One aspect of the future in my stories that generated a good deal of comment from readers is the linkage I make between ‘life partners’ and professional employment. My two protagonists in First Touch, Tar Barsak and Mia Lin Sun, were picked as a couple for their jobs, not just as individuals. This was an artifice I used in order to make a better love story as part of the background themes in First Touch. But it is also something that I believe would lead to improved efficiency and productivity in the workplace.
In First Touch, Tar Barsak and Mia Lin Sun were assigned to their jobs both because each was fully qualified for their job, but also largely because each counterbalanced, or reinforced, the other’s ability to do their job well. Simply put, each could do a better job while married than alone, because their personal, 24-hour a day relationship as life partners, meant the other made each better at their job than just their own capabilities alone. Most of the rest of the crew on the Von Braun were the same: married couples.
I think this ‘the crew is mostly married couples’ scenario is more realistic than one might first think. I don’t know about others, but I would not volunteer to work in space, living on a spacecraft for months or years at a time, if my spouse were not going along with me. A company would face a narrow and small labor pool of applicants, I think, unless it allowed spouses to come along. And if you are going to have someone on a spacecraft, you probably need to put them to work doing something useful, given how expensive it is to house and feed them. Given that, you would carefully select the couple for their jobs, getting the best combination you could find.
But beyond that, I believe this approach would benefit job performance and economic prosperity in our society a good deal, even though I think that its explicit use in hiring and work management would be strongly opposed by many people as both unfair and an intrusion of a person’s personal space and rights. Over a 57-year career in which I was everything from a flunky, an ‘individual contributor,’ to a supervisor, manager, director, and mid-level executive in a global giant conglomerate, and a top executive in a hundred-plus-million-dollar company I helped grow from nothing, I saw repeatedly that job performance depended not just on the person, but their ‘other half.’ There were many reasons of course, and to some extent, this tends to work itself out automatically in today’s workplace. People who have made good life-partner choices, who have good members of their team at home tend to perform better, not doubt both because they maybe have better common sense in picking those partners, and have a better environment at home.
But I think that, if used explicitly and managed well, this approach could be put on steroids and where needed, make a big difference, as for example in a company having to live in space and face all the challenges that would entail. So, in the Free Mars Defence Force series, that is how Y-Company, and its competitors, vet employees and evaluate performance on the job, even straying perhaps – at least as far as some of the characters in the books suspect – into manipulating certain couples to marry so as to create especially effective teams for key jobs the Company has.
Again, I added this aspect to the stories because it gives me a chance to better delve into the private lives of the characters and make each story more ‘alive’ and human. But it is something I firmly believe would be done, if and when we venture into space in a big way: “Stay on Earth if you will. But if you come out here for the challenging life we have for you, expect us to evaluate you and if and where you fit into our team based on who you are as a couple, not just individually.”
Such a work environment would make managing much harder and bring up a host of ethical, personal, and privacy issues. But executives, managers and supervisors in the future will have all manner of AI to help them manage the much more complex social and professional system it would create. And I think this is worth thinking about from a personal standpoint. When one picks a teammate-for-life, one is essentially putting them on the board of directors of their life. Their weaknesses become yours as do their strengths. Most of us in the United States marry or bond out of a combination of love and lust, as I did. But if you are lucky enough, or perhaps smart enough, to select a partner who has symbiotic chemistry that resonates with yours, you are in a situation where one plus one equals more than two. Many of us never think about that, but I saw the result in all my years of professional work.