The future of work in the companies: agility... or nothing?
Digital destabilizes the companies because it accelerates a double movement that blurs the borders:
- Private uses have evolved with a meteoric manner and interfere in the business to the point of challenging its codes - especially hierarchical;
- At the same time, the Taylorist model decays, labor relations "lifetime" no longer exist and the occasional collaborations are increasing: the collective yesterday mutated, and the concept of wage - at the heart of all the work building becomes blurred.
What organization model can the companies adopt while digital allows each employee to change his report to the company?
Does the individual in power signs the death of company?
After the industrial age of the employee who was a subordinate strictly speaking, simple running, we are witnessing the individual return in the company, and with it some confusion between private and professional lives - and / or public. This phenomenon is not limited to work, these are all people who suffer a "social order individualization". Today, autonomy becomes a cardinal value and the individual must be responsible for his choices, in essence. The digital embodies when it dramatically speeds up the process: employees are entering their mobile phone, tablet or laptop in the company, their network of professional knowledge and personal affinities intertwine, their passions combine the collective work, their talents and creativity must work together in an era of innovation...
Ultimately, the company now has to manage as many quests for happiness as there are individuals within it. Because in an economy whose creativity is the engine, the genius of each as well as its relationship to collective are determinants: the individual inclusion in all its complexity, as intimate social, is given entirely new in the companies!
More prosaically, the professional use example of his phone or personal laptop (a phenomenon known by the acronym BYOD, for Bring your own device), which raises important issues of data security and software compatibility, is typical of current transformations: where is the boundary between work and personal activity, associational activity, free time? How to count the working time when you can treat a client request in transit and during the holidays? How to make live a group when the "workplace" loses its meaning. These questions are essential, they are existential:
How can firms survive in their present form, while all the foundations of their modern existence are undermined? Will they be sufficiently agile to reinvent themselves?
Companies turn to survive
What emerges from the testimony of business leaders and scholars gathered by Fing is that the answers are found in the flexibility and openness:
* a management that seeks to stimulate and support more than imposing, which can be grasped by a support rather than a ban on BYOD;
* operation in "extended enterprise" that spreads: the heart of success achieved to the projects, is now claimed by large companies in their relationship with their ecosystem of SME subcontractors;
* an organization that breaks down silos, seeks to promote the work "in start-up mode" and stimulates the "intrapreneurship" (concept that the employee is a contractor within the company)...
* entities become "learning", including establishing their own universities.
Against digital mutations, companies now seek to promote among its employees, some features of specific contractors character:
1. risk appetite;
2. nonconformity;
3. organizational skills and personal effectiveness;
4. ability to challenge.
"The extended enterprise" takes shape thanks to digital
It recommends to adopt the model of "extended enterprise", which works in ecosystem by integrating its subcontractors and all project participants: "We must work together, to cooperate start-ups and large companies, in rather than oppose.
That said, the arrival of "outside" in the company and the takeover of individuals who enter their privacy via digital devices (the famous BYOD) poses a major challenge for IT managers : how to avoid anarchy? How to avoid losing control, with all that it implies in terms of security of confidential information in particular? Driven by the democratization of private use (the "consumerization of IT", that is to say, information technology", the fact that products originally designed for home use, are adapted to the professional market) employees gradually built a Shadow IT - a parallel computing - where everyone brings and uses the tool they prefer, bypassing the standard. Such a soft sling, without claim, is new to business!
The new reality of work has resulted in the development of a new framework for both autonomy and sharing, including a library of professional applications that each employee chooses according to his own needs and, most importantly, like creating a "business Youtube" accessed remotely. Called OpenTouch Video Store, the platform embodies the concept of extended enterprise by allowing employees, suppliers, customers and partners to share video documents relating to their business - without any special hardware or software required. A collaborative solution that streamlines communication between the company and its stakeholders, highlighting the contribution of each and stimulates the exchange, while trusting in self-regulation without sacrificing data control.
When the use and innovation are the law, the management reinvents
Corollary of this change, the development of a numerical tool in business is no longer in top-down today: it is not the direction that decides and employees who apply, particularly because individual practices took such a place in everyone's life that the company would lose a lot of time, energy and money trying to counter them. The CIO (Chief Information Officer) has a strategic role to evolve, he "is rooted in the business" - offering solutions able to increase productivity - and becomes a source of proposals to ensure policy digital in phase with uses. To satisfy individual preferences, experimentation and development "iterative" multiply and facilitate rapid and flexible responses to change, allowing testing and backtracking. The goal: to improve the well-being at work while stimulating innovation.
To the company-artist, deviant kingdom?
What is the future model? What mythology replace the moribund, the "wonders of industry?" This is the key issue, the process of innovation is now the same as that of artistic creation.
The company today is a world of acrobats. It is based on creative, whose value depends primarily on the ability to surprise and thinking against the norm. the reluctance to change comes from the fact that the foundations of work are embedded in our collective imagination as if they were immutable by nature. The terms innovation and business are historically rooted! The model of innovation that has emerged, is that derived from science. Known to all, it is now saturated. The planning that was glory of industry, is exceeded. Yet it would be if it could still be going on today, and this "lie" would be destructive to the human adventure in company: it is difficult to make collective based on lures work. In a world of uncertainty, a business plan must take place in a half-page and software specifications (ie the explicit set of requirements to be met by a product) would be banned because they do believe in the possibility to control totally the future, they convey a belief in an idealized world, in the end, they are misleading.
In sum, the company must find its raison to be: "create". Having to make a profit, this is its stress, no glory. The only salvation of the company today lies in its ontological tipping: The future company must protect the deviant because it innovates and is able to create rationality into the unknown.
To push this change, there are two options:
* Consolidate the legal framework, because the labor code is outdated and would sustain a structural archaisms. And propose a model: "Flexible Purpose Corporation" created in California (USA). While U.S. law requires business leaders to pursue a single goal (maximize the performance of the company in the interests of shareholders), this new statute broadens the main mission of the company and avoids the maximization of shareholders only in either single horizon.
* Redefining corporate governance, management, to make it truly "horizontal" and transform managers into change coaches. Maybe even to the point of "turn all heads".
Outside the agility is no salvation?
If companies seek to anticipate and accompany the changes of their foundations, it is because they question their existence. They must all be aware now of the need to change radically if they are to avoid the arise.
Moreover, at the end of this tunnel of the unknown that "agility" represents, there could be light. To end a conference passionate about the future company, which has led to many questions about the future of growth.
