The Changing Landscape of Work Life

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Rajiv Malhotra

UMassOnline Research Analyst Raj Malhotra In a recent issue, Time magazine presents a ten chapter look at how jobs, companies, management structures, and working people’s expectations and requirements will change in the coming years. If I culled every interesting stat and statement from this report, this post would be a mile long. But here are two that I just can’t exclude. The first one is about how the company of the future will have many, many more women in the top ranks. The second is about GenXers taking control in 2019.

The workplace-research group Catalyst studied 353 Fortune 500 companies and found that those with the most women in senior management had a higher return on equities — by more than a third.

The Gen X managers who will be holding all this together will need to be adept at a few things that earlier generations, with their more hierarchical management styles and relative geographical insularity, never really had to learn. One of those is collaborative decision-making that might involve team members scattered around the world, from Beijing to Barcelona to Boston, whom the nominal leader of a given project may never have met in person.

If you’re an online college student taking classes through UMassOnline, that second excerpt should really hit home. After all, that collaborative decision-making with team members you may not have met defines what you do now, doesn’t it?

Here’s how Time itself introduces this informative report.

Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25 year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls. Here are 10 ways your job will change. In fact, it already has.