Working It (Financial Times) · Financial Times

Finale: How work has changed since we started this show

January 28, 2025·26 min·2 clips

Andrew Hill reveals why workplaces are about people, not work or place, after the pandemic.

Isabel Berwick opens the final episode of Working It by thanking listeners, executive producer Manuela Saragossa and producer Misha Frankel-Duval. She invites three regular contributors — Andrew Hill, Emma Jacobs and Anjali Raval — to reflect on what the show has covered since October 2021. Andrew Hill says the big lesson is that workplaces are about people, not places or even work itself. Emma Jacobs argues the pandemic changed work less than it might have, comparing it to the way offices snapped back to normal after 9/11. Anjali Raval frames the last two years as a power shift from employees back to managers as the labour market loosened. The panel agrees that return-to-office stories stay popular because they are human stories everyone can relate to. On AI, Andrew Hill tells Isabel she is not uniquely behind — everyone is still at the beginning — while Anjali reports 2025 is shaping up as the year professional services try to commercialise AI use. On pay, Emma recounts a database glitch that once gave her access to every colleague's salary, which she found too depressing to keep open. The group argues pay transparency is mostly wanted by employees, not employers. Andrew reflects on why ethical failures repeat: each new generation has to learn workplace norms from scratch. Anjali and Emma push back on lazy intergenerational stereotypes, noting younger workers in small flats often want the office more than senior staff with houses and networks. Isabel recalls being mortified reading her own early-90s work diaries. On wellness, Emma notes one in five UK workers are long-term sick and the conversation is only starting. They discuss how remote workers tend to work through illness rather than take sick leave. Andrew warns Trump-era leadership could embolden old-fashioned top-down bosses and fuel anti-woke pushback against HR and DEI. Anjali notes US legal retrenchment on positive action has real implications for UK and European companies that prefer a single global policy. Emma closes on the fading four-day-week experiments she reported on in Portsmouth and the Norfolk Coast, lamenting the loss of genuine workplace experimentation. The episode ends with Emma bringing in a celebratory cake for the team.

As heard by us

A thoughtful farewell on office etiquette, generational tension and the workplace habits each cohort has to learn anew.

Working It ends with a measured FT roundtable on how workplace habits keep being relearned. Isabel Berwick brings back Andrew Hill, Emma Jacobs and Anjali Raval to look back on the show, which began in October 2021 and closes after 153 episodes and several million downloads.

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Why you'd press play

For a sharp farewell on how office life has shifted since 2021.

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