A recent article in Stuff talks about the changing work place. A couple things amused me about this:
Generation X are the "in-betweeners"; brash, cynical, motivated by self-interest, judge things by money, have little respect for authority and are generally disliked by both boomers and Generation Y.
Obvious examples of Generation X are film star Tom Cruise and computer company Microsoft.
Generation Y are motivated by fun, work satisfaction, social responsibility, corporate integrity and honesty, work opportunity and not by money.
Google is an example of a Generation Y company, which gives workers a day off a month for community service, employees are paid well but encouraged to work hard and have fun. The company has already set up a foundation.
Isn't it funny how quickly GenX have gone from being described with terms like creative, rebellious, disinterested and slackers? Part of me wonders if all of this is just the perspective of the age of the writers creating the news. Does the quoted description simply represent GenY's views of GenX?
In future, people will be rewarded primarily on performance – "getting the job done, rather than just showing up".
Welding equipment maker Lincoln Electric in the US has taken things further. Workers have no benefits or holiday leave and are paid per unit produced "and they love it".
The reason being that relatively poorly-educated people are able to earn up to US$200,000 a year (NZ$300,000) if they work hard.
He describes the future as the "Hollywood" model – where work forces are made up of a series of contractors brought in to work on a project.
An example in New Zealand is Weta Workshop's way of working, where the majority of staff are self-employed contractors working on long-term contracts.
There are many benefits for workers. Those who are good at their job and able to deliver will have freedom, autonomy and the chance to negotiate good pay rates.
While I agree that there is a certain appeal in the "fairness" of this model, I think the author has a rather simplistic view. Having worked for a company that operates this way, there are a lot of bad, and confusing, things about it as well. As a some simple examples:
- No sick days means people come to work sick and get everyone else sick.
- No holidays means that people get really focused on how much money they can make, and often don't look after themselves or their families as well as they should.
- Target oriented earnings mean that people focus on the best way to keep "unit production" (and thus earnings) up. They don't always do the job "right" or take the time to fix things that are important but don't result in earnings (eg. what if a month of your time improving a process could result in 1% better earnings for everyone in the company. You might loose money by taking the time to do it while everyone else benefits).
- Target oriented earnings make sense for profit centres, but what about cost centres? What about HR, IT, accounts and the admin staff? It's really hard to quantify how well these people are doing their jobs.
I suspect I'm being over sensitive but this whole things strikes me as yet another stupid ideology which is designed to suit certain managers beliefs about how the world should work, rather then trying to build systems which actually do work for the people living and working in them.