A new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that a majority of current employees believe that the 9-to-5, eight-hour workday will become obsolete.
An additional 68 percent of those polled believe that their workday will take place outside of a traditional office, and more than three-fourths expressed their belief that their healthcare and retirement benefits will be something that they’ll have to personally prepare for and manage.
CBS MoneyWatch points out that most educated workers currently do not work an eight-hour day, instead opting for an arrangement that blurs the time spent doing work and engaging in leisure.
The freelance economy, which is rapidly growing, is expected by many to be the prevailing work arrangement of the future. 40 percent of standard employees expect to become freelancers within the next five years.
It is thought that to satisfy the new demands of employees, employers will have to provide the same kind of flexibility inherent to the freelance worker. The PwC report highlights that those who have privileges to work at home at least once a week are significantly more likely to express satisfaction with their job.
The report shows that employees are much more cynical about the workplace than their employers, as employers were nearly twice as likely to express that they believed they were in a “committed partnership” with their employees.
Contrary to popular belief, the workplace study also found that older individuals are more likely to want to work independently than millennials.
The PwC study polled 1,385 American employees in May.
