Dogs, sofas and film-nights in the office are just some of the ways in which workplaces appear to be changing, according to Jacob Morgan’s new YouTube show.
Prompted to explore the Future of Work by both red10 clients and fellow consultant Andy Partridge – founder of the Enviable Workplace Blog – Will Sudworth explores this growing conversation here.
Having appreciated Jacob Morgan’s book “The Future of Work”, one of red10’s clients spotted that in September 2015, Morgan launched a new YouTube show visiting a different organisation each week to see the way in which workplaces are changing and hear their plans for the future.
In his first episode, Morgan visited Atlassian, the Australian enterprise software company, famous for their JIRA and Confluence products. Touring one of their buildings will reveal dogs happily wandering around, a very open-plan mixture of sofas as well as desks, conference rooms where even the walls are on wheels for easy reconfiguration, and an amphitheater hostin family film-nights.
This seems to be a growing conversation.
This week Will Sudworth had the pleasure of working with Andy Partridge, fresh from being the keynote speaker at airbnb’s “EMEA gathering”. Over 50,000 international HR directors, managers, employees and leaders have read or contributed insights to the Enviable Workplace blog Partridge founded in 2010 addressing the impact of the changing workplace.
What is driving this discussion?
Morgan identifies five trends:
1) Millennials will be 50% of the workforce in 2020 and 75% by 2025, with the need for more immediate “light touch” attention, coaching and feedback
2) We will see new behaviours including increased collaboration, sharing and working in dynamic teams versus the old patterns of static organizations with functions and hierarchy
3) The ‘war for talent’ will encourage much more mobility with organizations employing the best people wherever they are connecting in
4) Technology will continue at pace, including the ‘Internet of Things’ and wearables
5) A mindset of globalization where boundaries don’t exist
What does this mean?
According to Morgan, it means exploring new ways of managing people and working in teams, reshaping corporate cultures and HR policies, and encouraging everyone to adopt the “7 Principles of the Future Employee”.
Whatever it means, I’ve enjoyed Jacob Morgan’s weekly YouTube visits to innovative organizations and wonder whether you might find inspiration in them too.
On a related topic, see also HBR magazine July-August 2015: ‘It’s time to blow up HR and build something new’.