NOVEMBER
1999
Trends
to Watch in the 21st Century Workplace
WHO CAN
RESIST, at the end of 1999, gazing into a crystal ball to
see what changes the 21st century has in store? Not Sanford
Rose Associates, which sees the following trends affecting
the corporate workplace around the world.
Virtual Employees
Companies
will exist increasingly in cyberspace – for example,
selling goods through e-commerce; communicating electronically
inside and outside the organization; and controlling complex
manufacturing, financial, human resources and other functions
with costly enterprise application software.
One result:
an inevitable trimming of the conventional workforce in departments
as diverse as sales and production planning. Another result:
the growing importance of highly specialized "knowledge
workers" to develop and apply the new technology of the
Information Age.
There
will be no need for many of these people, given a computer
and modem, to be physically present at a company location
– or even to work at specified times. Many of the old
paradigms of supervising and measuring employee performance
accordingly will need to be replaced or supplemented with
different methods.
That
being said, however, virtual employment will work less well
for those expected to lead the organization, manage others
or deal face to face with customers, investors, the media
and special-interest groups.
The
Gift of Time
Time
will become an increasingly precious commodity in almost everyone’s
life.
On the
one hand, "lean and mean" companies (from ambitious
start-ups to downsized dinosaurs) will continue to expect
each employee to do the work that two or three might have
done in prior years, and so-called "hot groups"
– scrambling to get a new product to the world market
before the competition does – will work late into the
night.
On the
other hand, a growing number of employees will experience
burnout, complaining of workplace stress and too little time
to spend with their families. As is true today, these pressures
will be felt most severely in families where both spouses
work and children themselves are under increasing time demands
– juggling school, study, sports and an ever-heavier
load of extracurricular pursuits.
In the
U.S., "flextime" has enjoyed some popularity since
the 1970s. Also, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993
has provided relief to workers with family medical problems
and to those with newborn or newly adopted children. Neither,
however, fully solves the time problem.
Over
the next decade, demand likely will increase for three- or
four-day workweeks, the ability to purchase extra weeks of
vacation or even the adoption of fixed holiday periods (running
four weeks or longer) that are already the norm in parts of
Europe.
In the
meantime, more and more companies will give time off as a
preferred incentive award for a job well done. The challenge
to companies everywhere: maintaining productivity in the face
of fewer hours on the job.
Portable Careers
Much
has been written about the decline in employer/employee loyalty,
which has been one contributor to increased workforce mobility.
From Toronto to Tokyo, companies no longer can afford to promise
a "job for life," and, from the CEO’s office
to the production floor, job security has become an oxymoron.
As a consequence, more and more employees will change jobs
repeatedly during their career, and virtually all employers
will prefer the "well-rounded" job candidate to
the corporate "lifer."
Recently,
in a related development, a number of large corporations have
begun to replace accrued pension funds (which are back-end
loaded) with so-called cash balance pensions that accumulate
relatively equal contributions over time. While the new pay-as-you-go
pensions improve a company’s balance sheet by removing
long-term pension liabilities, they also eliminate one of
the "golden handcuffs" that discourage employees
from jumping ship.
Here’s
yet another trend to watch: The current reluctance of employers
to share their staffing plans with employees – and,
likewise, of employees to share their job-casting activities
with employers – will be replaced in the 21st century
by a more proactive career-management approach with significant
benefit to both parties.
By learning
the company’s assessment of his or her career potential,
the employee will make a more informed judgment of whether
to leave or stay and can even be assisted by the company or
its search firm if the best decision is to leave. This enlightened
approach to career management will benefit the employer as
well, reducing the brain drain caused by employees who left
but should have stayed.
Employee Search and Selection
Since
the emergence of search and staffing firms in the 1950s, the
employee recruitment process has taken months to complete.
For critical position openings, a "fast" search
has been one completed in 45 days or so, while more difficult
assignments have been known to take 180 days or more.
At the
dawn of the new millennium, technology exists that can, in
theory, complete some searches in as little as a day or two.
For example, a large staffing firm has developed software
for a computer-company client that harvests engineering candidates
off the Internet, queries them by e-mail about particular
job openings, tests and profiles interested candidates online,
and presents the hiring manager with a simple binary decision:
hire or not hire.
If it
works, this relatively advanced form of "e-cruitment"
will work best when large numbers of candidates are needed
for standardized jobs with standardized skills. Even then,
it remains open to debate as to whether the best candidates
(assuming, of course, that they have registered themselves
on the Internet) can be romanced by e-mail. For other kinds
of jobs, where numerous subjective factors come into play,
it is difficult to believe that human contact and salesmanship
can be eliminated from the recruiting process.
The challenge
to employers and their search firms will be not to eliminate
the human factor – but, rather, to speed it up. The
luxury of contemplative thought ("I wonder who else might
be available for this job…") is already causing
employers to lose strong candidates, who meanwhile have accepted
other jobs. With the assistance of technology, it will become
increasingly important for search professionals to identify
and screen candidates promptly – and for employers to
act on them with equal promptness.
The Professional Manager Class
The aging
population, proliferating career paths and changing cultural
values will create a managerial shortfall by the early 21st
century. The leader who can manage people as well as projects,
who has both depth and breadth of experience (increasingly
on a global basis) and who thrives on long hours and hard
work will be able to set his or her price in the marketplace.
Many
will come from large corporations that have the ability to
provide cross-functional training and multinational assignments.
They will be courted by smaller companies and start-ups, which
will need to offer highly creative compensation packages along
with exceptional opportunities for personal growth.
For many
years, Hollywood stars and professional athletes have been
represented by talent agencies and management firms. While
today’s executive search firms almost always represent
employers, what will keep tomorrow’s search firms –
or their offshoots – from managing the careers and prosperity
of "star" executives as they move from job to job?
The answer is nothing.
As Bette
Davis advised almost 50 years ago in All About Eve, "Fasten
your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride"
– but an exciting one, too.
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