Today’s Milieu
The modern organization faces challenges to a degree unimagined a generation ago. Globalization, biotechnology, an avalanche of government regulation and debt, technology, new competition, Internet inspired industry and process effects, and changing demographics, are but a few.
It’s also fair to say that with all the restructuring these changes imply, fluidity in the workplace will and must continue. The US Department of Labor estimates that today’s school kids will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38. China will soon be the largest English speaking country on earth. Over 25% of American workers have been in their place of employment less than one year. The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.
Education
If you see where we’re going here, the Federal government, which controls and manages our education, spends less money innovating education than Nintendo does on R&D. Twenty large city newspapers are likely to contain more information than a typical person would read in a lifetime in the 18th century. A computer chip cluster will soon be developed that is faster and more comprehensive than the human brain. The Internet will soon triple in speed. We are training our future generations for jobs that have not be invented.
But somehow, we need to go to school for 16 years! As an interesting comparison, check out the final exam for an 8th grade education in 1895. And for the most part, we are still educating our students in a passive, regurgitating environment, hesitant to treat children uniquely in an age of custom manufacturing. Education’s cost is spiraling while virtually everything else is declining in price, and for over 20 years we’ve been arguing about class size without empirical evidence.
Industry
At the same time whole industries now have the reputation of caring little or nothing about the well-being of their employees. But is that true? Certainly few people could hope to still believe that emotion and caring and openness have no place in organizational behavior, or that they bring no tangible value.
Caring requires knowledge. It requires empathy and active listening, and innate appreciation. These emotions are not at first blush compatible with hierarchies and negotiations. We are reminded of the stereotype of a generation ago of the stern and rational father and businessman who made tough but logical choices at work, emotion be damned. Was it ever like that? Or was that guy really the exception to the rule?
And yet, no one believes any of these emotions strange or unwieldy in child / parent relationships, which are the ultimate in top/down hierarchical relationships. And we care deeply, knowing, nay hoping, that one day they will leave us, fly the coop, and mature and do their own thing. One could say their future independence depends on our caring enough to teach and educate them enough along the way.
Change suggested
As the world turns faster, caring organizations and governments might consider the family model of development as opposed to resisting change by making it more difficult to lay people off. And we don’t just kick our children out of the home (fire them) either. At the least, we give them notice. We help them through training, our contacts and the benefit of our time.
If our young adult performs poorly, we do not bring them home and allow them to sit idle as unemployment insurance and welfare is wont to do. No child, no adult, no person, can withstand the continued humiliation of forced idleness without resenting themselves and those that pay for and control them. Caring demands much more than carrot and stick subjugation, and it never works in the long term anyway. Emotional and educational support, connections, healthful relationships, and positive environments are all methods we employ to care for our children, especially when they are struggling.
The pace of the world demands we look at our education and our organization’s relationships with their employees and our support structures for displaced workers in a different light. Rapid change has a way of uncovering the weaknesses of our assumptions.
Technology and increased wealth give us a great opportunity to change what we think we know and increase both efficiency and productivity. For the personal well being of the child, it can not be acceptable to be unemployable after 8 long years of education. Governments would do well to concentrate on both emotional and educational retraining programs for displaced workers. As any parent knows, if you don’t do it right the first time, you’re going to have to do it again anyway. And after all, now that we have these New Deal programs, we are in for a penny, in for a pound.
Lastly, both employees and managers could do a better job of internalizing the idea that people will need constant training, and perhaps most of all, the search to identify strengths, and then align talent, training, and positions so that employees can maximize their potential. No organization can guarantee a job for life. Even without globalization, the world is changing too fast.
But there are huge opportunities to take a more holistic view of some of our institutional practices, and update their effectiveness at helping develop and employ self-actualized adults, even as we reduce cost.
