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The slogan “take back control” taps into something deep in the British electorate — or so politicians seem to believe, since it continues to pop up in speeches almost a decade after it was first deployed by the Brexit campaign. But while policy wonks and psephologists have explored why the phrase might resonate with people in terms of immigration or sovereignty, there is another venue in which people have reported a remarkable loss of control in their daily lives: the workplace.
We know this thanks to a government-funded survey of workers called the Skills and Employment Survey which has been running for almost 40 years. One of the most striking trends uncovered by the survey is a steep and steady decline in “task discretion” since the 1990s. This is a measure of how much influence people say they have over their day-to-day work, such as which tasks to do and how to do them. In 1992, 62 per cent of surveyed workers said they had a great deal of task discretion. By 2024, only 34 per cent said the same.
Before 2017, this decline was most evident among people in lower-paid jobs. But between 2017 and 2024, task discretion fell among professionals and more highly skilled workers too. Is this just a British trend? Sadly, there is a lack of up-to-date internationally comparable data, though a large European survey of working conditions due to be published later this year should offer some answers.
As to the explanation, one clue is the trend’s persistence, which doesn’t seem to have been swayed very much by the gyrations of the labour market in recent decades, from the financial crisis to the pandemic. Alan Felstead, a research professor at Cardiff University who worked on the survey, told me the most “likely culprit” was “the increased use of digital technologies” in the workplace. “It’s not a coincidence that one has rocketed over that time period, and the other has gone in the opposite direction,” he said.
It is easy to think of examples of software which has made work more prescriptive or structured, from real-time tracking of logistics workers to the use of tools which allow managers to keep track of white-collar workers’ productivity. Felstead describes this trend as “discretion-sapping technological change.”
Of course, these interventions may have made workers more productive and improved the standardisation or quality of their work. But there is a body of research which suggests that having little control over how you work can also be bad for your mental and physical health.
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In addition, productivity can be improved from the top down or the bottom up. Tools which monitor, direct or organise work processes might ensure that people work more quickly or with more precision, but they could also reduce the scope for workers to try new ways of doing things or make suggestions for how to work in a smarter way. In the survey, people with high task discretion were much more likely to say they had made suggestions to improve efficiency in their workplace. And while I don’t think the decline in task discretion at work is to blame for the UK’s poor productivity performance since the financial crisis, it doesn’t seem to have done much to help either.
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The question now is whether generative artificial intelligence will reverse or accelerate the trend. Notably, the spread of AI has been much more organic and “bottom up” so far than previous waves of technological change in the workplace. A survey of more than 48,000 people in 47 countries published this year by the University of Melbourne in collaboration with KPMG found that 58 per cent of employees were intentionally using AI tools at work on a regular basis, but more were using free public tools than were using tools provided to them by their employers. Only two in five reported that their organisation had a policy or provided guidance on the use of generative AI tools.
If workers are taking the lead with these tools, that suggests a moment of increased autonomy as people find their own new ways of doing things (albeit with risks to security and accuracy, among other things). But it is still early days. Already, some employers are beginning to exert top-down control over the process. Shopify, for example, has said AI use is now a “fundamental expectation” and told employees it will add “AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire”.
The “wild west” phase of AI adoption offers workers a rare opportunity to experiment and change the way they do their jobs. Perhaps even to “take back control”. Whether this turns out to be a brief phase or a new norm will depend on what employers do next.