Organizations are more boundary-less, agile, global, and transparent — and will be even more so in the future. Work and workers (yes, humans) will always be essential to organizations, but organizations themselves will be more diverse, and work will be organized, structured, and done in new ways, increasingly through arrangements outside of regular full-time employment. How can leaders navigate this new digital work ecosystem? How should your organization plan for the changes ahead?
Important clues are emerging from a unique consortium of human resource executives and other leaders. They have gathered through CHREATE (the Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the Enterprise) to map how organizations must evolve to meet future challenges, to identify pivotal initiatives to accelerate that evolution, and to design the actions needed to make the future a reality.
To help frame where the world of work is going, CHREATE leaders identified five fundamental forces driving change:
Social and organizational reconfiguration. Organizations will be increasingly transparent to stakeholders and more flexible, shifting toward more power-balanced forms and more project-based relationships. Talent will engage on aligned purpose, not just economics. Beyond traditional hierarchies and contracts, networks and social and external collaborations will make leadership more horizontal, shared, and collective.
All-inclusive global talent market. Women and nonwhite ethnicities become talent majorities, and greater longevity increases multigenerational workforces. Social policies support boundary-less work beyond traditional full-time employment. Work and worker segmentation enables increasingly differentiated policies, practices, work designs, pay, and benefits, and workers choose organizations based on the opinions of socially connected peers and opinion leaders.
A truly connected world. Work is increasingly virtual and occurs anywhere and any time, through mobile personal devices with global real-time communications. Boundary-less work partnerships and networks augment capabilities and redefine careers, learning and workplace fairness and attractiveness.
Exponential technology change. Robots, autonomous vehicles, commoditized sensors, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things reshape the work ecosystem so that flexible, distributed, and transient workforces adapt to rapid business reinvention. Organizations and workers balance long-term bets and flexibility under uncertainty by engaging automation to adapt to frequent changes and rapid skills obsolescence.
Human-automation collaboration. Analytics, algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence increasingly abolish work previously performed by humans but also create new work at the interface of humans and automation. Organizations and workers conceive and design their work to optimize rather than resist this interface.
Read More at https://hbr.org/2016/03/work-in-the-future-will-fall-into-these-4-categories
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