Today, everyone is a forecaster. With information and images at our fingertips, it appears anyone can make a case that a personal preference could be “trend” or will soon be.
So after scouring the internet and surveying our favorite resources, we offer these observations for our readers on what could be trends for 2012. We consider them from the employee seat and the employer’s.
- Quality of Life: Home is Work and Work is Home.
- Digital World: Connected but Not-Protected.
- Mentoring Vs. Development: Self-Help Growth Programs.
- Space Shifting: The Environment Morphs and is Mobile
- Culture Vs. Rules: Increasing Trust
For more read on…
Quality of Life: Home is Work and Work is Home.
- Staff/workers/teams want to have the flexibility and transparency to check in and out of their personal lives seamlessly in their work day.
- Employers are balancing between trust worthy autonomy and protecting the company assets and agendas.
- Recommendation: Workers please acknowledge to your teams when you are “at work” or on a personal moment. Employers please monitor level of productivity not appearances of social engagement.
Digital World: Connected but Not-Protected.
- Staff/Workers/Employees want to be available to family so caring smart phones is a good thing there, but not so good when it means your boss sees you as always available. Staff/Workers/Employees want to be engaged in social media and share their lives from all points of their world. They see it as entertainment, stress relief, pleasure. BUT may not be aware of the danger of exposing information that could be harmful to their careers, relationships or those of their families and employers.
- Employers are tempted to control use of smart phones by providing them, and linking them to office servers and e-mails. Employers have no real clue how paranoid to be about staff sharing work related information even informally in social media.
- Recommendation: Employees monitor carefully what you share in social media. Assume what ever you write/share is going directly to your bosses desk. Consider engaging in some sort of digital disciplines for amount of use, when to use. Always be aware that everyone knows what you are doing. Employers, give ‘em a brake. Inform employees of the rules if there are any. But more importantly make sure your handbook covers your concerns and risks of the digital world.
Mentoring Vs. Development: Self-Help Growth Programs.
- Staff/Teams/Employees/Workers are human beings who crave praise, correction and inclusion. When quality programs of development are not offered through their jobs, workers will seek it out through networking groups, mentoring opportunities and community programs. We can’t not look for this support. LinkedIn and their “groups” is a growing resource for like minded professionals to gain help in “next step” personal development and decision making.
- Employers/Bosses/Managers while they need this themselves are probably pacing themselves based on increases of personal work-load for the same 8 hour day. They may not see the advantage of managing a development program when they are stressed for time already. Reviews and salary discussions can not replace true development programs. Bosses are nervous about how much their company allows them to “give” to their teams. Many of them see the need.
- Recommendations: Workers, ask your supervisors and team members for support. Ask about programs and ask how other team members are handing development needs. Employers, don’t ignore the need. Open dialogue goes a long way. A creative team can create low to no cost ways of building team skills.
Space Shifting: The Environment Morphs and is Mobile
- Workers/Teams/ Staff appear to be more compromising where the photo of the family dog sits in their offices. Collaboration requires work to be done in a variety of places in an office. While everyone wants “their space”, the time spent there or the need to nest or escape is changing. Wireless networks untie us all from our cubicles.
- Employers/Bosses and Managers’s facility budgets are liking the new mobility as it puts less stress on creating personal permanent environments. It does challenge the electronic and computing budget. There is also an increased ability to work from other then “the office”, which doesn’t initially appear to be an issue but starts to reduce the ability to create team culture over time.
- Recommendation: For both employees and their bosses, the benefits and challenges of the technology of our digital workplace are from stabilizing. Shared information and shared accessibility is key. Process and procedure management has to evolve, cannot be mandated, but at some point everyone has to compromise to meet goals.
Culture Vs. Rules: Increasing Trust
- Worker/Staff/Employees, over 40% are waiting for the economy to get better and then they are going to find another job. According to Deloitte, a recognized leader in business consulting and financial planning, In their “2010 Ethics in the Workplace Survey-Trust in the Workplace”. July 10, 2010 48% of all employees report that when the economy gets better, they are looking for another job. Why? The lack of trust and transparency in the workplace www.deloitte.com
- Employers/Bosses and Managers, most of whom are employees as well are in the same boat. Corporate Fortitude has written a couple of “case studies” about this issue. Please look for older posts with the titles, “Why we don’t trust Chuck the Paranoid Manager, (Part 1 and 2)
- Recommendation: Company stakeholders need to take this issue seriously and begin to monitor how fearful their workforces are. There are several training groups, methods and processes that have been used to help company teams move their culture from negative to helpful
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Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | change management, trust in the workplace, teamwork, Corporate Improvements, changing employee behavior, change that lasts, power of a culture, trends in the workplace, a better future at work
