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The Future of Work

"Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls."

Here are 6 ways your job will change. In fact, it already has.

1. Societal trends

The new demography will reshape our understanding and expectations of work. The baby boomers are the largest demographic group the world has ever seen and the coming decades will be defined by them. They will currently be in their 50's and 60's and by 2025 most will have retired taking with them a huge store of tacit knowledge and know - how. They will also be taking with them a large amount of wealth of the next generations.

Life expectancy will increase dramatically in the future with some healthy children born now possibly living more than 100 years along with some of those already in their 20’s. This will bring into question our current assumptions about the employment of the over-65, provision of pensions and retirement.

By 2025 it will be expected that many people will be living in small family groups or even alone and a number of these relationships will become more virtual. There will be a more family friendly working environment which will mean much more time spent working in small community hubs or from home. It will continue to be important to think about the environment and these changes will help avoid carbon costs and the general wear and tear of lengthy commutes. Role reversal will play a big part in the future with a greater amount of men choosing to spend more time at home taking an active part in caring for their children. “More people will work as freelancers and ‘neo-nomads’, expecting increasing autonomy and freedom. As families become smaller and more dislocated, friends (and what I have termed the ‘regenerative community’) will play an increasing role in individual happiness.”

Developments such as language, science, communications, media, literacy and transport etc. have transformed the mental life of human beings. “These changes will continue over the coming years. By 2025, we can expect that people will be more individualistic and increasingly prepared to forge lifestyles based on their own needs rather than societal expectations.”

2. Women in management

"The workplace-research group Catalyst studied 353 Fortune 500 companies and found that those with the most women in senior management had a higher return on equities by more than a third". |accessdate=11 November 2013}}

The percentage of women in employment has drastically risen in the past 40 years. With more research around which management styles work best it is becoming more evident that the stereotypical view on how women manage is changing. There is growing evidence that in today's marketplace the female management style is not only distinctly different but essential. Women tend to employ what is called a transformational leadership style which is well suited for the emerging, less hierarchical workplace. Women also tend to be less competitive but still continue to be heavily engaged and motivational. Studies suggest that women manage more cautiously and focus on long term goals rather than thriving on risk.

Companies are gaining a better understanding of work-life balance which is working in favour of those women with families. It's now becoming increasingly important to also have a career. By creating a female friendly working environment where the focus is placed on results and efficiency and not time spent in an office lets women strike the right balance. And this is making companies more money. As long as the job is being done to a high standard this might work best in a three day week, at nights or at home. This sense of freedom equals happier and more productive workers. An example of this is Best Buy, which implemented a system called ROWE (results-only work environment) and found that productivity, in some cases, shot up 40%.

"Indeed, when the Chartered Management Institute in the U.K. looked ahead to 2018, it saw a work world that will be more fluid and more virtual, where the demand for female management skills will be stronger than ever. Women, CMI predicts, will move rapidly up the chain of command, and their emotional-intelligence skills may become ever more essential."

Forward looking companies will be aware its women who receive the majority of college and advanced degrees. They will also know women control a vast majority of all consumer purchases. These companies will understand they need women to figure out how to market to other women.

3. Technology

The introduction of new technologies and the enhancement of existing technologies is dramatically changing the way we work. New collaborative software such as Microsoft Projects, 4 Projects and IBM Connections are examples of the hundreds of new tools that allow groups of individuals to work on a task simultaneously while never having to be in the same location. Users can log in and close their assigned tasks from wherever they are whenever they want, increasing the possibility of globalized working teams and addressing work life balance.

Cloud technologies are also assisting companies and employee’s by creating online space for work to be stored and shared. This benefits the company by reducing overheads of deploying expensive hardware as well as giving employee’s access to information in real time.

3D printing is revolutionising the manufacturing industry. An object can now be scanned digitised and then replicated through a 3d printer making historically labour and manpower costly processes quicker and more efficient. The printer has also enabled a rise in smaller manufacturing companies; with many people now set up cottage businesses from home due to the inexpensive cost of the printer. At present the printer is only capable of printing plastic objects but in the future metallic objects may be processed in a similar way open the possibilities even further.

4. Working from home

In 1998 BT (British Telecom) became the first UK Company to offer a home working option to its employees with its “Freedom to work initiative. This experiment allowed 600 of BT’s workers to work from their homes and choose their own working patterns, within 5 years the number had grown to 5000." (Donker 2010)

Since then the number of people working from home in the UK has risen to 1.3 million with a further 3.7m (12% of working population) employee who sometimes work from home or use home as a base. (ONS 2010). Scase (1999) and Lees (1999) suggest that up to half of the UK workforce could be working from home in the near future.

BT now estimate that they save approximately £6000 per year on costs through offering home working (BBC.com 2011). This is only one of the reason why employers can find the option of home working attractive. Ctrip, a hotel and airline booking company in China experimented with a home working option and were surprised to find that productivity increased by “13% over the nine months of the experiment. This improvement came mainly from a 9% increase in the number of minutes they worked during their shifts (i.e., the time they were logged in to take calls). This was due to a reduction in breaks and sick-days taken by the home workers. The remaining 4% improvement came from home workers increasing the number of calls per minute worked.)(Bloom et al 2013). Bloom Et al also note that there was a 50% drop in the rate of attrition.

The rise of new communication and internet technology greatly aided the home working option. Companies such as Cisco and Arkadin offer web conferencing packages that allow conferences to be held with employees online whilst sharing desktops. This means that many employees’ can work on the same task whilst never having to meet face to face. Cloud storage has also aided in this by providing an area that documents can be uploaded to and worked on by several people before completion. VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or internet telephony has also made communications easier and cheaper, in 2008, 80% of all new PBX lines installed internationally were VoIP. Apart from the employer cost advantages working from home also benefits the employee by offering a more flexible working environment with a greater emphasis on their work life balance. It is these factors that lead many to believe that working from home will be the predominate working environment in the future. |newspaper=Bbc|date=2011}}

5. Future Globalization

One of the major forces advancing the globalization of economic activities is the innovation in information and communication technology. Computer network connects the world in time and space like no other way, making economic activities borderless and ceaseless. Business continues for 24 hours, because when the market in one country closes for the day, it opens across the ocean in another.

The future reach of economic globalization will be more extensive than before, affecting industries and workforce segments relatively insulated from trade-related competition in the past. For example, trade in services has grown from 18 to 30 percent of the total over the last 20 years, and some higher-skilled jobs in the services sector, such as IT and business processing services, are now increasingly outsourced overseas. The new era of globalization, marked by growing trade in intermediate goods and services, expanding capital flows, more rapid transfer of knowledge and technologies, and mobile populations - partly results from inexpensive, rapid communications and information transmission enabled by the IT revolution.

Globalization will continue its record to date of contributing economic benefits in the aggregate. Although market share and jobs will be lost in some economic sectors, with short-term and longer term consequences for affected workers, the job losses will be counterbalanced by employment gains in other sectors. There is also a rise in a more ’entrepreneurial’ way of working, this is happening globally.

Pink’s Free Agent Nation (2001) crystallizes, perhaps beyond any other work, the revolutionary changes that are occurring in people’s work and lives in advanced industrial countries. Free agents are independent workers who are “free” from the bonds of a large organization, because they serve multiple clients and customers instead of a single employer. They are “agents” of their lives and futures, because they tailor their working lives to their own needs and desires.

6. Environmental

As is well documented the environment is suffering greatly in terms of global warming and pollution from many years of ever expanding manufacturing and business development. Two examples of governments taking the initiative are The UK launching the London Carbon Trading Exchange(2010) and The US when signing  the Kyoto II agreement and becoming a leading advocate for actions to reduce the rate of global warming. Governments while major contributors to change also need large multinational companies to rethink their ways.

Any future positive impact on the environment will come  where consumers and employees force change,  Where New graduates look for employers with strong environmental and social credentials; in response HR departments play a key role in developing the corporate social responsibility programme. In a nutshell: Companies must develop a powerful social conscience and green sense of responsibility. Consumers must demand ethics and environmental credentials as a top priority. Society and business see their agenda align.

In the Green World where companies care, corporate responsibility (CR) is good. The CR agenda is fused with people management. As society becomes a convert to the sustainable living movement, the people management function is forced to embrace sustainability as part of its people engagement and talent management agendas. Under this scenario successful companies must engage with society across a broader footprint. Communities, customers and contractors all become equal stakeholders along with employees and shareholders.