THE WORKFORCE IS MELTING!
The Distributed Workforce Project
by FarsideHR Solutions
In April 2018 I spoke at a DisruptHR event in San Francisco in front of several hundred HR leaders. After 20 years as an HR executive, coach, consultant, software entrepreneur and top employer winner, I stood on stage, sighed, and admitted an inconvenient truth in front of the assembled audience:
The workforce is melting. It’s our fault. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
If you’ve never attended DisruptHR, it’s important to set the stage. The format is designed to be brutal. You have 5 minutes to express your disruptive thought, in the spotlight, in front of hundreds of your professional HR colleagues, and your slides change every 15 seconds automatically. You don’t have time to pause, read the room, change the narrative, take questions or get lost in what you’re saying. It’s a stand-and-deliver context for even the most seasoned public speaker. That night I was delivering a controversial message. But as the slides automatically progressed, and as I walked through the evidence, people began to really focus. They began to nod their heads. Their faces expressed their collective concerned thoughts. Surely there’s something we can do? That night, I provoked many questions but did not present any answers.
Fast forward to 2019 and let’s unpack the use of the term ‘melting’ to describe the workforce changes all around us. It turns out that climate change and global warming is a useful way to think about long-term interactions and consequences. You can’t point to one simple catalyst and because it happens over time the shift is nearly imperceptible. But bit by bit, we as employers have overheated the workforce beyond the tipping point so that what once behaved more like a solid, now behaves more like a liquid.
What did we do? For starters we removed predictable career paths, the stability of co-located teams, increased the use of contingent workers, outsourced and offshored work, disrespected work/life boundaries, shattered 9–5 hours, rolled back benefits, introduced agility and change as core philosophies, chopped training investment dollars, hollowed out middle management and embraced employment at will as our defense for all layoffs. We conditioned workers to become more independent and to manage their own careers accordingly.
Then the labor market got really hot as the economy started to really shine, traffic worsened and living costs went up while wages stayed stagnant.
We started to notice the meltwater. The gig-economy and side hustle moved from fringe concept to tech powered headline news. Turnover and churn increased as people took control of their own career and earnings advancement. Employment choice began to take on consumer-like behavior patterns, with organizations needing to address diversity and inclusion, provide accelerated promotions and include employee voice in decision making, or else workers would vote with their feet. Loyalty and flexibility became quid pro quo.
There’s an enormous amount of time going into studying Millenial and Gen Z work preferences. I actually think that if we hadn’t changed the old deal so much, these brilliant additions to the workforce would have enjoyed and embraced the same world earlier generations enjoyed. But we didn’t leave that world behind. We changed it. And so, Newton’s 3rd law comes into play: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.The new liquid workforce is already adapting; they are becoming more confident, vocal, mobile and less loyal as they embrace the changes in their environment.
This Labor Day 2019, we at FarsideHR launched The Distributed Workforce Project to answer the question of the next decade: how will we as employers respond? Our core hypothesis is that the answer does not lie in offering more perks or engaging in non-sustainable wars of attrition in local markets. Instead, we believe that top performing organizations will require an ‘all-in’ holistic commitment, embracing the distributed and liquid future of work our workers are already adapting to and demanding.
Largely, we believe the most successful organizations (and HR departments) will focus on leveling up and empowering the very middle managers whose jobs we began to eliminate 30 years ago in the 1980’s. In a melted workforce, storming, forming and norming people and processes never happens. Instead, it’s just 24/7 storming. And managing productivity in such a liquid and distributed context requires a new approach. Looking for impact right now?
- Can every team member answer: why do we exist and why are they part of this group?
- Can every team member answer what the top 3 priorities are?
- Can every team member answer how can I best contribute towards these priorities?
- Can you answer what career journey goals every one of your team members are pursuing?
If no to any of the above, you have an alignment problem that only magnifies with the miles separating each member.
The Distributed Workforce Project seeks to find managers who are early adapters to this future of work and to synthesize their core routines: What do they actually do that makes them so successful in highly fluid and distributed work environments? We in turn can then democratize and disseminate these behaviors for the betterment of all through training, coaching and tools.
Please help us in our #MakeManagersAwesome mission. If you’ve ever worked in a highly dynamic and distributed team for a truly great manager who is clearly an early adapter, please take 10 minutes and share your input into our study here. By adding your email address we’ll provide a free copy of the insights and promise not to spam you without additional permission.
We welcome any thoughts and stories about The Workforce is Melting Project at info@farsidehr.com. If you’d like to see the original DisruptHR ‘The Workforce is Melting’ presentation, the link is here.
Derek Sidebottom
CHRO, President FarsideHR Solutions
