Jacob Morgan

Last week I wrote about one of the key themes that I believe are going to make up the future work, I encourage you to read that post titled: The Future of Work is About Customized Work.  There are several of these themes that I’m going to be exploring in the near future and the next one is “Connect to Work.”  The traditional view of working  sees an employee waking up around 6:30 am, having their morning breakfast and then commuting anywhere from  30 mins to over 1.5 hours to get to work.  The employee gets to their office around 8 or 9 am and usually leaves around 6 pm.  This is what it used to mean to “work” or better yet “to GO TO work.”

What does it mean to connect to work?

One of the things we can’t neglect when thinking about the future of work is for organizations to align on a sense of purpose.  Many organizations who are investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies to a good job of messaging and conveying value but where many fall short is on being able to align the organization as a whole on a sense of purpose.  Atos Origin does a good example of this but publicly conveying their goal of becoming a zero email company by the end of 2014.  Another company that does a great job of this is  TELUS which set out an aggressive goal to have 30% of their almost 40,000 workers work full-time from home by 2015.  These are organizations who are truly planning and seeking to impact the future of work.

So how does an organization go about aligning on a sense of purpose?

At a very high level there are a few things that need to be done:

Much of what we are seeing in the enterprise is being fueled by the consumer web.  For example if there would have been no Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, chances are there would be no Jive, Yammer, Chatter, or any other enterprise collaboration platform.  The behaviors we exhibit on social media channels are also making their way into the enterprise.  For example we can easily use social media to: create communities, easily find people or information, share our ideas and insights, ask for help or get advice, create and share content, and get access to people and information anytime, anywhere, and on an device (among other things).  The same cannot be said for many enterprises around the world.  In fact there is a large gap between the consumer web and the enterprise (which is trying to catch up!).

The image below looks at some of the different characteristics of the consumer web and the enterprise and the gap that exists between the two.

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According to a Forbes article by Jeanne Meister:

“The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that.  Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years…”

This is obviously a concern for many companies around the world because they invest a lot of time and resources into making sure they can attract and then retain top talent.  One of the many benefits of investing in enterprise collaboration is being able to do both of these things.  Before I...