10 Forces Shaping the Workplace of the Future

1) Transparency and trust: Employers that articulate and demonstrate accountability to their promises will be the most likely to attract and retain talent. “Authenticity and transparency, aka honesty and truthfulness, are the new communication standards for the future,” said Sara Roberts, co-author of Light Their Fire and president/CEO of Roberts Golden, an organizational change consulting firm.

2) Out-tasking: Outsourcing is passé, but it will continue. Outsourcing will be joined by out-tasking, which farms out small projects and tasks to specialists and generalists. Organizations will need to evaluate risks associated with agreements with individuals who they may never meet. Making sense of online reputations will be a new core competency.

3) Contracting: Contractors are no longer independent entities. They will be seen as extensions of the firm. Organizations will need to understand their competencies, value-alignment, reputation and other intangible attributes.

4) Contract-to-hire: Contract-to-hire may provide the balance between renting talent and filling a role. With knowledge becoming more specialized, contracting makes sense because the contract firm can offer better competency development models, career paths and mentorships than an organization’s occasional need for a particular role. If an organization wants to test a new market, experiment with a new technology or evaluate the difference between insourcing and outsourcing, hiring a contractor may be the best answer. If this idea works, contractors who do it well would be offered jobs. If it doesn’t work, the company has localized and minimized its risk.

5) On-boarding: As organizations stretch their boundaries, on-boarding will become more global, and as they coordinate better between work and life, more intimate. It won’t be limited to going over insurance forms, disclosing policy and getting a computer set up. It will include discussions about where and when people work, what skills people have and what skills they need, how to get along with people in other generations and how to work with people from different cultural backgrounds and those with various work arrangements and relationships.

6) Parallel promotions: Becoming the boss may not be in most people’s future, because being a boss may not be a job. With the world moving toward networks and away from hierarchies, employees will need to appreciate learning opportunities and new experiences as they move laterally through the organization. Organizations will need to realize that hierarchy represents reporting relationships, but that people get work done through the parallelism of networks, which are a source of value.

7) Hire-to-automate: Knowledge workers and information workers will encounter more automation as the decade unfolds. Computer operations roles will be the first to fall, but anything that involves repetitive analysis involving patterns eventually will be automated.

8) Business continuity: Organizations need to develop active and passive means to gather and vet knowledge, rapidly disbursing it and looking for changes, improvements and discontinuities over time. They will need to learn what to forget as well as what to remember. Organizations that focus too much on automation and efficiency in lieu of human relationships may find their efficiencies and increased productivity stifle their ability to remain relevant.

9) Demographic shifts: Demographic shifts during the next decade won’t be limited to millennials figuring out how to work with baby boomers. Demographics shifts will create new markets in Africa, South America and Asia as younger populations become wealthier and more consumers driven. “Young, highly-skilled and technically proficient talent from emerging markets has the potential to offset retirement and succession issues generated by the aging workforces of Europe, north Asia and North America,” said Rob Salkowitz, author of Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up.

10) Virtual work: Today, virtual work is something most people experience as an alternative to the traditional workplace. Letting people stay where they are will drive down hard infrastructure costs as organizations realize they don’t need as many buildings and all but eliminate moving expenses. It will, however, drive up the need for social network management skills and for clear and transparent communications. It won’t be as easy to assert culture or managerial will on a virtual workforce, so people will need to be more proactive about defining work outcomes and expectations, and communicating status and changes. Organizations that learn how to foster and nurture virtual relationships will find that capability a competitive differentiator in the decades to come

In all of these shifts, performance management becomes a major issue as people decrease their physical work interactions. How organizations measure performance will become more isolated and more virtual as well, which may require a complete rethinking of performance management. The End Result’s Spiegel said “organizations aren’t paying enough attention to the disruptive nature of the new working relationships. We have already reached a point where most performance management systems are disconnected from the work people do, and the way they like to be rewarded.”

Link to the article: http://articlesandreports.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-forces-shaping-workplace-of-future_18.html and http://talentmgt.com/articles/view/10-forces-shaping-the-workplace-of-the-future/1