7 trends driving the evolving workforce – are you ready for change?

Today’s working practices are far more varied and unpredictable than they were even just a few years ago. Rapid developments in technology have empowered workers to adopt new ways of working. Workers simply want to extend the technology benefits they enjoy in their personal lives into the professional environment.

Employers are also taking notice and beginning to embrace this new way of working. CIO’s want a thriving workforce and see a business opportunity to provide the technologies that enable workers to be more creative and efficient. But with these opportunities and demands come new challenges and potentially increased levels of IT complexity.

Dell has just posted the first report (see below) in a series of three which looks at emerging trends in the workplace, how companies are responding and what the impact will be for technology and IT. Here's the first report from the Dell SlideShare account:

This is the first stage of the Evolving Workforce research, commissioned by Dell and our partner Intel. The 8-month study kicks off with initial insights from 21 experts at the top of their field. Technologists, consultants, analysts, futurists, recruitment specialists and organizational psychologists came together, identified and discussed 7 trends or hypotheses which are driving change in the workplace:

1. Crowdsourcing and Crowdsource services – will the workplace of the future involve thousands of people working in different locations? 
2. Productivity measured in output, not hours – will there be a move towards measuring workers’ performance in quality of output and not just in hours? 
3. Changes in the adoption of devices – are employers going to allow increased end-user choice? 
4. Intergenerational kiss and punch – will there be friction in the workplace between the younger digital savvy workers and older generations? 
5. Values versus rules – technology is increasingly pervasive and companies can monitor workers at any time – will this mean an environment of mistrust in the future? 
6. Many hats of the IT manager – the pace of technological change is getting even faster so will this require a new breed of IT manager? 
7. Employee-led Innovation – how do you capture great ideas from wherever they may come from in a company and conversely how do you stop employees spending too much time innovating and then dropping the ball on work that needs to be done today?

This initial research should provoke some interesting discussion – if you’d like to find out more about how your workplace could change in the future, then check out the Evolving Workplace Report 1 and read what the experts are saying. Also, keep your eyes open for Report 2 coming later this year - it will summarise the findings of several thousand interviews with workers across the globe and further our journey in investigating the workplace of the future. Join the conversation on Twitter via the #workforce hashtag.