|
Today’s workforce dynamics - Is it in e-economy transition?
Courtesy humanlinks.com
THE WORKFORCE FLUIDITY
It has now become a cliche to say that the prime resource of
sustainable competitive advantage is not superior products, or
technology, or any other physical assets, but recruiting and retaining
talented employees for companies to be successful. To retain the top
talent in the tight labor market, companies are adopting newer
techniques and sometimes funnier practices too. Not to be left behind,
employees are becoming more funnier too. In the war for top talent,
employees change jobs, as easily, as one sheds an old pair of shoes or
clothes.
Employee commitment and loyalty has switched gears. Commitment and
loyalty is no more towards the company but for oneself. Recruiters
tell tales of entertaining quitters. Sending resignations with singing
telegrams, or in a cake, or by writing I QUIT in the snow on the boss’
windshield. Perceptions about hiring have also been slowly changing.
Earlier there used to be guidelines, which said if a person had more
than five jobs in a career or more than three jobs in ten years, they
were considered job hoppers. In fact, loyal workers may face a reverse
stigma, say recruiters. In the fast changing world, potential
recruiters sometimes view long-timers as having out-of-date skills.
To help the incorrigible
quitters, a veritable industry has sprung up. One can read any number
of self-help quitting books or you may even go to a website
WWW.IQUIT.ORG. Coming to the bottom-line, why do people start looking
for jobs so soon in the first place? The main culprits: bad management
and bad bosses.
THE REASONS FOR THE WORKPLACE FLUIDITY
The key reason for this workplace turbulence can be attributed to the
introduction of powerful personal computers and internet technologies
of the 21st century, which are changing the economic equation of
employee skills. Because information can be shared instantly and
inexpensively among many people in many locations, individuals can
manage themselves, coordinating their efforts through electronic links
with other independent parties. Hence, many tasks of today can be
carried out autonomously by independent individuals who are now being
labeled as e-lancers. (one more sub-category to the word
free-lancers). These e-lancers don’t have to go through conventional
chain of command where tasks are assigned and controlled in a typical
organization.
Besides, technology is
enabling e-lancers to join together into fluid and temporary networks
to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done - after a
day, a month, a year - the network dissolves, and its members become
independent agents again, circulating through the economy seeking the
next assignment. Since today’s companies are becoming more knowledge
driven, many individuals would want to quit the job and get into
business themselves, either for controlling their own destiny or to
find or explore the true meaning of self.
WORKPLACE LOLLIPOPS TO RETAIN THE TOP TALENT
Just imagine a place where you can pump iron in the gym, practice jump
shot in the gleaming basketball court, or hang around the putting
green, horseshoe pits, or beach volleyball court. Cooking up your own
meal with the choice of your favorite fruits, along with an array of
services thrown in - bank, store, dry cleaner, hairdresser and a
person for pedicure and manicure. If this is not enough, one can also
eat, nap, swim, pray, kickbox, drink beer, run your errands, start a
romance, get your dental work done, sculpt nude models, well, the list
drones on. This is not a biosphere, it is actually BMC Software in
Houston. (No. 56 on Fortune’s Best Companies to work for list.) Such
fancy workplace amenities are becoming common in cutting edge
technology and software companies, where employers are expecting
employees to bring the whole self - mind, body, and spirit - to work
each day. These companies are taking the best aspects of home and
incorporating them into work, raising some fundamental questions: Do
the new amenities really ease overwork? Or do they just make it easier
to overwork? These amenities are blurring the line between work and
life and there are people working 24 hours a day giving this nagging
doubt that whether the amenities are just a ruse of the employers, so
that the employees never have to go home.
Look into any aspects of
private life, it is being subsumed into the workplace. Take domestic
chores: 46 of the 100 Best Companies offer take-home meals to liberate
people having to cook dinner. 26 of the 100 offer personal concierge
services, allowing employees to outsource the time-consuming details
of buying flowers, birthday presents, planning bar mitzvahs and
organizing even an engagement dinner. The amenities include almost
everything under the sun: Clubs for chess, genealogy, gardening,
karate, scuba diving, breast cancer support group, a single parents’
group and almost anything one can think of.
All these trends seem have found their apotheosis in NetPark, a
project to convert shopping malls into New Age office parks in Tampa
Bay and another in Hampton, Va. After the completion of these
‘electronic villages’, employees of tenant companies will be able to
drop their children at the day-care center, their parents at the
elder-care center, and perhaps even their pets at on-site kennel. Once
the employees are at the desk, computer screen video will let them
keep an eye on the family. Workplace amenities have virtually covered
everything except a place for burial or cremation.
THE SOCIAL AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE LOLLIPOPS
The company town with all these amenities is raising some serious
questions. Sociologists worry that these trend could leave public life
increasingly barren, widening the gap between haves and have-nots and
denuding the real community outside the corporate realm. Couple of
years back Fortune identified three traits that makes a great place to
work: ‘ a sense of purpose.’ inspiring leadership,’ and ‘knockout
facilities.’ Now it has assumed cultist definition: ‘devotion,’
‘charismatic leadership,’ and ‘separation from community.’
A psychologist from Berkeley reports of clients appearing in her
office, who talked about their companies in the first-person plural;
their obsession over small traumas experienced at work; and their
distress seemed out of proportion to the setbacks they had suffered at
the workplace. One of the client - a mother of three children - said,
“ My whole life revolved around this company, I was there all day, all
night. I literally embraced my job like my family.” The involvement
with the company was so complete, that she did not mind when the
company’s pager woke her at 3 a.m. Or even when she brought her kids
to work evenings and weekends because, she explains, “day-care centers
are not open all those hours.” It is typical when the employees don’t
receive appreciation in personal life and receive at the workplace,
they feel appreciated and feel that they are somebody at the
workplace. Then something happened, a round layoffs in her office
increased her workload, to such an extent, that she feared she would
have an heart attack. Then she asked her work to scaled back, which
never materialized. She felt betrayed and took extended sick leave.
Since then, she has dumped all company trinkets and other
paraphernalia into the dustbin, and is struggling to cut the emotional
‘umbilical cord’ with the company. She says, “Now I see it clearly,
all that family stuff was fake. They were just using me to get that
bottom line.” Although this case is an extreme, one point can’t be
missed. When anybody invests in one arena of life(read work) to the
exclusion of others(read home and social life), there’s bound be a
downside. Just imagine the social consequences, if there is an
economic downturn, compelling companies to lay-off employees
involuntarily.
Maintaining the balance
between work and family has more or less become an idealism that is
being taught more rather than being practiced. People would not want
spend time at home, because work has become all sparkly and glittery,
and home seems kind of empty and colourless. Some writers lay the
blame for this malaise on our consumerist society, which presumably
makes us want to work more so that we can buy more stuff, and of
greedy corporations, who find it cheaper to hire fewer employees and
drive them harder.
Dual career couple,
electronic networks which drive the 24-hour global economy have also
had their share in increasing the working hours particularly for
highly educated professionals. While working hours for unskilled
workers have actually been falling slightly, even after taking into
consideration their multi-skills, it has been increasing for highly
educated professionals. The working class now has more leisure, and
the leisure class has more work. Many studies vouch this factor in US
and this phenomenon is no different for India particularly for IT
industry. For example, a Families and Work Institute Survey shows that
the average work week has increased from 43.6 hours in 1977 to 47.1
hours in 1997. And according to ILO statistics Americans are now
outworking even the notoriously work-addicted Japanese, 1966 hours per
year to 1889.
THE CONCLUSION - OR IS IT THE BEGINNING?
It is too early to make sense of these changes, and companies are
slower in responding or coping with these changes. Large companies are
now decentralizing their structures and replacing it with market based
structures. The key role for managers or individuals are now being
increasingly redefined, in which they play their parts in shaping or
enhancing their work across functions that neither they nor anyone
else controls.
While telecommunications
and internet technologies are advancing day-by-day, our imagination
has not. We have been unable to conceive this e-economy in its
entirety, and besides, what we know of about doing business, no longer
applies today. The need now, is to change our biases and mind-sets and
to recognize that e-economy would have profound implications for
business and society. An e-economy might well lead to a flowering of
individual wealth, freedom, and creativity. This is already becoming
apparent. Twenty five years ago, one in five U.S. workers was employed
by a Fortune 500 company. Today the ratio has dropped to less than one
in ten. The largest employer in U.S. is not General Motors or UPS.
It’s the temporary employment agency Manpower Incorporated, which in
1997 employed 2 million people. Businesses and industries in future,
might become much more flexible and efficient, and people might find
themselves with much more time for leisure, for education, and for
other pursuits.
Finally, George Bernard
Shaw once observed, “That all progress depends on the unreasonable
man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the
world while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to
himself, therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the
unreasonable man, or, I must add, to the unreasonable woman.”
 |
|
Jobnet's
Placement Consultants Directory - India & International
What's Inside?
Placement Consultants in
over 38 cities in India
International Placement
Consultants in over 31 countries
Coverage in MNC's NGO's
UN Government & Indian Co websites
Special Section for
Freshers
with complete Addresses,
telephone numbers, email ids & specializations.
Jobnet Placement Consultants
Directory -
Order Online
or Call - 09811017183 |
