The New World of Work

Socio-economic trends

Over the last few years, disruptive socio-economic trends challenged the way organizations are collaborating, communicating and searching for information.

- Globalization changed value chains and led to international specialization. Microsoft has an R&D center at headquarters, but also in Beijing, Bangalore and London. BMW is outsourcing the car assembly of its X3 to Magna Steyr. KBC expands heavily in Eastern Europe. The above examples imply significant challenges for collaboration (different locations, culltures or organizations), communication (different time zones, travel cost) and search (central availability of information, preserving global IP).

- Mobility has become an important productivity factor. Every minute spent in a traffic jam or an airport lounge is lost money for the company. The challenge is twofold. First, how can you avoid travel time and costs, by allowing home working and enabling web meetings with (foreign) colleagues instead of travelling there? Secondly, how can you ensure that ‘mobile’ employees can continue collaborating and communicating when on the road or in the airport? 

- Information overload is an acknowledged phenomenon of the 21st century. The channels, the sources and the amount of information grew exponentially over the last 10 years. In the consumer world, three technology streams help us to navigate this overload: search engines such as Google and Microsoft Live (now ‘Bing’), social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook(1), and wikis where Wikipedia has become the reference encyclopedia site(2). In an enterprise context, business leaders and their companies are challenged on their information access strategy and the collaboration process around it. The future winners will be those who invest in search (what is your Intranet equivalent of Google or Bing?), prioritize build-up of global IP (what is your internal equivalent of Wikipedia?) and leverage internal and external networks to accelerate innnovation and decision making (what is your internal equivalent of LinkedIn?).

- Generation Y stands for the so-called ‘digital natives’, people born in 1984 or later. 76% of them use Messenger (chat) and Skype (voice-over-IP). 69% of them have a Facebook account. They are all taught at school how to use Wikipedia. They use the above tools because the process becomes much faster and more intuitive. Does your company have the environment and the culture to attract the best of them? Are your company’s processes and tools as efficient as those in the consumer world?

The New World of Work

Given the above trends and challenges, a new approach to collaboration, communication and search is needed. Change will typically need to take place in three areas: people, technology and workplace. 

- People are at the heart of your company. The work culture should empower them with freedom and accountability. They should have the freedom to make their own choices within the framework of core values for the company, whilst being held accountable for their results – and not for the time spent in the office. In the New World of Work, employees are measured on cross-group collaboration and contribution to the company’s IP as opposed to on individual excellence. A company’s culture is the leading indicator for successful attraction and retention of employees. Companies like Randstad and Microsoft have invested significantly in personal, functional and change leadership. These investments contributed to these companies’ cultures, confirmed by their nomination as ‘Best Employer of 2009’ (Vlerick/Vacature).

- Technology is a key enabler of the New World of Work. Messenger, Skype, Facebook and Wikipedia are mainstream technologies in the consumer world. We should adopt the efficiency of these tools, whilst meeting enterprise requirements like security and application integration. In the New World of Work, employees are not sharing their information via email, but via workspaces. They use shared calendars and exchange meeting minutes in a digital file. They do not bump into the voicemail of another colleague, but use presence-aware unified communications technology(3). Business units are reducing travel costs by setting up web conferences with other countries. The company’s social community site connects individuals by showing personal information, interests, projects and latest presentations. Wikis are used for accelerating product innovation. End user experiences are independent of the device they use: laptop, mobile device or just an Internet connection. Companies like Rabobank, Crédit Agricole, Renault, Pfizer and Shell have each gone a long way in implementing these technologies, with a clear ROI.

- The workplace no longer equals the office. In the New World of Work, the office is the place where employees physically come together. All individual tasks (like preparing a presentation or budget) can be performed from anywhere and many meetings can be replaced by virtual meetings using the appropriate technology. Home working and even ‘home shoring’ become standard business practices, and are a necessary condition for workforce diversity and successful attraction of new employees. Consequently, the design of the office needs to be re-thought: desk sharing, less workspaces, more meeting rooms.

Companies like Ordina, Rabobank and Microsoft have relocated to another building, or refurbished their existing office. 

Business benefits

Clearly, each company needs to individually articulate its ambitions in the New World of Work and balance its investments over people-technology-workplace. Although each business case is different, three main drivers will always be present. Today, most cases are centered on cost savings or internal efficiency. A New World of Work approach helps to reduce physical workplace costs (12.500 Euro per employee per year), travel costs (typically 30%) and telco costs (20-40%).

As important in today’s economic context is customer satisfaction. The New World of Work enables new communication channels with customers (e.g. ING experimenting with web casts to inform potential customers on mortgages). Successful interactions drive ‘emotional connection’ and emotional connection remains the most important buying criterium …

Finally, innovation processes are much better supported by technology: R&D teams are exchanging complex schemes over web casts, wikis shorten the decision cycle for new programs, internal and external social community sites bring creative minds together.

Change

Enterprise-wide adoption of the New World of Work requires a simple but solid change management process. It is critical that the CEO takes the business decision and drives a clear vision towards all employees. Each line organization needs to be involved (HR around culture, PR for communication, IT for enabling technology, …). And most importantly: showing is believing! Once involved in a pilot approach, no single employee will want to return to the previous state. 

For hands-on experiences on adoption of the New World of Work, see the case studies on Rabobank, Microsoft and Ordina.

(1)The logic behind it is that you rather trust information coming from someone you know or trust. Also, finding an expert is much faster using a social network site.
(2)Wikipedia is an example of end-user created content. It brings together information from people all over the world, puts context to it, and is refreshed on a daily basis.
(3)Presence-aware unified communications technology leverages information on the connection of the employee (online/offline), his calendar information (e.g. in meeting, available, out of office) and his personal input (e.g. do not disturb at this moment). Based on this information, the system allows you to choose the appropriate communication channel (instant message, email, call, …) at that time