The Work That Can't Be Counted

I'm in the closing stretch of my working life, and lately I've been asking myself a blunt question: what is someone at my stage actually for?

It's not a gloomy question. If anything, it's the opposite. Because the more I look at what's happening in workplaces right now, the more convinced I am that people like me are holding something companies spent thirty years throwing away, and are about to need back rather badly.

What we broke

Be honest about the last few decades. Companies steadily dismantled learning on the job. Apprenticeships faded. Training budgets shrank. Mentoring stopped being something that just happened and became a programme, then a form, then nothing much at all. Then remote work took away the last of the everyday contact. A whole cohort started their careers staring at a green dot on a screen, never once watching how work was actually done. Some of those people are managers now. A few are leaders. They were never apprenticed in any of it.

At the same time, work turned transactional. When mass layoffs became a routine way to balance the books, companies taught their people that loyalty only flows one way. Employees learned the lesson and stopped offering it back. Fair enough, frankly. And underneath all of that sits a wider culture that keeps telling every one of us that we are the main character: smaller families, schooling that only ever rewards individual results, a phone that shows each of us a completely personal version of the world.

You can see the result in tiny things. Nobody cleans the office kitchen anymore. You can also see it in bigger things. The complaint I hear most about young colleagues is "why can't they just pick up the phone?" But think it through. They didn't grow up with a landline, so they never absorbed the ritual of calling a friend's house and getting the parents first. And at work, nobody ever let them watch someone handle a difficult call, and nobody gave them small, safe calls to practise on before the frightening one to the big client. That isn't a character flaw in a generation. That's a learning system we switched off.

It's now producing some strange symptoms. There are junior staff who are so unpractised at ordinary workplace friction that they quietly ask AI to write the email requesting a day off, rather than ask their manager directly. Every one of those ghost-written messages is a small sign of a workplace that has stopped connecting.

What AI actually changes

Here's the thought that reframed it for me. AI is very good at the work you can count: output, speed, clearing the inbox, grinding through the routine. You could almost think of it as the newest recruit in the building. Works all night, produces at double speed, gets things wrong sometimes, desperately eager to please. Like every new generation, it needs managing and putting in its place.

If the machines take the countable work, the question becomes unavoidable: what are the humans for? I'd say three things, and none of them will ever show up on a productivity dashboard.

The first is care. Not wellbeing programmes or HR procedures, but the ordinary skill of noticing what's going on in a colleague's life without prying, and responding like a human being.

The second is passing on wisdom. Judgment, craft, instinct, professional manners. The things you can't look up. And these days it has to flow in both directions, because the younger people have plenty to teach the rest of us about the new tools.

The third is honest communication. Saying the clear thing kindly instead of hiding behind niceness until the annual review, and actually listening in return.

There's a catch worth naming, though. The routine work AI is removing was never just drudgery. It was the path to mastery. The years of grind are how people develop judgment in the first place. I heard of a senior partner at a major law firm who said two things in the same breath: they're hiring fewer paralegals because AI now does the groundwork, and they're spending serious money taking clients and their families to Taylor Swift concerts. Both decisions come from the same realisation. Knowledge is becoming a commodity. What clients pay for is judgment, judgment rests on trust, and trust is only ever built person to person. But if the apprentice work disappears, where does the next generation's judgment come from? Someone has to build that path deliberately now, because it no longer happens by accident.

Where someone like me comes in

This is the part that has me leaning in rather than winding down. Nearly everything on that list is precisely what a person with decades behind them can give, and precisely what companies stopped making room for.

So this is my working agenda for the final act, and I'd offer it to anyone in a similar position.

Make yourself observable. The deepest teaching isn't a training course, it's letting people watch you work. Take the awkward phone call with a junior colleague sitting beside you. Think out loud. Let them see the recovery from the clumsy moment as well as the polished result.

Build the small rungs. Nobody should make their first scary client call as their actual first call. Hand younger colleagues small, survivable versions of the big moments first. That ladder used to exist naturally. Now it has to be built on purpose.

Learn downwards as well as teach. The most credible thing an experienced person can do is ask a twenty-five-year-old to teach them something, and genuinely mean it. It earns you the right to teach in return.

Show people how to ask. How to raise a concern, how to reset someone's expectations of you, how to take feedback without crumbling. Those of us who absorbed all this slowly over decades tend to assume it's obvious. It isn't. It was taught to us, informally, by people who let us watch.

Protect the people already doing this unpaid. Every office has one: the person everyone leans on for support, advice and a hundred small favours, who is never recognised for it, eventually burns out and leaves, at which point a surprising amount quietly collapses. If human connection really is the future of work, it can't keep being extracted for free.

And for anyone in leadership, one last piece: you can't workshop your way out of a transactional culture. People do what the reward structure tells them. If only individual output gets measured, "we" will never beat "me". The honest question every leader now has to answer is this: if I can't offer stability anymore, what exactly am I offering? A place to learn? A place to belong? The step that prepares someone for their next step? Companies that can answer that keep their people. Companies that can't shouldn't be surprised by what they get back.

I'll add the uncomfortable bit too. Very little of this works fully remotely. Watching, practising, connecting. It needs people in a room together at least some of the time.

The closing argument

For thirty years we optimised work for everything that could be measured and starved everything that couldn't. The irony of AI is that by mastering the measurable, it hands the unmeasurable back to us, and shows us how badly we neglected it.

For those of us near the end of our careers, that's not a reason to coast to the finish line. It might be the best use of the whole final act: to be the connective tissue, the observable example, the patient teacher of the things no dashboard will ever capture. Judgment, unlike information, can only be passed from one person to another.

That handover is the job now. I suspect it's the most important one I'll ever do.

Inspired by a discussion between Dr Eliza Filby and Simon Sinek.