#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.
I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world.
Today, we are diving into the future of work with Josh Dream. Josh is a Harvard MBA, a startup founder, and a co-author of the book called Employment is Dead.
Yes, you hear it right. That is a very bold statement.
But he's got a story to back it up. Across this three-part series, we'll explore why traditional employment models are failing, how emerging technologies like Web3 and AI are reshaping work, and what companies must do to survive.
We'll also go behind the scenes of George's book, how a cold call turned into a major publishing deal and why the old ways of managing people just don't cut it anymore. Whether you are an employee, an employer, or just curious about where work is headed, this series will challenge the way you think.
Good morning, Josh. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
It's very early morning for you there. It is.
It's nice and early, but I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, Vince.
Let's dive right in. First of all, who you really are, what you have done in the past.
Then we'll deep dive into different elements of your journey. Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity and thanks again for having me.
My passion is rooted in employee engagement and employee experience, making sure that we are helping employees have the best experience possible so that they can do their best work possible. It's a very simple solution.
And when I was a student, we were building a startup out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. We were very interested in this concept of employee engagement.
And when we started to look at the landscape, we recognized that there wasn't a lot being done there. A company would unilaterally make decisions about, maybe we should bring a ping pong table in.
Maybe we should have

snacks in the break room. And this concept of an employee engagement survey never really sat well with us because the idea is let's ask employees how they're feeling.
It's a great concept, but the way that we were doing it was just completely flawed in my mind. It was a once a year survey, long questions.
There was no real diving into the culture or the issues at hand. A lot of it seemed performative and employees weren't very trusting of an organization.
So they weren't being honest on these surveys. Growing up in this generation of social media, we thought we are so used to immediate feedback almost daily from our social posts and from the feedback that we receive from putting ourselves out into the world.
So we started building this startup where we pioneering sentiment analysis in real time. That's a fancy way of saying, let's ask more often.
Let's create an environment where employees can trust us. And let's receive feedback in a way that flows with the day-to-day activities of an employee so it doesn't feel like they have to stop what they're doing to take an annoying survey.
It was quite an interesting venture, and we absolutely learned so much. And I think the surprising outcome for us is we didn't really, some of the assumptions that we were making didn't actually hold to be true.
For example, I'll never forget showing my wife the software for the first time. She's a marriage and family therapist.
And as I was so excited to show her the software that we were working on, she just turned to me and said, Surveys are the dumbest way to build relationships with people. Why are you focusing on this?

It's a very deep thought when you really unpack it. But the biggest thing that we learned, the biggest assumption that was broken for us is that we didn't understand.
Most companies don't actually want to know how employees are feeling. We had pilot organizations who either liked the performance or the view that they were interested, even though it just felt like they were giving lip service to it.
Or they really just wanted to know for their own benefit so that they could push the employees harder or know who to fire. All of the fears that employees have turned out to be fairly real.
And that just blew our minds. And so I spent a long time trying to understand why are most companies not that interested to know how employees are truly feeling.
And what we came up with was that it's not necessarily a people problem. It's not a leadership problem.
It's a system problem. The system is designed for short-term shareholder value, which often neglects employees' needs.
And it was also established at a time where the industrial age was really catching its strides, right? Taylorism is this concept where we're checking boxes, we're on the assembly line, and we have one task to complete. So management makes sure that we are doing our tasks perfectly.
And in the age of information, we just don't need that style of management anymore. So the bold claim, employment is dead, comes out of that experience where we believe that traditional models of employment are failing to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more about the short-term mindset. I've studied economics, finance, and accounting.
And at the end of the day, even with the best intentions, a competent, capable, and purpose-driven CEO, a chief HR officer, or any senior leader still has to balance doing good with making money. They look at the numbers, the bottom line, and all the financial metrics.
They ask, how was our accounting income this quarter? What's our cash position? And eventually, they make decisions, sometimes tough ones like cutting jobs. To them, it's ultimately just a number.
It feels cold, but that's the reality of how these decisions are made. And yet, in financial reports, you always see the same message.
People are our greatest asset. But let's be real.
On the financial statements, people are not listed as assets. They are categorized as an expense item on the income statement, not something quantified on the balance sheet that drives revenue and income.
So while the message says people first, the decision making still comes down to numbers.

In the end, employees adjust HR records sitting in the cloud. Now, I'm not saying this to discredit well-intentioned HR leaders or CEOs.
It's just the reality of how businesses operate. Before we get into Work Street Institute and the solutions you're building for these big challenges, I want to take a step back and talk about your own career journey.
You've observed these issues firsthand. And what about your personal experience? When you were fresh off college, studying psychology, working under different leaders and managers, what did that look like for you? Then you went to Harvard for your MBA and learned to be more innovative in your approach.
Let's start with your early career. How did your experiences shape the way you see these challenges today

and influence the solutions you're working on? Yeah, you highlight a really good point, right?

The reason why HR tends to get a bad rap from employees, oh no, I'm getting called into the HR office, which means I'm getting fired, is because there is no positive signal coming from that department outside of I'm getting a paycheck, I'm getting paid. And most people recognize at this point that HR, their job is to protect the company from getting sued, from any lawsuits that might come out of their employment.
And so I think you're absolutely right that we need to evolve from what we have been evolving from personnel to human resources. And a lot of human centric human resource officers are now looking at it as people operations.
Or how do we step away from terms like, oh, our people are an asset or human capital, where it is just a number on a balance sheet to the actual human. We're moving away from a contractual based employment to a partnership based employment.
How do we build that relationship in a way that honors their humanity? And I guess

that's where I get started. I am very passionate about, again, that employee experience.
How are

we designing experiences that let employees bring their full selves to work, that are aware of their

work-life balance, that understand the nuances of the things that they are dealing with. And that

became very apparent as I was graduating school. It was right in the middle of the pandemic.
2020 is a terrible year to graduate. I remember being so excited to walk at graduation, April of 2020, and the pandemic hit and we are, here we are throwing our caps and gowns in our base, like on a Zoom call.
But I entered the workforce fairly quickly. I started working with a consulting firm that eventually was merged with Mercer.
And we were working with HR departments of large organizations who were dealing with next level real world pandemic issues with their employees. How do we keep our employees safe who still have to work? How do we bring a remote policy to the workplace that allows people to continue to work from home? They were forced to work from home, if you will.
How do we design for a work-life balance? And that's where I really started to cut my teeth in this industry of understanding, here's what people are experiencing at work. Here's why leadership is failing to meet those needs.

and the book really serves as a red flag to organizations who aren't focused on designing an experience for employees if you still feel like they are just an asset and that you can

tell them exactly what to do and they should be grateful to have a job because most don't and you promote them without pay or you fire them and lay them off in droves as we're seeing right now or you force them back to the office against what their preferences are we're seeing so many practices on display that are just going to destroy the cultures of organizations that are going to destroy the trust that employees have. And it's going to lead to a great resignation 2.0 that is going to be so much worse than we've ever seen.
You started with psychology, then went to business school, and now you're in Web 3. That's quite the journey.
I'm curious about that transition, not just in the sense of switching jobs, but more about what shifted in your mindset. A lot of people see psychology as a soft skill field and tech as a hard skill domain.
So what was it for you? Was there something about Web3 that really fascinated you? Something that made you think this is the technology that can truly change the world for good? What was the trigger that pushed you into this uncharted territory coming from a psychology background? That transition from soft skill to hard skill, from working with people to working on a very deep technological advance. So I can definitely see the interest there.
And I don't think my raison d'etre ever changed. It is, again, that employee experience.
And when you

really unpack what do employees want and need out of work, it is evolving in a way that we

sometimes are blind to. We have this entire younger generation who is interested in connecting

with people digitally in a way that didn't exist before. For example, my son, who's eight years old, loves to play Roblox.
He loves to play Fortnite. He loves to play Minecraft.
And he created a friend group and a community with people all over the world that he's never actually met in person. But getting into this game has created an environment where they bond.
They get to not just hang out at the mall. They get to go on adventures and discover new things.
And so for me, Web3 presents this blue ocean of opportunity where we can continue to like live those psychological principles. I guess the reason why my co-founder and I, Deborah Perry-Pishoni, we are co-authors of the book as well as co-founders of the Work3 Institute.
Our main goal is to help marry workforce strategies with emerging technologies. There are so many technologies emerging right now, whether it's AI or Web3 or decentralization, blockchain, smart contracts, all of that is going to change the way that we work forever and for good.
And we're helping those digital first companies take those first steps and pioneer the path forward. And that's when you start to see at the tail end of the pandemic, we saw all of these virtual office spaces.
Working virtually wasn't that great because we often felt siloed. We were just on Zoom calls.
We couldn't be together. That's the reason why we're pushing for this RTO mandate right now.
Return to the office because it's better in person. There are a lot of companies who are like, we can have the best of both worlds where we don't have to commute.
We don't have to, we can save on gas. We can save on money.
We can save time. We can work more and also be together because my digital avatar is sitting right next to your digital avatar in the coworking space.
It feels like we've largely set that aside for now. That's not going to serve us that much.
Let's all just return to the office. And I would say that if you feel like the metaverse is dead, you are greatly mistaken and you should continue to pay attention because of the expectations of employees.
So, would it be fair to say that the metaverse, Web3, and all these emerging technologies are essentially britches,

tools that help us redefine the employee experience,

not just in one way, but in ways that actually make sense for our lives,

our productivity, our outcome, and our well-being.

Would you put it that way?

Yeah, so we actually write in the book, we call it the 10 operating principles of work three. These are the non-negotiables of the modern day workforce.
I work with people leaders all over the world and I show them these principles. I say, can you offer any of your employees any of these today? And if the answer is no, why should they work for you? And they're really on a spectrum.
There are some that are deeply technical, like interoperability. They want to jump from job to job.
They want to mix and match several streams of income. They don't want to be a full-time employee at your organization.
They want to work on several different projects across several different DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations. And then there are stuff that is readily apparent today, like flexibility.
There's flexibility, autonomy, ownership. How do we allow employees to work flexibly so that they can work on their circadian rhythm, right? A lot of them are logging on at 9 p.m.
at night so that they can get some deep work done or they work really well in the morning before the kids are awake or they like being able to run out and pick up their kids from school at 3 p.m. without skipping a beat.

so it just is tragic to me to see that we are returning to the office so forcefully in this

nine-to-five structure instead of moving forward in a way that makes sense for the employee

and their work-life balance office so forcefully in this nine-to-five structure instead of moving forward in a way

that makes sense for the employee and their work-life balance. Again, that's on this end of the spectrum of flexibility.
There's this end of the spectrum that's interoperability, and all throughout there are all the elements that you need to design a better employee experience. You mentioned that you and Deborah, the co-founder of Work Street Institute, worked on this book together with you.
I know there's quite a story behind how this book came to be. Can you share that with us here? Yeah, it's quite an interesting story.
I feel if you're writing a book with Harvard Business Review Press, especially, it feels like a lot of times it would be, I've been a professor for many decades.

My colleagues and I have written several books together.

And so we're finally ready to write with HBR.

That is the opposite of what happened with Debra.

And I was actually.

That's the web for today. We've broken down why traditional employment is crumbling and why companies need to wake up before they lose their best talent.
But how do we actually rebuild work for the future? In the next episode, Josh takes us behind the scenes of his book, Employment is Dead, from a cold call to a major publishing deal. Don't miss it.
Thank you so much for joining us today.

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I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care. Thank you.