This episode originally aired on July 1, 2026.
It’s been six years since workplaces were completely upended by COVID-19.
Concepts like full remote work and a new trend, “micro-shifting," would have been foreign to workers only a decade ago.
However, completely shifting how people work has some questioning what works best for them.
From unorthodox schedules going against the traditional 9 to 5 to new methods in how work gets done, how are people working in 2026?
Guests:
- Tara Weiss, business journalist and contributor, The Wall Street Journal
- Lori Kendall, director, full-time MBA program/senior lecturer in management and human resources at Ohio State University
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. A new trend in how people are working is making work-life balance much more of a true balance. Micro-shifting, or splitting your workday into highly productive chunks while doing personal things outside of those chunks has become popular across the country. Never heard of micro-shifting? Well, you're not alone, but you may be doing it anyway if you leave work early for an appointment and finish things up at home hours later. Why exactly are employees micro-shifting? And is it indicative of larger trends in the American workplace? Joining us now is Tara Weiss, business journalist and contributor for the Wall Street Journal. Welcome to the show, Tara.
Tara Weiss: Hi, thanks for having me Amy.
Juravich: So you wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on micro shifting. Can you explain it a little more? I don't know if I did a good job there in the introduction of explaining it.
Weiss: No, you did a great job. You did a great job, but basically, basically it's where you're working to get your outcome, not working to be at your desk for eight hours. And so however that however you need to do that work, whether it's in three hour chunks, I spoke to a guy who works best in two hour chunks. The idea is that you're really focused in those chunks of time when you're working. Some people turn their email notifications off. They mark their calendars as busy. And sometimes this is known as deep work. And so you're doing really deep work for a period of time and then you're breaking.
Maybe you're walking the dog, you're getting some movement in. People find that if they get out from their desk after several hours of deep work, they really do better when they return to their desk after moving around, getting some exercise in. Maybe they're throwing a load of laundry in, so they're really doing that, like you said, work-life balance. And then they'll come back for another chunk of time to do that deep work, and then maybe they'll go pick the kids up. Maybe they'll dinner prep, and then a lot of times people will return back. But the key to this, the key is successfully micro-shifting so that you're not working 24-7 is setting very firm boundaries. Otherwise, you could be working until one o'clock in the morning, and we don't want anyone to do that. That goes against the philosophy of micro-shifting.
Juravich: Okay, so, so it is adjusting the typical Monday through Friday 9 to 5, but it's also not working at midnight necessarily, right?
Weiss: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Although I did speak to a couple people who are like, I do work best at midnight. But one of the things that you have to do when you work at midnight is not send an email at midnight thinking that you're gonna get a response from your coworker or your client. In fact, I spoke to one source who had a funny story. She was, you know, she is one of those people. And she said that she sent a client email out sometime after the sun had long gone down.
And the client was concerned saying, oh my God, are we working you too hard? You're working all these ridiculous hours. So one way that people find that they can do this and not make their peers or their clients feel pressure to get back ASAP is by scheduling an email for quote unquote normal business hours.
Juravich: So type it up and schedule send it at 9 a.m. Yeah, so you're typing it up at 1 in the morning But they don't need to know that
Weiss: Exactly. Isn't technology great?
Juravich: But why do you think micro-shifting has become so popular?
Weiss: I think it's a few things. I feel like so much in our lives and specifically the world of work has changed as a result of the pandemic and this is definitely one of them. Obviously during the pandemic, we learned that people can successfully work from home and the work product is not only good, but it's great. And so the technology has also helped to support that. Not only things like video conferencing, but just the technology in general has gotten so much better.
Whether it's AI or just the capabilities of connecting with people all over the globe. And so once those two factors were in place and employees were demanding that their work-life balance be enhanced, employers started experimenting. And a lot of the managers that I spoke to, people who own businesses, they're the ones who are driving this because they found that this is the best way that they work. And so for all of those reasons, particularly in outcome-driven industries, they want the best results. They don't just want you to sit there for eight hours. That's why they're exploring microshifting.
Juravich: What about the managers that expect an answer to their email right away? Do they have to just adapt and not expect someone to answer their email within five minutes?
Weiss: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, some of the managers I spoke to were like, listen, you know, I'll be giving the kids a bath and an emergency comes up. So yeah, sometimes you have to set out, step outside of those strict boundaries that you're setting. But communication seems to be key. One employer that I spoke to said that she has every new employee fill out not only like where they're located in the time zone nationally or internationally, she has them fill out times they work best.
So having an idea of when your peers are online really helps with that and setting very clear expectations about when you need to be communicating. But if a work product is due, a deadline is a deadline, and you're going to have to work outside of those boundaries sometimes.
Juravich: And, does micro-shifting work best when you have permission to do it? So if you disappear for a couple of hours and your boss truly doesn't know where you are, what if your boss doesn't KNOW you're micro- shifting?
Weiss: Yeah, I think that micro shifting only works if you have your boss's approval. I think there shouldn't be self-declared micro shifting. But one of the things that was really interesting that I learned was that because of AI technology, like scheduling technology, even retail workers can start to micro shift. And so clear communication, don't micro shift without sharing that with your boss and get approval.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the new workplace trend called micro-shifting. We're also talking about workplace culture with Tara Weiss, business journalist and contributor for the Wall Street Journal. So who is micro- shifting popular amongst? Are we talking a younger demographic? Or is everyone doing it at any age?
Weiss: I think it's less about the demographic and more about where your circumstances are in your life. Like what you're doing, are you a caregiver? And that could be caring for an elderly parents or relative or a young child. But I think, it's more about the industry you're in. Anything that's very outcome-driven tends to be more popular with micro shifting. Maybe listeners have heard of in a creative industry or in the tech industry if they're going into a sprint.
And they have to solve a very large problem, you can really only push so long before you burn out. And instead of pushing through that burnout, the idea is that if you take a break when you feel burned out, do something that reinvigorates you, whether it's physical activity or just completely changing what you're doing and chopping vegetables for dinner or taking the dog for a walk, the idea that it avoids burnout. That's what this is meant to do. If you are in an industry like mine and you're writing newspaper articles, working for three hour chunks and still making that deadline, they don't care if I'm writing it at one o'clock in the morning or one o' clock in the afternoon.
Juravich: So do you feel that micro-shifting does prevent burnout? Because you mentioned taking a break if you're starting to feel burnt out. So is this a way to get out ahead of it, the burnout?
Weiss: Yeah, that's what a lot of people I spoke to say. One of my sources who works in financial resource, excuse me, financial research, said that he would be done with all of his work and he would just still feel like he needed to sit at his desk until six o'clock so that his boss thought he was working. That same employee was saying that when they're doing their financial research there are only so many hours you can sit in front of your computer. And make cold calls and also do online research before your eyes start crossing. And so when you have the ability to work in chunks of time, the idea is to get out ahead of it.
Juravich: The burnout. And young adults, many of whom have never known a workplace before COVID-19, are now entering offices for the first time. Do you think this has led to the creation of habits like microshifting because they've only known the hybrid work or the work from home aspect?
Weiss: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think young workers tend to be leading the charge in many ways on this concept of flexibility and that work should not run your life and that if you want somebody to put out their best work product, you have to let them do that in a way that best works for them. So I think there's definitely some level of that. But I think also for Gen Xers, people who have been in the workplace for, you know, two or three decades.
They're often called the sandwich generation. So they're taking care of their elderly relatives and they're taken care of of their children. And the reality of life is that sometimes you need to pick the kids up from school. And so I think that those, it doesn't necessarily where you are in your stage of work. I think this is coming from all sides, the demand for flexibility.
Juravich: Yeah, a statistic you have in your story for the Wall Street Journal says a report found that 72% of caregivers are interested in micro-shifting compared to 28% of non-caregivers. So this is for a season in your life too.
Weiss: Yeah. I think that that's true. But again, like I said, at every different season of your life, we all have different responsibilities. But don't forget that one of the reasons that people are doing this is to avoid burnout and to work when their brains work best. I'm not a night person. I will never be the person who's sitting at my desk at 9 o'clock at night burning the midnight oil. I love working in the morning. And so for somebody like me in the late afternoon, like I need to step away from my desk. I need take the dog for a walk in order to sort of push through and really do the best work that I can. And I think that with this new world of flexibility opening up, I think more people are keen on that.
Juravich: How do you prevent the infinite workday though? Because I mean, I know you have to set boundaries, but you know, I myself was working while watching a World Cup game, you know like late at night. But it's, you know there's only so many hours in the nine to five day and you got kids to pick up in those hours and sometimes you just can't get everything done. How do prevent from an infinite work day?
Weiss: So you have to be uber-disciplined. That's like rule number one that all of my sources said. A lot of times they'll block out time on their calendar. So you can't even make a meeting with a colleague if you wanted to, they don't allow it. And I think that there's like a real temptation to just come back to work and think, oh, I'm just gonna get this one more thing done. But that really goes against the point of this.
The idea is to do your best work when you do your work and have people use the term deep focus, deep concentration. And so for the three or four hours that people are working in microchips, they're singularly focused on the task at hand. One woman that I spoke to says that every day, the first thing she does is make a list. These are the three things I need to get done by 10 o'clock in the morning. And I think that when you set priorities like that, it goes a long way to not working around the clock. But I also think that in the real world, sometimes emergencies come up, clients come first, and sometimes you have to pick up that email after quote unquote work hours. It's all about flexibility, isn't it?
Juravich: I mean, but I can also see if you work from home, you can turn your email off and block off your calendar and actually work uninterrupted. You have more ability to do that than if you're in an office and someone just like approaches your desk and says, you know, do you have a minute? And it's never a minute, right? So yeah, it's harder to block yourself off.
Weiss: You know, it's so funny you say that because I work from home and I personally think that working from home is so much harder than working in an office because when the kids come home from school, you know, like they barrel in, the dog has to go out, you, know, the doorman is calling up with a grocery delivery. I miss the days of working in a office, but that might just be me.
Juravich: Well, so I work in an office, and it's an open office concept, so it's easier to get interrupted. Sometimes I have to put headphones on with white noise in order to do that deep focus.
Weiss: Yeah, no, I completely understand. I think a lot of workplaces have also come up in the post-pandemic world. I've written about this one too. They've come up with these like, almost like a phone booth and you can work in a private phone booth. I mean, it's not really a phonebooth. People probably don't even remember what that is. No, we have.
Juravich: Yeah, we have those. They're just not nearly as comfortable as my desk chair.
Weiss: Yeah, I completely understand that. But yeah, these are all just some of the like little bumps that we're going to be figuring out along the way in this, you know, brave new world of work.
Juravich: We have been talking about a new workplace trend called micro shifting, where you do work in blocks of time, but not necessarily the typical Monday through Friday, nine to five. I want to say thank you to Tara Weiss, business journalist and contributor for the Wall Street Journal. Thank you for your time today. Oh, thank you so much. Have a good one. And coming up, we're gonna talk about more, more about workplace trends and workplace culture and the way people are working and how it continues to evolve. That is when all sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. COVID-19 upended how everyone, from managers to employees, looked at offices, reversing many preconceived notions of productivity. Employees are experimenting with personalized schedules, ditching the traditional Monday through Friday nine-to-five structure, and even living in areas far from their office. What is the future of the office and how are new workplace trends affecting overall workplace culture. Joining us now to discuss this and more is Lori Kendall, Director of the Full-Time MBA Program and Senior Lecturer in Management and Human Resources at Ohio State University. Welcome to the show, Lori. Glad to be here. So we are now far off from COVID, putting everyone at home, and people are starting to find the balance between whether they work at home or in an office. You know, the jobs have changed back and forth. What do you think is the best balance? You know the 100% at home 100% in office, the flexibility, what have you found? Yeah.
Lori Kendall: The difference between the research and what's actually happening is that you've got return to office where you've 61% of US companies have formal return to offers policies and yet remote rates for hybrid work have gone up during that same time post-COVID that return to offices policies have been mandated. And so what we find is we've got about 60% are in some type of hybrid work situation. You've got then the remaining approximately 40% are divided into. Either I have to be in the office full time or I'm a fully remote employee. With slightly more full time in the office, slightly less fully remote.
Juravich: Do you find that, in your opinion, one is better than the other? The data.
Kendall: Suggests that from the purposes of stress, burnout, employee turnover, and job satisfaction, that hybrid work for the organizations that have designed hybrid work is, number one, it is a net positive for performance. It is a reduction in how people perceive stress and burnout. And employees feel that their managers trust them more. Because they're able to either micro shift.
Juravich: Or do some work from home. Tell me the difference between hybrid, though, and flexibility, because I feel like there's a difference there of whether you have a flexible schedule or you actually work an actual hybrid schedule.
Kendall: Sure. Sure. There, uh, They're two sisters of the same coin. It depends on how HR has decided to adopt. When you're working on teams and you have a lot of collaboration, you kind of want people to be in the office kind of at the same time. And so that's where a hybrid work schedule might say, hey listen, Mondays and Fridays you can work from home, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays you need to be at the office for key collaboration, key team events and less you have the additional accommodation requirement to have a flexible schedule, because you're a caregiver for what your previous guest, Tara, was talking about.
Juravich: Okay, so the idea of that flexibility can be where you're not in trouble if you're not there from nine to five exactly, right? Right, correct. And there are several companies, the state government included here in central Ohio that called people back to the office full time. Do you get a feeling that they're actually holding to that? It's hard to like check, you know, you're right. You know, are things at least still a little flexible, even if, you now, the government says everyone is back in office five days a week.
Kendall: Well, you know, it's really interesting because again, it's that gap. It all depends on how competitive employment is and how competitive people can find other forms of work. Your best natural experiment, I'm gonna give the counter example, the federal government that in 2025, there was an executive order that mandated hybrid work arrangements or flexible work arrangements drop from 61% to 28% after the mandate.
Compare that with the private sector or some forms of the public sector, including where I work, the Ohio State University, and you saw that the flexible or hybrid work arrangements remained either steady or increased slightly from 2022 through 2025. And what that says to us, very clearly, is that... When you mandate work in a hierarchical organization that you have very limited labor alternatives, people are going to feel forced to comply, but where you have a competitive private market and employees have choice, then you can mandate however you like. But the reality is that people are still.
Juravich: Hybrid work. Okay. And the idea of mandating five full days in the office, I guess, have you seen or does the data show that there's been turnover then? If that doesn't work for your life and your life has changed, then you just have to leave that job if they're going to be rigid about it.
Kendall: Yeah, and there's two, so there's this dichotomy and it's a real thing. If you hear an executive mandating or you hear a company mandating return to the office and yet people still are by, you judge their badging, you judge by turnover rates. And remember, every time you lose a knowledge worker, it's 30 to $50,000 to replace that worker, so it's kind of expensive. And reteach them, yeah. Yeah, well, to bring somebody else on board. Okay, yeah, so there's two reasons why people do this.
One is it leaders, some leaders genuinely believe that in-person collaboration matters for culture and innovation, and there is research that shows that in a number of contexts, that's true. And also, some readers use RTO to manage attrition, saying, I know that some people- arts.
Juravich: Wait, RTO, what's that stand for? Return to office. OK, yeah.
Kendall: So they use the return to office policy to expect a certain amount of attrition without having to do formal layoffs.
Juravich: Oh, OK, to get the people to quit who don't want to do it. And both of those are happening at the same time. Tell me a little bit more about productivity, because I think you said that certain types of workways have shown to be more productive. What are you finding is the most productive way in this post-COVID world that we're in?
Kendall: So there is an, this actually also kind of ties into what Tara was talking about earlier in terms of microshifting and flexible schedules. So organizational design and being really ruthless of eliminating the reasons of why you sometimes have people in the office five days a week, nine to five, requires that you pay attention to what are you filling up your time with? Are you really busy for 40 hours in the office five day a week or is there performative types of work happening. So if you wanna go to a four day work week, which a lot of research that supports four day work weeks actually do work.
But again, it's organizational design. What you find, McKenzie, well-organized hybrid teams are approximately 5% more productive than either the pure return to office or pure remote. There's a landmark nature study that was 2024, Stanford and Harvard, that the largest investment in hybrid work, 1600 employees, zero negative effect on performance. Managers initially expected a drop in performance, and yet there is no drop in the performance. Okay, I'm gonna have to reconsider that. Hybrid workers have a 33% lower quit rate, which has an indirect effect.
In the short term on productivity, long-term it does show up in productivity labor rates. And finally, that people that have flexible or hybrid work environments are value it roughly at the equivalent of an 8% raise, and that's according to the Stanford 2024 study, or they're willing to forego up to 25% of their total compensation in exchange for flexibility.
Juravich: I'll work for less money if you give me a schedule that meets my life.
Kendall: And that 25% figure, which blew everybody away, is about three to five times higher than earlier estimates before they conducted the study.
Juravich: And the study is recent or that's twenty twenty five. Twenty twenty. Yeah, that's very I don't think studies get more recent than that. OK, this is all sides on eighty nine seven NPR News. And we're talking about workplace culture with Laurie Kendall, director of the full time MBA program and senior lecturer in management and human resources at Ohio State. Listeners, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the future of work and workplace culture. Do you like the office nine to five? Is flexibility a must for the future work? Give us a call and tell us your story 614-292-8513. That's 614 2 9 2 8 5 1 3 or email us at allsides at double osu.org. So in the first segment you mentioned we discussed employees micro shifting, splitting the work days into chunks to get more done, you know, breaking up the time. Had you heard of the word micro shifting? Cause I hadn't heard the word micro shifting till I read this Wall Street Journal story.
Kendall: No, that's actually a really clever way to describe this phenomena of work being less industrial revolution organized and more in favor of flexibility. In fact, that a beautiful term.
Juravich: Micro, so you like the term micro shifting? Yeah, I do. Okay, because another term that I didn't bring up, but like, because everyone's talking about eating more protein, so it's called protein maxing. So we were like calling it work maxing, that I guess that's another way to talk about it. But so, but whether or not you've heard of the term, micro shifting, I think a lot of people are doing it now, wouldn't you say like a lot, a lot people are trying to work and have. A life, especially caregivers, and make the time all work. So they're working at random hours, not Monday through Friday, nine to five. Have you found that? We have, and there's a...
Kendall: Problem in that and that is how does the office redesign the work and who gets to be flexible, who gets the micro shift and who get to define office hours. Obviously if you're frontline worker, if you are in the call center industry, if your a service worker, If you are staffing a hospital as a nurse, a radio technologist, a doctor. Do you have that flexibility? Right? Yeah. And so one of the issue, I mean, look, Iceland, subsequent to the research that they ran, 85% of the workforce now does flexible types of micro shifting or flexible work schedules in comparison with 10 years ago.
In Iceland? In Iceland, specifically. Here's the hard thing, that it has to be available in non-office. Settings. It has to be able, you have to have a redesign for shift base, for frontline workers, and you can't just trim a day and ask people to do 50 hours of work in a four-day work week. The evidence is that the design challenges are much harder for everybody else. If you are only saying, hey, these knowledge workers get to do a flexible work schedule, you don't, that contributes to the perception of inequity. And inequality and people say, okay, I'm not okay with that.
Juravich: I could see people saying, well, you chose to work in a hospital. You're a nurse or a doctor, or you chose to be a teacher. And those are types of professions that couldn't micro shift. I mean, you have 28 kids sitting in front of you. You can't look at the kids and say, you know what? I have to leave for an hour. So there are certain professions that you just innately can't do that to, even probably in Iceland. Have people come up with ways to make that work, make it fair?
Kendall: You know, that a great point. So, look, I'm a college professor. And I know, and I will have to be on desk door with the flu before I don't go to a class. Because replacing me is kind of hard for the classes that I'm responsible for teaching, right? But on the other hand, my schedule is far more flexible than a nine to five office worker, right.
Juravich: Right, except for those hours when you have the class, the rest of your hours are flex, yeah.
Kendall: Are more determined by what needs to be done rather than an expectation of being somewhere. I think what you talk about is true. If I have a shift obligation as a nurse, one of the things that we've done, of course, in a number of hospital settings is arrange for 36 hour shifts, right? To do 12, 12, and 12, which is trading. And again, that's kind of a larger form of microshifting. Yeah. Because you already have to be there, so you might as well stay longer. But I'm giving you time back because I'm limiting the number of days you've got to spend that approximate $51 to come into the office. For that average commuting. Costs that people expend. Interesting.
Juravich: Well, the way that Tara Weiss from The Wall Street Journal talked about microshifting in shift work was there is a trend at some places that maybe like a retail place or she had a quote in her story from someone who works at a restaurant where they have like an online app where they can like check in. And see if there's the need for an employee, and then they can decide yes or no if they're gonna come in for a partial shift. So maybe if like there's a call out for extra servers at a restaurant, or more retail is needed on a Saturday, and they can pick just to go in for like three hours to help with the crunch or not. Is that micro shifting? I think that is a combination of a flexible schedule and micro shifting. And so I haven't really heard about that very much in the retail industry or the service industry, but do you think, could you see that being the future?
Kendall: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, first of all, let's go back to Gen Z for a moment. Gen Z didn't invent the notion of flexibility, but they are the generation that had an expectation that flexibility was to be supported. Yeah. Right? Okay. Yeah. So as you see your Gen Z workforce in service work industry, in retail industry, you see a greater expectation that I have this flexibility. So it honestly makes sense.
Because if I want to retain you, if you are a wonderful server, but you have other obligations, you're a student. Or you have obligations outside of work. Do I want retain you and it's worth it to retain you and provide that flexibility? Or do I want use an earlier era of expectation and say, sorry, if you want to work here, then these are the rules. Hmm. Organizations that win in this? Are organizations that flex as an intentional idea, not as an accidental one.
Juravich: Staying with us after the break is Lori Kendall, Director of the Full-Time MBA Program and Senior Lecturer in Management and Human Resources at Ohio State. Coming up, we are going to talk more about how people are working, and we're gonna look at how AI might change the future of work. But listeners, if you'd like to join us to talk about the future work and your current workplace culture, flexibility, nine to five, give us a call, 614-292-8513, or email us at allsidesatosu.org. And All Sides continues in just a moment on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Jurovich. American offices used to have one homogenous idea about how and when people work. However, after decades of one idea and then a pandemic, many employees are questioning how they work and the culture around where they work. Workplace culture can be both positive and negative, and how have new trends in office dynamics impacted culture? How might they change over time? And AI is almost impossible to avoid in the modern workplace. So how are employees using it and does everyone see it as a good thing? Still with us is Lori Kendall, Director of the full-time MBA program and Senior Lecturer in Management and Human Resources at Ohio State University. Thanks for being here, Lori. Absolutely. Listeners, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Join us about the future of work and workplace culture. Give us a call 614-292-8513 or email us at all sides at www.osu.org. Before we dive into AI, we have an email from Anthony. And Anthony says, I feel like people are wanting to just stay home. People need to be social. It makes you stronger. The internet is making us lazy. So do you feel like the flexibility thing or the hybrid thing is just people wanting to stay home? Ha ha ha
Kendall: I have a lot of compassion for that point of view because I can think of in my own life how many times I've thought, man, I would just really rather stay home. And so I get that. The thing about hybrid work and the thing about the usefulness of hybrid work is just recognizing that our understanding about when, where, and how work gets done changes. Because the pandemic did change that. It actually taught us that we could be productive at home.
And once you do that and once you have an expectation that you can do that, then going back to the office, yeah, particularly for younger folks who maybe spent part of their most formative years during the pandemic behind a screen, you can get that tendency. But on the other hand, it's also recognizing the stresses and the additional, what it takes to go into the office. And so, Yeah, is it possible for people to say, oh, I'm just too lazy? Okay, I get that. On the other hand, people have lives. People have kids. People have parents. People have obligations. Or more people are going to school and working full time than ever before. So how do you balance that?
Juravich: What about the socialization factor, the need to talk to other humans in an office just for socialization, but also for your ability to grow as a human?
Kendall: I'm gonna give an example of a company that I worked with for a long time that I saw this as an executive and as a business leader. If you have technology, and if you are very skilled at using technology, you're skilled at use Zoom, you're skill at using Teams, you're you skilled at you using Slack, you're skills at using WebEx, some form of both real-time messaging as well as video communication, then You can still have connection, even remote. It's not about being isolated, cut off from the rest of the world.
It's really about how and when and where you connect and how you connect. So that's thing one. But thing number two, what you lose when you do that, because it's real. You lose the water cooler conversation. You lose that impulse to go to lunch. You use the, hey, Don't you have a daughter who has a birthday coming up? Hey, don't you a major anniversary coming up?" You tend to lose that unless you find a way to incorporate that into this asynchronous online communication. And for most of us, we lose it. So we become more transactional. So he's right, absolutely right, that the way in which you use the workplace as a tool, not as a management construct, but as a a tool for how to connect. Where to connect and when to connect is about maintaining that social communication.
Juravich: So let's talk about technology changing work. You just mentioned it a little bit there, but AI is everywhere, and it's moving into offices very quickly. How long before AI takes all of our jobs? I'm kidding, but seriously. Yeah, seriously. So.
Kendall: I'm going to answer the second part first, and then I'm gonna go back to where the statistics are right now, because there is a, this is actually a really strange moment. This is a strange moment in the workplace. Love strange, yeah. Well, be careful of the word for opportunity, right? So the technology's running ahead of the management science, because the workers who are now navigating hybrid schedules, arranging to meet in person on a day of the week where everybody can be there.
And figuring out how to be productive outside of the office. At the same time, are still figuring out how to use AI tools. Yeah. And by the way, these AI tools have really only been around for organizations for the past two years. So we're asking a lot. The second part of your question is the following. If I look at what the Gartner group maps for the AI trajectory, the maturity trajectory, we've got task assistance 2025, that's actually a thing, generative AI, the chat bot.
You've got tasks specific agents 2026, collaborative agents in 2027, and cross app ecosystems by 2028. What does that mean? That means by 2029, half of knowledge work might very well be organized around building and managing agents rather than just using AI tools to do the work themselves.
Juravich: Hmm, I don't know whether to be whether to say fascinating or uh-oh
Kendall: Combination of both? I mean, look, our very own Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan is publicly predicting that advancing AI could push the standard work week to below four days a week before the end of the decade. So now if you think about micro-shifting, you think flexible work schedules, and you think about AI productivity, how do you converge that in a way that benefits both business and benefits people without the displacement. Now the first part of your question.
The first part your question was that the best predictions we have right now, underneath the doom scrolling of it, the best prediction we have now is that we will overall not take into account disproportionate sector displacement, meaning individuals in certain sectors will be hit harder than other sectors. But overall, you have 12 million new jobs By 2030, that's $97 million created and $85 million displaced. But some sectors are going to have a lot more jobs potentially displaced. And that's a very legitimate concern.
Juravich: So the growth is in the tech sector, people building the agents, managing the agents and the loss is in, the busy work is being done by the agents.
Kendall: It's actually, yeah, it's actually coding. Okay. Look. I grew up learning how to code. My first jobs out of college were software engineering jobs and I was in coding for a very long time before I went over into marketing product management in my career. I can take AI today and I can have AI produce at least half of the amount of routine coding and routine maintenance that needs to be done.
That displaces a whole lot of entry level folks. And that trend's going to continue. I think what you're really saying is that what gets displaced are the things that can become very routinized. And in all industries, what doesn't get replaced by AI are relationships, fuzzy decision making, decisions under uncertainty, and human collaboration. So I can have AI design an icon. But what I can't do is have AI respond in real time to users in a focus group responding, I like that, I don't like that.
Juravich: That's the difference. This is All Sides on 89.7 MTR News. We're talking about workplace culture and workplace trends and whether AI is taking over the workplace with Lori Kendall, director of the full-time MBA program and senior lecturer in management and human resources at Ohio State University. And listeners, there's still a few minutes if you want to join us and tell us your thoughts on the future of work. 614-292-8513 if you have a question or email us at allsides www.osu.org. So. You know, Microsoft Co-Pilot, ChatGBT, Claude, Gemini, all these AI assistants are supposed to get all the busy work done quicker so that the employee has time to be creative, be a human. Those are the jobs that are going to grow. Is that basically what you're saying, the more creative jobs, the fuzzier jobs? Is that the, yeah? I think ...
Kendall: We see a sharp change and shift in even hiring MBA graduates, away from what I will call the functional task skill, and in favor of the soft skills, how I interpret, how I look at information that's fuzzy, how I looked at situations that require discernment and the ability to argue and consider alternative explanations. Even in those jobs, you're gonna see the role of an AI agent as a collaborator. One of the things I teach in a classroom is I always have to put the human being first. Put the human in the center. And use AI as an adversarial sparring partner. Don't use AI necessarily to do your thinking for you. So critical thinking, still gonna be in high demand. The ability to have your own opinion, to have your own reason judgment. Still going to be in demand.
Juravich: So if you know how to, you know, you're a wiz at Excel, right? AI can now do that for you and, you know, do all the Excel stuff, make all the charts and graphs. But the human of you can make the graphs look appealing to the person they're presenting to, or no?
Kendall: And making sure that the graphs and the charts say what you want to say.
Juravich: Yeah, okay.
Kendall: The nuance in there, yeah. Making sure your graphs don't lie. I mean, I teach a class where I talk about, there's statistics, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. And you can take a graph, and you can make a graph say a very distorted, not factually true. You need that sharpness. OK.
Juravich: What about the AI hallucinations are happening all the time? AI is just making stuff up. So what if AI makes up what's on the graph, I guess? That could happen. Yeah, it can absolutely happen. So you.
Kendall: Again, if the human being starts in the center, if you use AI to develop an analysis, then you need a way to check that analysis. And you need to way to do what you call thumb rules or rules of thumb to go in and say, is that calculation actually correct? Is that code actually correct. So you need the ability to interrogate the work to satisfy yourself that this is the result that you want. It's very dangerous to take a citation from AI. Unless you go actually find the citation and you go extract the analysis of that paper and say, yeah, that's actually what the paper said.
Juravich: You mentioned earlier that the idea of the the workplace turning into a four-day workweek. You've mentioned this a couple of times, and I wanted to come back to that because it's very appealing, and you say to someone a four day workweek, and they love the idea of having a Monday or a Friday off or whatever day, but does society have to shift with that in order to have a four days workweek? Because like a hospital can't have a four day week, a school system would have to change. Like what does that look like?
Kendall: Obviously not all jobs and not all industries, but there are countries that have sort of mandated a 35 hour work week, which in practical terms means that it may not be a 40 hour, nine to five job. So what you might have, I mean, and realistically, do I teach every day of the week? No, most of my teaching is kind of organized or centered if I meet students twice a week, because that's kind of a very traditional cadence class. And I have five classes in a semester, that's probably going to be on two or three days. Now, what do you do on those other days? Well, you got papers to write, you've got students' stuff to grade. So you can kind of see in a classroom situation in higher ed, very viable. We already know that shift work in many hospitals is organized around three 12-hour shifts. So I guess the answer is it comes down to organizational design. Not a blanket rule.
Juravich: And that also brings me back to, I mean, a little bit of the AI talk, but you mentioned that offices like human resources or like the management science is behind the AI technology. So the technology is moving faster and we haven't changed our policies to meet it. So how much faster does the human resources departments and the management sciences, do they need to, are they already two years behind? Oh gosh. Yeah.
Kendall: Yeah. I wish I had a good answer for you. I'm going to highlight something to highlight the tension and the reality of that, right? The bottleneck is not going to be the technology. In fact, in every single technology wave we've seen since I've been in tech, and I'm an old Gen Xer, so I've gone from mainframes to micros to PCs to cloud, right, in In every one of those, technology is not the bottleneck. It's about how you deliver value in the incorporation of that technology is how you organize the work to leverage that technology. And only when the organization redesigns the workflows around it. And that is a half a decade, decade, sometimes even longer, because businesses don't change that fast.
Juravich: Oh, wow. Okay. So we're 10 years behind. So even so Jamie Diamond saying that things are going to change in 10 years, he's already working on it. Or he has to be. Yeah. Yeah, so how do we get offices to adapt quicker to the AI technology? I mean, they want to incorporate it and they're hiring consultants left and right to help them incorporate it, but then they're not writing the policies to meet it.
Kendall: Dang. It's one thing to write a policy. It's another thing that people receive training and it becomes the muscle memory of how they do their job and how they're compensated and how their reviewed for that job. So I'll give you a statistic. This is from the Pew Research Center in late 2025. 21% of US workers at the end of 2025 reported using AI at work. And that was up from 16% from the year prior. Sound good, right? Except that only 10% of the workforce reported daily use. 77% of employers say that they plan to reskill for AI by 2030, but only 13% of workers have received any AI training at all.
Juravich: Oh, those numbers don't match up. Well, I guess we're going to leave it there, but we'll have to have you back as the workplace tries to adapt and figure this whole AI thing out. But we've been talking about the present and the future of work and workplace culture with Lori Kendall, director of the full-time MBA program and a senior lecturer in management and human resources at Ohio State. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lori. My absolute pleasure. Thank you. And you've been listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. If you missed any part of today's show or any show, listen back at our website, osu.org slash all sides. Subscribe to our podcast. Every episode is available for free in our mobile app. This is 89.7 NPR News and I'm Amy Juravich. Thanks for joining us.