INTRODUCTION
10 RULES TO NAVIGATE THE FUTURE WORKPLACEA
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.
Understanding the Future Workplace: Today’s Core Competency
The future is happening now. It’s not waiting for you or your organization. In times of constant and accelerated change, organizations that do not adapt, that do not anticipate the future and take action, are in danger of irrelevancy—or worse, extinction. Consider that 52 percent of Fortune 500 organizations have merged, been acquired, or gone bankrupt since 2000.1 The global business landscape will continue to experience constant change and turmoil. New circumstances require fresh solutions—and superior business results reward organizations that deliver them. Collectively, the Fortune 500 employ 28 million people and generate over $12.5 trillion in global revenue. The fastest growing, those most responsive to their business environment and who financially outperform their peers, are intense learning machines. They are led by agile leaders, consider technology as both an enabler and a disruptor, and are manically focused on satisfying their customers and engaging their employees globally. Most importantly, they encourage employees to be workplace activists, propagating changes to reinvent the experience of their global workplace to drive business results.
The Future Workplace Experience challenges most of the conventional wisdom about work, employees, human resource practices and the very nature of a job itself to help you anticipate and adapt to a new world of work! As we scan the workplace of today, and of the future, we see that everything we take for granted about work—what we expect from our work, where we work, how we work, when we work, and with whom we work—is being disrupted. Think of this: “Freelancing in America,” a report issued by the Freelancers Union, states that gig economy workers (independent workers who are not employees and work when and where they need to) now account for 54 million people and contributed over $7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2015.2 These changes in what, where, how, when, and who works will only accelerate as every organization in every category will be impacted by a new set of workplace expectations. To be ready for this massive change, you will need to anticipate the future, take action, become “a workplace activist,” and advocate for change in your organization. This book will show you how.
Why We Wrote This Book
The Future Workplace Experience revolves around the premise that workers of all generations and cultures will increasingly come to expect a workplace that mirrors their personal lives, one that is transparent, connected, personalized, and offers choices. Understanding this future workplace experience will be a core competency of both business and human resource leaders. We went beyond hypothesizing about these changes. We interviewed over 100 senior HR and business executives at companies successfully navigating the trends reshaping the future workplace experience. We also conducted the Future Workplace Forecast, a global survey of human resource and business leaders.
Our interviews and survey uncovered a confluence of disruptive forces that leaders are grappling with today, from the experiences workers expect in the workplace, to the myriad of current and next-generation technologies transforming how and where we work, to the diversifying composition of workers, representing multiple generations and cultures, in addition to various segments of workers such as breadwinner moms, boomers on the grid, and independent workers. We synthesized the results of our research into 10 rules to guide you, your team, and your organization to master disruption in recruiting and engaging employees in the future workplace.
The 10 rules illustrate through interviews and real-world examples the accelerated pace of change and how organizations are proactively positioning for the future workplace. As the world has become more interconnected, so too has the workplace. Traditional hierarchies have given way to the democratization of work and radical new solutions for employees and customers. We share how Cisco created an HR Breakathon to “break” HR silos and create new solutions to enhance the employee experience and how DBS Bank in Singapore launched a “hackathon” for bankers to develop new digital financial service solutions for their clients.
The Future Workplace Experience takes a bold step toward the future, serving as a road map for organizations of all sizes to rethink, reimagine, and reinvent the employee experience. Our 10 rules will help your organization compete more effectively in a global talent marketplace, defined by changing expectations, transformative technologies, and a shifting composition of the workforce. We feature companies of all types, including companies with growing populations of younger workers like Airbnb, Cognizant Technologies, IBM, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and GE Digital that are on the leading edge of shaping future global employment practices.
As coauthors, we each bring a set of unique experiences that shape our worldview of the future workplace. We are both partners in Future Workplace, an HR executive network and research firm dedicated to working with organizations to anticipate and plan for disruptive changes in their companies, industries, and geographic markets.
Jeanne has consulted with organizations on preparing them for the future of learning and working for over 25 years, both through her own consulting firm and with Accenture. As the author of three previous books and a contributor to Forbes, Jeanne consults and speaks with hundreds of organizations on how build the talent capabilities of their organization, reinvent Human Resources, and prepare for the future of work.
Kevin has consulted to executives on business strategies to respond to change across multiple industries and geographies for over two decades. He has led the delivery of business insights, facilitated business planning and strategy, and led a global start-up. He coaches on leadership effectiveness at the Harvard Business School and promotes entrepreneurial thought and action as an adjunct faculty member at Babson College.
Both of us are engaged daily in thinking about how individuals, teams, and organizations can best prepare for the future of work. We operate the Future Workplace Network, a peer membership community for senior HR leaders to regularly come together in person and online to discuss, debate, and share “next” practices to thrive in the future workplace. This book extends our members-only dialogue on the future workplace experience to a broader audience of leaders that we have not yet met. We purposefully use the word dialogue, because expectations of the workplace experience, applications of technology, and the composition of the workforce will continue to evolve. We invite you to join our conversation as we collaborate together to empower you to enhance your future workplace experience and take action to master disruption in recruiting and engaging employees.
What You Will Find in This Book
Our intent in writing The Future Workplace Experience is to weave a story of how the workplace is changing and to profile the new practices that organizations are implementing at work. We organized these practices into three areas: What workers expect from work, how technology transforms the workplace, and the changing composition of the workforce. We have synthesized our insights into 10 rules that you can apply to rethink and reimagine your future workplace.
The Future Workplace Experience combines extensive interviews and research with reflective questions that you can use to guide yourself, your team, and your organization to best prepare for and navigate the future workplace. The key features of our book include:
• Insights on new practices by organizations adapting to the future workplace, developed through over 100 personal interviews with HR and business leaders from a cross section of organizations, including Airbnb, Cisco, Cognizant Technologies, Credit Suisse, Fidelity Investments, GE Digital, Genentech, Glassdoor, IBM, JetBlue, La-Z-Boy, LinkedIn, Rackspace, SunTrust, and Verizon Wireless, to name just a few. These organizations are leading the way in the use of innovative practices for recruiting, developing, and engaging talent for their future workplace.
• Key findings from our Future Workplace Forecast, a global survey of 2,147 human resource and business leaders across 7 countries and representing 10 industries. Our findings identify a segment of “winning organizations,” which operate differently from—and better than—the rest. Their employees are likely or very likely to recommend their organization for employment to a friend or family member, they financially outperform industry peers over a three-year period, and they have been recognized on one of a number of “Best Places to Work” lists. Essentially, they have a different operating model for running their organization; they are adaptive learning organizations obsessed with providing exceptional levels of service to their customers and designing compelling workplace experiences for their employees.
• Questions ending each chapter for exploring what you, your team, and your organization could do to deliver a compelling workplace experience.
• Advice on how you can become a workplace activist and anticipate the expected and unexpected outcomes of making the changes you see needed in your workplace.
The 10 rules, each of which forms the basis of a chapter, are shown in Figure I.1. Our 10 rules paint a picture of how organizations are responding to constant disruption and shifting business goals to reimagine their workplaces and workforces. In the past, most of us could spend our entire working lives at the same organization, tapping into the skills we learned in school, college, or graduate school to further our career. This is no longer the case, as the knowledge cycle is growing shorter and shorter. Louis Ross, former vice chairman of Ford Motor Co., said, “In your career, knowledge is like milk . . . if you’re not replacing everything you know . . . your career is going to turn sour fast.”3
Figure I.1 Ten rules to navigate the future workplace
It’s not just employees who must continually change and update skills; this need for constant reinvention also applies to organizations that have to prepare for changing customer and employee needs. As an executive at a leading global bank observed, “When we look at the pace at which digital native companies operate and launch new capabilities, that’s something that doesn’t really happen in large enterprises.”4 This is becoming a new operating model for organizations to thrive in the twenty-first century.
Our rules will guide you as you lead your organization’s path forward to more confidently navigate the future workplace.
10 Rules to Navigate the Future Workplace
Rule #1: Make the Workplace an Experience
Today, we live in the experience economy. This term was coined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in their Harvard Business Review article in 1988 to refer to the movement among companies to orchestrate memorable events for their customers, which was increasingly becoming the “product” they were selling.5 The experience economy was considered at the time to be the main underpinning for customer experience management.
Fast-forward to the workplace of the twenty-first century. Companies are now creating employee experiences to keep workers engaged, happy, and loyal to the organization. We call this new movement the Future Workplace Experience. It is driven by employees who come to expect a workplace that mirrors the quality of experiences they have when they consume, transact, or communicate outside their workplace.
Airbnb, profiled in Rule #1: “Make the Workplace an Experience,” is an example of a company explicitly committed to building a future workplace experience where all the elements of work—the emotional, the intellectual, the physical, the technological, and the cultural—are carefully orchestrated to create a compelling employee experience.
On an organizational level, companies that are on a journey to create the workplace as an experience will operate outside traditional silos and assemble intact teams charged with creating this experience for employees. In many cases this means the lines within organizations, such as HR, IT, real estate, marketing, and internal communications, are blurring. And this means more partnerships among disparate groups and sometimes even new reporting lines between these functions.
For the workplace as an experience to become a reality, you must consider how your organization can go beyond providing today’s “trophy perks”—such as massages, gyms, free food, game rooms, and yoga classes—to creating tomorrow’s memorable employee experiences, which fully tap the emotional, intellectual, physical, technological, and cultural aspects of a job in today’s new world of work.
Rule #2: Use Space to Promote Culture
Workspace shapes culture. Increasingly, companies as different as Apple and La-Z-Boy have redesigned their workspaces to better align with their core values, attract the right talent, and encourage serendipitous personal encounters. As reported by Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs, Jobs fixated on every detail of the physical layout of his offices including where to locate the bathrooms so as to allow for more possible “points of collision.” In fact, Korn Ferry, an organizational and people advisory firm, acknowledges the importance of space by proposing in “The Future of Work: A Meeting of Minds,” that “people who work in real estate should be evaluated based not on how many more people can be crammed into smaller offices but much more on how the physical space affects day-to-day collaboration.”6
Before organizations can redesign their workspaces to support achieving their goals, business leaders and HR professionals must have a vision for the power of the workspace to motivate a community of employees to drive business results. Ben Waber, CEO of Humanyze, a Boston-based company founded out of MIT’s Media Lab, makes “sociometric badges” that capture interaction, communication, and location information for the employees wearing them. The data is then analyzed to determine the types of experiences employees are having during the day. Privacy, of course, is key here, and employees must opt in to wear the badges. But what Waber has been able to demonstrate is that face-to-face interactions and a sense of community are increasingly important in workspaces of the future.
This rule highlights new ways to think about workspace and raises new questions about how space is used to support organizational values and culture while creating more opportunities for collaboration and unplanned yet productive collisions between employees.
Rule #3: Be an Agile Leader
New times require new leadership skills. In the future workplace, a new generation of managers will need to learn to lead differently to be effective. What distinguishes winning organizations in our Future Workplace Forecast study is how they demonstrate transparency by being open and communicating and regularly sharing information. The majority of our winning organizations (6 out of 10) rated their organization as transparent, compared with less than half of our survey population.
Why is greater transparency so critical at this time? Transparency enables trust, and trust plays an important role in the workplace and affects the engagement and motivation of employees. According to the American Psychological Association, a quarter of U.S. workers claim to not trust their employer. And a staggering half do not believe their boss is open with them.7 This lack of trust in the workplace should be a wake-up call for employers.
We asked employers about what they expected of the Agile Leader of the Future. Our results indicate that the agile leader is one who is focused on the ability to produce results by being transparent, accountable, intrapreneurial, and future focused. And this leader is also focused on the ability to engage people, meaning being team intelligent, inclusive, and a great people developer. We expand on each of these desired capabilities in depth. We provide examples of how leaders in companies like Adobe, Amway, AT&T, Cisco, DBS Bank, and Telstra are putting these capabilities into practice in their organizations. Finally, we recommend model behaviors for you to apply in yours.
Developing agile leadership skills in the workplace will be critical to recruiting and engaging the best talent. Ask yourself: Do we have a leadership pipeline that understands the power of successfully balancing the ability to produce results with the ability to engage people? What could our organization do to further develop agile leadership among our leaders?
Rule #4: Consider Technology an Enabler and Disruptor
Technology has become more critical to business than ever before. Employees must master new technologies to work. In a 2016 Cognizant study, 30 percent of executives cited a “serious” digital skills gap in their organization, mostly due to inadequate supply of both digital and sector knowledge.8
Being able to use technology as an enabler to get work done more effectively will be a core competency of working in the twenty-first century. We will need to be able to use cloud based services like Dropbox and Box for file storage; Yammer, Slack, Spark, and Google Hangouts for collaboration; Google Docs and Analytics to run the business; Workboard and BetterWorks for online goal setting; HipChat for team collaboration; and Basecamp for online project management, as well as a host of cognitive computing services that apply data analytics to our work flows.
Technology will also disrupt current business practices; businesses that were once managed by “gut” will now have access to streams of data. This new era of cognitive computing presents us with a unique opportunity to apply data to make better business decisions. Those making decisions without the benefit of analyzing data will quickly feel as if they are stumbling around in the dark compared with their competitors. This applies to the HR department more than anywhere else, where the way we use data to find and develop our employees will create competitive advantages.
Technology is irreversibly transforming how we work regardless of our job role. This rule describes how to respond to the technology impacting the workplace. We see that some jobs will certainly be automated by technology (think telemarketers and paralegals), others will be created by technology (data scientists and learning experience managers), and still others will be reimagined to incorporate artificial intelligence into job roles. In response, we need to understand the impact of technology for us personally, our teams, and our organizations and map a strategy for how to best incorporate technology into our future workplace practices.
Rule #5: Build a Data-Driven Recruiting Ecosystem
Conventional wisdom in recruiting is that a small percentage of people are active job seekers and the rest are passive candidates, happily employed people who aren’t actively looking for a new job—but who could be convinced to take a new job under the right circumstances.
Today that distinction no longer applies. Now that job hopping is as easy as swiping right on apps such as Switch and Anthology or passively receiving job suggestions from LinkedIn and Glassdoor, everyone is a continual job seeker. So the question becomes, how does recruiting evolve to acknowledge that job seekers are always on the hunt for new gigs, whether full time or freelance? Forward-looking companies are starting with the realization that recruiting the best talent must begin with building a strong employer brand so candidates seek out the employer as a desirable company to work for.
Next, while using social media—including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and more—was in an experimental stage for much of the last few years, companies are now leveraging these social sites to source candidates, turn customers into employees and candidates into customers. The key is to continue to leverage social media for recruiting while devising a strategy to turn a company’s own employees into brand ambassadors. According to LinkedIn, socially engaged companies are 58 percent more likely to attract top talent and 20 percent more likely to retain them.9
The key for companies is to apply a marketing mindset to sourcing talent as they recruit various employee segments.
Rule #6: Embrace On-Demand Learning
Continual learning is now a requirement to stay employable. A recent study by Deloitte, a consultancy firm, found that the rapid pace of technological change in the workplace is leading to a skills half-life of only 2.5 years,10 while IBM believes that the shelf life of knowledge in some industries is as short as 13 months.11
Whatever estimate you believe, the conclusion is the same: being able to stay on top of your field and adjacent fields by continually learning will be crucial for you and your organization to win in the future workplace. To stay competitive, organizations will need to go beyond paying lip service to the importance of being a continual learner. They will need to create opportunities for learners to become serial learners, providing access to all forms of learning available on demand, and encouraging learners to become intellectually curious in looking beyond their immediate job to possible new ways of working.
Companies can start down the path of serial learning by offering employees opportunities to access learning from a wide array of sources, both internal and external to the organization. Will on-demand learning replace formal learning programs? Not immediately. But companies and their learning leaders should begin to question where their budgets and resources are going, and whether they are being deployed in the most effective and efficient way possible.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, recently spoke about his passion for and commitment to continual learning and improvement, even with the increased responsibilities and demands of his new role. Says Nadella, “What defines me [is that] . . . I’m a lifelong learner.” Nadella continued, during the Q&A following his appointment, “I get energized when I see people achieve standards. That’s the thing that gets me going.”12
Corporate learning departments need to think and act in new ways to deliver on the promise of on-demand learning. The department must move from controlling learning inside the four walls of the organization to allowing—even encouraging—learning to happen in any number of ways, including MOOCs (massive open online courses), TED Talks, and podcasts. We must offer new ways for our learners to become serial learners. It’s time for corporate learning leaders to relinquish control and give it to learners!
Rule #7: Tap the Power of Multiple Generations
We believe age is a mindset rather than a number. As older generations continue to stay in the workforce longer, we see multiple generations working side by side.
What unfolds can either drive creative thinking or lead to generational conflict. And this becomes very interesting when the tables are turned and older workers increasingly find themselves managed by younger workers. Younger bosses—already prevalent in industries like IT, professional services, and accounting—will likely become more common as companies promote millennials (aged 24–35) into leadership positions.
In the end, the key is to develop what we call generational intelligence, or the ability to understand the expectations, similarities, and differences of each generational cohort and think of the positive benefits of how working across the generations can lead to diversity of thought. How organizations successfully develop generational intelligence will be a key factor in attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent.
Rule #8: Build Gender Equality
The research is in: companies that put into practice an inclusive workplace outperform their peers. McKinsey calls this the diversity dividend. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.13
If we can make the business case for inclusion, how are we doing against this goal? According to LeanIn and McKinsey’s survey of 30,000 men and women at 118 North American companies, women hold 45 percent of entry-level jobs at the companies surveyed. However, their ranks thin out sharply as you go higher in the organization. Only 27 percent of vice presidents at those companies are women, followed by 23 percent of senior vice presidents and 17 percent of C-suite executives.
This decline in female leadership is occurring at the same time that women are rising in educational achievement. In the United States, women comprise almost 60 percent of the annual university graduates and more than 70 percent of 2012 high school valedictorians. Research by EY has found that a majority of leading female executives first found success in athletics. Elite women athletes now out number men. Women took home more medals (61) in the 2016 Olympics, compared to men (55). More U.S. women qualified for the Olympics (291) than men (263). The leading indicators are strong for more competitive female C-suite executives. While women are now becoming a growing, more educated part of the workforce, they hold substantially fewer leadership positions and only earn 78 percent of the salaries of their male counterparts.
If inclusion is the goal, then the path to reaching this goal is to embed diversity and inclusion into all aspects of hiring, promoting, performance management, succession planning, and learning and development while holding senior executives accountable for inclusive behaviors. This starts with identifying what is causing the inequality in the workforce. In many cases this starts with unconscious biases. Unconscious bias is defined by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization with a mission to expand opportunities for women and business, as “an implicit association or attitude about the characteristics of an individual—such as an individual’s race or gender—that operates out of our control, and can influence decision making and behavior—even without us realizing it is happening.” Google, PwC, and Barclays were among the first companies to call out unconscious bias for contributing to the systemic lack of diversity in the workplace. Over the next decade companies can accelerate the journey toward gender equality by offering unconscious bias training as well as embedding inclusion into all aspects of talent management. But the job of creating an inclusive workplace goes beyond what companies can do alone.
Companies must examine what can be done on the individual, team, and organizational level to create the type of workplace that mirrors the world we live in.
Rule # 9: Plan for More Gig Economy Workers
Nonemployee talent is becoming as vital to an organization’s success as full-time workers. A 2016 study by Future Workplace and Field Nation found that “gig economy,” workers are no longer just adjunct staff but are part of a new “blended workforce” where gig economy workers work side by side with full-time workers. With nearly 35 percent of the total workforce composed of gig economy workers—including temp workers, freelancers, statement-of-work–based labor, and independent contractors—the impact of the gig economy can be felt across all businesses regardless of size, region, or industry.
With this growth comes a new set of issues. First, according to a study by Ardent Partners, only half of all gig economy workers are formally accounted for in corporate planning, budgeting, and forecasting. While the majority of businesses expect gig economy work to grow, the bulk of their workforce planning does not account for the development and oversight of this segment of the workforce. Second, this new blended workforce of gig economy workers and full-time employees is often not managed holistically. What is missing is the creation of a total talent management approach, from onboarding to training and development, so all segments of workers are captured in total talent visibility. Finally, companies need to identify the specific training needs of gig economy workers to seamlessly contribute to their future, more blended workforces.
This rise of the gig economy worker is forcing organizations, and HR departments in particular, to rethink how they source and develop talent. For employers, the gig economy allows organizations to hire on demand, lower their employment costs, and have access to a flexible global talent pool. As a survey conducted by Randstad, entitled “2015 Talent Trends,” found, only 47 percent of HR leaders are factoring in independent contractors as part of their talent-acquisition strategy. Organizations increasing their gig economy workforce need to rethink how to engage these workers and consider how their employer brand is perceived across the entire employee population from full-timers to gig economy workers.
As companies increase their dependence on gig economy workers, we may see a new C-suite job created: the chief gig economy officer, a role designed to maintain and grow an organization’s partnerships and reputation within the independent worker community. Anyone interested in being groomed for this new role?
Rule #10: Be a Workplace Activist
As Darwin famously noted, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Being a workplace activist is about knowing your company’s business and industry and anticipating future changes. But it does not stop there. Companies can see the future unfolding, yet still not take action, as Kodak tragically illustrated. As Andrew Salzman, former head of marketing for Kodak, says, “Kodak recognized as early as 1987 that digital was going to be the next big thing. It had volumes of research on how digital would develop. But from a go-to-market point of view, from an organizational prioritization vantage point, it was tethered to the 95 percent of revenue coming from paper and chemicals.”14
Avoid having your own “Kodak moment” and consider becoming a workplace activist. Put into place the changes you see to better prepare for and navigate the future workplace! The Future Workplace Experience will challenge you to examine everything you take for granted about work, the workplace, what a job is, and who is a worker. Work is becoming more about what employees do and less about where they do it.
We expand upon each rule in depth and propose an action plan for you, your team, and your organization to initiate discussion and action on reimagining your organization’s future workplace experience. We introduce you to the frameworks used by leading businesses to better prepare for the future. In our final chapter, we provide you with you a powerful framework to look forward and learn how to expect the unexpected.
Ten Rules to to Navigate the Future Workplace
1. Make the workplace an experience.
2. Use space to promote culture.
3. Be an agile leader.
4. Consider technology an enabler and disruptor.
5. Build a data-driven recruiting ecosystem.
6. Embrace on-demand learning.
7. Tap the power of multiple generations.
8. Build gender equality.
9. Plan for more gig economy workers.
10. Be a workplace activist.
How Might the Future Workplace Be?
How different might the future workplace experience be for our employees? Imagine this:
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
Emma’s smartbracelet buzzes softly. It’s 6:14 a.m., and the bracelet knows Emma so well, it can determine the optimal time for Emma to wake up, given her sleep cycle and her scheduled 8 a.m. meeting, when she needs to be at peak alertness. It’s a big week for Emma—her first week as a full-time employee working for Pixel Institute,15 a leader in the wearable computing industry. Emma discovered Pixel Institute from one of the apps she signed up for while still in college. The app alerted her to internships and full-time employment at companies she followed online. At every turn, Emma is using the latest technologies to be as productive as possible at work. She regularly communicates with team members on the company’s internal collaboration portal, as Pixel Institute has a zero internal email policy. Emma also uses bots powered by machine learning to organize meetings, follow up after meetings, staying in touch with her professional network, and assisting with research projects.
Emma joined the software team’s BugBusting division of three full-time employees, two independent workers, and an AI (artificial intelligence) powered coach that continually learns from past interactions with Emma and makes suggestions to her.
Emma already experienced Pixel Institute before joining the company. She explored the corporate campus on Pixel Institute’s app, met the avatars of her leadership team, listened to the team members each describe what they are working on, and learned about the company’s culture, values, and strategic priorities by reading recent posts and viewing videos from top leaders on the company orientation app.
Emma is now ready to head over to an onsite meeting with her team members. After checking in on the retina scanner to confirm her identity and scanning her smart badge to register her location at work, Emma queries her virtual benefits assistant on her student loan balance. Thankfully, the company offers student loan debt repayment as a benefit, so she is making headway in repaying her loans. All her updated balances are instantly downloaded to her smart bracelet. This team meeting is one of the few times Emma comes to the office. She works at different locations depending on the work she is doing at the time, either from home, a client location or one of the company’ local co-working spaces. Emma is thrilled to see the company headquarters, as it was named one of the top 10 “trophy workplaces” by the Association of Future Workplaces.
Next, Emma accepts the company’s offer to start using iGoals, an app to help her prioritize her work and fitness goals for the first month on the job. iGoals includes a complete list of her objectives for the first month, and she can also view all objectives and key results for her colleagues—including the CEO. iGoals also identifies Emma’s health, fitness, and learning goals. It is easy to check frequently to see what engaging new micro-learning opportunities she can begin, now that she knows the scope of her software project.
It’s nearly 4 p.m., and Emma is ending her work day. Her usual work schedule is a four-day workweek starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. and then remotely collaborating with her global team from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. This gives Emma plenty of time for meeting her health and fitness goals as well as spending time with her friends and family.
The final objective during Emma’s first week is to select her manager. She does this by participating in a series of presentations delivered via HoloPresence from five possible managers, each selected by the people analytics team as being particularly compatible with Emma’s work style, communication needs, career development, training goals, and requirements for purposeful work. She scans each profile, which includes a description of the projects the manager is leading, plus she views the mix of internal ratings each manager has received on the company’s Rate My Manager and the external ratings from former team members and job candidates found on public employer rating sites.
Voilà! Emma makes her choice and is ready to start her new and exciting assignment at Pixel Institute.
Sound far-fetched? Think again. Much of what Emma experiences is already happening at forward-thinking organizations today.
Are you, your team, and your organization prepared for this new future workplace experience? Our book will help you create a road map to master the disruption in recruiting and engaging employees.
Now you’re ready to explore each rule in depth to learn how to create a compelling workplace experience for your organization. Please also visit us at www.TheFutureWorkplaceExperience.com to learn more on how organizations are preparing for the future workplace.