Us in the Future

The intensity of tides that have been tugging at organizations for a while is gaining power, placing an even greater premium on building ties that bind. Organizations that fail to remedy their neglect of employee allegiance face growing peril.

Doing More With Less

Pressures requiring companies to do much more with fewer staff for greater numbers of customers show no signs of abating. Periods of protection from competitors' responses to product innovations are shorter today than they were yesterday, and they will be shorter still tomorrow. In response, companies are already seeking to shorten innovation cycles by organizing large sections of their workforces around temporary projects rather than permanent assignments. Personnel rosters are not only smaller, they are also constantly changing in composition in order to rapidly rearrange skill concentrations. These onrushing events are aggravated by the mounting use of part-timers, of “virtual” workers (who are physically separate from work sites), and of temporary workers (currently some 30% of the workforce and, significantly, labeled disposable and throwaway workers by economists). This increasingly common use of nontraditional job arrangements widens the psychological distance between workers and employers, thereby worsening the prospects for success in future efforts to build the ties that bind employees to their organizations.

Going Global

Globalization has resulted in the loosening of the hold that corporate headquarters have on affiliates, granting them greater freedom—but often breaking the bond between employers and employees in the process. In expanding worldwide, many companies have abandoned landmark sites that they believe are too narrowly identified with one nation, a plan that backfires when it cuts off the feelings of identification that workers may have for such traditional sites. In 1995, for example, Pharmacia AB, a Swedish company, acquired The Upjohn Company, an American firm based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The headquarters for the new company that resulted, Pharmacia & Upjohn, were placed in London, a location that decision makers presumably hoped would prove more neutral ground. It was a reasonable ambition, but the move seems to have ended up as no more than a costly eradication of a corporate symbol to which employees felt attached. As the directors of Pharmacia learned the hard way, many bosses' Field of Dreams hope that a new corporate identity and faithful customers will magically emerge once balanced arrangements and neutral sites are constructed are destined for disappointment, having ignored the importance of workers' identification.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing has also made company success more dependent on the thorough development of employees' organizational identity. Originally conceived as a cost-cutting tool, outsourcing is increasingly seen as a means for more effectively producing products and for servicing internal and external customers. The idea is that by allotting certain tasks to firms outside the company, personnel resources can be focused on a narrower range of tasks, and specialized skills and economies of scale will be developed in place of sprawling efforts to cover all bases. If Peter F. Drucker is correct in guessing that within the next decade or two all organizations' support work will be outsourced, then someone had better begin paying attention to outsourcing's current afflictions. A 1996 PA Consulting Group survey of companies in France, Germany, Denmark, Hong Kong, Australia, England, and the United States showed that one third of the responding firms believed that outsourcing's disadvantages were greater than its advantages.^[12]

Companies to which work and workers are outsourced face a different version of the common lack of emotional connection between employee and employer. Customers and clients, like some cousins, are “once removed.” They are, in fact, part of another organization. This requires firms that receive outsourced work to build strong ties to their employees, so that their goal of servicing someone else's employees and customers become their own workers' goals as well.

Employing Generation X

Investigators and observers are nearly unanimous in pointing out that the group of adults currently moving into the labor force in America and elsewhere in the industrialized world lacks a pro-organizational orientation. In a Coopers Lybrand study of 1,200 business students, 45% identified a “rewarding life outside work” as one of their lives' leading priorities.^[13] And 68% of nearly 1,800 MBA students at major American universities agreed that “the family will always be more important to me than career.”^[14] In 1995, three fourths of the respondents to a poll conducted by Penn, Schoen, and Berland supported the idea of giving workers a choice between overtime pay and compensatory time away from the job. They opted for the choice because in their list of priorities, time commonly comes ahead of money.^[15] The effect of this trend is as evident in the professions as it is in corporate business. For example, a Law Practice Management Journal article titled “The Loyalty Crisis” complained about how young lawyers have less commitment and willingness to work the hours typically expected by law firms, preferring instead to focus on personal matters away from the office.^[16]

Generation X represents an additional challenge in the new obstacle course of employee–employer relations, joining doing-more-with-less, globalization, and outsourcing as changes in business conditions to which organizations must swiftly adapt. Successfully employing Generation X necessitates policies of company management that create affiliation, not alienation, more effectively than ever before.