Forgive me, those of you who are under 40:
Remember when you kept a letter-opener next to your stapler? You’d return from lunch to a big pile of (gasp) envelopes bearing resumes and cover letters and correspondence of all kinds. Today, whenever I bemoan the number of emails in my in-box, I think of how much more difficult it was to handle all of that paper. Today, I can schedule an interview – or dash someone’s hopes – with the click of a button. Nice.
Just as technology and communication have evolved, so too should the ways in which we as managers and hiring authorities approach the way our employees work. In his Monday session at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Annual Conference & Exposition, “The Changing Nature of Work: Five Global Trends Affecting Strategic Human Resources,” Gary B. Kushner, SPHR, outlined the five global trends affecting the changing nature of work and how HR professionals must approach those trends within the next 10 years.
Kushner says the trends include technological advancement, outsourcing, changing worker attitudes and values, demographics and diversity, and globalization.
“The organizations that are going to be successful are those that are nimble,” Kushner told the standing-room-only crowd. He added that embracing change isn’t just a necessity, it is a requirement. A summary of his points:
Technology. Since we’re connected all the time – how do we encourage employees to balance work and home?
Outsourcing. We all know this saves money, but to be effective we need a good strategy for determining what work gets done by whom.
Changing worker attitudes and values. No one works 50 years for the same company anymore. We have to embrace this and recognize that we will probably only have our top performers for a season.
Demographics and diversity. People are living longer; in the next 10 years, we will have five generations in the workplace,” Kushner pointed out. “You’ll have traditionalists, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and what I like to call Gen wireless. These are people who grew up with technology in their hands—they understand it; they know how to leverage those tools.”
Globalization. We need to align our strategies with the fact that we can have workers all around the globe, 24/7.
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