Hello and welcome to Working It.
The FT Weekend Festival at Kenwood House on Saturday was a lot of fun. Thank you to all the Working It readers and listeners who came to my sessions or stopped for a frank chat about the things we love — and struggle with — in our working lives.
Another highlight was joining my friend and colleague Claer Barrett in conversation with a group of impressive young people. The event was part of festival sponsor Bank of America’s partnership with upReach, a charity supporting students from lower socio-economic backgrounds to succeed in graduate careers.
We covered lots of questions around making your job application stand out, AI in the workplace — and why Gen Z should not undersell themselves. Younger people have valuable experience and outlooks that older colleagues lack. (On that note, check out this week’s “one more thing” recommendation, below ⬇️.)
And if you missed the festival, you can register now for next year’s event on 6 September 2025!
Read on for a heads-up: it looks very likely that employers will be asked to do far more to recruit and retain people who are currently not in work because of (often complex) health conditions.
PS: Office Therapy is back next week. We have plenty of fresh problems to solve. (Summer absence does not, apparently, make the heart grow fonder of our co-workers 😇.)
Next on the agenda: getting the long-term sick back into work
A new report estimates 9.4mn adults are “economically inactive” in the UK — and that number has risen by 900,000 since 2020📈. We are an outlier: in other nations, far more people have returned to the workforce since the pandemic. Many of the UK’s workless population are classed as long-term sick, and in the stark words of Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, “being economically inactive makes you sicker”.
Matthew was speaking at the launch of a report — the weighty (both size and title length) Improving our Nation’s Health: A Whole-of-Government Approach to Tackling the Causes of Long-Term Sickness and Economic Inactivity. It’s been produced by Boston Consulting Group’s Centre for Growth and the NHS Confederation.
The authors say that about 375mn workdays are lost annually through people being out of the workforce due to long-term sickness. They also suggest that a return to work by half to three-quarters of the people who’ve dropped out since 2019 “could boost the UK’s GDP by £109-177bn and fiscal revenue by £35-57bn over the next five years”.
These millions of workless adults represent a massive potential pool of workers at a time when we need many more people to join or rejoin the workforce as the UK faces big demographic shifts: ageing populations 👵🏽, falling birth rates and lower rates of immigration.
Change will involve new partnerships across all sorts of organisations 🤝 (and let’s not underestimate how hard that will be: different workplace cultures and organisational “silos” are tricky to navigate). But it’s clear that the role of employers will be key. There’s a lot of momentum within the new Labour government to get more of the long-term sick back into work.
My FT colleague Camilla Cavendish, who has worked across government and social policy (most recently on this Harvard report into health and care for over-65s), chaired the launch of the BCG/NHS report. Afterwards, she told me that: “Tight labour markets mean businesses have more of a stake in this problem than they did 20 years ago. Companies are likely to be asked to sign up to targets to employ and retain more people who are suffering from a range of chronic illnesses, including mental health problems.”
Now is a good time to get ahead of any future targets and mandates. Businesses will need to create back-to-work pipelines — for example, by co-operating with the government’s Jobcentre Plus service and voluntary sector schemes.
How to do that? To get the tl;dr, read the BCG/NHS Confederation report for a “top down” analysis, giving a national view of the scale of the problem. Then pair it with a “bottom up” view from Barnsley in Yorkshire, a post-industrial town with high levels of deprivation. A Pathways to Work Commission, commissioned by the local council and South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, spent a year looking at the problem and interviewing unemployed and long-term sick residents — it’s granular, as the jargon goes. It’s also an easy to read analysis of what keeps people out of work, and what helps get them earning again. (You could usefully “slice and dice” this report for internal plans and presentations.)
As Camilla wrote about the Barnsley report in July: “Seven in 10 of those surveyed . . . said that they would like to work, if they could find a job that fitted their circumstances.” Flexible work patterns, and offering adjustments for people with health issues, emerge from both reports as key ways to get people into work — and keep them there.
Employers will also need to invest in occupational health services: I didn’t realise that the UK is so badly served 😞. The Barnsley report outlines: “Evidence suggests that around 51 per cent of employees in the UK have access to occupational health services, compared to countries such as Finland, France and Poland with coverage of over 90 per cent.” Wow.
I’ve read both reports. What shocked me most? The steep rise in the number of 18/24-year-olds who aren’t working because of mental health conditions. They are the fastest-growing category of workless people. As Matthew Taylor said at his report’s launch: “Young people have a very negative view of what working life is.”
We surely all have a responsibility to help change that view. What can we do? And please tell me about your innovative schemes to support staff with long-term health issues: [email protected]
This week on the Working It podcast
Oliver Burkeman is a productivity guru who doesn’t hold with systems, optimisation or any other faddish attempts to “get on top of” our workloads and busy lives. Oliver wrote the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks in 2021, a book that starts from the reality that we are all going to die, and suggests we prioritise our time accordingly.
I have recommended this book to many friends and colleagues, and I really enjoyed talking to Oliver on this week’s podcast episode about his follow up, Meditations for Mortals. It’s a four-week course of lessons and ideas (nothing preachy or woo woo) to help us find ways to do more of what matters to us. You’ll feel better and more energised — optimised, even — after listening to Oliver’s soothing and wise advice 🦉.
Five top stories from the world of work
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Should companies let staff do what they want? Rohan Banerjee looks at the rise of autonomous work, with examples including hackathons, allowing time for personal project development and no fixed working hours.
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Why did shared parental leave fall flat? Emma Jacobs on SPL, introduced in 2015 to try to give fathers and partners more time off to bond with their children. Loss of earnings and surprisingly entrenched views are two of the reasons why it’s failed to take off.
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Not everyone needs to have an opinion on AI. Stephen Bush goes there: it’s what we were all thinking but didn’t like to say 😬.
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Can Labour revitalise the UK’s creative industries? The sector faced big cuts under the Conservatives, but the UK is still a global powerhouse for the arts- and the new government has made it central to its growth strategy, as Daniel Thomas reports.
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Out of a job but not ready for the golf course. How about joining a board? Great feature from Brooke Masters on “what comes next” for top executives. As Morgan Stanley’s former chief executive James Gorman completes a transitional year as its executive chair, he joins many others embracing portfolio careers.
One more thing . . .
I have gone right down the rabbit hole of this week’s (apparently UK-specific) viral workplace trend: just type “When you ask Gen Z staff to write the marketing script” into TikTok or Instagram. Businesses as varied as Currys, Northumberland Zoo and East Midlands Airport have enticed bemused older staff on to vertical video, overusing the word “slay” as they point out the highlights of their workplace. It all started with a B&B in Oxfordshire, but my favourite is Hever Castle’s deadpan effort: “My guy’s rizz is fire” — next to a bad mannequin of Henry VIII 👑.
Giveaways are back
The Courageous Leaders conference caught my eye among the glut of autumn invites. Its net proceeds go to charity — in this case Plan International. It’s a one-day event on October 7 in London: a great line-up of speakers, with the aim of inspiring (yes) courageous leaders.
The first five readers to register on Eventbrite with code FTCL2024 will receive a free ticket. If you miss out, the code will unlock a 10 per cent discount on tickets for all Working It readers.
And finally . . .
The first FT video in the Working It autumn series is out now. “How to grow the next generation of CEOs” covers the rise and fall (and rise again) of corporate learning campuses. Remember GE’s Crotonville? What’s the alternative in 2024? To find out, I talk to leaders from Ricoh, Deloitte and Emeritus — an online leadership development platform. We also filmed in a giant green screen studio run by Global Alumni in Madrid: it allows business school professors to “teleport” into the room. (Shades of my beloved Star Trek.) Feedback welcome*: [email protected].
*Be nice, I am a video newbie 🙈.
Read the full article here