With the financial world lurching from crisis to crisis on an almost daily basis, wouldn’t it be wonderful to gaze into a crystal ball and view the business landscape in a decade’s time?
A report from UK-think-tank The Chartered Management Institute finds that the business world will be very different, perhaps unrecognisable, and only those businesses that have prepared and planned ahead properly will benefit.
By 2018, says CMI, teams will have become increasingly multi-generational. Similarly, a continuing increase in the number of women in senior executive positions will change management styles, predicted more than four out of 10 of those surveyed.
The whole structure of business models will have also changed by 2018, the managers forecast, with businesses in a wired, globalised world, becoming much more open to external influences.
Two-thirds felt customer participation in business decisions would increase, with more than six out of 10 predicting that environmental concerns and regulation would create products with longer lifecycles.
The arrival of Generation Y into the workplace in substantial numbers will also have a significant impact.
Last month, consultancy KPMG also predicted that the coming decades would see wholesale population shifts, with a global migration of workers from developing and emerging nations to the West.
Not long ago, there was a predictable workplace where you could depend on continuous employment and job security. With minimal planning, your career and life ‘happened to you’.
Consequently, we’re unprepared for today’s career challenges.
In a workplace where change and competition raise varying levels of uncertainty, even the most confident individuals wonder “where do I fit?” and “what’s my future?” And the answers are not quickly forthcoming.
It is pleasing, then, to know that some people view this change as positive and rewarding. Like Pollyanna, we’ve put on our smiley faces and adopted euphemisms for the changes around us. We call the new career landscape a ‘mosaic’, people are expected to become ‘skilled at managing a portfolio of careers’, formulating ‘proposals for career moves’ and then ‘smoothly transitioning between jobs’. Now transition sounds so easy, so nice. One has visions of a graceful glide from one position to another – degree of difficulty 4.5.
It is quite unlike the reality of the working world. What often happens is that people are casualised, destabilised and marginalised. Workers find out about their redundancy on the late night news or they are the ones who have sat at their same desk for four years and worked for three different companies only to find out that the urge to merge is closely followed by the urge to purge.
One woman I know likes to think of her career in terms of Lego. She says she’s very good at building a space stations that transition to ambulances. I must say my attempts to build with Lego as a child ended up with my space station looking more like the shuttle disaster, where all the King’s horses and all the King’s men were unable to put it together again.
It’s estimated that today’s students will have 10-14 jobs before their 38th birthday. In this new world of work people are loyal to their skill not to their employer. Work was somewhere you went, now it’s something you do. E3unlimited, a talent management company in the UK, shares a vision that is inspiring, exciting and daunting. Take a look.
The real challenge for leaders in today’s world of work is to shape their own roles – before it is reshaped for them!
This means a commitment to pursuing life long learning goals, and facilitating and encouraging others to do the same. For leaders to stay ahead they must step outside the boundaries of their own organisation and competency to ensure they are informed about trends in population, the environment, technology, social contexts and the economy.
I like to apply the ‘n+1 Principle’ for myself and my staff. For every n (number of conferences attended in your own industry or competency), attend one that is outside your field, and use the information to make positive change.
In 1996, Jeremy Rifkin prophesised the end of work altogether. In the 21st century, he predicted, employment would be phased out, at least in the industrialised world. Jobs would be taken over by machines and workers forced on to the dole.
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck, in The Brave New World of Work, published in 2000, claimed the work society was disappearing. The working environment of the future, he said, will resemble that of Brazil, with no permanent jobs, only informal and insecure labour.
And Charles Handy, in his book The Empty Raincoat, said what is disappearing is the job itself.
These were some bleak predictions – but going by current trends, Keynes’s proposition is impossible and Rifkin’s, Handy’s and Beck’s seem implausible.
The next revolution in our workplaces will not be no work. Instead it will be flexible work.
Flexible working has enormous potential to raise productivity levels, increase employee job satisfaction and create business cost-savings. Moreover, as our workforce ages and shrinks over the next 25 years, practical solutions that assist organisations attract and retain staff will be fundamental to the way companies retain their competitive advantage.
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