Rizers - Workforce Trends

Our favorite workforce trend analyst, Tammy Ericksen, over at the Harvard Business blogs, has just posted two terrific articles about the impact of the recession on the workplace of the future.

Tammy singles out the “furlough” trend in the knowledge workplace. Employees who routinely work many more than 40 hours are being told their work time is “being cut to 32 hours.“ What can the communication of this possibly mean to a modern worker? It completely ignores their past long hours and commitment to discretionary effort. It’s this discretionary effort that is so critical to the modern organization where it really is the one of the most fundamental parts of competitive advantage. Organizations have poured millions of dollars into employee engagement strategies to motivate and support an extra level of effort by employees. The ‘furlough’ move may undo it all.

And of course, the demographic and talent trends continue – moving toward collaborative ways of communicating, toward transparency beyond company firewalls, toward increasing numbers of knowledge workers in the service sectors, toward the slowing growth of the U.S. skilled workforce, and toward shifting expectations of what work means for different generations. These trends may be masked by the current recession, but we should not be surprised when in just a few years the talent game moves to favor the employee.

Overall the trend to the ‘gig’ economy continues, and may even be hastened by our recession.

“… companies are inadvertently and ironically conditioning individuals to new ways of working, by breaking the dependency on one all-encompassing work relationship. The use of furloughs and other approaches that erode the concept of one "job" fulfilling all our needs is encouraging individuals to create portfolios of work options.”

Are you ready? Do you know what your portfolio will be?

Tags: talent - workforce - hbr - furlough

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