The Future of Work: How AI, Climate Change and Hybrid Work Are Reshaping Workplace Wellbeing
The forces reshaping work extend far beyond the individual. Here is what AI, climate change and hybrid work mean for worker wellbeing, work design and the future of coaching.
Work is changing rapidly, and the conditions shaping worker health are changing with it.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 describes technological change, geoeconomic pressures, climate-related shifts, and demographic change as major forces reshaping jobs and skills through 2030 (1). For occupational health coaching, 3 major drivers are especially important: AI and automation, hybrid or remote work, and climate hazards and workplace adaptation needs. These are not separate trends. Instead, they are rapidly reshaping task design, skill demands, risk exposure, recovery patterns, and what sustainable work now requires.
AI and automation
AI is not simply adding new tools to existing jobs. It is changing the work itself: which tasks people perform, what skills carry value, how performance is measured and how quickly work is expected to move.
Current evidence points to the scale and complexity of this change:
The World Economic Forum estimates that structural labour-market change could affect 22% of current jobs by 2030. It projects 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced globally - a net increase of 78 million jobs (1)
Among surveyed employers, 86% expect AI and information-processing technologies to transform their business. At the same time, 63% identify skills gaps as a major barrier to transformation and 85% plan to prioritise workforce upskilling (1)
An OECD survey of more than 6,000 firms across six countries found that algorithmic management tools were already commonly used in most countries studied. Managers reported benefits to decision-making alongside concerns about accountability, transparency and the protection of workers’ physical and mental health (2)
In a global study of more than 32,000 workers, 58% reported using AI at work at least every few months and 53% were willing to trust it for work purposes. While employees reported performance benefits, 26% experienced increased workload, stress and pressure, and 35% reported increased privacy or compliance risks (3).
These figures tell only part of the story. For workers, ‘new technology’ may mean reorganised tasks, blurred role boundaries, faster work, new performance expectations and uncertainty about job security or the future value of existing skills. It may also mean working alongside systems that collect data, recommend decisions or monitor performance in ways that are not always visible or easily understood.
Photo courtesy Karolina Gabrowska and Kaboompics
Importantly, the effects of AI can move in both directions. It may reduce repetitive work, support capability and make some tasks safer or more engaging. It may also intensify work and create risks involving privacy, fairness, autonomy and transparency. These outcomes are not created by the technology alone. They are shaped by how AI is selected, introduced, governed and integrated into the design of work (4,5).
In coaching terms, AI can create both opportunity and strain. Coaching can help people make sense of changing roles, build relevant capability, use technology more reflectively and establish realistic boundaries around pace and availability. But it should not be used to make workers more adaptable to poorly designed systems. Coaching cannot replace responsible governance, meaningful consultation, privacy protection, safe workloads or fair work design.
Hybrid and remote work
Hybrid and remote work have created new freedoms for some workers, but they have also introduced new health and inequality issues. Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey 2024 reports that 1 in 5 workers engage in telework, and notes that telework brings flexibility but also increased risks of blurred boundaries between work and private life (6). Eurofound’s The hybrid workplace: Ensuring benefits for workers and organisations (2025) adds that hybrid working can improve work-life balance and productivity, but also risks longer hours, blurred boundaries, and fewer structured breaks and social interactions than on-site work (7).
This matters because hybrid work is not experienced equally. An earlier 2022 Eurofound analysis found that around 1 in 5 EU employees worked from home sometimes or usually during the period 2020–2021, but also identified issues around disconnecting and employer expectations of availability outside working hours (8). Research by Braesemann et al. (2022) on remote labour markets also suggests that remote work opportunities are unevenly distributed, shaped by skills, human capital, and opportunity, which means access to the benefits of remote work is not equal across occupations or populations (9).
In practice, hybrid and remote work can affect social connection, visibility, boundary-setting, sedentary behaviour, caregiving strain, and access to informal support. Some workers gain autonomy and flexibility; others lose separation, structure, and belonging. Coaching can be useful here by helping coachees design boundaries, recovery routines, social connection strategies, and more intentional transitions between work and non-work. But coaching cannot substitute for organisational decisions about workload, right-to-disconnect expectations, inclusion, or equitable access to flexibility.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Jutzeler and Sujufoto
Climate hazards and adaptation needs
Climate change is already affecting work through heat, smoke, storms, outages, and other environmental disruptions. The International Labour Organization reports that climate change is creating a ‘cocktail’ of hazards for up to 70% of the world’s workers, and its 2024 Ensuring safety and health at work in a changing climate report identifies excessive heat, ultraviolet radiation, extreme weather events, workplace air pollution, vector-borne diseases, and agrochemicals as key climate-related occupational risks (10).
For coaching, this matters because climate-related strain does not only show up as a safety issue in the traditional sense. It can also affect sleep, fatigue, hydration, emotional load, recovery time, commuting, childcare arrangements, and whether work can continue at all after storms, outages, or poor air quality. Heat is especially important because it affects both health and performance. The World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization’s 2025 Climate change and workplace heat stress: technical report and guidance states that the health and productivity of workers are being severely impacted by rising temperatures, while 2024 was the hottest year on record (11).
This means coaching conversations increasingly need to include adaptation questions:
What part of the work is becoming harder in heat, smoke, or extreme weather?
What recovery practices matter more in these conditions?
What boundaries, pacing, or communication will help?
Coaching can support adaptation, but it cannot replace hazard control, safe systems of work, or emergency planning. Those remain organisational duties.
What all of this means for coaching
Across AI, climate change and hybrid work, the common thread is not simply that work is changing. It is that workers are being asked to adapt to multiple, overlapping pressures - often without greater control, clearer boundaries or adequate opportunities for recovery.
Coaching can help people understand what is changing, strengthen relevant capabilities, set healthier boundaries and identify where further support is needed. It can help clients distinguish between what sits within their influence and what must be addressed by leaders, employers or the wider system.
That distinction matters. Asking workers to become more resilient or adaptable cannot become a substitute for making work safer. Coaching cannot replace organisational risk management, hazard control, consultation, fatigue management, privacy safeguards or fair work design.
The future of workplace coaching lies in working across both levels: strengthening individual capability while remaining attentive to the conditions shaping health, performance and recovery. The goal is not to help people tolerate poorly designed work. It is to support healthier people - and contribute to better systems of work.
References
World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Milanez, A., Lemmens, A., & Ruggiu, C. (2025). Algorithmic management in the workplace: New evidence from an OECD employer survey (OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers No. 31).
Gillespie, N., Lockey, S., Ward, T., Macdade, A., & Hassed, G. (2025). Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025.
OECD. (2024). Using AI in the workplace: Opportunities, risks and policy responses (OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers No. 11). https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/03/using-ai-in-the-workplace_02d6890a/73d417f9-en.pdf
Salvi del Pero, A., Wyckoff, P., & Vourc’h, A. (2022). Using Artificial Intelligence in the workplace: What are the main ethical risks? OECD Publishing
Eurofound. (2024). European Working Conditions Survey 2024: First findings.
Eurofound. (2025). The hybrid workplace: Ensuring benefits for workers and organisations.
Eurofound. (2022). The rise in telework: Impact on working conditions and regulations.
Braesemann, F., Stephany, F., Teutloff, O., Kässi, O., Graham, M., & Lehdonvirta, V. (2022). The global polarisation of remote work.PloS one, 17(10), e0274630.
International Labour Organization (ILO) (2024). Ensuring safety and health at work in a changing climate.
World Health Organization (WHO) & World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (2025). Climate change and workplace heat stress: technical report and guidance.