THE WORKFORCE FLUIDITY

It has now become a cliche to say that the prime resource of sustainable competitive advantage is not superior products, or technology, or any other physical assets, but recruiting and retaining talented employees for companies to be successful. To retain the top talent in the tight labor market, companies are adopting newer techniques and sometimes funnier practices too. Not to be left behind, employees are becoming more funnier too. In the war for top talent, employees change jobs, as easily, as one sheds an old pair of shoes or clothes.

Employee commitment and loyalty has switched gears. Commitment and loyalty is no more towards the company but for oneself. Recruiters tell tales of entertaining quitters. Sending resignations with singing telegrams, or in a cake, or by writing I QUIT in the snow on the boss’ windshield. Perceptions about hiring have also been slowly changing. Earlier there used to be guidelines, which said if a person had more than five jobs in a career or more than three jobs in ten years, they were considered job hoppers. In fact, loyal workers may face a reverse stigma, say recruiters. In the fast changing world, potential recruiters sometimes view long-timers as having out-of-date skills.

To help the incorrigible quitters, a veritable industry has sprung up. One can read any number of self-help quitting books or you may even go to a website WWW.IQUIT.ORG. Coming to the bottom-line, why do people start looking for jobs so soon in the first place? The main culprits: bad management and bad bosses.

THE REASONS FOR THE WORKPLACE FLUIDITY

The key reason for this workplace turbulence can be attributed to the introduction of powerful personal computers and internet technologies of the 21^st century, which are changing the economic equation of employee skills. Because information can be shared instantly and inexpensively among many people in many locations, individuals can manage themselves, coordinating their efforts through electronic links with other independent parties. Hence, many tasks of today can be carried out autonomously by independent individuals who are now being labeled as e-lancers. (one more sub-category to the word free-lancers). These e-lancers don’t have to go through conventional chain of command where tasks are assigned and controlled in a typical organization. Besides, technology is enabling e-lancers to join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done – after a day, a month, a year – the network dissolves, and its members become independent agents again, circulating through the economy seeking the next assignment. Since today’s companies are becoming more knowledge driven, many individuals would want to quit the job and get into business themselves, either for controlling their own destiny or to find or explore the true meaning of self.

WORKPLACE LOLLIPOPS TO RETAIN THE TOP TALENT

Just imagine a place where you can pump iron in the gym, practice jump shot in the gleaming basketball court, or hang around the putting green, horseshoe pits, or beach volleyball court. Cooking up your own meal with the choice of your favourite fruits, alongwith an array of services thrown in – bank, store, dry cleaner, hairdresser and a person for pedicure and manicure. If this is not enough, one can also eat, nap, swim, pray, kickbox, drink beer, run your errands, start a romance, get your dental work done, sculpt nude models, well, the list drones on. This is not a biosphere, it is actually BMC Software in Houston. (No. 56 on Fortune’s Best Companies to work for list.) Such fancy workplace amenities are becoming common in cutting edge technology and software companies, where employers are expecting employees to bring the whole self – mind, body, and spirit – to work each day. These companies are taking the best aspects of home and incorporating them into work, raising some fundamental questions: Do the new amenities really ease overwork? Or do they just make it easier to overwork? These amenities are blurring the line between work and life and there are people working 24 hours a day giving this nagging doubt that whether the amenities are just a ruse of the employers, so that the employees never have to go home.

Look into any aspects of private life, it is being subsumed into the workplace. Take domestic chores: 46 of the 100 Best Companies offer take-home meals to liberate people having to cook dinner. 26 of the 100 offer personal concierge services, allowing employees to outsource the time-consuming details of buying flowers, birthday presents, planning bar mitzvahs and organizing even an engagement dinner. The amenities include almost everything under the sun: Clubs for chess, genealogy, gardening, karate, scuba diving, breast cancer support group, a single parents’ group and almost anything one can think of.

All these trends seem have found their apotheosis in NetPark, a project to convert shopping malls into New Age office parks in Tampa Bay and another in Hampton, Va. After the completion of these ‘electronic villages’, employees of tenant companies will be able to drop their children at the day-care center, their parents at the elder-care center, and perhaps even their pets at on-site kennel. Once the employees are at the desk, computer screen video will let them keep an eye on the family. Workplace amenities have virtually covered everything except a place for burial or cremation.

THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE LOLLIPOPS

The company town with all these amenities is raising some serious questions. Sociologists worry that these trend could leave public life increasingly barren, widening the gap between haves and have-nots and denuding the real community outside the corporate realm. Couple of years back Fortune identified three traits that makes a great place to work: ‘ a sense of purpose.’ inspiring leadership,’ and ‘knockout facilities.’ Now it has assumed cultist definition: ‘devotion,’ ‘charismatic leadership,’ and ‘separation from community.’

A psychologist from Berkeley reports of clients appearing in her office, who talked about their companies in the first-person plural; their obsession over small traumas experienced at work; and their distress seemed out of proportion to the setbacks they had suffered at the workplace. One of the client – a mother of three children - said, " My whole life revolved around this company, I was there all day, all night. I literally embraced my job like my family." The involvement with the company was so complete, that she did not mind when the company’s pager woke her at 3 a.m. Or even when she brought her kids to work evenings and weekends because, she explains, "day-care centers are not open all those hours." It is typical when the employees don’t receive appreciation in personal life and receive at the workplace, they feel appreciated and feel that they are somebody at the workplace. Then something happened, a round layoffs in her office increased her workload, to such an extent, that she feared she would have an heart attack. Then she asked her work to scaled back, which never materialized. She felt betrayed and took extended sick leave. Since then, she has dumped all company trinkets other paraphernalia into dustbin, and struggling to cut the emotional ‘umbilical cord’ with the company. She says, "Now I see it clearly, all that family stuff was fake. They were just using me to get that bottom line." Although this case is an extreme, one point can’t be missed. When anybody invests in one arena of life(read work) to the exclusion of others(read home and social life), there’s bound be a downside. Just imagine the social consequences, if there is an economic downturn, compelling companies to send employees involuntarily.

Maintaining the balance between work and family has more or less become an idealism that is being taught more rather than being practiced. People would not want spend time at home, because work has become all sparkly and glittery, and home seems kind of empty and colourless. Some writers lay the blame for this malaise on our consumerist society, which presumably makes us want to work more so that we can buy more stuff, and of greedy corporations, who find it cheaper to hire fewer employees and drive them harder.

Dual career couple, electronic networks which drive the 24-hour global economy have also had their share in increasing the working hours particularly for highly educated professionals. While working hours for unskilled workers have actually been falling slightly, even after taking into consideration their multi-skills, it has been increasing for highly educated professionals. The working class now has more leisure, and the leisure class has more work. Many studies vouch this factor in US and this phenomenon is no different for India particularly for IT industry. For example, a Families and Work Institute Survey shows that the average work week has increased from 43.6 hours in 1977 to 47.1 hours in 1997. And according to ILO statistics Americans are now outworking even the notoriously work-addicted Japanese, 1966 hours per year to 1889.

THE CONCLUSION – OR IS IT THE BEGINNING?

It is too early to make sense of these changes, and companies are slower in responding or coping with these changes. Large companies are now decentralizing their structures and replacing it with market based structures. The key role for now managers or individuals are now being increasingly redefined, in which they play their parts in shaping or enhancing their work across functions that neither they nor they anyone else controls.

While telecommunications and internet technologies are advancing day-by-day, our imagination has not. We have been unable to conceive this e-economy in its entirety, and besides, what we know of about doing business, no longer applies today. The need now, is to change our biases and mind-sets and to recognize that e-economy would have profound implications for business and society. An e-economy might well lead to a flowering of individual wealth, freedom, and creativity. This is already becoming apparent. Twenty five years ago, one in five U.S. workers was employed by a Fortune 500 company. Today the ratio has dropped to less than one in ten. The largest employer in U.S. is not General Motors or UPS. It’s the temporary employment agency Manpower Incorporated, which in 1997 employed 2 million people. Businesses and industries in future, might become much more flexible and efficient, and people might find themselves with much more time for leisure, for education, and for other pursuits.

Finally, George Bernard Shaw once observed, "That all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, I must add, to the unreasonable woman."

Source:                           1 . Charles Handy. The age of unreason. Arrow Business Books. 1989.

2. Thomas W Malone and Robert J Laubacher. The dawn of the e-lance economy. Harvard Business Review. September-October, 1998, pp145-152

3. Cora Daniels and Carol Vinzant. The joy of quitting. Fortune. 7^th Februay, 2000, p85-87.

4. Jerry Useem. Welcome to the new company town. Fortune. 10^th January, 2000, pp60-66.