The thinning of management’s middle. Interestingly, it will be the members of Generation X (born between 1963 and 1980), once stereotyped as “slackers,” who will be called on to fill the gap left by baby boomer departures in the years before the millennials can contribute meaningfully. The trouble is that Gen Xers only number about 53 million in the U.S., sandwiched between about 78 million boomers and 80 million millennials. This means Gen Xers will have a relatively short span of control: Soon after Gen Xers assume managerial positions, they will be overwhelmed in number by millennials vying for those same jobs. As a smaller group, Gen Xers will have to create efficient arrangements for employees to interact and communicate well in order to achieve high productivity in a punctuated workday. They will also need to manage effectively a workforce made up of contractors, freelancers, and other partners.
The blended workforce. Over the next decade many employees won’t be employees at all; they will be temporaries, contractors, contingent workers, outsourced workers, freelancers, and, in business-to-business transactions, customers. Today, there are more than 42 million independent workers in the United States, or about 31 percent of the workforce. The sheer size of that group indicates a major shift in employers’ expectations of workers. More diverse and geographically distributed organizations will need to implement process management strategies and use performance management software. With outsourcing sure to be even more common in the future, managers will have to pay attention to project handoffs and coordination costs between partners. To keep their blended workforce happy, they will also need to create interesting work in an engaging workplace and pay workers’ invoices on time or risk exacerbating turnover, creating yet another fissure through which knowledge can drain.
Commitment-based work. Because physical presence at a workplace will not be required for many information services jobs, workers may be measured and compensated according to individual tasks or projects rather than on an ongoing basis. Some organizations will adopt a more flexible commitment-based employee measurement system that allows workers to choose how, where, and when they work, as long as they meet preordained deadlines. In this environment, the annual review will itself be up for review and likely be replaced by new reward structures. With worker loyalty tied to work engagement rather than economic stability, work quality can be better judged and rewarded in the moment. Technologies will need to evolve to track these projects by metrics other than the number of hours worked.
Citizen regulators. With bloggers exposing more and more of a company’s internal processes and problems, it won’t be long before citizens’ voices, amplified and directed by information services, reach parity with government regulation. This phenomenon may change the employee–employer relationship, as employees, chiming in under assumed aliases, use Internet forums as a suggestion box to advocate for internal change.
Companies committed to staying on top of shifts in workplace attitudes and expectations need to recognize how inextricably intertwined the workforce and the information services of tomorrow will be. Understanding the strategic implications that emerge from the evolution of both will enable organizations to position themselves better to innovate, attract top talent, and win in the marketplace.
Daniel W. Rasmus is director of business insights at Microsoft Corporation and the author of numerous articles on the workplace of the future. His fifth book, Management by Design (Wiley), will be available in 2009.
