A workplace of new possibilities
A story is told about two marketing scouts sent to a Third World country to determine a possible business expansion there. One sent back a telegram to Head Office saying, “SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES HERE.” The other sent back this message, “GREAT OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES.”
Reality, like beauty or contact lens, is in the eye of the beholder. This is hardly due to one’s attitude or personality. Scientists and researchers have found out that human beings perceive the world through a sequence. First, we gather selective information through our senses. Next, our brain constructs images of what we perceive. Third, we have a conscious experience of what we perceive.
In the words of Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, “The world comes into our consciousness in the form of a map already drawn, a story already told, a hypothesis, a construction of our own making.”
If something is not within the realm of what we see as reality, it is often rejected by our own consciousness.
Selective
Human eyes are powerful. But, if we think we can see everything, think again. Some animals have more powerful senses. Dogs hear sounds above our range of hearing. Some insects can pick up molecular traces emitted from potential mates kilometers away.
Human eyes are selective, too. We perceive only the sensations that we are programmed to receive. Our awareness is often limited, as we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.
According to British neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, “The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us.”
Donald O. Hebb, another neuropsychologist, theorizes, “The ‘real world’ is a construct, and some of the peculiarities of scientific thought become more intelligible when this fact is recognized … Einstein himself in 1926 told Heisenberg it was nonsense to found a theory on observable facts alone. ‘In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.'”
Possibility
Everything we see in our world is “all invented.” As the Zander couple said, “It’s all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us.”
Science is often seen as an orderly process of accumulating knowledge based on previously acquired truths. Even science relies on our capacity to adapt to new facts by radically shifting the theoretical constructions we previously accepted as truth.”
Robert Frost once said, “Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.”
In the world of work, many things have changed over time. One sad part is that the changes in the way we manage people have not changed as fast as the way business is done. The other sad part is that many inhabitants of the changing workplace are slow to adapt to the changing market environment. The saddest part is that many more don’t want to admit that things have changed, simply because the changes are not within their framework of learned things.
Career implications
Many of the emerging changes in the workplace have serious implications on working people’s careers. Consider the following:
• Fit with the organization. In the past, recruiters simply “put a round peg in a round hole, a square peg in a square hole.” Today, you don’t get hired for the skills you have for the vacant position alone. Jobs are now so dynamic that the position you get hired for today will likely no longer exist before you retire. Almost a quarter of the jobs in today’s workplace did not exist a couple of decades ago. To get hired, you must show a fit or alignment between the organization’s values, culture, and core competencies and yours.
• Make, buy or borrow. In many organizations today, half to two-thirds of their employees are not full time employees (FTEs). The majority are tempos, contractors, or doing outsourced services. The pattern follows how business has evolved. In the past, business owners or investors have to manufacture or produce what they have to sell. All their employees were regular employees – including security guards, janitors, and messengers. Today, most services, including the supply chain, support and peripheral services, financial, human resources, and even the management can be outsourced. Businesses today have the option to make, buy or borrow everything, including human resources.
• Pay for value creation. Organizations today look for return on their investment (ROI) on everything, including ROI on people. Investors want a return on the money spent on anything and everything. Payroll has become one of the biggest fixed costs in many organizations. Many organizations are adopting a new compensation policy – pay only for the creation of value that customers are willing to pay for.
• Performance-based CBA increase. Time was when employees in the same position get paid the same across the board. Salary increases, particularly due to collective bargaining agreements (CBA), were always granted across the board. In 1994, I negotiated the first performance-based CBA in a large oil company. The rest of the industry followed, but other companies did not have the political will to become an exception to the rule.
• Pay as rewards. In many organizations, salaries and benefits are an entitlement to their employees. In a culture like this, there is no need to justify why people must deserve their pay. Often, the result is low or no productivity at all. In a culture of achievement or excellence, employees’ compensation is treated as a reward. Employees understand that they have an accountability to contribute value to deserve staying in the organization.
• From annual merit increase to performance bonus. An acceptable level of performance is expected from employees – that is paid for by the basic salary. Performance exceeding pre-set standards are recognized and rewarded with incentives or bonuses. When organizations give merit pay increases to reward good performance, they unduly increase their fixed cost. What happens when a high-performing employee today delivers an unacceptable performance next year? Can you take back today’s merit increase?
• From seniority to value creation. In the past, seniority, longevity and incumbency were time-honored achievements. Today, creating customer value trumps them all. Businesses don’t make seniority, longevity or incumbency their customer value proposition. Customers don’t buy your products or services simply because you’re been in the business since time immemorial. They look for customer value. Therefore, companies will be wise to pay employees for creating customer value, not just for workers’ seniority, longevity or incumbency. The market has rendered these three things irrelevant.
• Security of tenure. The Philippine Constitution and the Labor Code guarantee employees security of tenure. This guarantee, however, is not absolute. Read the Labor Code’s definition of security of tenure and you’ll know how employees can lose their job – not keep their job. The concept of job security is changing. The formula for jobs has not, and will not, change. Investment equals employment. In a market-driven workplace, the real security of tenure is your ability acquire and use your competencies to do a variety of jobs, even as you move from one job, department, function, company, or country to another.
• Adversarial to collaborative union relations. Several decades ago, most workers were in the manufacturing sector, which was highly unionized. At that time, at least two and a half million workers were covered by collective bargaining agreements. Majority of today’s workers are now in the services sector. Consequently, the number of CBA-covered workers dropped to less than ten percent of the all-time high. The new modus vivendi with most labor unions today is more collaborative than adversarial. This proves more mutually beneficial to management and employees.
To succeed in the emerging new workplace, you need to understand your environment. However the workplace changes, you just got to work, work, and work!
A story is told about General Pershing, commander-in-chief of the Allied Forces during World War I, who was praised by some friends for his talents and his gifts. He replied, “Gifts! Gifts! There is no such thing. There is nothing but hard work. You have gifts, tastes, and abilities. What importance has that? Do you believe in natural gifts? No. One works, one perseveres! There is nothing but that.”
(Ernie is the 1999 President of the People Management Association of the Philippines; Chair of the AMCHAM Human Capital Committee; and Co-Chair of ECOP’s TWG on Labor Policy and Issues. Contact him at [email protected])
