to be honest. But it's short term shareholder value is the name of the game.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:05:35

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:05:36

So. So when you really unpack it, right. We have all of the data right in front of us. It's like Gallup will publish this report. Disengagement is the highest it's ever been. Today, 79% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged. And that costs $7.8 trillion globally. So it's like a huge,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:05:52

91% in Ireland, 91%. Yeah. It's crazy. Only 9% of employees in Ireland are engaged.

Josh Drean [: 00:06:02

Honestly, it's probably because you are honest on the reports. I have a feeling the number is much higher, right. It is, it is dismal to hear those numbers. And we have the solution right in front of us, right. A happy employee is a productive employee.

Josh Drean [: 00:06:20

Productivity equals roi.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:06:23

Yeah, but it's the short-term focus.

Josh Drean [: 00:06:25

It's this balance, right. Of like, well, that takes a long time. Culture is hard to build. It takes a long time. We have these deliverables for Q3 that have to get done. Like any dollar extra that we spend on the employee experience, whether it's into their salary or for benefits, is a dollar taken away from shareholders. And so we've kind of created this system that doesn't serve employees. Even though I think about how obsessed we are about the customer experience, like, we gotta nail it because they have options and they are going to take their business elsewhere if we can't get it.

Josh Drean [: 00:07:00

And yet when we look at the employee experience, it feels like we're still treating them like office equipment.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:07:05

Yeah. And I often think when I think about happiness at work, it's happier employees equal happier customers, if you can keep your employees happy, they're the ones who are keeping the customers happy. And you want to have customers because if you don't have customers, then you don't have a business. And if you don't have employees, you also don't have a business. And you know, we won't go down the AI road just yet. Like, AI can't do every single thing in your organisation for you.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:07:35

You do still have to have that human I think for now anyway. Touch wood. For the time being, we still need humans to work in organisations. So this focus on the short term and taking that money away at the expense of longer term shareholder value, like, that's really what's driving this.

Josh Drean [: 00:07:54

100%, and I think it was all exposed and laid bare during the Pandemic. It's very interesting to see a lot of companies who were paying lip service to the employee experience. And especially you'll notice when everyone went remote, forced to because of the pandemic,

Josh Drean [: 00:08:12

it was like, we are going to keep it this way because we care about our employees and we want them to be happy. So remote work is here to stay. And look how long that lasted. Yes, it's this,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:08:24

Now we're back to the office people. Five days a week, please.

Josh Drean [: 00:08:28

Yeah, that's it. And when you see it, the pendulum swung so hard from the great resignation over to an employer's market, right. Employees are staying longer their job. There's less options. The job market is absolutely horrendous right now. And they leverage their power to do things like lowball candidates because they might be desperate or threaten employees who are completely burned out within the organisation with a potential layoff. You need to perform more.

Josh Drean [: 00:08:58

They will quiet promote, which is you get a promotion with the extra job responsibilities, but you don't get the pay bump, and

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:09:07

Oh I've been there, you get it on paper but you don't get it in paper.

Josh Drean [: 00:09:11

I like that. Yes, exactly. That's perfect. That. Let. Let that be the title of the episode. And. And the thing that I find interesting is like you find this balance between trust and control within organisations.

Josh Drean [: 00:09:27

Like the more you seek to control employees, quiet promote, tell them, tell them you know exactly how they need to be micromanaged them, they're going to find ways to push back against that. And we're seeing an entire generation quiet quit. Which is you can lead a horse to water. You can't make them drink.

Josh Drean [: 00:09:46

You can bring us back to the office. You can't make us work. And so TikTok is flooded with videos of younger generation just pretending to be productive. And that is bad for their career development. It is bad for the productivity of the company. And yet we're just doing it, you know, like there's no relative, relatively no change.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:10:08

And yet it's funny for me watching those videos because I can relate and remember what it was like working in that kind of environment as well. Josh, something tells me from everything that you're saying here that you have some answers in relation to what we can actually do to address some of these things. Maybe take us on the journey from, okay, I have this realisation that once a year survey is not good and then a more frequent survey, actually a lot of companies don't really care enough to want to know that because it's all about the short term and then taking the leap into what you're doing now.

Josh Drean [: 00:10:46

Yeah. It's funny, when I was first showing the, the base model of our tool to my wife, so excited I was like, look at all the things that it can do, look at the survey, how it pops up. She's a marriage and family therapist and after I showed her it, her only response was, it sounds kind of silly that you would build relationships at work through a survey. And it really stuck with me because when you look at what employment actually is, it's not a relationship, it's a contract.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:11:18

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:11:18

From the beginning of the industrial age, it was just a contract that we signed. You are giving me X amount of hours every single day and I will give you Y amount of dollars. And somehow we have maintained that model through decades of evolution through to now the, you know, age of information, where a contract and sitting at a desk for nine hours a day doesn't actually equal productivity. It might have been when you were in a factory pushing a button, but we are all doing much different work. And so that is the premise of the book that we, my co author, Deborah Perry Piccione and I have written. It came out in January of this year. We're really excited about it. The title is boldly Employment is Dead.

Josh Drean [: 00:12:13

The premise is that traditional models of employment are failing to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce. That we have a lot of different expectations on what role work will play in our lives, how we fulfill that role, how we are compensated for that work, and so, to answer your question, right, this is the 10 operating principles of work 3, the non negotiables of the modern workforce. I often talk to people, leaders across the globe and I show them these 10 operating principles which are, you know, as I said, it's partnership, moving beyond the contract to working with a company not for a company. Transparency, autonomy, having ownership over the work that you do, decision making, power, flexibility, upskilling, incentives, interoperability and community. We don't have to touch on all of these, but they are demanding a different type of work.

Josh Drean [: 00:13:20

They want a relationship. They want to bring their full selves to work. They want to be able to work according to their circadian rhythm, not have to sit at a desk 9 to 5 and then try to figure out how to juggle all the domestic responsibilities while they're being emailed after hours by their boss, right, like there's this always on 24 7 culture that has creeped up, that has changed the game around, what it means to have a 9 to 5. And so I believe that the companies that are willing to take a hard look at the way that they've organised work and are willing to make some changes specifically around the relationship that they have with their employees, that those are going to be the companies that are going to win regardless of what AI brings. And,

Josh Drean [: 00:14:03

and might I say that we are seeing it play out spectacularly right now to companies who are holding to their values and those who are changing with, you know, political tides.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:14:12

Yeah. Any examples that you'd like to share from what's going on?

Josh Drean [: 00:14:18

I, you know, just comes to mind because I stay tuned on the large corporations. You watch the difference between Target, say Target and Costco right now. Target decided to abandon quietly their DE and I efforts didn't sit well with their target audience at all. And you know, they have been weeks now of just client, customers boycotting, not shopping at the store anymore, reclaiming kind of their funding, and it's just a mess, right. You can see their value dipping. Whereas Costco pulled all of their shareholders together and made a vote, and they overwhelmingly voted to keep their De and I efforts, which showed their clients and their customers that they truly matter. And, you know, lines are out the door at Costco.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:15:10

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:15:11

So that could be a just one example of what it looks like to, to change.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:15:17

But dare I say, for a retailer, surely you want the people in your organisation to be representative of your customers, and your customers are representative of the population, and therefore you need to have some sort of DE and I policy in your organisation in order to support that, in order to reflect that, in order to help people to grow at work.

Josh Drean [: 00:15:39

Aoife, that logic is so simple and so sound. Thank you for just saying it how it is. Wow. If only we could do that, right?

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:15:48

If only we could do that. If only we had a choice in the matter. If only we could decide for ourselves what to do. Isn't that it. Josh, something I picked up on before you shared the operating principles is this idea of needs and expectations. So to give a bit of context, the research I did as part of my master's, I looked at needs satisfaction specifically at work, and so I looked at our universal needs through the self determination theory,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:16:15

so our need for autonomy, relatedness and competence, and beyond just the satisfaction of that need, it's the balance. So you mentioned about control and trust, whereas I'm looking at things like direction and control. So giving people control over what they're doing and how they're doing it, but also providing them with the guidance and direction of what it is that they need to deliver on and being really clear and setting those clear expectations. And interestingly, on the topic of expectations, last week I ran a webinar all about expectations. The expectations we have of ourselves, the expectations we place on others, and the expectations that others have on us. Because I think that those kinds of things shape our experience of work. And now here you are sharing that same kind of language as well. So I just wanted to reinforce the importance of needs and expectations for what it is that we're talking about before we kind of go into some of the operating principles.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:17:12

Anything to add on what I've said?

Josh Drean [: 00:17:14

Yeah, I mean, we're actually jumping right into the operating principles. As you mentioned that, right. Autonomy is, is a, is a big part of that, right? Again, work has been designed to be. We're button pushers. You have a job description you fit within that job description. You're probably doing 1% of what you really like to do.

Josh Drean [: 00:17:34

The rest is just like bureaucratic, you know, like it's, it's inefficient. And so when we talk about autonomy, this is giving employees the ability to make decisions, quickly and efficiently, confidently based on their potential role. Like they know that their contribution matters. And with the right systems in place, you can empower them to do their best work. I think a great example is Bill Anderson with Bayer last year. He's the CEO of Bayer and last year they did away with middle management and threw out 99% of their corporate handbook. The reason why is because he said increasingly they couldn't get anything done. It was just too hard to get ideas approved.

Josh Drean [: 00:18:16

There were too many, you know, too much red tape, too many layers of approval. And so the idea was to kind of give them this dynamic shared ownership is what they call it. The idea is to give them the autonomy to do the work that we have entrusted them to do and to trust that they can do it without having to micromanage them.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:18:39

Yes, I love that. Sounds like it was really bureaucratic before. And I've been there working in an organisation where to try and send a corporate email, you have to get approval from a 40,000 person organisation, we have to get approval from one of two people based in the US for a marketing email to be sent to the local clients in Ireland, so I have definitely been there. And I wish that that company had thrown out the corporate handbook as well.

Josh Drean [: 00:19:12

That is rough. My goodness.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:19:14

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:19:15

Talk about really trusting your people.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:19:17

You can talk about how long it takes to get approved. I think the, the reasoning behind it, I do understand, the reasoning behind it is to make sure we use the proper branding. It would have been before the GDPR rules and regulations around that, but it was probably something to do with data privacy and how we used. And I think only one or two people had access to use the software as well.

Josh Drean [: 00:19:38

Justify it however you want, Aoife. Justify it however you want. It sounds very, for a company that large, it sounds like they have a hard time delegating, but that's just my surface level opinion.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:19:52

So, back to the operating principles then. Are there any. I. I'm imagining that they're all really important and trying to pick one is maybe like trying to pick one of your children. But are there some that stand out more than others or that some are more important in specific context, for example in business?

Josh Drean [: 00:20:14

Yeah. Well, I would say that some are more relevant right now and some will be much more relevant down, down the road. So flexibility right now is extremely relevant, right. It was. Everyone started working remote. We kind of cracked the code on what that looked like.

Josh Drean [: 00:20:30

The reports seemed to show that remote work works. And then we saw the RTO movement of companies bringing everyone back. And I loved how they pinned it on company culture just we're better when we're altogether. When we're in the room, we can be more creative and more productive together. And when you really unpack that, it's like you can't pull the wall over employees eyes. They know that the culture is not what you say it is because they're in the trenches experiencing the subculture of the organisation or you know, they can read the reports, they can see that real estate becomes a part of the decision or being able to control what you are doing and see everything that you are working on, trusting that what you're doing at home, like let's move away from this. Let's measure time spent at the office to let's measure the output.

Josh Drean [: 00:21:25

Let's measure,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:21:27

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:21:27

the value that you generated. That's a very different thing. It's just hard to. It's hard to embrace that if you are still kind of operating on this traditional model.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:21:35

Yeah. And I think. Well, there's a few things I think to unpack with that, Josh. It is, it's defining clearly here's the outcomes that we expect you to produce. But going back to this idea of expectations that requires that a leader sets those really clear expectations and knows what is expected of them. And when there's a lack of clarity around that, I think it makes it much harder to. To talk about those kinds of things. And it's much easier to measure how long someone is in the office or how long they're active on their laptop or whatever it might be to say and to measure that as.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:22:09

As what, as productivity, as what they're actually producing. But that's, as you and I both know, that's not the case. So it is. It's a mindset shift to move over to this. What are the outcomes I'm expected to deliver? And if I deliver those outcomes in two hours, then that's okay, you know, can I move on to something else? Or how, how does that work? And if I have this extra time because I've delivered on what I said I would deliver on, then it's an opportunity to redefine my role, or it's an opportunity to work on something that I'm more passionate about or catch up on some of that admin that is,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:22:45

that's been backing up as well. I think the big challenge is defining what those outcomes really are without the clarity that you really need and shifting priorities as well as both of us, I think. Yeah, know, yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:23:00

Well, I think, Aoife, what you're touching on here is kind of. Kind of the technology side of things that we touch on in the book, right? How do we, how do we give employees some of these things? And what you're, what you're saying here is very important, right? It's that, like, we need to define what is the real problem here. Is it defining a job role better? Is it time management? Is it value generation itself as it hooks up to the rest of the organisation? And what's exciting is that AI can help with a lot of this. And this concept of a smart contract can help as well, which is AI. Let's take a scenario where, like, you have a group of people who all have a vision on where they want to go and how they want to get there, who does what work? How fast are they doing the work? There's a lot of work to do to get it into scope, but if you could use AI to help you get it there, and even more so if you had a smart contract, when I say smart contract, all this is, is like a digital contract,

Josh Drean [: 00:24:03

it self-executes, meaning once you hit a milestone, it executes. It can deliver compensation, it can deliver the next piece of the work. What, whatever you decide the smart contract says and does can help you do it. And so if we're talking a little bit further down the road, there is a work environment where that job isn't HR's department that is, you know, the work of AI and the smart contracts. And then me as not even an employee of an organisation. I could be a core contributor, which is, you know, I come and go and contribute to this one organisation. I could be a bounty hunter as we call it, call it in word, in work three, which is, let me work on some projects at this organisation while I'm working on some projects over here. While I'm working on some projects over here.

Josh Drean [: 00:24:54

I'm just highly specialised skills. I can jump and work how I want. And now all of a sudden the work starts to, it's still done by humans, but it is organized by AI, which is kind of an interesting take on the future of work, I think.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:25:09

I mean, I think that's such a brilliant idea. Can we take maybe a little step back and address some of the fears that some people have when it comes to AI? Like for me, I don't know how long I've been using it, but it's been a couple, at least a couple of years now. I can't imagine life without it. I've introduced some of my friends to AI only very recently and they're saying the same thing. I don't know how I actually existed before because I can get so much more done now that I have AI. So maybe addressing some of the resistance around embracing AI in how we organise work and how we get stuff done. First of all, and interestingly, I heard Sam Altman talking about CHAT GPT earlier today.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:25:53

It was just a snippet of a video and he was saying different generations use ChatGPT for different functions. So older generations, like I think he was saying, like people in their 40s like myself are using AI like Google and they'll just type in something that they would have previously put into Google. Whereas the kind of 20 and 30 year olds are using it for life advice and then the college students are using it as an entire operating system because they're the digital natives and they're used to just embracing these new technologies. So maybe talk about some of the resistance around using AI generally and, and maybe more specifically in how, how we organise our work and then we can talk about some of the solutions around that.

Josh Drean [: 00:26:39

Yeah, I did see that clip as well. I think it was Sam Altman who was saying that. And I, I, he nailed me as a millennial. The 30s and 40 year olds using it this way, I'm like, yep, yep. And then the younger generation using it as an operational system. It is, it is fascinating to see that, to hear it and what does that even mean? Right?

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:27:01

I went straight on to Chat GPT and I said, how can I use Chat GPT as an operating system? So now I have, I'm setting it up as an operating system.

Josh Drean [: 00:27:11

There you go. I think the first step is giving it a name, right? Like hey Johnny or whatever.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:27:16

Like for me it's Chat GPT and it's, and it's totally a guy, I don't know why it is, but it's is.

Josh Drean [: 00:27:22

That's too funny. Yeah, there's a lot there. As someone who is fascinated about work specifically and how AI is shifting work, I think the question comes up a lot, will AI take our jobs? And the fact that no one can give a straight answer right now is enough to fear and honestly fear away because that's where we are at. But my hot take on it is that having used AI deeply for writing books and doing other things, it's an incredible tool. It is a game changing tool. It does not replace us. I think the companies that are sold on AI will replace my workforce are completely missing the point because guess what, they are kind of the contract generation. Like they look at employees as a tool to get a job done.

Josh Drean [: 00:28:16

They look at their workforce as a very extensive, expensive overhead. And so if you look at work as it stands today, right, we're just task completers, we're just button pushers. And so if you are looking for a button pusher, a task completer, AI, yeah, will replace those roles because it's really good at automation, it's really good at completing tasks. But that's not what we're good at. That's not what we went to college for. That's not, you know, there's so much more there that we just have yet to tap into. What about the critical thinking? What about the collaboration? What about building trust? Here's a great example that's playing out right now in spectacular fashion on TikTok. This concept of an AI interview just hit the shelves and these companies are paying lots of money to as they are looking for a candidate to hire.

Josh Drean [: 00:29:10

The idea is what if we could scale the amount of interviews we did to AI? And so now you're seeing like these TikTokers post. I was so excited, I finally got an interview and it was just an AI chat bot and there's videos of them glitching out on a word and it never finishes and they never got to get it right. And so I think from an HR perspective, sure, like it sounds nice to be able to scale that up and get more people data into the system. However, I think we are sacrificing this fundamental part of hiring, which is that human connection. And if your candidate feels like you're using AI as a proxy for human interaction, it can feel like you're missing the point. It can feel like I wouldn't want to work for you because that's not what I'm into. And if AI really is taking my job, why is AI not just doing the job and you're looking for a candidate? Right. So it's.

Josh Drean [: 00:30:00

I, I want to call BS a little bit on a lot of that because those who have the mindset of work is a relationship, our people matter. We are learning how to engage, Gen Z are going to be doing much better than those who are trying to outsource everything to AI and think that that's going to solve all their problems.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:30:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I don't have to deal with people and AI is just pushing buttons for me, then I'm going to be really successful and earn loads of money. It's like, no, that's not how it works. Because not only is work built on relationships, sales are built on relationships as well. So you need to have people building those genuine connections with, with customers in order to have a successful company. I would argue.

Josh Drean [: 00:30:43

Yeah. And here's a, here's an interesting article that came out. It was called entitled Is AI driving efficiency or fueling burnout? It essentially stated that 96% all, all of C Suite leadership expect AI tools to increase the company's overall productivity. But 47% of employees who are actually using AI say they don't know how to use it to meet their employers, productivity expectations. And then you have 77% saying that these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload. I thought the point of AI was to reduce workloads. And the problem is that we're chasing the shiny rock, right? We're chasing this new technology, we're purchasing it, we're putting it in the hands of employees, and we're asking them to pull productivity out of thin air. And that is not how you will realise the expected productivity gains of AI.

Josh Drean [: 00:31:33

You have to be strategic. And the strategy that you use is most likely going to be something that you've been using for a long time. It's who are the people, the stakeholders, what's the process? And once we have all those pieces in place, then let's go find the tools that can help us get there, not the other way around.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:31:52

Yes. Yeah. And I was again listening to another podcast recently where they talked about exactly the same thing, that sometimes we find the tool and we try and shoehorn what it is that we're doing into the tool rather than thinking what's the problem that we're trying to solve here? And what's the best tool to solve that problem? Not just look to see what's the most popular tool at the moment. And let's get that and try and shoehorn it. Dare I say as well, Josh, that beyond just trying to understand what we're trying to solve here, it's comes back to this idea of expectations and having that clarity to begin with. So what are the expected outcomes here and how to teach people how to use this stuff?

Josh Drean [: 00:32:36

Yeah. Another 10 operating principles is upskilling. Right. That half life of skills. I think someone said that, you know, with AI skills will be obsolete every two years now, which is hard to hear, especially when you have, you know, I just spent four years going to school, getting my degree, can't find a job right now. Lots of student debt.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:32:59

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:33:00

No jobs are available, right. There's, there's a lot of challenges, right, right, right there. And so I, I, there, there's two camps here. We're going to oversimplify things.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:33:13

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:33:13

There's the camp that believes that AI is the solve to all of our workforce problems and they're going to do everything they can to run at it and automate it. And you know, that's your prerogative, go. There are other companies who are like, we're going to use AI. However, we are going to use it to augment the potential of our people. We're going to upskill them. We're going to teach them how to use it so well that they 10x their productivity, 50x their productivity 100x, right.

Josh Drean [: 00:33:45

So I, I find the reductionist or saving on our headcount isn't going to work as well as, wow. We have these people, they are incredible and they are going to do amazing things with AI. Let's empower them is a much more important approach.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:34:00

Yeah. Like let's help them like you say to 10x or 100x their productivity by using AI as opposed to AI is going to replace them and their jobs. It's like, no, let's take away the mundane, repetitive tasks that AI could potentially do. Give them the human tasks, the critical thinking, the relationship building and let's see where we can take our organisation that way. So I love, I love that approach. Do you have any specific recommendations on how to use AI in the workplace, to, to do that?

Josh Drean [: 00:34:36

Yeah. I mean, the first step is if you have never used AI, start using it. Right. Like, it sounds like you were a bit of an early adopter, ifa you were sharing around with your friends and kind of helping people understand how it feels, where it's at, starting to recognise its limitations. I think that was a big part for me is like, oh, so this isn't the big old amazing thing that everyone's been talking about. And I fully recognise that, like we could both be completely wrong. You know, maybe like the AI apocalypse is upon us and the robots are taking over. Yeah, it very well could be.

Josh Drean [: 00:35:13

I don't know if that is a great way to live.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:35:16

Skynet is calling.

Josh Drean [: 00:35:17

Skynet, yes. We're just sitting here twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it. I think pushing the ball forward in a positive way using AI is the right fit. But I would say again, it's so basic. It's just like you have to understand how to use it before you can even formulate expectations.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:35:35

Yeah.

Josh Drean [: 00:35:36

You need to get it into the hands of your employees so that they can be using it. I would say a huge thing that a lot of companies can do right now, that I guarantee you probably aren't, is understand how your employees are using AI today to do their normal job functions, because I, I guarantee there are. I've got a presentation. I'm plugging it into CHAT GPT to see how I can make it better. I've got an email to send. I'm plugging it in to make sure that it's not as angry as it might otherwise be. And when you start to learn those nuances, you start to realise like, oh well, you're actually automating 80% of your job.

Josh Drean [: 00:36:10

Let's like carve out the rest of your time doing creative work, doing some of the stuff that matters much more than the COG used to be. How can you be innovative? How can you do things differently? And that's just touching the surface, right. What we do at the work3 institute is where are you at at your organisation? A lot of times we start with a one-on-one course which is run an employee engagement survey. You haven't done one. Do sentiment analysis in real time. Here's the tool. Then there's like a 201 which is like, let's figure out how to use AI.

Josh Drean [: 00:36:45

And then we have full blown companies who are working on a Web3 model, which is they are a decentralised, autonomous organisation. They run outside of leadership, they have no managers. It's very flat. It's very transparent. They are working in a way that everyone has decision making power at the organisation. Anyone can propose a decision that needs to be made. You can vote immediately on a tool called Snapshot. And a smart contract executes the direction that the company heads.

Josh Drean [: 00:37:18

If you want to talk about moving with speed and agility, that's where it's happening.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:37:25

Yeah, I mean that sounds incredible and I was going to bring us on to that because I know your book talks more than just about AI it's about disruptive technology in general. So do you want to introduce people a little bit more to that concept of what does that mean for the workplace and work of the future and what to expect? Which from where I'm sitting and what you're talking about earlier, like this idea of, it sounds kind of like the gig economy, but a much more organised way of doing it. Like that sounds like a perfect solution for someone like me.

Josh Drean [: 00:37:58

That's exactly right. It's the gig economy on steroids. It's the Web3 version of the gig economy. Simply put, the premise for me starts with again, the employee expectations, the tenant operating principles. They don't want to work in an office. They want to have autonomy. They want to have ownership over the work. Like if they are generating a lot of value for the company, they feel like they should be compensated accordingly.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:38:20

Yes.

Josh Drean [: 00:38:21

And so if you can't give them that within a traditional employment model, which is traditionally extractive, again, I got you for nine hours. You do exactly what I say. Nothing outside of that. You might have a good idea every once in a while, but you're not incentivised to tell me about it because we're just going to steal it and use it for our own benefit. But if you change the narrative to,

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:38:41

You're paying for people's hands, rather than their brains and their hearts.

Josh Drean [: 00:38:43

Another title for the episode if that's that was probably like the top of your, your, your paper. But I, I, I love that a lot. I think that's really it, right? Like the gig economy is, is, is I will say this, the decentralised gig economy. And if we need to make the connection there a centralised organisation is essentially there are a few decision makers at top who say exactly what needs to happen at the organisation. They make all the decisions and they technically they benefit from all of the revenue. A decentralised organisation means more of a peer-to-peer relationship where if I provide you a service, it's a transaction between you and me. There's no, we don't need no middleman for that.

Josh Drean [: 00:39:28

That's why, you know, the gig economy or the creator economy or the economy of like, let's look at Uber or Airbnb. You have a service that you are providing. There's this middleman sitting there that takes a large chunk of the revenues in order to operate. And so, like, it's becoming less and less viable to be, you know, a driver for this company as your main source of income. If you had a decentralised version of this, it would be all on the blockchain. What that means is that the app runs independent of, you know, the people who are in charge of that app. Or when you get paid, you actually get a majority of the money that you made instead of upwork, which is the main gig economy platform, taking a large cut of that. Not only that, it kind of creates this world.

Josh Drean [: 00:40:21

We already talked about this a little bit. Is like, what if you could verify your skills instantaneously? Right now you can't. You have a resume that you put in front of an employer, and they might believe you or they might not, and you might have lied or you. We. We don't know. Right. How can we verify that you have those skills? Well, what if, you know, a Web3 model for work can verify? It's like you have done, earned these skills, you have worked with these clients. It's now immutably imprinted on the blockchain.

Josh Drean [: 00:40:50

What that means is now AI can actually match you with projects across several different organisations that actually match your skill set perfectly. Oh, and by the way, you're a single mother and you only want to work for three hours during the day. Put that in your preferences. Yeah, and you go off and you do it. You can work as much or as little as possible, and this is independent of working directly for an organisation. A lot of questions come up around this of like, what about the ethics? What about how will I get my benefits? But I think that there are individuals like Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who are big proponents of this web3 gig economy. And he, he predicts that by 2034, all jobs will be obsolete.

Josh Drean [: 00:41:34

And don't, he's not saying AI will take your job. What he's saying is that it will actually be more lucrative and pay more for you to work in this model once the technology is officially in place.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:41:45

Okay, yeah, no, you've intrigued me enough. And I know before we hit the record button, we had a brief chat about what this means. And interestingly, very early in my business journey, I shared some of those ideas that we're talking about now with someone and I guess it was the wrong person because she just couldn't get what I was talking about. And it just leads me to believe that for a long time I've been speaking to the wrong people. They just don't, they don't see the opportunity, they don't see the potential in what these kinds of things and being able to verify people's skills and like the added thing of knowing how many of those skills exist and therefore how valuable those skills are, I think is really, really important as well. So if you have a verifiable skill of, I think coding is probably an easier one to talk about because you could probably verify it much more easily and say there's only a handful of people in your location or in this market that are pool of people that, that we're looking in, then that skill becomes a lot more valuable than if it, if you had that same skill but in a saturated market.

Josh Drean [: 00:42:55

Yeah, exactly. I, I, I think we are definitely moving away from experience to skills-based learning.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:43:04

Yeah. Because experience means nothing. Experience, the number of years of experience means nothing.

Josh Drean [: 00:43:11

Yeah, I mean I've got my piece of paper on the wall right here. This is my college degree. Can I tell you exactly, like can I verify that I learned anything there? I have maybe some transcripts that might help, but that doesn't translate. And the sad part is that a lot of companies are abandoning the, you know, the college degree requirement because they're finding exactly that we don't know if you have the skill or not. And so you're seeing at least in the hiring process an abandoning of experience-based hiring to skills-based hiring. And if you want to take that very literally, like here's your action step within your organisation if you want to start implementing an internal talent marketplace like Gloat or Fuel 50, these are companies that will help you find untapped resources and skills at your organisation. It will help you pull teams together that you might not have seen before. It will, it's essentially an internal gig economy if you will.

Josh Drean [: 00:44:09

And you can essentially allow employees to, I'm not quite sure the, the verification process there, but once you have verified that you have the skill now you will be eligible to work on projects that you never would have had a chance to otherwise. Because again, a manager sitting over you that says no or you're just siloed within your department.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:44:29

Yeah, we don't have visibility on what's happening in, in these other areas, you don't even know and you're working on something, maybe it's not to your strength or you don't have that skill particularly, and I think we alluded to it at the start of the conversation, that there's so much untapped potential. You're working on maybe 10% of some, what you could potentially do if you're unleashed to do all the things that you're really brilliant at. Josh, I think we could continue this conversation for hours, but in the interest of time, is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap things up?

Josh Drean [: 00:45:05

There's obviously a lot to go through, but I do, at the end here, kind of think about your final question, which I believe is.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:45:16

What does happier at work mean to you?

Josh Drean [: 00:45:19

Yeah. Yeah. What. What does being happier at work? It goes back to meaning and purpose. For me. Is the work that you're doing meaningful? Are you connected to a bigger purpose? Do you feel like you are contributing to something bigger than just yourself? I feel like that is an innate human desire, and we are naturally industrious.

Josh Drean [: 00:45:39

We naturally want to work hard. And so when you blame this entire, you know, disengaged workforce, they don't want to work anymore. I don't think that covers the whole picture. I think the picture is if we cannot figure out how to unlock that meaning and purpose for employees, they're not going to be incentivised to work harder for us. And I hate the idea of saying, come work for us. Like, work for you leading into a bigger group that allows us to together create meaning and purpose while we are here on this earth. I think that is where true happiness comes from.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:46:16

Brilliant. I love that. And if people want to find out more about you, about the book, what's the best way they can do that?

Josh Drean [: 00:46:24

Yeah, you can pick up the book on Amazon. I am highly active on my socials at joshdren. You'd probably hear from me quicker if you reached out to me on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. But I'm also on LinkedIn. Please send me a message. I would love to continue the conversation.

Aoife O'Brien [: 00:46:40

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today and your insights. I love this. And as my action point, I'm going to start researching everything Web3 now to figure out, well, how do I understand more about this and what the future of work might actually look like?

Josh Drean [: 00:46:56

That's awesome. Aoife. Thank you so much for having me.

Share Episode

Shownotes

Transcripts

Follow

Links

Chapters

Video

More from YouTube