The third of the CIPD's changes behind the new S curve is change in the workplace.  We're looking at new ways to organise our new workforces to undertake the new work, including the use of new types of location and technology to enable them.

Again there often seems to be some positively serendipitous factors connecting all of these changes - we need work to be done more flexibly by more flexible workers and at  the same time cost and environmental pressures are making our inflexible office spaces look so anachronistic.

We often don't need these huge head office buildings anymore, and if we do, we don't need long corridors of individual offices, or fields of open plan desks.  We need much more flexible, creatively designed workplaces (physical facilities) and workspaces (virtual technology) which enable work to be performed more intelligently, and provide a compelling 'splace' for the new workers to get this new work done.

I often think some of the most exciting work in HR is currently being undertaken in Facilities Management and IT, so we need to be linked to these functions (as well as Finance, Procurement and Marketing) much more closely than we are.  and I'll be writing about changes in the workplace and workspaces here as well.

But probably most importantly, do also note that when put together, the linked changes in work, the workforce and the workplace absolutely provide a perfect storm.  And the need is often to find that integrated approach which links them all together - creating a sweet spot at the eye of the storm.

One of the changes which is driving synergy between work and the workforce is feminisation.

Work is becoming more feminine in nature - the shifts towards service work, customer focus, knowledge work and team work which I've already covered here tend to require skills, capabilities and interests which are perhaps more traditionally associated with women rather then men.

Even management and leadership are shifting towards emphasising more traditionally feminine approaches (caring and empowering rather than commanding and controlling.)

And as yet another example of what I was discussing in my previous post, the workforce is rapidly becoming more feminine as well, though not yet at senior levels.  Though I don't think we need to worry too much about the remaining difficulties with glass ceilings and pay gaps as these issues will take care of themselves - businesses will increasingly want to employe people with more traditionally feminine skills and perspectives and a high proportion of these people are going to be women.

Of course, as I've also been suggesting, it is important to recognise stereotypes for what they are.  So although neuroscience does suggest that there are differences in the brains of men and women, and research suggests that women are more sensitive to social situations, these differences are typically quite small (I think this recent article makes this point quite well.)

But it does mean another aspect of many organisations is quite important too.  We know that HR is predominantly female (though CHROs and certain areas like HR technology and analytics still tend to be much more male.)  We tend not to be that representative of our workforces in the way they are today, but I do think we are much more typical of the workforces most of our organisations will become.

This is important because it reinforces why we are often seen as being different by our business colleagues but why we should celebrate and reinforce this difference and not obscure or downplay it (see my recent post over at Strategic HCM - Finance are from Mars, HR are from Venus.)

Photo: Churchill's Pendleton Women at Work 1916

One of the things I think is quite interesting about changes in work and the workforce is how many of these are aligned - for example we need work to be cut up differently from the old 9 to 5, 40 hours per week approach, and increasingly people want to fit work in to their lives in smaller, more flexible chunks as well.

Of course, this doesn't always apply and even when it does, matching demand and supply when both are much more complicated than they were before is quite tough to do - but at least the potential is there.

For example the typical middle level manager that you might want to send abroad or have commuting to two of three countries every week may not want this sort of experience given their links and responsibilities at home, but a younger manager without these responsibilities might relish the challenge this type of working would provide (again as I've just been posting, these are just stereotypes and what's really important is to personalise our people management approaches, understanding each individual's engagement drivers and offering them an individual employment deal.)

That's why, whilst I was an HR Director at Ernst & Young, we tried to articulate the pyschological contract between the firm and our employees (see the picture, taken from Michael Wellin's book, Managing the Pyschological Contract, at the organisation and team level but also to try to get our employees to think about it too - what do they give to the firm, and what do they receive back?

The more that we could do this, the greater our ability to personalise the deal and provide what the employee wanted, and the higher the likelihood the employee would feel rationally as well as emotionally engaged and therefore have greater likelihood to stay in the organisation.  It implies risk as well though - once you start to articulate the deal like this it becomes even more important to deliver upon the articulated expectations.  If you're not going to deliver it's much more effective just not to talk about it.  Which is, I think, a large part of the reason why most organisations don't do it.  But also why if you really do want to be people centric, that it's a very good reason why you should.

There are also certainly a number of significant shifts in expectations, which again apply to the whole workforce, not just generation Y.

The biggest one of these is the fall in trust, and particularly trust in traditional, hierarchical, status and authority based relationships.  The bank managers, accountants, solicitors, judges, politicians, newspaper editors, CEOs and maybe even consultants.  All those people we used to look upwards to and be deferential to basically - and whom we don’t do so to anymore.

This is partly a Western trait but whenever I’m away in Asia, Africa and South America I make a point of asking about this and the answer’s basically the same - deference is falling - maybe from a higher starting point, but it’s still falling.  I’ve not seen this work its way through into any surveys of national culture, eg to Hofstede’s or Trompenaars’ power distance scales, but I’m sure in time we will.

The survey which does capture the trend is Edelman’s global Trust Barometer which firstly shows the decline in trust, and particularly in authority based trust over the last decade and beyond.  And which suggests that one of the relationships which has become most important during this period is what Edelman call a PLY - a Person Like Yourself.

The good news about this is that becoming a PLY is a pretty easy thing to do - you just need to find some connection that brings you together as people and reminds you that the other person is a human being too.  This can be as simple as having come from the same home town or having been to the same place on holiday, or both supporting the same football team or having the same taste in music, or, or, or…

Importantly, it’s not about cloning - you could have two people as different as they could be who can still find PLY factors that bring them together as people.  (That’s not to say that cloning doesn’t happen, in fact a couple of days before posting this advice I was reading about research findings suggesting that close friends tend to share relatively close DNA.)

This PLY based trust is the basis for so much of what is required in today’s world of work - social communication, social learning, social anything at all really.

And it means that everyone needs to communicate in the new social way.  Ie a CEO can’t rely on influencing his or her organisation by simply getting the Internal Comms person to include scripted, bland messages inside the monthly company magazine (partly because nobody reads it and also because it they do they won’t believe it anyway.)  So instead smart executives will blog and vlog, unscripted and unrehearsed, and will sometimes write or talk about what they’ve been doing as people, not just as CEOs (so they’re helping present themselves as PLYs as well.)

There’s more to it than this of course, and we’ll come to some of these other factors later on.

One of the biggest changes in the workforce, or at least the one which is brought up most, is generational change.  This usually relates to

• Engaging generation Y employees: individuals born after 1980 who are perceived as having particularly high expectations about the level of support they will receive, the availability of technology and  opportunities for collaboration and quick career progression.
• Retaining older boomers or members of the silent generation (like me in the photo).
  

People tend to have their own opinions on this and to believe that generations are different, or that they aren’t, but actually there is neuroscience evidence to show that brains of younger people are developing in a different way to those in the older generations.  (Though I do think the recession muted some of gen Y’s wildest expectations about employment!)

This isn’t just about age.  A 20 year old today will have a very different way of thinking to a generation X’er was when they were 20.  The theory is that generational change occurs because of the different experiences they have when they are teenagers.

But actually I don’t think it’s just teen years that are important now.  The effect of the economic shocks experienced during the last few years will have been profound and will probably impact the behaviour of a mid-20s millennial more than the things which were happening when they were a teenager.  But we’ve all experienced this recent turbulence so this may also mean the differences between generations are now somewhat less than they were up to 2008.

I certainly think generation y is largely a mindset not an age bracket.  Technological savvy comes with experienced regardless of whether you've been bathed in or grown up with bits.  And the demands for involvement, ethical behaviour and the ability to progress are things I think most employees of all generations would want from their employment.

It’s also important to note that, as I described in my last post, both age and generation are only two of the factors that lead to different behaviour.

Plus generational differences will be impacted by these other factors too, eg a Saudi woman will have very different experiences in their teenage years from an American man (although there is probably some truth in the suggestion that millennials are more similar in nature globally than past generations have been).

I sat through a presentation on generations from a Saudi HR professional at a Dubai conference I was speaking at a few years back and he had clearly just lifted a USA based presentation which made no sense in the UAE never mind Saudi Arabia.  It’ this sort of nonsense which gives the whole topic the ‘generation blah’ description but then that’s not fair either.  We just need to use research and employment models sensibly and with a bit of thought.

And again, all of this means that that things are now very complex and that what we really need to do is to treat each individual, not just each generation, differently.

Probably the best explanation of the changes in work come also from Gary Hamel’s suggestions around the new S curve. 

For him, the old S curve was built on theories developed at a time when attendance, diligence and compliance were all critical requirements to organisational effectiveness.

But in today’s world, it’s passion, pride, zeal and creativity (even love?) which are the main enablers for competitive success.  And you don’t develop these attributes through the traditional, command and control practices of the old S curve.  Hence we need management 2.0, and HR 2.0, as a completely transformative approach to managing and developing our people and organisations.You can even question whether management is a useful word or concept at all in this new world.  Leadership is hardly much more helpful, at least if it’s defined as ‘from the front’, ‘from the top’ etc.

Instead of these approaches we need to create environments in which people are able to do their best work, moving from the hygiene to the motivator axis of the Hertzberg matrix.

We also need to liberate and encourage people so that they want do this best work!  I remember an event I did with Sir John Harvey Jones in 1994  where he suggested rebadging HR as ‘People Liberation’ - I wasn’t convinced then but I am now.

Liberation is about creating autonomy, mastery and purpose (and maybe relatedness?) (Back once again to Dan Pink’s Drive which I referenced in my last post); using pull vs push (John Hagel); art vs science and lots of other approaches, or perhaps elements of an approach, which I’ll be writing about here.