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Since the late 1980s, three workplace trends have emerged in the United States that are already having a profound impact on American workers.
Trend # 1: The Growing Contingent Workforce
The social contract that promised job security in exchange for employee
loyalty has been broken. American companies continue to downsize,
restructure, and lay off thousands of workers. Work that is not
considered to be part of the "core competency" of the corporation is
being outsourced or performed by temporary, part-time, or contract
workers. If this trend continues, many Americans--perhaps half of the
workforce by some estimates--will be contingent workers employed in
part-time, temporary, contract or other non-traditional jobs within the
next five years. Many will be self-employed solo-professionals. Full-time
permanent jobs and the benefits associated with them will be reserved to
a select few highly skilled "core" employees.
Trend # 2: Telecommuting
The number of employees telecommuting, or working at non-traditional work
sites such as "satellite" offices, has been growing at the rate of 20% or
more per year throughout most of this decade. New technology is making it
possible to perform many jobs anywhere. The geographic
same-time-same-place workplace is being replaced by anytime, anywhere
workspaces. Within a few years the phrase "going to work" will become
meaningless for most Americans. Work, for them, will be what they do; not
the place they go to.
Trend # 3: Self-led Teams
Finally, we are seeing rapid growth in the use of temporary,
cross-functional, multi-disciplinary teams with globally- and
ethnically-diverse memberships. These teams have no traditional boss or
supervisor. Team members take on responsibility for planning, organizing,
staffing, scheduling, directing, monitoring, and controlling their own
work. Perhaps more importantly, these teams are increasingly linked, via
global networks or just the internet, with instantaneous and unrestricted
flow of information within and between teams and team members. 
Implications
These trends have enormous social, economic, and political implications.
Here are just a few: Implications for Individuals
* In order to succeed in the new workplace, American workers will need skills to add value quickly. The new workplace will reward the "specialized generalist" who has both a solid basic education plus professional and technical skills in demand across a range of companies and even industries. The SCANS competencies will no longer be enough. Everyone will have to be able to do something that adds value now in order to be considered for employment in all but the most marginal jobs.
* American companies no longer will provide mentors or career counseling to their workers. Americans will be responsible for managing their own careers. As Charles Handy has written, we will all need an "agent." Temporary staffing services, career counselors, and employment agencies in particular will rapidly redefine their missions and marketing to stress their role as "agents."
* Since most Americans will not have full-time permanent jobs and even those who do will have no real job security, most workers will be financially insecure. Americans will be forced to build and maintain liquid savings equivalent to a year or more of income as a shield against periods of unemployment or underemployment. Home ownership will become difficult for most people since their incomes will fluctuate.
* Americans will begin working earlier and continue working longer. The concept of retirement will disappear, since most Americans will have to work most of their lives.
* The barrier that since the 1800s has separated work and the rest of life will be shattered. Work will intrude into every aspect of life.
* Housing will change dramatically. All homes will be wired for commerce as well as for recreation. Houses and apartments will become both homes, work sites and education centers.
* Everyone will be expected to demonstrate strong team skills and to have the ability to function effectively in a new team from the start. Companies will no longer accept or tolerate 6 to 12 months of "team building." Like a second- or third-string tail back, everyone will be expected to come off the bench on short notice, and help the team gain yardage right away.
* As we move increasingly to self-managed teams, everyone will be expected to perform one or more of the following critical leadership roles: envisioning (facilitating idea generation and innovation in the team and helping the team members think conceptually and creatively); organizing (helping the team focus on details, deadlines, efficiency and structure so the team gets its work done); spanning (maintaining relationships with outside groups and people, networking, presentation management, developing and maintaining a strong team image, intelligence gathering, locating and securing critical team resources); and socializing (uncovering the needs and concerns of individuals in the group, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to present his or her views, injecting humor when it is need to relieve tensions, taking care of the social and psychological needs of group members).
* Since most teams will be cross-functional and international, everyone will require strong language skills (fluency in at least one language other than English) and the ability to appreciate differences and work effectively with diverse cultures.
Implications for Organizations
* Every business--indeed every organization whether public or private,
profit or non-profit--will be forced to clarify its core competencies and
reason for existence. Those groups which fail to identify and guard what
is truly "core" will keep inside the wrong things and outsource those
things that make them unique and vital. By doing so they will condemn
themselves to becoming hollow, unnecessary, untenable shells.
* As continuous learning becomes the norm, educational institutions will be swamped with demand. The new student will expect value, quality, speed of delivery and effectiveness in addition to availability and convenience . Education will be a critical personal investment for which the consumer will demand an exceptionally high return. Expect technology to play an increasingly important role in the delivery of education with 50% or more of students never entering a classroom.
* Traditional methods of management and motivation such as "employee of the month awards" and the promise of a future promotion will not work with the new employees. Highly skilled contingent workers will be more loyal to their discipline than their employer of the moment. Threats of job loss will be meaningless to these workers since they expect no job security. Instead, these new workers will demand: respect, interesting and challenging work, the chance to further develop their skills, freedom and resources to use their talents and knowledge to do the work they were hired to do and enjoy doing, and an equitable share in the financial rewards that flow from their contribution.
* As work is increasingly performed away from the traditional work site, the few managers and supervisors who remain will have to learn to manage without depending upon "face time" as an indicator of contribution. Performance goals will become more explicit, and measurement will become more sophisticated and objective. Results will count more than activities.
* Increasingly, the value of a company will be based upon its core knowledge. As we move to global teams, telecommuting, and contingent employment, information security issues will become a major concern to most companies.
* A key role of leaders will be to create a shared vision to which both permanent and contingent team members can commit. We are building organizations that are, in reality, enterprise constellations. The gravity that holds the constellation of teams together and keeps them from spinning out of control or colliding with each other is the shared and unifying vision of who "WE" are, even if "WE" are acknowledged to be finite. Without such a unifying vision and specific team goals and mission statements that link teams to the overriding vision, there is perpetual conflict, competition for resources, and misdirected energy.
* Organizations will succeed or fail based upon the ability of the leadership to assemble teams with the right mix of talent quickly. Just one missing technical or leadership skill may doom a team and the organization that depends upon its success to failure.
Implications for Society as a Whole
* As we move to the new economy, businesses will increasingly resist
taking on responsibility for delivering social services, particularly to
the fifty percent of the workforce who are non-core employees. The
argument will be that the business of business is not to provide
healthcare insurance or child care or elder care or education and
training. Healthcare, child care, elder care, education, and so on, it
will be argued, are individual problems, not business problems, and
should be addressed by individuals or governments (the collective "We").
The U.S. will be forced to uncouple social support mechanisms from
full-time employment or risk abandoning half the nation to no access to
such benefits.
* As more workers telecommute or use satellite offices, cities no longer will be a center of commerce. High-rise office buildings will sit half empty. We will be forced to find non-commercial purposes for our cities or witness their slow but inevitable decline to filthy, dangerous, shells of abandoned concrete and steel.
* The decline of cities will mean the revival of small towns. No longer
tied to geography for employment, Americans will seek more pristine
surroundings. Rural areas will boom as we see a migration back to the
countryside. 
* As Americans increasingly work on cross-functional, diverse, multi-national teams, they will become more global in outlook. This globalization of individuals will make the nation-state irrelevant as people everywhere identify more closely with their professionals peers than their fellow countrymen.
The Greatest Implication of All
We are about to enter a new wave of change that will crash upon us with a
force we haven't known before. This time everyone will change and
everything will change. These changes will touch not just our daily
tasks, but who we are. This time we will change not just what we know,
but how we think. This time we will change not just how we view the
world, but how we live in it.
