Are we noticing a major shift in today’s workforce and work – life balance? Working for a single company during your entire life is now something of the past. With the advent of new technologies being available at our fingertips, the only limit is imagination and today’s generation can do anything they can possibly think of.
In less than a day, you can have an ecommerce website ready to accept payments, blogs, videos and all you need are a bunch of logins from a laptop, your phone and an internet connection without touching a single line of codes – can this be made any easier?
On the flip side, organisations need to rethink how they can retain their transient talents and resources. The new generation of talents will be more like grass hoppers going from company to company promoting the skills they choose to promote throughout their life than staying at a company in the hopes of a role promotion and a better future.
Having a career has a new definition, it has become a career of choice where life is the most important variable with some work to support it – the entrepreneur-way!
Life’s Purpose
Let me put things into perspective, you are born, you are a kid, you go to University, then start working anywhere between the age of 18-25. The traditional working methods say that you work 9am to 5pm on average until you retire by the age of 60-65. So that’s about 40+ years of your life, the good years of your life, many sitting in an office staring at a computer screen.
With yesterday technologies, you had to be present to share information and communicate. Remember the letters and stamps? The Fax machine? Now we have instant communications, text and video.
Not everyone has similar jobs, and some jobs do require a day-shift or night-shift presence (nurses, doctors, truck drivers, etc) but many other jobs are candidates to a new way of working more efficiently.
Paid to be Physically Present vs. Paid for Adding Value
Of course, you still need to have people available during workdays, but the work hours could be swapped from being physically present in a job vs. adding value to a task. That’s an important distinction!
Let me get a little bit more technical here. In any Enterprise, at any staff level, three activities need to happen: (1) an input, (2) some value add, and (3) an output. 3-Steps made of specific activities, it is as simple as that. The combinations of these three activities when performed in an optimal way by themselves and/or in combination with others across an entire enterprise will determine how efficient an organisation is.
Now… If you have established an organisation that is fully measurable with Performance Management Framework at all levels, staffs no longer need to be physically working 9 to 5 under one roof, nor need to be working within those hours either. Remember “People are not creative on demand, this happens at different time slots for all of us.”
Creativity, energy levels, stamina, ideas are not programmed to be happening between 9-5, these are unique to each individual. So instead of working traditional hours, imagine being paid by the value you create within an organisation, not by the time you spend sitting on an office chair? Employers could save money on human resource costs and employees could charge more for their time, thus having to work less for the same pay or take on additional for with the extra time – of course unless you want to get pay to chit-chat during your 3 or 4 coffee breaks a day – but that’s another discussion.
Future organisations will no longer be paying for being present and performing some tasks, they will be paying for well-defined and measured value adding activities.
The other outcome this will create is that companies will have to be more precise as to what contribute “value” and hire talent to deliver against that specific value. I have seen so many people get hired against a job description that could not be further away from what they are doing on a day-to-day basis. By not having staff on tap, it will force organisations to be more in tune with their entire value-chain and how value is being created and given back to benefit consumers.
Think of the value gained both from the contributor and the employer, better rate / pay and more time to invest ‘in-your-life’, and ‘pay-for-what-you-need’ at the employer level, and not paying for down time or having to provide a space for someone to work from.
The Futuristic Organisation Ahead
In the future, one individual will no longer be tied to a single organisation, but provide their value to many, manage when and how they choose to do work. Whether they get repeat work will depend on how good they are.
Organisations on their end, will have to establish Performance Management Frameworks to financially quantify that value, and tap into that ‘virtual workplace’ when required.
Employees / contractors will be able to work for many organisations and perform those unique tasks as a value-based-contract, and perhaps have a more enjoyable 40 years of their life at the same time.
It’s a really Win-Win for everyone, including the consumers!
Keynote speaker and business consultant Christophe Barriere-Varju presents what companies have to brace themselves for, or potentially become obsolete. This topic is available as a presentation or as a workshop, enquire for more details.
