Online/onsite/office: the future of environmental work

For many young professionals, the answer has been to follow their passions, pursuing careers that integrate their beliefs with their work, but which also allow them sufficient freedom to pursue those interests in their own time. At the intersection of their skills, their values, and their career prospects, young workers are finding integrated work-life missions which satisfy their individual needs while also supporting their passions.

An integrated approach to work missions and life can also be a solution for many of the potential challenges facing the future of the workforce. Younger workers are increasingly motivated at work by their passions and beliefs, meaning that they are less particular about the practicalities of remote working or the nature of their day-to-day work. 

The key factor is an appropriate work-life balance, with young professionals increasingly aware of their mental health needs and increasingly seeking balanced lives, rather than assessing their success on their career progression alone. For this new generation of workers, their priorities may be more focused on their individual experience, their work-life balance, and their ability to contribute their time towards work which aligns with their core beliefs. In that context, the goal of employers should be to provide greater balance without compromising on the wellbeing of other employees.

Over the next 50 years, we should expect to see these trends shape the make-up of the environmental workforce. While the labour market is likely to continue to be driven by the overall necessities of the economy, it’s likely that the increased desire for environmentally-ethical jobs will see a long-term move towards employers seeking to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, as well as an increased corporate focus on individual development rather than organisational expansion.

Within that context, there are still challenges. For many young professionals, the typical office environment is less of a feature in their early careers than it has been in the past, shifting the landscape of their skills development into a partially online setting. Many of the soft skills associated with communication, management, and leadership have historically been disseminated through peer interactions in-person, so novel approaches to developing these skills will be essential.

Some young people have begun turning to online seminars and 'one-to-ones' to support their professional development. For some, these are no less effective than other forms of skills development, and for others they might even be more inclusive than past approaches which lent themselves more to extroverted personalities. However, online sessions aren’t as effective for everyone, so more innovation will be necessary in the learning landscape before the necessary acquisition of skills across the environmental workforce can be guaranteed.

While the move away from a physical office environment also presents challenges for how organisations can effectively instil their organisational culture, young professionals have a broadly optimistic perspective. The increased challenge may also drive organisations to express their organisational culture through actions, pushing values into the heart of their missions and work. 

For young professionals, many of whom have grown up with online communities playing as much a role in their lives as physical ones, the challenges associated with instilling those values are not insurmountable. Ultimately, the solution may be for organisations to learn from young workers, rather than the other way round.

Over the next 50 years, we should expect to see the balance between online, onsite, and office-based working diversify substantially from organisation to organisation, led by the demands of work and the ability of organisations to provide professional development in increasingly hybrid environments.

Rather than attempting to pre-empt the ways that AI might reshape our working practices, our foresight should focus on giving us the agility and flexibility to respond to these developments when they emerge from the innovation pipeline.

Many workplaces will gain very little from forcing tools like ChatGPT into their operations without careful thought, so the environment sector should position itself to make rational judgments about different digital technologies as they emerge, and whether or not implementing them will truly add value to existing working practices. 

What we do know for certain is that artificial intelligence will not be able to replace everything that human scientists currently do, nor would it be desirable for the workforce to become fully automated. If human beings struggle with the intangible and the indescribable, then machines are even less able to capture those concepts.   

Over the next 50 years, regardless of what form of technological developments we see emerge, human scientists will have a vital role as translators, interpreting the values of nature in ways that only humans can understand and using that information to interpret and guide machine-driven data and analysis.

New skills linked to digital literacy, data analysis, and communication will become increasingly important, but the classic environmental science skill set will remain important even as artificial intelligence makes some of the mundane aspects of work more procedural.