Future Work:

Future Work will feature at the launch of the Center for Creative Leadership's new regional headquarters and training campus in Brussels tomorrow. The event is titled "A Day for Change" and I've been invited to speak about how to create change and to adapt and thrive in the new world of work - the subtitle of our book. I'm keen to see the campus, workshops and technology demonstrations as well as hearing the other speakers on leadership and change.

There's a solution to the rising levels of stress we're seeing in the current tough economic conditions - give people greater control over how, where and when they do their work. A new survey by Towers Watson and WorldatWork reports high levels of stress in companies around the world as employees are required to take on ever greater workloads and hours.

Now the Olympic Summer is over we can see if it has had any lasting effect onthe way people work. A post-Olympics survey of over 1,000 managers, published by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM), showed that almost half (48%) of managers said that the Olympics had resulted in higher morale in the office. 

Great piece by Andrew Hill in today's FT titled "Flexiworkers are heroes, not slackers", on how the Olympics are testing managers' traditional assumptions about how work gets done. As he rightly says, managers' fears about losing control, and employees' (directly related) fears about being seen as slackers, are holding back the spread of new working practices. This is usually to the detriment of business.

It was encouraging to hear Simon Langley, UK head of Inclusion & Diversity at National Grid, talk recently about the need for performance management based on outputs, not hours and presence. “There are too many managers who think the way you manage people is to count the backs of their heads,” he told a conference. “If I can achieve what’s needed within my regular hours, then my time is my own. Why do we make people stare at a screen for seven hours?

As the Olympic Games draw closer, employers in London are using it as a trigger for trying out more flexible working patterns.

According to some new research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than half of employers are making changes to their working practices during the Olympics to enable staff to work more flexibly or enable them to watch key events at work,

Edge, the magazine of the Institute of Leadership & Management, says in a review of Future Work this month: "Every manager who cares about the future success of their organisation should read this book." Another strong endorsement comes from the Center for Creative Leadership, which says its new regional headquarters in Brussels “draws inspiration from the groundbreaking research on collaborative working trends recently published in Future Work”.

We had a rich and lively debate at Cass Business School on Future Work this week. Our panellists were asked: What will be the tipping point for organisations to adopt a new work model? Robert Phillips, CEO of Edelman EMEA, said: “Enlightenment and fear: the enlightenment of leaders who just get it, and the fear [of others] that ‘the world will get you if you don’t get the world’.”

We've just launched a short, fact-packed video about work in a changing world. It's on our FutureWorkBook YouTube channel.

Lots of activity going on around future work and the book. Next week (April 24) I'm speaking with Peter at the Future Work Conference in Birmingham along with leaders from Vodafone, Microsoft and co-organiser Word Association about how to make it happen. Then I'm off to Brussels on April 26 to address the multilingual Jump Forum, this year titled Time To Change: how to break free from old models. Couldn't be more appropriate!