From the FT: Think twice about giving up the day job
Hot of the press from the Thursday FT, might be worth a quick look.
Auric
APPOINTMENTS: Think twice about giving up the day job
By Kevin Done
Financial Times; Jul 22, 2004
We all know that the way we work is changing but it is difficult to assess the strength or the direction of change. Equally, we can be seduced by images of change that portray a future of work quite unlike our existing experience.
I became so attracted to the vision of portfolio careers, promoted by the management writer Charles Handy, that two-and-a-half years ago I stepped out of salaried work into the uncertain world of the self-employed.
The experience has been a happy one so far. But I would hesitate about recommending it for everyone, not because of the usual worries about social isolation - I enjoy working from home - but because of the inefficiencies in this type of work that keep you away from the job you do best.
Working for an employer meant that I could concentrate on research and writing - the essence of a news reporter's job. Today I must invest time in marketing, sales, negotiating, networking, presenting and administration. This is fine. I always preferred to lick my own stamps anyway. But writing - still my chief source of income - has become a luxury that I struggle to make time for among all the other stuff.
A new book* on the changing workplace has reinforced my belief that most of us should stick to our day jobs. Written by four leading employment experts, it is an impressive and comprehensive analysis of the forces of workplace change in Britain.
Instead of engaging in populist futurology, the authors ground their observations in a 2002 survey of employment practices among 2,000 private and public sector workplaces ranging in size between five and 7,500 employees.
The impact of the research is not so much in the practices it reveals - all of them are widely recognised - but the degree to which companies have been changing their employment policies.
"The picture from the survey is one of tumultuous change," say the authors. "The great majority of workplaces have engaged in new forms of recruitment, have added to flexibility, [and] have made a multiplicity of advances in their human resource development or people practices."
The book identifies four pervasive trends underpinning the transformation of employment policies: broadening competition, the rise of "knowledge work", a sharper focus on the management of people and external regulation.
It also sheds new light on the nature of flexible working practices, making a distinction between "bought-in" flexibility to substitute for permanent jobs and what it calls "intelligent flexibility". This involves training, multi-skilling and varying work experience to equip internal employees with transferable skills that can be used in different parts of an organisation.
Evidence from the survey, say the authors, suggests that the use of temporary and contract labour, now entrenched across the labour market, may be "running out of steam". I would question the weight given to this observation since more employers than not were expecting to increase their use of temporary, contract and outsourced work in the three-year period covered.
Even so, the distinction between two different types of flexibility is worth making as a counter to populist beliefs that long-term career paths will disappear from the labour market. In fact the evidence points to a continuing determination among employers to retain long-term career prospects for their best staff.
The offer of long-term prospects, the authors argue, is an effective way of retaining good staff who might otherwise be lured away by recruiters skilled at identifying talent in competitor companies.
The research is set against broad economic change in which manufacturing has given way to services as the dominant source of employment in the UK within a single generation. In the same period, manual work has shrunk from providing the majority of jobs to representing less than one job in three while managerial and professional jobs have increased their share of the market to 40 per cent.
Another influential change in the latter half of the 20th century has been a big increase in the proportion of jobs held by women, up from one-third to almost a half of all jobs today. The book also notes the decline in trade union influence. In 1980, seven in 10 employees had their pay set by collective bargaining. In 1998 the proportion was down to four in 10, mostly in the public sector. No wonder employees are becoming increasingly individualist in their approach to their careers. Old-style collectivism is on the retreat across society.
One of the most telling collection of statistics presented in the book is a table of selected changes in employment practices (in the three years to the survey date) that reveal broad-based change. Training people to cover other jobs, job rotation, the expectation of staff to fill varying roles, and team working have all shown a marked increase. The same is true for individual performance assessment and the use of group-based incentives.
Although a significant number of companies among those surveyed were continuing to reduce the number of management grades and the proportion of managers to employees during this period, a far larger number were recording increases in both these areas, indicating a reversal of the trend towards "de-layering" of management grades.
The research, however, should not be interpreted as a sign that employers are returning to traditional employment practices. It found that companies were experimenting increasingly with "hot-desking", teleworking and home working.
The most comforting finding for people who want to retain permanent jobs, however, must be the evidence suggesting that long-term careers remain a necessary feature of organisational strength. "Employees and managers have come through troubling years of insecurity in the early 90s. Relative to that experience, the current trends are much improved. Flexibility is turning intelligent, careers are back, knowledge and know-how are valued, recruitment barriers are lowered," say the authors.
But they do include caveats. Employers, they note, have yet to find ways of easing the burden of increasingly longer office hours keeping people away from their domestic responsibilities.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of this research is that it should be regarded as surprising. Viewed separately the trends reflect what might be expected. Viewed together, however, with some convincing interpretation added, the findings portray a remarkable transformation in the British workplace. As the authors remind us: "Despite all the uncertainties and shortcomings, British workplaces are managing to change."
*Managing to Change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work, by Michael White, Stephen Hill, Colin Mills and Deborah Smeaton, is published by Palgrave Macmillan, price £50, as part of the Economic & Social Research Council's Future of Work Series
www.richarddonkin.com
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd
, or travel the world/do a dream.
i told an ex manager to stick the job up his arse if that was his attitude,i'd had enough of the 9-5 bullshit 
, except for an LDIF export (of user details) and some connector info...but I guess the infrastructure is now in place...
