The Future of Work - with Jan Owen and Professor Leah Ruppanner

The pandemic has flipped the lid on several business models, including changing the fundamentals of the way we work. A McKinsey report states that about 20-25% of the workers in advanced economies will continue to work remotely for three to five days a week. Success in this new world order will be for those who learn to adapt and give their employees the opportunity to embrace an emerging work culture, namely, choose your workplace.

While enterprises are giving employees flexibility, the future of work will be successful only through intelligent technology choices.

Folio's May Conversation Event will be in-person.

Where: Boyd Community Hub - Assembly Hall 207 City Rd, Southbank VIC 3006

When: Tues 24th May, please start arriving from 7pm for a 7:30pm start

Jan has spent her career working at the intersection of individual, organisational and societal change as an entrepreneur, innovator and social sector leader.

Her work includes: building and leading alliances; campaigns and advocacy on the rights of children and young people around the globe; strategy, innovation and leadership on the future of education, work and entrepreneurship; facilitating and building powerful strategic community, business, government and philanthropic investment and partnerships committed to our collective future as an inclusive, imaginative and courageous world.

Jan has been the recipient of many Awards acknowledging her commitment to unleashing the unlimited potential of children and young people and services to the Australian community.

Jan is Founder & Principal, Adaptability & working with innovative leaders and organisations on strategy, innovation & systems change; co-Chair/Convenor, Learning Creates Australia; co-Convenor, FoyerInvest Consortium; Chair, Cool Australia and co-Founder, Be Well.

She is the co-author of Every Childhood Lasts a Lifetime (1996) and The Future Chasers (2014); and Host of the New Work Bites Podcast.

Leah Ruppanner is a Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of The Future of Work Lab at the University of Melbourne. She was previously a Director of The Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne.

Her research investigates gender and its intersection to inequalities, technologies and policies. Associate Professor Ruppanner is a leading expert on COVID-19 and its impact on gender inequality in US and Australia. Her book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers out of Employment (2020) provides a typology of childcare and gender policies and their relationship to mothers' employment varies across US states. This has led to a range of high impact publications showing women have divergent experiences based on their state of residence. Finally, she is leading a project on gender bias in hiring algorithms to understand how gender bias limits women's access to employment.

Ruppanner's research is published in Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociological Methods and Research, European Sociological Review and Social Science Research. She also has expansive media coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian and external grant success including the ARC DECRA, an ARC Discovery on sleep and an ARC Linkage on women in local government.