Here's a scary scenario: The news regularly reports that technology is taking over your job – which is kind of true, as 80% of all jobs will soon be influenced by technology and thirty percent of all jobs, mainly in transport, retail, industry, construction, healthcare, and education, will be replaced. Half of these jobs will be influenced by technology.
The half-life of knowledge has shrunk from 30 years to five years. In IT, it’s two years. For example, in IT, if you don’t improve yourself in four years, you are out. This is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it is happening. Check out the book Disrupting Unemployment, to learn and understand how we can overcome this scary scenario.
Millennials and Gen-Z
Millennials and Generation Z have a different value system. Born with the conviction that they are masters of their own universe because of the internet and gaming, they think inside-out, not outside-in. This is why they have a culture clash and a value clash when they start working for corporations and government bodies, which work centrally, hierarchically, and aim for efficiency. They want purpose, and a higher (holistic) goal. For them work is art and self-expression.
Transform Your Company
We are moving from an era of information, to intelligence (AI), to awareness. In this awareness era, holism is the keyword. Holism, as a value, fits Millennials and Gen-Zs very well.
To keep these generations continuously developing themselves and engaged, your company should transform into more autonomous and self-steering teams, with radical decentralization of authority and mandate.
In the past, you had hierarchy and an organogram. Today, you need more teams that operate horizontally; teams that cooperate and compete.
An example is Haier, a Chinese collective multinational consumer electronics and home appliances company headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong. This company is about 30 years old and has approximately 80,000 employees. Ten years ago, they turned their company of 80,000 people into 2,000 startups in one corporate structure. Each startup is a self-steering team, in which every three months the employees can ask their manager to stay or to leave – a completely democratized structure to remain successful in a rapidly changing world.
The message? Create an organization to be able to adapt swiftly to stay relevant and keep creating value.
Feel free to reach out to us for more information or to arrange a workshop on digital transformation and on creating autonomous, self-steering teams within a corporate structure at your company.
Author Sicco Maathuis is a managing business technology consultant at Capgemini. Read more Capgemini blogs here.
