The Near Future

By 2020, just two years from now, 50% of the workforce will be composed of millennials. By 2025, they shall have multiplied to 75%. That is the oft-repeated scenario in many articles on the future of work.

Yesterday’s Sun*Star Weekend issue reinforced that inevitability. Some 75% of its 33 inside pages were by, of, to, and about millennials--favorite foods and hangouts.

The signs are clear; the weatherman cannot stop the thunderstorm.

Thus, organizations should take the clear cues that business ownerships will mushroom with millennials at the helm.

Also, that for established and long-standing businesses, it is wise to accept the reality that as the owners grow older (assuming that they will hold on tenaciously even in the winter of their years), the age gap between them and their marching soldiers will be widening. The question of relevance of one to the other will pervade.

So, how will work be in 2020 and onward? What trends will shape the future of work?

Jacob Morgan, a futurist, author, and co-founder of FOW Community, a network of the world’s most forward-thinking organizations, easily mentions five trends --- globalization, mobility, new behaviors, technology, and there you go, millennials in the workplace.

If today’s organizations are finding challenges in their talent acquisition efforts, globalization will offer them no let-up.

Interpret globalization to mean no boundaries; thus, while access to talents outside of one’s country is easier now, so is it equally easier for other countries to snatch existing talents from neighboring countries.

Mobility has modified, even redefined work boundaries. While we used to equate work station as physical location, people can now actually bring their work home, not necessarily in hard copies and heavy folders.

They can access their work right from their mobile phones and laptops. Just visit any of the coffee hangouts here in our city, and you see people deeply focused on opened laptops. Their facial expressions, especially the knitted eyebrows, are sure proof they’re not doing Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Thus, overtime work can now mean outside of physical office confines, and mean a moving vehicle on land, a sea vessel, or tens of thousands of feet up in the air.

While the older generation valued privacy, people nowadays are comfortable with new behaviors. Lines between public and private lives are blurring. The upsides, though, are real-time feedback, and greater and faster collaboration and sharing.

This, especially because better technology facilitates accessing and sharing big data, and collaboration platforms, even robots and automation.

And since the paradigm of company-loyal employees is a thing of the past, the influx of millennials will only strengthen the swell of a career-resilient workforce. Meaning, they go where they think their career will grow.

There’s a strong implication in there for organizations. If they are not prepared for the future of work, they will have no future.

(lelani.echaves@gmail.com)