LOOKING FORWARD: EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
The future is not built on one trend alone. It is the simultaneous convergence of numerous trends, moving at various rates of change and impacting us and our organizations differently depending on our circumstances. Forward-looking organizations tend to have a formal and disciplined process for tracking trends to help them win in the marketplace. When we anticipate the future, we are essentially making assumptions about what will happen. The assumptions we make are our expectations of the trends we expect to see. We need to anticipate both expected and unexpected possible future states and be comfortable not having all the answers along our journey. To bring our 10 rules together, we introduce you to our recommended framework for documenting your assumptions to help you more thoughtfully prepare for your future workplace experience.
Expected Versus Unexpected
The following table outlines each of our 10 rules for navigating the future workplace along with a summary of expected and unexpected assumptions regarding the future of each rule.
Let’s examine each rule and offer an “expected” and an “unexpected” observation for you to consider and discuss with your team. We identify an expected future as one that is the probable future we know and may have already experienced in our organization. By documenting and sharing what your team expects, you can ensure that your management teams are building their strategies based on a consistent set of shared assumptions.
An unexpected future is relatively more radical and can come about as the result of events, innovations, or societal occurrences that are more difficult to predict and tend to be anticipated by a minority, not the majority. Capturing the unexpected is best done by documenting assumptions made by the minority of people who interpret the direction of trends differently and therefore have different expectations for what will unfold. Celebrate these differences, as they will help you anticipate and accept unfolding trends faster and generate more alternative and thought-provoking outcomes.
To contemplate the implications of the future workplace, we have to be willing to examine potentially conflicting perspectives and, oftentimes, opposing assumptions. To do this, we must develop a framework for making sense of the trends we expect and those that we do not expect. Think about what is expected of yourself, your team, and your organization to navigate the future workplace. Use our framework as a starting point in your journey. Ask yourself: What is expected? What is unexpected?
Rule #1: Make the Workplace an Experience
Expected: The Employee Experience Continues to Mirror the Consumer Experience
The Workplace as an Experience will continue to be carefully orchestrated, where all the elements of work—the emotional, the intellectual, the physical, the technological, and the cultural—are designed to work in concert to create even more memorable employee experiences. The new emphasis on employee experience will create an expanded scope for HR leaders and their teams who will not only focus on traditional HR roles of learning, development, recruiting, and compensation, but they will also assume a new mission for creating a compelling workplace experience, one that will excite employees to work for and be engaged in the company.
Unexpected: Employee-Centric Policies Go Even Deeper into Employees’ Personal Lives
The unexpected consequences of enhancing the employee experience are beginning to manifest in unanticipated ways. For example, a growing number of companies enable employees to bring their pets to work. As a result, companies have to now also consider the needs of workers with pet allergies or animal phobias, conditions that HR had no need to previously understand. Pet friendly workplaces have had tremendous appeal to many pet owners across the generational cohorts on selecting or staying with employers. Unanticipated consequences of reinforcing the bond between pet owner and pet have now resulted in the emergence of pet-related benefits that range from offering paid time off in the form of “Pet-ternity” leave (provided by Mars Petcare) when a new pet joins the household, to granting pet bereavement leave (offered by a variety of businesses that include Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants), and free pet health screenings during Pet Parents day (Activision Blizzard) all in recognizing the importance of pets in employees’ lives.1
Rule #2: Use Space to Promote Culture
Expected: A Radical Restructuring of How Workspace Is Designed, Used, and Technologically Supported
Across many organizations, there has been a steady dismantling of policies that allocate space based on the grade level of employees, and there has been a corresponding increase of interest in designing workspaces to promote an organization’s culture, as well as increase productivity and wellness at work. Morris Levy, co-founder of co-working space The Yard, noted that since people can work anywhere, you should provide a space that employees are happy coming to.2 And as we highlighted in Rule #2, Use Space to Promote Culture, organizations are increasingly taking lessons from co-working spaces and creating lively fun workspaces that can be viewed as workplace experience centers, a place employees want to go to network, collaborate with colleagues, and find a productive spot for their focused work. These workspaces are more than adding Ping-Pong tables or meditation classes. Rather they inspire workers to congregate, network, and connect to each other. The workplace of the future acknowledges a new way of working that is both virtually and physically engaging.
Unexpected: A Further Blurring of Work and Home as Companies Push to Integrate Workers Even Further into the Workplace
Companies are offering new forms of motivation to incentivize employees to integrate their life into work. In fact, some companies are creating new incentives to support “homing from work.” Sarah Slater, director of Workplace Strategy, CBRE, talks about employers’ efforts to support employees’ “second shift” of after-hours work by enabling employees to take care of certain home-life needs from the office. She highlights the emergence and growth of hospitality-minded concierge services (happening beyond Silicon Valley firms) offering employees at work a range of services including shopping, arranging dinner, or collecting the dry cleaning.
But watch for other new incentives such as paying employees a premium to live closer to the office (Facebook) or offering forgivable loans to buy property closer to the office (Quicken). These policies are a substantial pivot from traditional policies of additionally compensating employees who live farther from the office. The trajectory is toward a further blurring of the lines between work and home.
Rule #3: Be an Agile Leader
Expected: Multifaceted Leaders Are Touted for New Levels of Leadership Agility in Producing Results
The permutations of what the agile leader could look like are innumerable. Many of the core characteristics and goals of the agile leader are interwoven. Each agile leader in the making should keep one thing in mind: leadership is about achieving results—while not compromising relationships to get those results. The traits of an agile leader fit together in many different ways, with the goal of engaging and mobilizing diverse teams to achieve great things.
Unexpected: The Leadership Mantle Shifts from “Hero Leaders” to High-Performing Teams, with Some Even Hired and Compensated as Intact Teams
“Team lift-out” is the term used to hire an established group of employees who have been working together and then decide to switch to another employer en masse. Traditionally, this has been rare; however, we see large companies acquire small ones specifically for their intact teams. Over time we will see team lift-outs to be an unanticipated consequence of the next-generation economy as the visibility of teams and their accomplishments are seen as the newest type of competency in the workplace.
Rule #4: Consider Technology as an Enabler and Disruptor
Expected: Technology Enables or Disrupts How Every Employee Gets Work Done
Regardless of industry, technology is eliminating, creating, and changing jobs, and the most important lesson is to stay on top of technology shifts in order to avoid skills gaps that leave people and technologies underutilized. The influx of new technologies is changing our behaviors and is altering the way we communicate, collaborate, motivate, and stay productive at work. It’s no longer enough for our employees and ourselves to simply be technologically competent—we have to recognize that every job will be enabled or disrupted by technology. It is just a matter of when, what, and how technology gets applied to the job.
Unexpected: Companies and Jobs Die Off Faster as Higher Numbers Are Caught Unprepared for the Accelerated Rate of Business Disruption
No industry will be safe from having its “Uber moment.” Former CEO of Barclays Anthony Jenkins said in a speech that banking, as an industry, was facing huge disruption and could be forced to cut jobs and automate operations due in large part to the success of FinTech start-ups, displacing and disintermediating the old-world finance via technology. Look for more industries that are upended as technology reimagines entire sectors of business.
Rule #5: Build a Data-Driven Recruiting Ecosystem
Expected: More Companies Contact Job Candidates Before the Candidates Start Actively Job Seeking
The proliferation of apps that proactively analyze and match our online profiles to available openings will continue, enabling everyone to be a continual job seeker. Identifying candidates becomes a lot easier. Successfully hiring candidates becomes a lot harder. Whether a prospect embarks on that proactive opportunity may depend a lot more heavily on the candidate’s perception of the employer brand. Forward-looking companies are investing in strengthening their employer brand to influence positive responses from prospects.
Unexpected: Recruiting Technology Enables Employees to Be Hired Without Ever Having Been Interviewed in Person
Conventional recruiting dynamics and assumptions are repeatedly upended by practices previously considered implausible. Conventions used to dictate that employers would schedule a phone chat first, followed by an in person meeting at company headquarters. Some companies are becoming so comfortable with using technology to meet employees they are forgoing the in person meeting and offering a job without an in person meeting or a voice call. This is the case at Automattic, the 400 person firm responsible for the popular blogging platform WordPress. According to Marjorie Asturias, Happiness Engineer at Automattic, the recruiting process includes Skype chats with the hiring manager, and then completing a project for the company while earning $25.00 an hour. Once the applicant sends in the completed work, the hiring manager communicates with the applicant via a private blog. If this all works out, an offer is made without ever having a phone call with the applicant! The recruiting process at Automattic is referred to as “job tryouts” rather than job interviews. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg sums up the results this way: “We end up hiring about 40 percent of the people who try out with us. In 2013, we hired 101 people, and only two of them didn’t work out. In the entire history of the company we’ve hired 270 people, and only 40 of them are no longer here.”3 So in this knowledge-based gig economy, powered by data analytics and matching algorithms, it is now reasonable to ask, “How could we reconfigure the recruiting process to hire workers that no one has met in person?”
Rule #6: Embrace On-Demand Learning
Expected: The Rate of Employee-Generated and -Curated Content Grows Exponentially
There is a substantial increase in the content generated by employees to teach fellow employees. As companies reward and recognize employees for sharing knowledge with their peers, organizations are becoming teaching and learning machines. More informal peer-to-peer learning results in more opportunities to empower your learners to be in charge of their own learning and provide them ways to easily contribute learning, find external learning and then tag it, share it, and rate it. Corporate learning is mirroring how we find books on Amazon and movies on Netflix.
Unexpected: Corporate Learning Departments Expand Their Capabilities to Educate More Nonemployees Than Employees
Corporate learning departments may be shocked at how many nonemployees they will be educating in the years to come. Tenaris is already on this path, by opening up Tenaris University to audiences that range from local schoolchildren to global employee prospects. McKinsey Academy offers an immersive platform educating the employees of its clients on methodologies that were formerly reserved for the exclusive and proprietary use of its consultants. McKinsey Academy is now training executives at volumes that exceed many college-based executive education programs. Is it possible that we might see some corporate learning departments spun off as independent learning providers with their host organization as their largest client? We expect so!
Rule #7: Tap the Power of Multiple Generations
Expected: Workforces Continue to Diversify in Age and Culture
The workplace will continue to see multiple generations and cultures working side by side. While the emphasis will be on the similarities across the generations and cultures, companies will recognize the unique behaviors and attitudes of generations and cultures and build inclusive training focusing on developing generational and cultural intelligence. We expect more generational and cultural intelligence training as part of broader diversity and inclusion training programs with the goal of capitalizing upon the business benefit of tapping diverse talent pools.
Unexpected: Multiple Generational and Cultural Employee Resource Groups Have More Strategic Influence In the Workplace
An increasing number of organizations will tap deeper into the diversity of their multigenerational and multicultural workforces and consider this a strategic advantage. IBM is using its Millennial Corps to advise on a range of new products and services that can be developed for millennials and those with a millennial mindset. While leveraging the power of age and cultural diversity can lead to business results, it can also lead to generational conflicts. Businesses must be prepared for increases in younger managers leading older employees as well as Gen Xers and boomers who exhibit resentment about the disproportionate attention on millennials.
Rule #8: Build Gender Equality
Expected: Women Increase as a Percentage of the Workforce at All Levels but Slower at the Top
The proportion of women in leadership roles will slowly increase. March 2016 research from Glassdoor indicated that one of the biggest causes of the gender pay gap is the sorting of men and women into occupations and industries that pay differently throughout the economy, a structural enabler that will take years to change.4 As women assume more leadership roles, expect more spouses and partners of working women to stay at home. Breadwinner Moms and Chief Household Officers will become more prevalent.
Unexpected: Gender-Based Labels Appear Noticeably Less Frequently in Workplace Discussions
More roles and facilities become delabeled by gender. In the consumer world, companies such as Target are already phasing out gender-based signage in many product categories such as toys and bedding. Some companies proactively push gender relabeling beyond today’s boundaries, following the lead of Cooper Union, a college that removed all male and female signs from all of its bathrooms to accommodate both gender-conforming and gender nonconforming people.5 Expect a significantly lower use of the labels “woman” and “women” in front of roles such as “woman president” or “women leaders,” as exemplified by Drew Faust declaring, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard.”6
Rule #9: Plan for More Gig Economy Workers
Expected: The Workforce Is a More Blended Mix of Full-Time, Part-Time, Gig, and Other Nonpayroll Workers
Freelancing “has evolved from what you did between jobs to now it is your job,” according to Billy Cripe, VP Marketing of Field Nation, a gig economy platform provider. As more workers choose to join the gig economy, organizations will struggle with the increased complexity of a blended workforce when navigating legal, training, and cultural issues. More assignments within an organization will be filled by contractors from outside the corporation. Blending workers of different contractual status, abilities, ratings, and cost structures will be further enabled with advanced algorithms and platforms.
Unexpected: Gig Economy Players Team Up to Take on Bigger Self-Organized Project Leadership Roles
Gig economy workers will increasingly locate, coordinate, and cooperate with each other and self-organize. The nascent organizing principle for leaders of blended workforces will be to make everybody feel part of the same team regardless of contractual status. And for many gig economy workers—able to set their own hours, balance work with the rest of their lives, and team up with other gig workers—this is being viewed as preferential to being a full-time employee. Dynamo, a virtual forum for freelancers, is already proving that the collective willingness of freelancers to coordinate together is gaining traction.
Rule #10: Be a Workplace Activist
Expected: More Workers Become Workplace Activists, Identifying and Pushing for the Changes They See as Needed in the Workplace
Every people process needs to be a constant target for continual improvement, or the process will be at risk of irrelevancy. Organizations will continue to apply design thinking and agile leadership principles to adopt an iterative mindset as an operating principle. Organizations will be aware of the need for all employees to practice iterative design thinking.
Unexpected: Workers Deeply Appreciate the Values that Do Not Change, as Everything Else Does
Can you and your team members explain the key aspects of your business that do not change, regardless of how much your business expands and grows? Organizations that are able to successfully cascade the shared mission and values of the organization to every level without an individual having to pause and think about it are an exception. But this is what is needed, an appreciation for the changes and disruptions, as well as the constants of the business.
Questions Invite Dialogue!
The Future Workplace Experience has presented you with 10 rules to use in navigating the future. We structured each chapter to offer you insights from research, interviews with practitioners, and reflective questions to help you, your team, and your organization prepare for and navigate the future workplace.
Our 10 rules will guide you in rethinking and reimagining your future workplace and in mastering disruptions in recruiting and engaging employees. The questions following each rule will help you start relevant conversations with your peers.
FINAL THOUGHTS
1. What was most useful for me in this book?
2. Who do I initiate a dialog with about shaping our future workplace?
3.How do I start the journey to reimagine our “Future Workplace Experience”?
The ten rules we present in this book are opportunities for you to transform and reimagine your workplace. The future workplace will be shaped by each of you as embark on your journey to become activists and give voice to the changes you see needed, in your organization, on your team and importantly within yourself! We look forward to hearing from you about the ideas, projects and initiatives that you have been encouraged to start after reading our book!
Visit us at www.TheFutureWorkplaceExperience.com to continue the journey!