The Future of Work Is Already Here—Will Bureaucratic Organizations Survive It?

Every crisis paves the way for change—call it progress, growth, or recession—but the question remains: how many steps back are taken for every step forward. Whether a financial crisis or a global health crisis, the fallout manifests in how people live and work differently, affecting organizations’ once-traditional priorities. What directions are organizations, their management, and their employees headed in today?

While working from home and hybrid work are one tangible effect of COVID pandemic for anyone who works in an office, less visible is how the pandemic fast-forwarded not only the digitization of organizations but had an impact on equity and diversity within them. When more people work from home, brick-and-mortar real estate becomes less vital than computational power, server space, and online communication channels. When employees demand more say in how they work and are managed—and productivity levels or innovation prove them right—hierarchies and bureaucratic systems start to flex and possibly even flatten.

Yet resistance to change remains. Is productivity or team morale really at issue or something else, something more akin to maintaining a status-quo? Though some employees are content to work at least part of their time at home, more organizations are pushing for a return to the workplace: in an effort to encourage working on the Google campus, the tech company recently offered its employees a discount on the Google hotel rate; meanwhile, a leader in making hybrid work possible, video conferencing platform Zoom is requiring employees to return to the office.

Ironies aside, though organizations may strive for a return to “normalcy,” some have shown they’re crafting a new normal in a changing world. Several recent Delve podcast episodes and articles investigate these questions and beyond, asking:

• How are new management structures changing the nature of business? Could flat organizations and digital platform organizations lead to the end of hierarchical bureaucracies and conventional leadership?
• Is a renewed focus on business ethics fundamentally changing organizations, whether craft breweries or large corporates? Or is business ethics an oxymoron?
• In what ways does gender play a role who is recruited and hired for jobs where word-of-mouth is the most common way that people learn about jobs? How does this form of recruiting affect the organization?
• Why are otherwise ideal, educated, and experienced candidates considered overqualified for sought-after jobs in today’s labour market? Are organizations missing out?

Reworking, restructuring, rethinking bureaucracy

Bureaucracy isn’t exactly beloved by many, but it’s proved practical over the years for maintaining a certain structure and organization for firms. In an era when jobs are being redefined by new technologies and specialized knowledge, and when more people aren’t working 9-to-5 at the office, will the firm of the future—and the future of work—look less bureaucratic? Or will it embrace a form of bureaucracy all its own?

Delve investigates such critical management and business questions in its recent digital magazine: Reworking Bureaucracy. For the Delve podcast, Delve Editor-in-Chief Saku Mantere spoke to Nobel Prize in Economics laureate and Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics Emeritus at MIT Bengt Holmström, asking if, in the face of societal and generational change, organizational hierarchies will fall flat—and could the end of some bureaucracies spell the future of work?

“Today, firms give information and access to their data to outsiders, and they don’t know who will pick it up—outsiders can propose or work out solutions. This is part of what we call platform economies,” explains Holmström. “Platform organizations design playing fields for outsiders to play on and then they cash in on that in various ways. In the case of innovations, they use these innovations for themselves. It is pointing in a new direction, which is that the boundaries between firms and markets are becoming more diffuse in general.”

The prospect of a post-hierarchical workplace is a double-edged sword.

Meanwhile, the magazine’s cover story investigates changes to work life in the post-pandemic era. The continuing push-pull of in-person, remote, or hybrid models; a renewed focus on employees’ physical and mental well-being; labour shortages and the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” all weigh on the minds of employers and workers alike. Changes to work life in the post-pandemic era are well known and intimately felt. “The prospect of a post-hierarchical workplace is a double-edged sword,” says Desautels professor Matissa Hollister.

The magazine also features Delve podcasts on how organizations and entrepreneurship are reflecting an evolving society and changing world, including a conversation with Desautels professor Henry Mintzberg. For more insights, read Reworking Bureaucracy.

Is Business Truly Compatible with Ethics? with Jo-Ellen Pozner and Saku Mantere

Is business ethics an oxymoron? The answer depends on values. Craft business, such as microbreweries and ethical chocolate companies, has seen a rise in the past several years, with many claiming to put values over excessive profit. Meanwhile, larger, more economically driven businesses have imploded in the wake of questionable decision making.

On the Delve podcast, Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of management at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, joins Desautels Professor and Delve Editor-in-Chief Saku Mantere in an inspired conversation that asks how ethics affects the ways that businesses fundamentally function, from everyday operations to how leadership and boards make strategic decisions.

“There are good and bad ways of conducting yourself in any domain, there are multiple ways of enacting any goal,” says Pozner. “As a society for the past 200 years, we have been pushing people to maximize profit at all their costs, and then to enact their values privately, through philanthropy or other means. There’s received wisdom, or at least assumed wisdom, that that’s the correct way to do things, and that there’s no possible way of acting otherwise. But in fact, there are many possible ways of acting otherwise.”

How Organizations Can Increase Gender Diversity by Rethinking Job Recruitment, with Brian Rubineau

In the past few years of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have left or lost their jobs and sought out new ones. Who has succeeded and who hasn’t depends not only on merit and ability, but on who you know—word-of-mouth is one of the most common ways that people learn about and are encouraged to apply for jobs.

Who you know typically reflects your gender, race, and other influential differences that in policy terms are markers of diversity. Examining the role gender plays in job recruitment and hiring can lead to a more diverse workforce that benefits both organizations and society.

On the Delve podcast, Desautels Professor Brian Rubineau discusses new research that shows how gender is a factor in word-of-mouth recruiting, as well as in who applies for the job in the first place and who reapplies after they’ve been rejected. Some of his findings surprised him, showing that gender differences contribute to women’s under-representation in certain industry sectors and at certain levels of an organization.

The processes were still recreating a glass-ceiling phenomenon.

“On the one hand, more word-of-mouth recruitment was generating more integration, was desegregating the workforce,” says Rubineau. “But we were finding the strongest effects at the lowest levels of an organization. And thus the least strong effects at the highest levels of the organization. We were finding that to some extent the processes were still recreating a glass-ceiling phenomenon where women appear to have more barriers as they went to higher levels in the organization.”

Why Employers Think Overqualified Job Applicants Lack Commitment, with Roman Galperin

Why is being overqualified for a sought-after job at a desirable workplace seen as a drawback? Despite having prestigious educations and impressive work credentials, these candidates get turned down by hiring managers, often before they even get an interview.

Desautels Professor Roman Galperin ran experimental studies to figure out what hiring managers really thought about these exceptionally qualified job candidates. They found that the signals that candidates give about their capability for a job are linked to hiring managers’ perceptions of commitment—namely, the concern that overqualified applicants are a flight risk.

“The fundamental feature of commitment is that it’s very difficult to measure,” says Galperin. “It’s really easy to say that you’re committed, but it’s been really difficult to check to what extent this is true. This is an important question because it affects how people actually hire others and help people find jobs.”

On the Delve podcast, Galperin discusses why that is, what people can do about it when navigating the labour market, and why prospective employers should think again about these overqualified, highly knowledgeable job seekers—especially in a time when AI technologies are increasingly applied in the workplace.

Delve, the official thought leadership platform of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, covers all areas of research at Desautels. Subscribe to the Delve mailing list for the latest research-based content, including articles, podcasts, and events.

The Delve podcast is produced by Delve and Robyn Fadden. Original music by Saku Mantere. Subscribe to the Delve podcast on all major podcast platforms, including Apple podcasts and Spotify. And follow Delve on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.