Welcome to this week's episode of the Modern Mentor Podcast.

I'm your host, Rachel Cook.

Today's episode is all about the future of work, because the reality of 2020 has triggered tremendous changes in how we work. How do we wrap our

heads around what's already changed and what's coming next? And more importantly, how can we prepare

for success in the future of work? Enter Elaine Mason, Vice President of People and Communities at Cisco Systems.

Elaine is well read and researched on all

things future of work, and I invited her to join me in a conversation to help us make sense of

trends and to offer tips on how we can all prepare for success. Elaine leads a team at Cisco dedicated

to partnering with emerging and inclusive communities. Elaine also serves on the boards

of several nonprofit organizations, and she holds her master's degree in organization development

from Pepperdine University. Elaine, I'm so excited to have you here with me today. I wanted to have

this conversation because I know that you spend a lot of time researching and having conversations about the

future of work, which is this phrase that we all hear a lot about. We're recording this

conversation still during the pandemic. A lot of people are working remotely. And in some ways,

it feels like the future of work has started to come upon us.

And so I just wanted to get your perspective on what shifts we have been seeing and what we can

expect looking forward based on what you've seen and read.

We know that the pandemic caused the future of work to arrive early, whether we liked it or

not. When I think about future of work, I start thinking about what did we expect was going to happen in 2020, that a lot of people made predictions about what this year was going to be in 2010. I think a lot of them predicted rightly, and some of them had missed a couple of big marks. We heard about the gig economy and the talent war that the world of work is going to change and people were going to be a lot more flexible about their work. We heard about the gig economy and the talent war that, you know, the world of work is going to

change and people were going to be a lot more flexible about their work. We heard about the end of

corporate hierarchy. We heard about that workplace flexibility was going to become more common.

And we heard about the robots for taking over that was going to be automation. It was going to be

...