Dur­ing times of reces­sion the way busi­ness is con­ducted changes dras­ti­cally. Given the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate, Lynda Gratton—a pro­fes­sor from the Lon­don Busi­ness School—wonders what work­ing habits will emerge now?

The 1981–82 reces­sion her­alded the end of the notion of a “job for life”. Jobs and careers would never be the same. The mantra fol­low­ing the 1980s reces­sion was that of the “free agent”. The rela­tion­ship between employ­ees and employer was described as mov­ing from “parent-child” to “adult-adult”; flex­i­ble work­ing was increas­ingly seen as a viable option and only the deluded thought they had a job for life. This is increas­ingly seen as the norm, bring­ing despair to some and a sense of lib­er­a­tion to others.

The reces­sion of 1990–91 accel­er­ated these changes while adding one more impor­tant dimen­sion – that of glob­al­i­sa­tion. Costs were cut by mov­ing work out of the devel­oped coun­tries into the labour mar­kets of the emerg­ing nations such as India and east­ern Europe. What began as the exo­dus of low-cost work accel­er­ated over the next 10 years into the glob­al­i­sa­tion of tal­ent in sec­tors such as infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy and research.

So what impact will the cur­rent reces­sion have on work over the next decade? Of course, these trends are easy to spot in hind­sight – more dif­fi­cult when you are in the midst of the down­turn. But there are enough clues for us to make a guess.