Benjamin Zweig with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Decoding the Future of Work

Benjamin Zweig talks with Jason Barnard about decoding the future of work.

Benjamin Zweig, an economist and the CEO of Revelio Labs, talks with Jason Barnard about the future of work, particularly in light of AI and remote work trends. Benjamin highlights how remote work has proven beneficial for business growth, employee satisfaction, and global hiring opportunities.

Jason Barnard and Benjamin Zweig discuss remote work’s impact on productivity and organizational dynamics. They talk about the challenges of managing remote teams versus in-office teams and the evolving role of AI in job execution and coordination.

The conversation offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs navigating the future of work in an increasingly remote and AI-driven world.

#FutureOfWork #RemoteWork #WorkforceIntelligence #AIandEmployment

What you’ll learn from Benjamin Zweig

00:00 Benjamin Zweig and Jason Barnard
01:10 What Did Jason Barnard Emphasize on Benjamin Zweig’s Brand SERP?
01:37 How Did Jason Barnard Find Benjamin Zweig’s Knowledge Panel Even When Google Doesn’t Show it?
01:53 What is a Knowledge Panel According to Jason Barnard?
02:17 Why Doesn’t Benjamin Zweig’s Knowledge Panel Appear When Someone Searches His Name on Google?
04:13 Why Have COVID and AI Made the Future of Work Less Predictable?
04:28 Where Did Predictions About the Future of Work Typically Focus in the Past?
04:46 What Agency Makes Predictions About Job Growth by Occupation?
04:54 Why Are Predictions Made by the Bureau of Labor Statistics About Job Growth Often Inaccurate?
06:26 Why Didn’t Experts Predict the Shift to Remote Work Caused by COVID?
06:36 What Made COVID the First Major Labor Market Shock?
07:09 Why Has Remote Work Had a Good Impact on the Growth of Companies?
07:26 What Impact Has Remote Work Had on the Growth of Companies?
07:58 What Are the Two Main Reasons Remote Work Can Be Productive for Companies?
08:45 Why Do Some Bosses Believe Employees Should Return to the Office?
10:09 Why Do Some Managers Use the Return-To-Office Mandate as a Workforce Reduction Technique?
10:32 Why is Managing Employees Becoming More Difficult Over Time?
11:15 What Are the Tasks Involved in Managing Knowledge Work?
11:35 Why Has Managing Knowledge Work Become More Challenging?
11:54 What Are AI and Most Technologies Particularly Good At?
12:08 What Does a Job Involve Besides Performing Tasks?
12:35 Why is the Coordination Part of Jobs Expanding as Task Execution Shrinks?
12:54 Why Do We Still Need Human Organizers While AI is Handling Task Execution?
15:50 What Can Companies Do to Improve Workforce Engagement and Coordination in a Remote Work Environment?
16:11 What Makes External Data Easier to Analyze Compared to Internal Data?
17:15 How Can Messaging Data Help Organize Jobs?
19:37 What is the Foundation of Good Organizational Work?
20:14 Why Might It Be Challenging to Rely on ChatGPT for Orchestrating and Organizing a Company?

This episode was recorded live on video April 15th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/latest/
Benjamin Zweig

Transcript from Benjamin Zweig with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Decoding the Future of Work

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes our legacy?

[00:00:26] Narrator: A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. And today I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show Ben Zweig.

[00:00:42] Benjamin Zweig: Thank you. It was quite an intro.

[00:00:46] Jason Barnard: I love singing. It’s one of my favorite things. I’m an entrepreneur who’s a singer and you are an entrepreneur who’s an economist.

[00:00:53] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah, the close cousins.

[00:00:56] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Wonderful. Delightful. So welcome. We’re gonna be talking about decoding the future of work. I mean, I think my first question is gonna be, what is the future of work? Now that we have AI, we had covid, we have remote working. It’s gonna be a really, really interesting topic. But before that, we’re gonna look at your Brand SERP. That’s what we always do. And you share your name with this guy, a very famous drummer who’s got a huge Knowledge Panel with his photo in there, results about him. And when you share your name with somebody famous, getting the results to represent you is almost impossible.

[00:01:29] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.

[00:01:29] Jason Barnard: So here, you have an impossible task to dominate the drummer.

[00:01:34] Benjamin Zweig: Wow. I, I did not know that.

[00:01:36] Jason Barnard: Oh, right. Okay.

[00:01:37] Benjamin Zweig: Of luck.

[00:01:37] Jason Barnard: But look at this. When you work a Kalicube like I do, and you created a super machine, 3 billion data points, I can find your Knowledge Panel even if Google doesn’t show it.

[00:01:49] Jason Barnard: And here it is.

[00:01:51] Benjamin Zweig: Okay.

[00:01:52] Jason Barnard: So you actually have a Knowledge Panel. A Knowledge Panel is Google’s understanding of the facts about you. It’s a summary about you that it shows its users, so they don’t need to visit multiple sites to find all the information. So the description, and in our drummer’s case, the description from photos, different channels, in his age, for example, it would have potentially his partner. In your case businesses, you found it. For him, it would be groups he plays in. So it’s the factual summary of the person that Google thinks you’re looking for, which is why yours doesn’t pop. It doesn’t appear because Google thinks it’s more probable a persons searching for the famous drummer.

[00:02:30] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. That that, that’s a good life ambition to be the most famous Ben Zweig. So you know, Ben Zweig the drummer, I’m coming for you.

[00:02:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah. How many Ben Zweigs are in the world?

[00:02:40] Benjamin Zweig: You know, I, I, I know one other personally.

[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: You have a club.

[00:02:46] Benjamin Zweig: You know. What?

[00:02:48] Jason Barnard: You have a club.

[00:02:49] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah, yeah, I guess so. So, I mean, I, I, I actually had never met him, but he was, my wife was friends with him when they were little.

[00:03:00] Jason Barnard: Oh really?

[00:03:01] Benjamin Zweig: And, and they, and she thought, oh wow, that’s so funny. Like, I, you know, was kindergarten friends with the kid named Ben Zweig. So I don’t like I’d seen him around. But other than that, I, I think, I think I’d googled that there’s like a photographer named as I, I don’t know. So maybe, my guess is how many in the world, I would say not more than like six to eight.

[00:03:22] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. so your competition is all, is very low. The ambiguity is a huge problem with this guy here behind us. Scott Duffy. He shares his name to 10,000 other people.

[00:03:31] Benjamin Zweig: Right.

[00:03:32] Jason Barnard: And dominating like this was a huge challenge for us, but we managed to do it. I’m sharing my name with about 3,000 people.

[00:03:38] Benjamin Zweig: Oh wow. That’s pretty high.

[00:03:40] Jason Barnard: But if you search my name, Jason Barnard, I dominate. You wouldn’t imagine the other ones exist.

[00:03:44] Benjamin Zweig: Nice.

[00:03:44] Jason Barnard: I’d feel sorry for them because I worked so hard on it and I’m sorry. All the Jason Barnards out there. There’s a podcast in the UK. I’m very sorry. Anyway, onto the topic which is the future of work.

[00:03:57] Jason Barnard: The future of work from my perspective, has been in the past, pretty predictable. But Covid and AI have just thrown the whole thing out the window. Is that fair?

[00:04:10] Benjamin Zweig: What a good question. So has it been predictable in the past? I think I would say, I think I would, I would say no. I mean, there are, there are some cases where, I mean, yeah, I guess, let me, let me back up and, and think, you know, what are we really predicting when we’re predicting the future of work?

[00:04:32] Benjamin Zweig: Very often in the past, it seemed like what we were predicting would be employment. Just employment by occupation, by industry, by by sector. And there there’s a long history of us kind of getting it wrong. So, you know, the simplest, the simplest case is that you know, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes predictions on the growth rates by occupation, and that’s you know, as close to meaningless as possible. The, the correlation between the actual employment metrics is like zero. So, you know, and, and that’s on like a three to five year timeline. So in the kind of medium term employment predictions are very poor. Then there are some kind of high profile predictions. Like, you know, when the ATM came out, everyone predicted that would be the end of bank tellers and the employment of bank tellers actually increased.

[00:05:23] Benjamin Zweig: There, there’s this very famous paper written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, which, which tried to predict the very long term. So he was trying to predict what would happen by 2030, so in a hundred years from when he wrote in 1930. And basically that, you know, he wrote that, you know, we’re gonna see economic growth 2% a year, which we’ve actually exceeded.

[00:05:44] Benjamin Zweig: And because of that, the economic problem of scarcity will be solved. And, and we just won’t need, you know, we’ll live in an age of abundance and everyone will, will, everyone will work 15 hour weeks. And that was.

[00:05:59] Jason Barnard: That didn’t happen.

[00:06:00] Benjamin Zweig: That didn’t happen. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, and this is like, may, you know, one of the greatest economists of the last, you know, century or so, and, and you know, got it quite wrong.

[00:06:11] Jason Barnard: Well, would you agree that, I mean, let’s start with Covid.

[00:06:15] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.

[00:06:16] Jason Barnard: Covid ticked us all into a remote world.

[00:06:18] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.

[00:06:19] Jason Barnard: And that must have changed a lot and it must have caught everybody who was talking about the future of employment completely unaware.

[00:06:26] Benjamin Zweig: Totally. Yeah. I mean, it, it’s, it’s the first, it’s the first time I think in my lifetime that there’s been like a major labor market shock.

[00:06:35] There, there just hasn’t been anything like that that I remember. No, nothing, you know, labor markets didn’t move markets in the same way financial markets moved markets. And, and yeah, so, so Covid was, was a huge push and, and forced every company to kind of reoptimize its operations around the, the possibility of remote work and then hybrid work.

[00:06:56] Benjamin Zweig: So, so yeah, I think that was a huge disruption.

[00:07:02] Jason Barnard: Has remote work been good for the growth of companies?

[00:07:05] Benjamin Zweig: Yes.

[00:07:06] Jason Barnard: Good.

[00:07:07] Benjamin Zweig: Yes, it has. For the most part, I think we can say conclusively that yes, it has been good. And, and, and I, I usually not, not one to, to, you know, say things with a lot of confidence, but I think there, there’s so much research and evidence on the effectiveness of remote work.

[00:07:26] Benjamin Zweig: And I, I think there’s, there’s a few just like high level patterns that, you know, companies that have gone more remote are, you know, they’ve grown faster, they’ve adapted better, they, they’ve like performed better by, by whatever metrics of performance we, we wanna, we wanna capture. And employees prefer it for the most part.

[00:07:47] Benjamin Zweig: Not every employee. There’s a lot of heterogeneity.

[00:07:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:07:49] Benjamin Zweig: But, but you know, to the extent that that, you know, there’s some bargaining process between employees and employers, then you know that then making employees happy helps employers as well. But also, I think, I think the other, the other really important channel, so yeah, there’s two channels for why, why it’s productive.

[00:08:07] Benjamin Zweig: One is that like it’s better for employees and that’s, and that’s a big part of like the, the that’s a huge market that companies, that companies operate in, most of their expenses are for employees. Another is that it, it opens up the possibilities for, for hiring globally. So, so there’s, there’s labor arbitrage opportunities and that comes with its challenges, of course.

[00:08:31] Benjamin Zweig: But, you know, being in a more globalized market, being able to hire from wherever is, you know, if, if, if you’re well positioned to take advantage of that can be a lot more cost effective.

[00:08:42] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Okay. And from that perspective then, I mean, some bosses are saying you have to now come back into work because they want to have oversight. And it isn’t comfortable for them not to have that oversight, not to see somebody in office.

[00:09:00] Jason Barnard: And they’re convinced that the people are sitting at home in their pajamas looking at the ceiling, presumably.

[00:09:06] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there’s, there’s probably some of that, you know, like I, I think some of that is, is, yeah, here’s, here’s the, here’s the forgiving argument for it. That, you know, there are, there are people who shirk in their job and they need oversight and micromanagement and, you know, people need to be babysat to some degree.

[00:09:32] Benjamin Zweig: And that’s just, you know, a, a practical way to make sure people are effective. There’s another, there’s another forgiving argument that there’s, there’s something that there’s a type of culture that can be, that can be fostered in, in a workplace that, yeah. Is harder to foster in a remote environment.

[00:09:48] Benjamin Zweig: There’s another in that it’s easier to train people, especially more junior employees, you know, if you just like pop by someone’s desk, you know, you can, you can answer quick questions without having to like set up a meeting and go through the whole ring roll of like, answering, answering little questions.

[00:10:03] Benjamin Zweig: So those are kind of the, the, the forgiving read on like why, why managers want others in the office. The, the less forgiving read is that they, this is just a workforce reduction technique requiring people to come back to the office. They, they know people will, will quit and it’s maybe cheaper than like a layoff where you have to, you know, provide severance and all that.

[00:10:28] Benjamin Zweig: So, so I think that that’s like a, a factor. Another is that I think there’s this delusion that like you can, you can, that, that the reason why it’s harder to manage people is because they’re not on site. When I think in reality, it’s just getting harder to manage people full stop. You know, there’s sort of a secular trend toward difficulty of management.

[00:10:58] Benjamin Zweig: And I think that kind of relates to technology and, and, you know, AI in particular that, you know, a lot of, a lot of our jobs are getting more complex. You know, we we’re, you know.

[00:11:10] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:11:10] Benjamin Zweig: Like, yeah. Yeah. I really think, I mean, in the last like a hundred years or so, you know, we’ve been shifting more toward like, you know, sort of task-based work to more knowledge work where, where people are more, you know.

[00:11:23] Benjamin Zweig: Most people’s jobs right now is coordinating, is answering emails, being part of a network and figuring out where the bottlenecks are, you know, being this sort of, sort of coordinator. And a lot of white collar work. Knowledge work. It is, is that, and that, and that just, you know, the job is managing complexity.

[00:11:41] Benjamin Zweig: So if you are managing someone who’s managing complexity or managing someone who’s managing someone who’s managing complexity. You know, then, then, then like, it, it becomes more untenable to, to kind of stay on top of all that.

[00:11:54] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:11:54] Benjamin Zweig: And then with, with, with AI in particular, you know, what, what, what, what generative AI is, is, well really what most technologies are good at is performing tasks. But you know, every job, you know, you can think of job, of a job as a collection, as a bundle of work activities, a bundle of tasks. But I think the, the slightly different way to think about what a and, and that’s, that’s right in a lot of ways, but the slightly, the slightly more nuanced way to define a job is that yes, it’s a bundle of work activities, but it’s also coordinating between those work activities.

[00:12:29] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:12:30] Benjamin Zweig: So you’re, you’re deciding, you know, what comes first, what comes second, you know, how do these things fit together, blah, blah, blah. And, and that coordination, you know, now, now that we have more kind of like ai, you know, tools and, and more tools generally to perform the tasks, we also need to coordinate between those.

[00:12:46] Benjamin Zweig: So the coordination part of the job is expanding, well, the actual execution part of the job is shrinking.

[00:12:54] Jason Barnard: Right. So AI is taking over the execution, but we still need to organize it so the organizers have got a bright future.

[00:13:01] Benjamin Zweig: I think that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that’s, that’s the right read. Yeah.

[00:13:07] Jason Barnard: And organizing with remote teams is more difficult than it is with a team in an office.

[00:13:13] Jason Barnard: Would that be fair as well? I mean, you were saying just kind of knocking on the news door and having a quick conversation is a really good way to move forward very quickly.

[00:13:20] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.

[00:13:21] Jason Barnard: Whereas the remote aspect is, I need to set up a meeting, we book for half an hour, here’s my calendar. And all of a sudden I think we all feel much more busy, whereas just walking past or having a chat at the coffee machine is significantly quicker.

[00:13:35] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. I think, I think that sounds right on its face. The reason why I’m hesitant to, to say that that’s it’s definitely easier in person is that I think these, these examples of, you know, answering questions and training,, like training junior employees, I, I think that, that, I think we can be comfortable to say like, that’s easier. And, and you know, in, in person you get more of these serendipitous interactions, et cetera.

[00:14:00] Benjamin Zweig: But, but I think as we’ve, as we’ve shifted toward an economy where, where we’re more optimized around remote work. Then tools have popped up and, and you know, now we have, you know, the slack and notion and you know. What, whatever, you know, all these, all these different tracking technologies that, that are, that are built around distributed teams.

[00:14:25] Benjamin Zweig: And I think in some ways that like rigor and formality is, is kind of easier when, when, when you’re not like, when, when that’s, yeah. I, I guess like the, the formality of it, I think is helpful. So, so, and, and, and I, I could see a world where like actually being in person, you know, is like maybe too personal to some degree. You know, then you’re, you know, there’s all this research around how, like, you know, when, when one person, let’s say you’re a manager and one of your reports is in person and the other one is, is not. Then, then you’re much more likely to promote the one that you see in person, right?

[00:15:07] Benjamin Zweig: But it’s not clear that they’re doing a better job. It might just be the mere exposure effect that you see them and you like them and you hang out with them and your friends and, and, and that sort of may get in the way of more of a meritocracy. So, you know, could, could inhibit the ability to manage effectively.

[00:15:27] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:15:28] Benjamin Zweig: So I wouldn’t be surprised if it went any other direction, I guess.

[00:15:31] Jason Barnard: Okay. And well that just makes me think, you’re talking about Slack and Notion and so on and so forth with the online remote world. Of course, you’ve got a lot of data which you don’t get around the coffee machine.

[00:15:41] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

[00:15:44] Jason Barnard: So what do you do with the data? To improve the way your workforce is engaging and, and, and coordinating, as you said.

[00:15:50] Benjamin Zweig: So if, if we just think about how the data is segmented, so there’s, there’s kind of the, the formal data, like what’s someone’s job title, when did they start, who do they report to? Like what’s their, you know, what’s skills do they have?

[00:16:03] Benjamin Zweig: And you know, where do they come from when they join, where do they go when they leave? A lot of that data is, is kind of. In the public domain, you know, we, we collect that data from, you know.

[00:16:15] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:16:15] Benjamin Zweig: My resumes and profiles and, you know, GitHub and job postings and, you know, all, all these different sources.

[00:16:22] Benjamin Zweig: So, so that’s, that’s kind of out there. And then you have internal systems where you have some performance reading. You know, maybe some messaging app or meeting room reservations or something that’s, that’s harder to get. I think if we and, and it’s harder to unify and standardize. There are teams that work with internal data and, and they have a much harder job.

[00:16:40] Benjamin Zweig: And that, you know, wrangling that and getting that into shape is, is harder when it’s, you know, stored in like different systems. So, so for better or for worse, I mean, most of the value comes from analyzing external data. It’s just much easier to get value because you can centralize the effort. So, so the, the, you know, messaging data, I, I, you know, hope we see a world where that becomes very valuable.

[00:17:08] Benjamin Zweig: I don’t think we’re quite there yet. But what I’d say is that, like how does that help you, you know, organize your jobs? I would say it really depends on, whether you have a good structure for work activities and tasks. So, you know, like we said before, you know, a job can be, can be viewed as a bundle of tasks, bundle of activities. And, and ultimately, you know, the job of, of managing people, the job of management generally is about reconfiguring work. So, you know, there’s this, there’s this quote that I like that, you know, consultants do two things. They, they bundle and unbundle and that’s the job. And, and in some way like that, that kind of makes sense. Like analysis, you know, just is about, you know, breaking things into pieces and kind of recombining them in in different ways.

[00:17:56] Benjamin Zweig: So, so I think, I think if we, if we start with, with a sense of what people are doing and you know, and you know, let’s say you have a dozen things that you do in your job, you know, let’s say a dozen responsibilities. Those need to, those need to adapt all the time. You know, let’s say, you, you get a new, a new request from client and you say, Hmm, now we need to do this extra thing.

[00:18:23] Benjamin Zweig: Who can do it? And you think, okay, we have a new, a new task. You know, coming outta left field, who, who does it? Who delivers on it? You need to think like, okay, who’s got the bandwidth? Who’s good at it? Who’s interested in it? So, so you need to slot that someone, and then, you know, I dunno, someone, someone quits and someone needs to take over their work.

[00:18:41] Benjamin Zweig: Or someone comes, comes to you and they say, you know, an employee comes to you and they say, I don’t like this anymore. And you know, I’m bored by this work. I’m not engaged and I’d rather be doing this other thing. And you know, or or you finish a project and you have extra bandwidth or whatever it is. You know, we’re always dealing with, with changing requirements and, you know, matching the requirements of the business to, you know, what, what the employees deliver on is, is a very fluid dynamic process.

[00:19:11] Benjamin Zweig: So I think in order to manage that, you know, formally or informally, even if this just happens kind of in your head, is, is really, it’s really all about knowing what tasks and activities people are doing, and what they could be doing, and, and how you can kind of reconfigure that work to meet, to meet the demands of the business.

[00:19:37] Benjamin Zweig: So I think, yeah, getting, getting a good job architecture for activities, tasks, knowing the skills of your employees, the, you know, and how those kind of cluster together I think is really the foundation of good, good organizational work.

[00:19:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it, it’s a constantly evolving process that never,

[00:19:56] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.

[00:19:56] Jason Barnard: Stops and it, it, it’s very tempting and I’ll end with this question. It’s very tempting for me to think. Right, in that case I’ll just go and ask ChatGPT and I put it all the tasks of all my people and what they’re doing and how they connect and then tell me how to organize my company.

[00:20:12] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey, you know, may, maybe, maybe that’s the solution.

[00:20:16] Benjamin Zweig: Maybe in that sense, you know what, what you’re really relying on is, is ChatGPT to be this orchestrator, and then that orchestration does need to be done. The reason why I’m, I’m not like so sure that we’re ready for that yet, is that this data changes all the time. So, so we need to have a, a good way of, of kind of, you know, a good system for, for analyzing that, for versioning that. And, and I think that’s you know, not exactly what generative AI is built to do. You know, maybe other, other tools can augment that. So you know, that would be a very exciting prospect.

[00:20:58] Jason Barnard: But it’s too early.

[00:21:00] Benjamin Zweig: Forward headed, but, you know, yeah, someday, someday we’ll get there. Hopefully.

[00:21:04] Jason Barnard: It’s too early. And I mean, what I was hoping to hear is ChatGPT doesn’t understand people’s soul.

[00:21:10] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:11] Jason Barnard: And as a manager, I do. So that was absolutely brilliant, Ben. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching. You get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Ben.

[00:21:26] Benjamin Zweig: That was wonderful. Thank you.

[00:21:27] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much. That was absolutely delightful.

[00:21:29] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are.

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