Tag: employment

Farewell to the knowledge economy

The promise of the knowledge economy isn’t being delivered as knowledge becomes a commodity worth less than data.

One of the mantras of the 1980s was the future of western nations lay in becoming ‘knowledge economies’, unfortunately things don’t look like they are turning out that way.

As the developed economies moved their manufacturing offshore – first to Japan and Korea, then Mexico and finally China – the promise to displaced Western factory workers was the replacement jobs would be in vaguely knowledge based industries like call centres and backoffice computer work.

From the 1990s on, those jobs also started to go overseas  to lower cost centres in India, the Phillipines and other countries.

When the internet became ubiquitous in the developed world in the late 1990s, the creative industries – musicians, artists and writers – found income dried up as their work became commoditised by digital distribution channels.

Now the professions are being affected by combination of offshoring, artificial intelligence and automated processes. Many of the jobs that were done by highly paid accountants and lawyers can now be done by computers or in places not dissimilar to those that took away the call centre jobs twenty years ago.

So it turns out the knowledge economy isn’t the key to riches after all and the future turns out to be more complex than what we thought in the 1990s.

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Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

A challenge for organisations is opening the career path for Gen Y managers as baby boomers hang around the executive suite.

One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

“We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

Offering a career

For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

“For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

Language barriers

An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

“It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences.  “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

“We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

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Cutting the middle management fat

Cutting middle management is an imperative for business as markets change quickly.

No-one can say life is comfortable at Cisco when every two years the company engages on a round of job cutting that tends to keep employees on their toes.

While this year’s job cuts are relatively mild – only 4,000 as opposed to nearly 13,000 in 2011 – it’s notable the focus on culling middle management positions.

“We just have too much in the middle of the organization,”  the Wall Street Journal reports Cisco CEO John Chambers as saying.

One of the challenges for businesses is become more flexible when markets are rapidly changing. Having ranks of middle managers makes it harder for organisations to respond.

John Chambers and Cisco are reducing their middle management head count to respond to that need. Many other companies are going to have to do the same.

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Gen Y and the need for building new businesses

As baby boomers struggle to maintain their living standards, the burden will fall on younger generations to build future businesses.

The retirement of the baby boomers has been an demographic inevitability, but it’s interesting how policy makers and the population in general have ignored the ramifications of this despite the first boomers now aged beyond 65.

One of the consequences of this is we may see an entire generation being forced to become self employed entrepreneurs.

Illustrating this point are two stories from the US over the last few days; John Mauldin’s dissection of where US jobs are going and Zero Hedge’s 35 facts that should scare American baby boomers.

The 35 facts really boil down to one thing, that an affluent, middle class retirement at 65 when average life expectancy is 78 is an illusion for most people – neither their bank accounts or the state treasury can support that sort of spending.

Which is the point of John Mauldin’s column, that over 50s are taking most of the available US jobs as they can’t afford to retire.

For those over 50 who’ve fallen out of the workforce due to unemployment or illness, getting back into the workforce is proving to be tough and for many of those folk their later years are going to be a struggle.

Equally, as Mauldin points out, the younger generation is being locked out of the jobs being hogged by the over 50s.

Another aspect to that is those employed Gen-X’s and Y’s hoping to get a crack at a seniors manager’s job or their name on the partner’s list are going to find a longer wait as the boomers hold on for as long as they can.

Those young ‘uns need those high salary jobs too, a Westpac report on US student debt posits that crippling education costs are making it harder for graduates to participate in the workforce and affects their spending power when they do find a job.

What’s clear is existing government, corporate and social structures are beginning to struggle with the realities of the changing workforce and its demographic composition.

On a personal level, those Gen Xs, Ys and boomers who are locked out of the workforce have to find a new way to participate in the economy. It’s probably those locked out of today’s workplaces who will build the businesses of the future.

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Airtasker and the future of work

Micro task service Airtasker looks to reinvent employment in a partnership with the CareerOne job site.

Tim Fung, the co-founder of Airtasker, has been previously been interviewed on this blog about micro tasking service’s mission to change the workplace.

With the news that that Airtasker had gone into a partnership with employment site CareerOne it seemed Tim might be a good guest to kick off the first video for the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

During the interview Tim describes the motivations behind starting Airtasker, how he sees the relationship with CareerOne evolving and the benefits of operating out of a co-working space.

The Tank Stream Labs working space is an interesting setup – based at the bottom of Pitt Street in the heart of Sydney’s financial centre, it’s not in the more edgy areas on the city fringes where the rest of the town’s workspace are located.

Being away from the hipsters and grunge doesn’t seem to have hurt Tank Stream Labs as the space has now expanded to a second floor of the ten storey office block. The roll call of tenants is quite impressive too.

For Tim being in the workspace has been a great benefit for Airtasker.

There’s always the thing about sharing knowledge and more obviously there’s a lot of great contacts that everyone shares.

Airtasker’s relationship with employment site CareerOne is an interesting development that sees the joint venture between News Limited and Monster move into the crowdsourcing field. It also gives job hunters an opportunity to find short term work while looking for a more permanent role.

People are looking for more hours of work but equally businesses were coming to CareerOne and saying ‘hey, all you do is full time work’ and that’s only one piece of the employment puzzle.’

For CareerOne it really allows them to build up the full spectrum – all the way from tasks to part time to full time and be a one stop shop for employment.

How that works for CareerOne remains to be seen, but for Airtasker and Tim it validates their business model along with exposing their service to a wider audience.

With the workforce evolving and the trend to informal, casualised employment; services like Airtasker and the US Task Rabbit will take a more prominent role in workers’ careers. While it’s debatable on how desirable or stable such employment is, it’s the reality of a process that started in the 1970s.

Tim takes a more sanguine view of the challenges facing workers in an informal employment market.

What I’m sharing on Airtasker is my free time. Currently we have this pool of literally tens of thousands of hours of people sitting around saying ‘I’d love to have a job’ and that’s an underutilised resource.

Airtasker in many ways is one of the new breed of middlemen creating markets where one didn’t exist before. The service is an example of how new ways to communicate create opportunities to connect buyers and sellers.

Services like Airtasker are part of the future that’s very different to the world we or our parents grew up. It’s going to be interesting to see how society and governments evolve around the realities of today’s workplace.

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Expat workers and their fragile, guilded cage

The guilded cage for expats is a nice comfortable place to, but it can be a lot more fragile than many think.

I was sitting on the back of a motorbike grimly clutching a briefcase full of 100 baht bills when the realities of working in Thailand really dawned on me.

One of the downsides of being the contracts administrator in an Engineering company is that one gets stuck with the jobs that doesn’t fit anybody’s official duties.

This time it was going to rescue Ken – not his real name – a Kiwi Project Manager who instead of enjoying Friday afternoon in a Soi Cowboy beer bar was under siege in his site hut in suburban Bangkok.

Because of a glitch in the insanely bureaucratic payroll system our Singaporean employers used, Ken’s labourers hadn’t been paid and now they were threatening to burn down the site hut with Ken and his office staff in it.

So the story of Chip Starnes, the US businessman freed yesterday after being held hostage by former employees in his Beijing office for six days, is very familiar. It’s a story that expat workers should understand about their status and position when they take an overseas assignment.

While Chip seems to have come out of the ordeal unscathed apart from being in need of a good night’s sleep and a shower, it could have been much worse; shortly after I left Thailand an Australian accountant was gunned down over a business dispute involving a sugar mill outside Bangkok.

In Dubai, two Australian property developers find themselves mired in a legal dispute that could see them facing a decade in gaol.

The risks involved in being an expat worker are easily to overlook, particularly in places like Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore where the life is good for western expatriate workers – the reality for Filipino maids or Pakistani labourers is another matter of course.

When things go wrong though, they go wrong badly and the reality of life in a foreign country can be a rude shock for expats who thought they were living a privileged existence.

The guilded cage for expats is a nice, comfortable place to live in but it is a lot more fragile than many think.

For Ken, he escaped being burned out of his site hut by an angry mob as we arrived before the torches were lit. Some frantic dishing out of notes to the crowd – I’m still sure many of those we gave money to didn’t actually work for us – defused the situation.

Ken still got his Friday night beers at Soi Cowboy and took the whole saga as being part of a day’s work in Thailand, but then Ken was an old Asia construction hand who had no illusions of what could befall an innocent expat. Others might not have been so relaxed.

Dubai image from SG777 through SXC.HU

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Fire and be dammed, the poor management at tech companies

Quick firing firing of employees who make mistakes shows a weakness in the management of many tech companies.

Microsoft manager Adam Orth has joined the ranks of those fired after some poorly thought out comments found their way onto the Reddit discussion boards. The firing of Orth illustrates a weakness in the management of tech firms.

Orth’s firing follows the “forked dongle” affair where two developers lost their jobs over sexist comments at an industry conference.

What’s notable in all these firings is how Playhaven, SendGrid and Microsoft’s management all summarily fired their employees for what at worse could be described as a ‘lapse of judgement’.

One of the conceits of modern management is that risk can be eliminated, the mark of a poor manager is to act quickly to get rid of anything that could potentially be a risk.

These tech companies are good illustrations of this – neither Adam Orth, Adria Richards or the Playhaven developer deserved to lose their jobs over this, all it required was an apology and commitment to be more careful about what they post on the public internet in future.

All of us, including the sensitive and incompetent firing managers, have something on the internet that could embarrass us or our employers. In an era where people are quick to take offense, it’s easy for something taken out of context to spin out of control.

That’s a risk beyond the control of middle managers at software companies.

Hiding from risks or attempting to purge them is not the way to run an organisation. Strong, good managers can do better than that.

Management manual image by Ulrik through SXC.hu

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