The future of work: blue, green or orange?

Eva Jansen-Diener, PwC

PwC has commissioned a global survey on how companies and employees might operate and interact in the future. What cuts across the development of the future workplace are the push and pull of individualism versus collectivism and corporate integration versus business fragmentation. The competition and tensions between these are creating three scenarios for the future of work.

In the Blue World, big company capitalism reigns supreme. The main people challenge for the companies will be integration of the talent from different markets into the overall corporate culture. Metrics and data will be used to drive business performance through complex staff segmentation which identifies thousands of skills sets – creating precision around sourcing the right candidates for the right tasks, as well as on-the-job performance measurement and assessment.

The data profiling that drives customer management will increasingly be replicated among employees as screening and monitoring move to a new level. The ‘contract’ with employees is defined by the handing over of data (e.g. health, performance, possibly even private life) and such monitoring could become routine.

In the Green World, companies are open and collaborative learning organisations, supporting and developing their employees and local communities. Green firms opt for flexible, flat and fluid organisational structures: everyone will have the opportunity to participate in decision-making and feel responsibility for the organisation’s success.

Organisations embrace sustainability and support for socially valuable ‘good growth’. Reward models will be highly flexible as part of this personalised design. PwC survey confirms that the opportunity to work for organisations that share their values is attractive to many of the brightest candidates; however the overall incentive package is still going to be important.

In the Orange World organisations fragment into looser networks of autonomous, often specialised operations. Technology helps to bring these networks together, often on a task-by-task basis. Moves towards the Orange World have been bolstered by the rise of the portfolio career: people enjoy more flexibility and varied challenges by working freelance or as a contractor for a number of organisations.

People are more likely to see themselves as members of a particular skill or professional network than as an employee of a specific company. Orange pioneers will give a new lease of life to professional guilds, associations and trade bodies – relying on them for training, development and innovation.