The Evolving Workplace

Technological advances and deregulation had created changes that affected the way we live and the way we do business. Both events had allowed practically everyone around the world to get connected in a way that provides practically everyone and every consumer with information to make a choice and the ability by every supplier to compete in providing innovative solutions to the different and changing tastes and needs of people faster than before. We are also now capable of supplying more goods than what the limited and segmented consumer can buy, thereby creating intense competition and explosive changes and innovations to differentiate basically similar products and services from one another. These changes seem to be accelerating rather than slowing down. And while business may be keeping its eye on its long-term direction, it is also pressured to produce short-term results because of a product life cycle that also seems to be getting shorter every year.

As a result of all these changes, business has to be more flexible and should have plans that could be revised to accommodate expected and unexpected conditions that may affect its sustainability. The basic idea behind the business may remain the same but the organization, leadership, and evaluation criteria will continue to evolve to adapt to emerging opportunities and threats.

Some of the changes are in the way employees are expected to work, adapting to intergenerational diversity, acceptance of job hopping, the way employees expect to be treated, hoteling – changes in the work area, adapting to cultural diversity, managing in a virtual organization, and changing organizational structures.

EXPECTATION FROM EMPLOYEES

Since everything is happening faster creating new situations where experience may not be very useful or where surveys and the interpretation of results that takes time to do may be over taken by events employees are expected to think intuitively as well as rationally. And since changes are happening faster employees are also expected to question every current practices to test its relevance to evolving situations and changed if found wanting. This requires employees to get out of their comfort zone and become themselves as the agents of change. Given this scenario employees are expected to track trends and be the first to get to or out of the market, and to be the first of everything because anyone who comes second would be too late to fully exploit the opportunity that may have already passed.

Today’s changes can cause a lot of uncertainty but business has to respond rapidly even with a modicum of preparation and be ready to correct direction as it goes along. When I was working with a high tech company, a decision was made by the home office to move some of its operation into the country to take advantage of an opportunity. I was tasked to hire a massive number of people to take over the operation and train them within three months, which I thought was very unusual and difficult to do because other high tech companies in the country were doing the same thing and we were competing for a limited number of applicants. The other side of this situation is the need to quickly lay off a massive number of people when and if a decision is made to change direction or to locate an operation in another country. This takes a lot of organizational flexibility and would point to the desirability of also using temporary workers or the temporary use of retired workers who still want to work on a part time basis.

INTERGENERATIONAL DIVERSITY

A few years ago, I joined an organization that had a long history of operating in the country. As such it had a mix of workers from a few workers that were close to retirement, to a large group of Baby Boomer employees, a smaller group of Generation X employees, and a fresh batch of Generation Y or what we called the Millennial’s. I saw how different they were from each other and how each one worked and how each is motivated by different things.

• The ones close to retirement were the loyal employees, called the Silent Generation1 (born before 1946) who went through the effect of the World War II and were glad they had a job and a retirement check to look forward to. They were used to the bureaucracy with structured duties and fixed working hours and balked at the idea of working at some odd jobs that may be different from what their current jobs were and had technophobia in using the computer. One of them insisted on a secretary printing all his emails and dictating to the secretary his replies that is then sent through the email of the secretary which wasted a lot of time.

• The Baby Boomers1 (1946 – 1964) that lived through economic prosperity were mostly all well-educated, affluent, privileged and ambitious in climbing the corporate ladder and were more willing to travel and get new assignments as long as it offered them a chance for promotion and growth – they were the perfect organization man who were willing to subordinate their personal goals to the company goals. I had some employees who were willing to postpone the celebration of wedding anniversaries or who would miss the graduation ceremonies of their children to attend to corporate activities.

• The Generation X1 (1965 – 1981) employees who went through downsizing because of the oil crisis and the recession and aware of the effect of unmitigated consumption and the resulting pollution of the planet were a little bit more cautious and cynical about working for large organizations. They were less materialistic and valued experience and job satisfaction more than the monetary reward of a job. They were also more eager to volunteer for community work and support corporate social responsibility programs. They were free agents who like to choose where and what to work on; they prefer short duration project assignments, and in working in teams. This group of employees was the backbone of our work with the disabled and was willing to travel to the other parts of the country to promote our advocacy for the physically and mentally challenged. Another example of this kind of employee is one of my staff members who resigned because he was being promoted and reassigned to Manila – he grew up in Cebu and wanted to stay close to family and relatives.

• The Millennial’s1 (1982 – 2000), on the other hand, were the young employees who had passion for acquisition of personal properties – cellphones, MP3, etc. They have utter fluency and comfort with computer, digital, and Internet technology and could always be relied on to guide older employees in using the new technology. They were always looking for a variety of task to do, were always connected to the Internet either through their cellphones or laptop and were comfortable with multi-tasking.

Because of the above diversity of employees in my previous organization there was no one best way I could manage them. I just had to try to understand each generation of employee according to their generational imperatives and tried to treat them accordingly. Conflicts occurred between each generation as expected but it was not too difficult to resolve because I made them aware of each of their strengths and weaknesses and how we could use them to work with each other. But as the Baby Boomers exit the employment scene the values of the Gen X employees (who choose where they want to work) and the Millenial’s employees (have great expectations and switch jobs frequently), would dominate the workplace and it would serve managers well to understand each of them to use their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

JOB HOPPING

Most big organizations today may be composed of only a few long-term loyal employees who probably had only worked for the current organization without having experienced working for another company plus many younger employees who may have worked with other companies before joining the current organization. Job hopping may be something that should be expected in the workplace either because of restructuring, changes in strategies, or employees looking for more meaningful engagements. It has been said in many journals that new graduates today is expected to change jobs seven to eight times before they retire

EMPLOYEE EXPECTATIONS

The older employees may have been exposed and may have been used to the traditional top-down management style whereas younger workers might be more suited to the situational type of management and expect to be measured in terms of result under flexible working hours. Management has to look to providing these younger employees more unconventional career tracks (diagonal or horizontal career paths rather than the traditional vertical corporate ladder careers); portfolios of experiences; opportunity to learn and to grow and expand skills. In addition to growth and professional development, companies may have to give employees more time off from work, vacations, new job titles, job security, bonuses, financial assistance, charitable giving, and similar incentives.

HOTELING

Work area arrangements are also changing. When I was in China, I visited a chemical company that only provided their employees a cellphone, a laptop, and a filing cabinet stored in the office. And these employees were not necessarily expected to go to the office every day. But when the employees needed to work in the office, they checked-in and made reservations, through a computer, for available desks where they can pull their filing cabinets alongside. Once they have finished their work in the office, they checked-out and pulled their filing cabinets back to the storage room for later use. This practice maximizes the use of desks and office spaces that allowed a smaller office to accommodate a larger number of staff.

MANAGING IN A VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION

Face to face management of people is becoming less frequent because work is now taken out of the office location and brought to the field. Managers now manage people who are unseen in the office. Managers have to change the way they communicate with and motivate their subordinates and find some ways by which a managers build a team pulling in one direction. And since some type of work may also be outsourced, a manager may have to coordinate the work of some workers who may not be directly reporting to him. Add to this the fact that many organization are trying to build partnership with a select group of big accounts, a manager also has to learn to collaborate with people at different organizational levels of the customer.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Global work teams have become more commonplace, and employees are interacting with an expanding mix of colleagues from different cultures. The cultural orientation of each member of the team that comes from different parts of the world will speak, act, negotiate and make decisions differently. Understanding the cultures of the different countries can help individual employees to predict how people in certain cultures will speak, act, negotiate and make decisions thereby preventing any misunderstanding and improving communications. In order to prevent communication problems, traveling executives or foreigners being assigned to other countries are given cultural orientation by some multinational companies. Other companies provide training to all their employees on how to work across cultures.
According to Fons Trompenaars, every culture distinguishes itself from others by the specific solutions it chooses to certain problems2. According to him it is convenient to look at these problems under three headings:

1. Those which arise from our relationships with other people

-When dealing with people there are some cultures that based relationships on one good universal way whereas there are some cultures where friendship has special obligations.

-There are some cultures where people regard themselves primarily as individuals whereas some cultures where people regard themselves as part of a group.

-Other cultures regard business interaction as objective and detached while other cultures regard business a human affair full of emotional responses.

-Other cultures focused on specific business relationship prescribed by a contract whereas other cultures prefer real and personal contact before business can proceed

-Some cultures judge people on the basis of what they accomplish and their track record whereas others judge people on the basis of birth, kinship, gender, age, or connections

2. Those which comes from the passage to time

IMPORTANCE OF THE PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

-In some societies what somebody had achieved in the past is not that important compared to what they plan for the future

-In some societies you can make an impression with your past accomplishments than those of today

-In some societies what matters is your current performance

TIME PERCEPTION

-In some societies time is perceived as passing in a straight line, a sequence of disparate events

-Other societies think of time more as moving in a circle, the past and the present together with future possibilities.

3. Those that which relate to the environment

-Some cultures see the major focus that affects their lives as residing within the person

-Other cultures see the world as more powerful than individuals.

In addition to the physical distance between members of the team their cultural differences can aggravate the relationship tension between people which may serve as a barrier to their willingness to work together cooperatively or collaboratively. Each member of the team must learn to put themselves into the shoes of other members of the team who lives in the other parts of the world with a different view of the world to avoid misunderstandings. It will take a lot of emotional IQ and empathy to make a global team work smoothly together.

Consideration must also be given to the approach to planning, strategy, investment and solving business problems – there will be differences depending on where each individual member of the team comes from and what culture each belong to. In this regard, the organizational culture which would have been shaped by the culture of the geography where the company originates from may exercise a strong influence on how things would eventually be resolved within the organization. This contributes to making a very interesting workplace where agreement on how to solve business problems could be difficult to achieve because they could be directly opposed to each other.

CHANGING ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES

And since supply exceeds demand, it has now become a buyers’ market and customers had become powerful because they have the power of choice. Customer needs have to be satisfied thereby forcing organizations to provide not only core products or services but also activities and behaviors that provide reliability through quality, trust through deeper interaction, innovation through the knowledge of the customer situation, and/or mastery of the customer’s business in order to provide appropriate solutions to customer problems. This would require the whole workplace to be involved because today, a customer’s problem is everyone’s problem and in trying to solve problems, most organizations are forced to ask their employees to perform multifunctional task of not only providing functional expertise to the organization but of also of becoming customer focused by being part marketing or part sales in satisfying customer needs. One way or the other, customers are now communicating deeper into the organizations of suppliers in order to manage the value chain. This means that the vertical pyramidal structure based on functions as we know of today is slowly being transformed into a many horizontal team structures addressing customer needs where solid lines are being replaced by more dotted lines.

SUM UP

The workplace is changing and is a workplace-in-process. This is because business plans are flexible to accommodate unexpected changing conditions, marketing strategies are adjusted depending on emerging opportunities, and organizing arrangements follows strategies and plans in order to achieve business goals and objectives. The workplace will continue to change and adapt to the new and developing business environment. Some of the changes would need only small steps but some may need big leaps to adjust to what is happening in the environment.

Businessmen have to be continuously aware of what is happening around them and be able to establish trends that will have an impact on their organization. Change is costly but the consequences of not changing may be costlier.

For any organization, change must be a message that has to be repeated again and again and built into the workplace in order to avoid the boiled frog syndrome
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1Wikipedia
2Riding the Waves of Culture, Fons Trompenaars