The kind of workplace an employer offers is a key weapon in the armoury of any business wanting to attract and retain good people. It’s why the companies celebrated by Great Place to Work today give us the clearest indication of what might be coming down the tracks for the rest of us tomorrow.
“One thing we are seeing a lot of is an increase in listening practice. Top organisations are being very innovative about getting feedback,” says Conal Kavanagh of Great Place to Work.
He cites the “Ask Me Anything” initiative of Dublin- based gaming company Riot Games by way of example. Designed to gather open feedback, which it believes is vital to the culture of the organisation, the practice enables employees to ask and answer questions of one another across all levels, either anonymously or during meetings.
Open communication
As part of its emphasis on continuous feedback, colleagues can then offer red or green thumbs depending on how they rated the answers given. “It means there is no place to hide and it helps get participation from those people who would be reluctant to put up their hand in an open forum,” says Kavanagh.
Such open communication builds honesty and credibility in a way that traditional office communications might not. “Too often, organisations communicate by email, for example, which in fact is not communicating at all but a defence mechanism. The person at the receiving end can’t hold the person who sent it to account,” he says.
“By contrast, what we are seeing in really good organisations are things like planned walkabouts on a regular basis, where people come to your desk for you to ask questions of. Again, it does away with the issues some people might have about having to ask a question in a big room.”
Collaboration
The feedback such practices enable is invaluable but that is not an end in itself, he cautions. “Openness and honesty is key, which means that the information you gather must be shared, not covered up or limited to a few. A lot of organisations struggle with that level of transparency but those that listen well, perform better.”
How teams work together effectively will become increasingly important in the workplace of the future. “Collaboration will come more and more to the fore,” says Paul Breslin, managing director Europe at Riot Games. “You are going to see a bigger focus on how teams work together.”
This starts at the recruitment stage. “What we look for is flexible, talented individuals. The days of having one role or one craft are changing. What we look for now are what we call ‘T’ shaped individuals, people that have the right skill, or craft, in addition to the adaptability we need if we are to change with the shifting needs of our players. People in the future will need to be able to pivot and move. We already hire for that adaptability,” says Breslin.
The biggest shifts in the workplace of the future extend far beyond “pool table-in- the-basement” type trappings to changing the nature of work itself.
“The workplace is going to look and feel quite different to what it is today,” says Mary Connaughton, director of CIPD Ireland, the professional body for personnel development.
“We are going to see the increased ‘uberisation’, or fragmentation, of work, with much more ‘gig’ or short-term projects taking place,” she says.
Battle for skills
This will increase as the battle for skills intensifies. “Already we are seeing technology companies having difficulty recruiting people. Where businesses can’t find someone to do a job they will increasingly break that job up into projects and use the proliferating number of online tools available to help them find the skills they need to get that work done.”
The race to automate will gather pace. “We’re seeing automation spreading out across more fields, from administering medical care to chatbots dealing with the queries of online shoppers. A lot more administrative jobs are going to disappear, particularly at lower levels.”
The workplace of the future is increasingly going to see more bespoke working conditions introduced, designed to suit individual employee needs.
“Employers will work to better meet the needs of their staff, whether that is around greater flexibility on hours, or working from home, or helping them to find new ways of working that suits them. That is often thought of as being driven by ‘millennials’ but will go way beyond that age group and affect all generations in the workforce,” says Connaughton.
“Even the most traditional companies are realising that some of their people want to work a three-day week and maybe we should let them.”
Younger entrants into the workforce are also bringing with them an increased awareness of the importance of wellness and wellbeing, a result of the growing awareness of the importance of this topic, including the importance of protecting mental health, at secondary level.
“Wellbeing as a topic is coming out of schools and into the workplace. Increasingly we’ll see young people asking employers about their company’s wellbeing policies when considering a job,” Connaughton says.
