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The Future of Work: Josh Levine – Great Mondays

This content was taken from our latest eBook: ‘The Future of Work: Insights from our global Engagement 101 Influencers’. To download the eBook in full. simply click here.

Josh Levine

Partner & Author

Great Mondays

When employment rating sites like Glassdoor and social media-powered employee opinions reveal the truth behind ‘what it’s like to work with us’ Web proclamations, for better or worse, every company’s inner workings will become visible to the world. This influential trend will drive the first three megatrends.

Employees and customers will choose brands for their business practices as much as features and benefits.
Company culture will become a critical competitive advantage.
The role of Chief Culture Officer will become prevalent.

An increasing scarcity of highly skilled talent and the rising cost of real estate in urban areas drives the next four trends.

Companies will hire talent who live further and further from urban centres.
Extreme distributed workforces will become the norm.
Work hubs—hyper-localized WeWork style co-working spaces—will replace traditional offices and headquarters.
SMBs will become micro multinationals as they hire and work regularly with international teams.

These trends will be bolstered by the technology that allows people to work from anywhere, anytime. It’s going to be a gradual but powerful economic lift for non-urban regions, particularly those that have relied on dying or shored industries like coal and traditional manufacturing. The trend gives individuals who might otherwise not have earning potential a way to contribute, and on the other side, creates a market where businesses can seek the best talent at the best price.

Finally, because the average tenure of the American worker is falling—below 24 months for most, but a recruiter’s nightmare of 18 months in the Bay Area—we will soon see the last three trends emerge.

The fight for employee retention will lose economic viability.
Companies will adopt “work cycles,” a business methodology focused on high-speed, project-based work.
The majority of workers will need to build their own books of business and take responsibility for managing their own skills and development.

If you can keep employees, you should—it is definitely less expensive than finding new ones. But the shorter tenures will eventually drag down the ROI of retention efforts. Inside of a decade, job-hopping will be the norm for most employees, and even the most tantalizing retention offers won’t compete with the opportunity for new work with new people.

Individual career ownership was once the company that provided the opportunity to learn skills, provided leadership support and access to mentors, but that ability will be limited when individuals hop from one role to the next. Extend that theme and the more interesting question is what resources and organizations the modern worker will need. Hello, next business opportunity.

Now if I can just find some talent.

Deadline for the UK & European Awards is October 9, 2019 – Enter here.

This content was taken from our latest eBook: ‘The Future of Work: Insights from our global Engagement 101 Influencers’. To download the eBook in full. simply click here.