Navigate through the Future of Workplace and Workforce Management

In the rapidly evolving businesses and complex digital economic systems, making the disruptive change is critical but challenging for the company’s long term surviving and thriving.

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics such as hyperconnectivity, interdependence, velocity, and complexity in various shades and intensity. Digital organizations need to be organized in such a way that it is a part of the hyperconnected modern world, solid enough to manage orders from chaos and fluid enough for adapting to changes and keeping the business highly responsive to the dynamic business environment. Digital leaders today should be able to navigate through the future of the workplace and workforce management by sharing a clear vision, providing directions and advancing leadership influence.

Enforce communication, participation, and relationship building: With rapid changes and frequent disruptions, organizations cannot be organized using the outdated, mechanistic, or overly rigid hierarchical management style. Today’s companies should have a greater awareness of interconnectivity, intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, information fluency, or technological touches. They need to be organized in keeping renewing themselves periodically to cope with changes effectively, have a fluid structure that responds to their function effectively at the moment and keeps information flow across the business systems. To eliminate silos and break down bureaucracy, digital leaders should provide clear guidelines, evolve multidimensional management disciplines to achieve digital delight, have managers of respective functions to interact in a structural setting on a consistent base, allow the business units to reach across the aisles and work closely with each other to enforce cross-functional communication, participation and relationship building. Collaboration is the route towards revitalizing digital workforce to be future-ready by leveraging the latest digital technology trends. Real-time sharing, transparency, active listening, and two-way trust are crucial ingredients to build a strong team. Open leadership, cross-disciplinary management style and the culture of collaboration make the organization of the future not so far away.

Encourage autonomy and self-renewal: Compared to the previous era with knowledge scarcity and silo setting, the digital era upon us is information-rich and technological advanced. Knowledge work today is more purpose-driven and self-motivated. The work is not the place you go, but the task you accomplish and the achievement you make. The future of work will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of the environment and others around them. This will impact on the way how people interact with their organization and how companies interact with internal and external stakeholders. The digital organization encourages great autonomy, “self-generated” engagement, and self-renewal. Talented people are inspired to discover their career goals and strength, well aligned with business goals and vision to amplify collective potential. The future of work encourages the growth mindset and digital organizations also encourage teamwork, giving everyone a voice about how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. Teams gravitate towards self-organization, have the discipline to do the work well in a dynamic business environment, and demonstrate the high-level of organizational maturity. Creating positive change and building a delightful working environment is a joint effort and co-responsibility of management and employees. It requires not just making things work but being delightful and innovative to improve their productivity and engagement.

Enable flow by breaking down bureaucracy and command and control management discipline: Thanks for the unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies, today's digital workforce is information fluent and technology savvy; today’s digital businesses need to be highly collaborative and democratic. The traditional "command & control" management style which is often used as a euphemism for ineffective or authoritarian management, gradually loses its steam in the digital era of abundant knowledge and hyperconnected business normality. Because you can control people’s behavior, but not their mind. When the change is manually made based on fear, it won’t sustain for too long. The overly rigid organization hierarchy with command and control management style perpetuate bureaucracy and causes stagnation. The highly complex and dynamic digital business system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. Digital leaders today should lead by guiding, advising, coaching and influencing; practicing the deep listening skills, show respect, accept feedback and develop the trustful business relationship with peer managers, employees or varying shareholders. Organizations need to be adapted in a way that they can respond to the dynamic changes to the variety in the environment and foster the digital business with the nature of hyperconnectivity, nonlinearity, and interdependence.

In the rapidly evolving businesses and complex digital economic systems, making the disruptive change is critical but challenging for the company’s long term surviving and thriving. Digital transformation is a progressive journey of navigating through the future of the workplace and workforce, pursuing the next level of business maturity and societal progress. Forward-looking organizations are at the transition stage from operating a mechanical organization to running a dynamic and innovative digital living business with diverse mixtures of peoples who can spark creativity, amplify innovation effect and drive digital transformation effectively.

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