Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Sun, 23 Mar 2025
Part One of a 3-part series on Josh Drean. Josh has worn many hats—Harvard MBA, psychology grad, co-founder of Work3 Institute and now, co-author of Employment is Dead (Harvard Business Review Press). We’re kicking off 2025 with a bang—by declaring employment dead. Yes, you read that right. Josh Drean is here to dismantle the traditional job market, toss outdated HR policies into the digital abyss, and redefine what it means to work in the modern world.This is Part 1 of a three-part series with Josh, where we dig into why the corporate world’s obsession with employee engagement surveys is as effective as asking your toaster for career advice. Spoiler alert: Most companies don’t actually want honest feedback from employees.Stay tuned for Part 2, where we take the conversation even deeper into the new rules of work.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Why “people are our greatest asset” is corporate gaslighting – If people were really assets, why are they still an expense on the balance sheet?The future is flexible, but companies are stuck in the past – Why forcing employees back to the office is like making them commute to a typewriter factory._________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Josh Drean_________________________--Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.10 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.130,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today. --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'Employment is Dead'?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are diving into the future of work with George Dream. George is a Harvard MBA, a startup founder, and the co-author of the book called Employment is Dead.
Yes, you hear it right. That is a very bold statement. But he's got a story to back it up. Across this three-part series, We'll explore why traditional employment models are failing, how emerging technologies like Web3 and AI are reshaping work, and what companies must do to survive.
We'll also go behind the scenes of George's book, how a cold call turned into a major publishing deal, and why the old ways of managing people just don't cut it anymore. Whether you are an employee, an employer, or just curious about where work is headed, this series will challenge the way you think. Good morning, Josh. Welcome to Chief Change Officer. It's very early morning for you there.
It is. It's nice and early, but I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, Vince.
Let's dive right in. First of all, who you really are, what you have done in the past. Then we'll deep dive into different elements of your journey.
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity and thanks again for having me. My passion is rooted in employee engagement and employee experience, making sure that we are helping employees have the best experience possible so that they can do their best work possible. It's a very simple solution. And when I was a student, we were building a startup out of the Harvard Innovation Labs.
We were very interested in this concept of employee engagement. And when we started to look at the landscape, we recognized that there wasn't a lot being done there. A company would unilaterally make decisions about maybe we should bring a ping pong table in. Maybe we should have snacks in the break room.
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Chapter 2: Why are traditional employee engagement surveys flawed?
And this concept of an employee engagement survey never really sat well with us because the idea is let's ask employees how they're feeling. It's a great concept, but The way that we were doing it was just completely flawed in my mind. It was a once-a-year survey, long questions. There was no real diving into the culture or the issues at hand. A lot of it seemed performative.
And employees weren't very trusting of an organization, so they weren't being honest on these surveys. Growing up in this generation of social media, we thought, We are so used to immediate feedback almost daily from our social posts and from the feedback that we receive from putting ourselves out into the world.
Chapter 3: How did Josh Drean's startup approach employee feedback differently?
So we started building this startup where we pioneering sentiment analysis in real time. That's a fancy way of saying let's ask more often, let's create an environment where employees can trust us, and let's receive feedback in a way that flows with the day-to-day activities of an employee so it doesn't feel like they have to stop what they're doing to take an annoying survey.
It was quite an interesting venture and we absolutely learned so much. And I think the surprising outcome for us is we didn't really, some of the assumptions that we were making didn't actually hold to be true. For example, I'll never forget showing my wife the software for the first time. She's a marriage and family therapist.
And as I was so excited to show her the software that we were working on, she just turned to me and said, surveys are the dumbest way to build relationships with people. Why are you focusing on this? It's a very deep thought when you really unpack it.
But the biggest thing that we learned, the biggest assumption that was broken for us is that we didn't understand most companies don't actually want to know how employees are feeling. We had pilot organizations who... either liked the performance or the view that they were interested, even though it just felt like they were giving lip service to it.
Chapter 4: Why do companies often fail to value employees genuinely?
Or they were, they really just wanted to know for their own benefit so that they could push the employees harder or know who to fire. All of the fears that employees have turned out to be fairly real. And that just blew our minds. And so I spent a long time trying to understand why are most companies not that interested to know how employees are truly feeling and
What we came up with was that it's not necessarily a people problem. It's not a leadership problem. It's a system problem. The system is designed for short-term shareholder value, which often neglects employees' needs. And it was also established at a time where the industrial age was really catching its stride, right? Taylorism is this concept where... We're checking boxes.
Chapter 5: What systemic issues hinder true employee engagement?
We're on the assembly line and we have one task to complete. So management makes sure that we are doing our tasks perfectly. And in the age of information, we just don't need that style of management anymore. So the bold claim, employment is dead, comes out of that experience where we believe that traditional models of employment are failing to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more about the short-term mindset. I've studied economics, finance, and accounting, and at the end of the day, even with the best intentions, a competent, capable, and purpose-driven CEO, a chief HR officer, or any senior leader still has to balance doing good with making money. They look at the numbers, the bottom line, and all the financial metrics.
They ask, how was our accounting income this quarter? What's our cash position? And eventually, they make decisions, sometimes tough ones like cutting jobs. To them, it's ultimately just a number. It feels cold, but that's the reality of how these decisions are made. And yet, in financial reports, you always see the same message. People are our greatest asset.
But let's be real, on the financial statements, people are not listed as assets. They are categorized as an expense item on the income statement, not something quantified on the balance sheet that drives revenue and income. So while the message says people first, the decision-making still comes down to numbers. In the end, employees are just HR records sitting in the cloud.
Now, I'm not saying this to discredit well-intentioned HR leaders or CEOs. It's just the reality of how businesses operate. Before we get into Wall Street Institute and the solutions you're building for these big challenges, I want to take a step back and talk about your own career journey. You've observed these issues firsthand. And what about your personal experience?
When you were fresh off college, studying psychology, working under different leaders and managers, what did that look like for you? Then you went to Harvard for your MBA and learned to be more innovative in your approach. Let's start with your early career. How did your experiences shape the way you see these challenges today and influence the solutions you're working on?
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Chapter 6: How did Josh Drean's early career shape his views on employment?
Yeah, you highlight a really good point, right? The reason why HR tends to get a bad rap from employees, oh no, I'm getting called into the HR office, which means I'm getting fired, is because there is no positive signal coming from that department outside of I'm getting a paycheck, I'm getting paid.
And most people recognize at this point that HR, their job is to protect the company from getting sued, from any lawsuits that might come out of their employment. And I think you're absolutely right that we need to evolve from what we have been evolving from personnel to human resources. And a lot of human centric human resource officers are now looking at it as people operations.
Or how do we step away from terms like, oh, our people are an asset or human capital, where it is just a number on a balance sheet to the actual human. We're moving away from. a contractual based employment to a partnership based employment? How do we build that relationship in a way that honors their humanity? And I guess that's where I get started.
I am very passionate about, again, that employee experience. How are we designing experiences that let employees bring their full selves to work that are aware of their work-life balance, that understand the nuances of the things that they are dealing with. And that became very apparent as I was graduating school. It was right in the middle of the pandemic. 2020 is a terrible year to graduate.
I remember being so excited to walk at graduation, April of 2020, and the pandemic hit and we are And here we are throwing our caps and gowns in our base, like on a Zoom call. But I entered the workforce fairly quickly. I started working with a consulting firm that eventually was merged with Mercer. And we were working with HR departments of large organizations who were dealing with
next level real world pandemic issues with their employees. How do we keep our employees safe who still have to work? How do we bring a remote policy to the workplace that allows people to continue to work from home? They were forced to work from home, if you will. How do we design for a work life balance? And that's where I really started to cut my teeth in this industry of understanding
Here's what people are experiencing at work. Here's why leadership is failing to meet those needs. And the book really serves as a red flag to organizations who aren't focused on designing an experience for employees. If you still feel like they are just an asset and that you can... Tell them exactly what to do and they should be grateful to have a job because most don't.
And you promote them without pay or you fire them and lay them off in droves as we're seeing right now. Or you force them back to the office against what their preferences are. We're seeing so many practices on display that are just going to destroy the cultures of organizations that are going to destroy the trust that employees have.
And it's going to lead to a great resignation 2.0 that is going to be so much worse than we've ever seen.
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