Our motivation:
Since the current situation around the COVID-19 pandemic brings uncertainty yet also change – we think it’s a good point in time to look ahead and into the future. Throughout this year, we have collectively experimented and learned a lot about new ways of working together. These ways, putting a strong emphasis on remote work and increasing flexibility on both the company’s and on the employee’s side, collectively referred to as ’new work‘, are here to stay. Even conservative companies that previously didn’t give remote work a trial, not even for one day per month, have been forced to test these new collaboration approaches and have seen that they can work.
We believe that the new work will significantly change employees‘ everyday lives or generally of most people who work in knowledge-intensive jobs, allowing them to work in looser boundaries with organizations and traditional office infrastructures in the next decade. Consequently, we think looking at knowledge workers as a target group around the year 2030 could be very interesting to identify trends, believes, and behaviors that can shape or reshape products and services.
What we have learned:
We have identified several aspects that influence life changes. Recent trends, such as moving out of the cities or de-prioritizing work as a source of purpose, can be realistic developments for more extensive parts of the society in 2030. On the other side, we show stability, that values like family or social security will be fundamental in the future as they are in the past and central to many consumers‘ decision-making. We will present three future users that reflect different lifestyles, some more diverse from today than others. We have also tried to develop an exemplary prototype to present future development in a more tangible and actionable way than trend studies.