A common question I get asked by business leaders is why they should invest time, effort and money in understanding and adapting to the so-called future of work. My answer is that to not do so makes them and their organisation really vulnerable, and adapting now is a great competitive advantage on many fronts. They are future-proofing their organisation.
So what are the advantages of understanding and adapting now?
The top reasons given by clients and organisations I speak to include:
Innovation – future of work thinking and practice embraces truly diverse collaboration, which is at the heart of innovation. By diverse collaboration, I mean collaboration that is across function, age, seniority, location and maybe even organisations. To innovate, first you need an innovative idea, which by its very nature will be a minority idea. Then you need to quickly implement that idea – again by drawing quickly and collaboratively across a wide range of skills and functions.
Attracting talent – it’s a disruptive world out there, with pretty much every industry being, or about to be, turned upside down by non-conventional competition. The talent you and many other organisations need to weave your way through this disruption are likely to be exactly the talent attracted to organisations that embrace future of work ideas.
Customer closeness – one feature of the future of work is the blurring of conventional interfaces between customers and employees. Smart organisations take advantage of this to gather insight into what the customer wants and needs.
Employee engagement – in a 2013 Gallop poll, only 13 per cent of employees were positively engaged, with 24 per cent actively disengaged. Yet another Gallop poll of more than 50,000 business units and 1.4 million employees showed that engagement has a huge impact on productivity, profit and loss, and customer satisfaction.
Agile teams – the future of work is all about being open-minded and agile, experimenting and “pivoting” in the light of data and feedback.
There are many other opportunities and challenges, but the first step is to understand what is changing. The rate of change is such that organisations now need to proactively support their leaders and managers in understanding the future of work. That’s the way to turn a potential vulnerability into a competitive advantage.
Simon Walker, consultant, Candover Consulting