- Upwork’s Kelly Monahan has studied the future of work for 12 years.
- She runs Upwork’s Research Institute and wants 2024 to be a year of job disruption.
- Monahan’s insights are part of Business Insider’s year-end leadership series, “Looking Ahead 2024.”
Kelly Monahan wants to use “data-driven empirical insights to help guide” the conversation around the future of work.
It’s a crucial topic for Upwork, a marketplace that connects freelancers with clients. As the managing director of Upwork’s Research Institute, Monahan knows this is an uphill battle. “It’s so hard to get into the C-suite and break through for a variety of reasons, but especially the female voice,” she told Business Insider.
“I’ve been in a very heavy male sector since I finished my Ph.D. program. It’s probably why I’ve gravitated so much toward data,” she said.
“If I can bring data-driven insight, it’s not ‘So here’s what Kelly thinks,’ or ‘Here’s my opinion’, — literally I’m translating and representing what the workforce thinks,” Monahan said.
Her goal: “I can come and represent the voice of the worker, and the voice of what people are thinking and feeling, but do so in a way that I can also speak the language of a CFO or a CEO.”
She said she focuses her research on topics important to both top executives and regular employees.
“I just love being able to get into the data, run the research, analyze the numbers, but at the same time as much as I’m a data person, I always like to be creative. I think through: What is the story we’re trying to tell here?”
Monahan’s insights are part of BI’s year-end leadership package, “Looking Ahead 2024,” that digs into visions, strategies, and challenges across corporate America.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is one thing you’re excited about for 2024?
I’m going to make kind of a bold statement: I’m really excited for job disruption. When we’re talking about these big systematic changes we’re always talking about, sometimes it’s so hard to actually see — that we might even see some of these in our lifetime.
As leaders, and as workers, we can begin to really think about redesigning the job itself.
What are those tasks? What are those skills? What are the ways in which we work? What are those right cadences and norms of what we just talked about when you come back together?
That is what I want to see. So I want 2024 to be a year of job disruption. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be messy. But we have to start breaking the old way of working in order to start building up a new one. And I think the right unit of analysis to start with is the job itself.
What are you most worried about for 2024?
I continue to worry about the global economic condition. There’s still a lot of uncertainty as we just think through wars that are taking place. And macroeconomic conditions — there are so much for leaders that are outside of their control.
This is why we have to build more agile, adaptable workforces.
People think these are all “Black Swan” events happening. But that’s not necessarily true. A lot of these actually have been brewing for a long period of time.
There’s a phenomenon called a “Gray Rhino effect” where it’s “Hey, we should have seen that because it’s so obvious.” So I do worry about the uncertainty and complexity facing leaders, and that their organizations are not set and ready to face the uncertainty that may be ahead.
What’s one thing you got right in 2023?
We were early on the gen-AI train. So because of our platform data, we were able to see the rise of gen-AI searches, specifically ChatGPT in January, February, March.
We made a bet on Gen AI, we pivoted our research strategy to really begin to understand the dynamics that were taking place. And I think we got that right and I continue to think that AI is going to be a huge trend for businesses to figure out over the next couple of years.
What’s one thing you got wrong in 2023?
I honestly thought this hotly debated conversation around remote work would be over by now, to be fully honest.
In hindsight, I’m kind of pumping the gas again to figure out why we’re still stuck in this narrative of, “Do we trust people to work remotely? Can we enable flexible working conditions? How do we transform work itself to work for distributed teams?”
I thought we’d be much further along in that conversation, which is why as a researcher, I’m really willing to dive back into it going into 2024. Because I don’t think the majority of companies do really understand how to operate effectively in a distributed environment.
I’ve been thinking about it since 2017. (Editor’s note: Monahan and her colleagues at a consulting firm made three predictions that year: AI would transform work; freelancers would increasingly comprise the workforce; and proximity would no longer be a key issue for hiring talent.)
I’m wondering, why aren’t we better yet? Like those seem to be pretty solid predictions — the AI one is definitely coming true. But I think when it comes to the workforce and thinking about work staffing differently, and then remote work, I think we’re a little bit behind in my hunches because those are messy — human behavior — they don’t have easy tech solutions.
