Agenda Package - 05-18-09 - Laserfiche WebLink

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7}JE END OF (FIE JOB Asa way of organizing work. it is asocial artifact that has outli... Page 4 of 5 063 already dividing their job into several pieces. If you spend four hours doing A, two doing B, and two doing C; if Sally spends two hours doing A, four doing B, and two doing Q and if Dave spends two ® hours doing A, two doing B, and four doing C - then you are all job sharing already. What will the postjob policy be on job sharing? It will be to put the old policy in the Policy Museum as an artifact of a bygone age and get on with doing the work that needs doing. The same thing will happen to policies on flex-time and telecommuting. These matters will be governed partly by the demands of the work and partly by other economic factors, which can include the cost of office space, the availability of technological linkages between delocalized co-workers, and such idiosyncratic matters as the parties' family responsibilities, commuting conditions, and whether they work better early in the day or late. Self- employed workers always take all these matters into account, and so will post-job workers. How about policies on leaves of absence, vacations, and retirement? Leaves from what? Vacations from what? Retirement from what? The post-job worker will be far more likely to be hired for a project or a fixed length of time than a job holder is today. Working and leisure are no longer governed by the calculus of constant employment. Without the job, time off from work becomes something not taken out miles time but something taken during the interims between assignments or between project contracts. And retirement? As ever more people become businesses in themselves, retirement will become an individual matter that has less to do with organizational policy and more to do with individual circumstances and desires. IF SELF-EMPLOYMENT is any guide, the de-jobbed worker will likely be a stern taskmaster. This worker is losing with the job a definition of what is enough of what constitutes a day's work and entitles one to go home satisfied. Add the fact that the de-jobbed worker will be scheduling his or her own employment and trying, like any independent professional, to make hay while the sun shines. The result is that us jobbed workers will have to learn to pace themselves. For the organization, leave policies, vacation policies, and retirement policies will become relatively insignificant. Still not quite clear is what the post-job manager will have to do. Everyone agrees that tomorrow's worker, untrammeled by old constraints of hierarchy and job boundaries, will be far more independent and self-directed than tedayk. Will such a worker even need managing in anything like the accepted sense of the word? Michael Hammer, the consultant who has done most to advance reengineering, leaves no doubt where he stands: "Middle management as we currently know it will simply disappear." Three-quarters of middle managers will vanish, he says, many returning to the "'real' work" they did before they were promoted into management, with the remainder filling a role that "will change almost beyond recognition." How? "To oversimplify, there will be two main flavors of ((new style)) managers: process managers and employee coaches. Process managers will oversee, end to end, a reengineered process, such as ® order fulfillment or product development. Their skills t(will need to be those of)) performance management and work redesign. Employee coaches will support and nurture employees much as senior managers do in corporate America today," It is not too much to say that we have reached the point where we must talk about the end of management. The reason is that the manager was created only a little more than a century ago to oversee and direct the work of people who held jobs. Before that, there were masters and gang bosses and commanders and overseers, but there were no managers. People were led, but whatever management existed was self-management. That is what we are returning to with a crucial difference. The old self-management was taking care of yourself while you followed the leader. The new self-management is acting toward the business at hand as if you had an ownership stake in it. This means that tomorrow s executive, coordinator, facilitator, or whatever we choose to call the non-manager will have to provide people with direct access to information that was once the domain of decisionmakers. Tomorrow's employees and contractors will have to understand the whys and wherefores of the organization's strategy far better than today's do; they will have to understand the organization's problems, weaknesses, and challenges realistically The de-jobbed worker will need to be much clearer on the organization's vision and values than the job-based worker needed to be. In a job-based environment, you just tlo your job. In a de-jobbed environment, you /do what needs to be done to honor and realize the organization's vision and values. Specifically, companies that have already begun to employ de-jobbed workers effectively seem to share at least four traits: (1) They encourage rank-and- file employees to make the kind of operating decisions that used to be reserved for managers. (2) They give people the information that they need to make such decisions information that used to be given only to managers. (3) They give employees lots of training to create the kind of understanding of business and financial issues that no one but an owner or an executive used to be concerned with. (4) They give people a slake in the (mils of their labor - a share of company profits. The organization trial wants to move down the path toward the post-job future must answer several key questions - Is work being done by the right people? - Are the core tasks requiring and protecting the special competencies of the organization - being done in-house, and are other tasks being given to vendors or subcontractors, temps or term hires, or to the customers themselves? Are the people who do the work in each of those categories chosen in such a way that their desires, abilities, temperaments. and assets are matched with the demands of the task? Are such workers compensated in the most appropriate way? Is everyone ® involved - not just the core employees - given the business information they need to understand their part in the larger task? Do they have the understanding needed to think like business people? Does the way people are organized and managed help them complete their assignments, or does it lie them to outmoded expectations and job-based assumptions? Too often new ways of doing things http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune-archive/1 994/0 9/1 9/797 5 1 /index.htin 5/8/2009