Let’s start with a little recent history to establish the context of this challenge. Despite what numerous people had to say around Y2K and the dawning of a new millennium, the first chapter of our young century was largely a continuation of the culture and norms of the 1990s. It was a relatively prosperous time. The internet was still new, but progressing. The neo-liberal world order was established and largely unquestioned and our business expectations were mostly what they were in the final quarter of the 20th century. After all, human and technological progress happen according to their own time frames and not according to what dates seem key based on our calendar. However, things were about to change pretty drastically.
In 2007, Steve Jobs would release the first iPhone, ushering in an era where most people would carry smart phones around with them everywhere they went. Soon after, social media use would begin to skyrocket and a prolonged economic downturn would lead to a level of insecurity not seen since at least the beginning of the 1980s. We entered the next chapter. This one would be associated with isolation, loneliness and more division along partisan lines, leading to some poor mental health results. To be fair to this era, it was also associated with continued progress on things like global literacy rates and acceptance of certain groups of people, most notably the LGBTQ community. It was in this era that some people began to question things like what we now realize was an excessively rigid and hierarchal work culture for service sector employees. Other strange outdated norms like hiding true feelings were increasingly questioned.
The major disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new chapter. This chapter’s major themes, changes and results are still yet to be determined. For much of this new chapter, for understandable reasons, many people have simply been in survival mode, ensuring their loved ones are safe and, at the risk of sounding morbid, still alive. Still, this disruption has brought to light many ongoing challenges by accelerating a lot of changes. Before the pandemic, remote and hybrid work options were already beginning to be experimented with and adapted by some organizations. People were already moving in-person activities, like shopping, online. These, and many other trends, were suddenly accelerated by the need to stop the spread of the virus.
Before the pandemic, some people were already starting to identify the issues that the movement of activities online and adaptation of social media had caused. This can be seen in any statistic around how people’s social networks, as well as the rate of violence and suicide trended during the 2010s. The pandemic made these issues obvious to nearly everyone. Even the most introverted people would eventually become frustrated with the amount of time spent at home avoiding social contact.
The other issues brought to light are the issues with our work culture. Before the pandemic, many were already beginning to realize that something was not working. Finding jobs often involved hundreds of hours of “work” just for people to end up in roles they were not too happy in. Overall employee engagement is around 33%, meaning that after all of this, two thirds of all people still found the wrong job. On top of that, the lack of schedule flexibility and persistent need to make all jobs forty hours per week made it so many people were unable to pursue the activities that would lead to healthy lives, healthy families and healthy social networks.
The internet has the potential to connect nearly all people to each other, organizations and all the options available to us. The innovators of the early internet era, and current largest companies in the world are the ones that connected people to information and content, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix. However, this has led to too many choices.
The process of finding a job is a perfect example of this. In the pre-internet world, a company would post an open position in the want ads. Based on geographical proximity, as well as the level of access to information newspapers, television and industry publications provided at the time, a job seeker may have something like 50-100 postings to look at. The employer would receive 50-100 resumes and sort through them accordingly. The system made sense for the time.
Now, with internet job boards and remote work removing the location restraint, there are far more choices on both ends. How is the right connection to be made with infinite possibilities? How does a job seeker choose which jobs to pursue and how is an employer to sift through everyone that submits an application? The current answer, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), has obviously failed as employers complain about not finding top talent while job seekers still have extremely frustrating processes.
This is just one example of choice overload. Similar issues can be found in the world of dating, finding friends, content and activity selection and what restaurants to frequent. Numerous studies in the field of social psychology have demonstrated that when faced with too many choices, most people end up in some kind of state of analysis paralysis or decision fatigue and end up making no decision at all. It is perhaps why so many people, despite feeling lonely, dissatisfied with their jobs and in a rut, stay at their less than satisfying jobs, and stay home watching the content that the YouTube and Netflix algorithms point them to (which is similar to the content they have been consuming) when they know they’d feel better if they went out, joined groups, tried to meet people and tried new things. There is too much to choose from.
Hopefully, these problems are some sort of growing pain. The internet, and its access to all people, all information and all possibilities should enable people to find better options than the ones they found before these connections were made. With every option accessible, theoretically, people can find not just the job in their field and town, but the best possible job. They can find the content that will provide them the right combination of what they enjoy, what they need to grow and variety. They can find circles of people, the right connections at the right time for both one-time meetups and enduring friendships and relationships.
Now that the FAANG (is it now MAANG?) companies have facilitated connections, the time has come for a new group of innovators, a new group of “heroes” to address choice overload. This new mission requires tools that effectively sort through information to help people find the right connection at the right time, rather than simply access to all that is out there on the internet. Some organizations have already begun to do this. Unlike the social media and streaming companies, whose objective is to maximize the amount of time people engage with their platform, this mission requires platforms whose goal is to get people to their desired solution in the shortest amount of time possible, and on with their lives.
Some have started to do this. Meetup organizes groups by location and category and Lunchclub uses algorithms to make the right introduction. However, the true answer to this choice overload needs to include other considerations. Whether or not a person is happy in a job is often about more than just their skills and preferred industry. Employee engagement surveys indicate that one of the most important factors in determining whether an employee is happy, engaged and stays at a job is the quality of the relationships they form at work. Whether a person enjoys an experience often depends on their current mood. This requires the sorting through information to include these factors when directing people to what content they need to look at, what connections they need to make and what activities they should take part in at any given time.
If this challenge can be addressed, with the infinite amount of connections available and the information sorted in a way that overcomes choice overload without sorting out too many good options, as is the case with the Applicant Tracking Systems, the future world could be one where people are happier, healthier and more satisfied with their lives than in any era in human history. This would be something to celebrate, but there is a lot of work that needs to go into facilitating a new chapter that is better than the last one.