A mini-CEO. That's what the white-collar worker will need to be to succeed in the hyper-competitive, fluid corporation of tomorrow.

By Paroma Roy Chowdhury

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The Worker of Future Inc. could be any or all of this, and much more. For, tomorrow, the organisation would have changed. It would have ceased to be a place where you go to do a job. Instead it would be a place where multiple careers converge to achieve a larger and dynamic corporate goal. It would have ceased to be an employer that pays you for a set of skills that may or may not indirectly impact its bottomline. Instead, it would expect you to run your own profitable world (with its own microcosm) so that the corporate universe could be flexible and profitable still. It would have ceased to be a rigid set of hierarchies and functions. Instead, it would be a confederacy of small companies and intrapreneurs that leverages their collective competencies. Most of all, the organisation would have ceased to be what it is today. To stay employable, you-the worker-would necessarily need to change too.

Make Your Own Career

As management guru and corporate futurologist Charles Handy describes in The Empty Raincoat, the 'shamrock' organisation of the future will have three types of staff on its rolls: the professional core with high qualifications, essential to the organisation; the contractual fringe that may include skilled individuals and small organisations; and the flexible labour force that flits from one job to another, and cannot be expected to demonstrate a high degree of loyalty. And there will be no rules, no prototypes in this workplace of the future, governing the Generation x employee. Only drivers like competency, value, need, and profitability. Underscores Aquil Busrai, Director (HR), India and the SAARC countries, Motorola: ''The new employee will be focused completely on the self and choose employers, multiple or single, who would pay a premium for skills.''

What the word ''skill'' would then mean will vary, depending on the strategic requirements of the employer. Skills would need to evolve along with the lifecycle of the organisation. A small venture could probably do with generalists, who may not have in-depth expertise in any one area, but who, by virtue of being able to carry out a variety of tasks are able to grow the organisation. Once the corporation has become big and successful, the generalist would find herself grossly-underskilled and overwhelmed by the complexity of global transactions, decisions and execution. For continued relevance in a changing environment, the new worker would need to value-add to herself constantly. Obsolescence would be a threat that she would need to guard against both within and outside the workplace.

What will engender the new worker will, of course, be the challenges of profitability, the relative scarcity of talent, market competitiveness, and the alacrity and accuracy of decision-making. Therefore, organisations would need to mix and match skills, tenures of employees, and the nature of work engagements.

Consider the me-centric profile that executive search firm Korn/Ferry has worked out for the employee of the future. One company, one function tracks are clearly passe for the Gen-X-er. She has vastly different expectations from the workplace and from herself. She expects her career path to be mapped out by her organisation, with generous inputs from herself and puts a high premium on learning and diverse job experience. She is a transient creature who is willing to take risks and move across industries, functions, and boundaries. She expects to be paid handsomely for her efforts, and wants a better work-life balance than her predecessors. Likely to be found in the emerging sectors, like infotech, insurance, and other services, she is nonetheless mobile and works out of any place. Says C. Mahalingam, Director (HR), Philips Software Systems: ''They work to live, as against Baby Boomers who lived to work. They are quicker to adapt to change and they view work as a series of experiences. Their tenure would depend on the quality of that experience.''

The New Career Models

The future may be closer than we think. Take HCL Technologies, for instance. At the company, a new employee is seen as one with a high degree of technical expertise, who needs tremendous operational freedom and the constant stimuli of working with cutting-edge technology. HCL Technologies allows them to work in project teams that are drawn from various competency centres and are disbanded upon completion. Chennai-headquartered Polaris Software Laboratories (Polaris) has Konarks- young employees who are treated like mini-CEOs, and are invited to participate in brainstorming and strategic thinking sessions. They also enjoy accelerated career development. Says Govind Singhal, Senior Vice-President (HR), Polaris: ''We decided that Polaris would be shared among those who took ownership of what they did.''

At mobile communications company Ericsson, the new employee is an innovator, a competence developer, a team leader, and a participator, and can follow either a managerial career path or a specialist one, depending upon proclivities. Underlines Jan Campbell, Managing Director, Ericsson: ''We expect every Ericsson manager to be a business innovator, regardless of levels.''

The intrapreneur: Tomorrow's manager won't be a nine-to-fiver, or even a mere workaholic. Instead, she'll increasingly be an intrapreneur. She'll have to organise her work in line with corporate goals, run with her own team, manage own budgets, spot opportunities, and move quickly like an entrepreneur. Says A. Ravindranath, Manager, Human Capital Services, Arthur Andersen: ''Employees will need to maximise resources just like entrepreneurs do.''

Companies that are loath to let go of talent would offer to fund the ideas, either within or without their set up. Experimenting with that already is one of the most venerable corporate giants, Hindustan Lever Ltd. (HLL). hll's e-gameplan includes building a number of leading b2b and b2c businesses in high-potential areas, leveraging both its strong customer and supplier relationships and its repository of talent. To ensure this and to foster an entrepreneurial culture, it has set up its own internal venture capital fund, which will fund ideas generated by its own businesses. HLL has already cleared three ideas-all dotcoms-for funding and other support, and more are in the offing. It has also divided its product categories further to offer its younger managers opportunities to run businesses.

HCL, too, has 'intrapreneurs'. Comprising about 10 per cent of the workforce, these employees work on futuristic projects that have been cleared by respective project managers. Says Sujit Bakshi, Executive Vice-President (HR), HCL: ''We reward them with more options, to make them stay and earn greater equity from the company.''

The specialist consultant: In a talent-scarce market, this breed will command a premium. Because her unique skills are badly sought after, the specialist consultant would have the flexibility to choose who she works for, the work arrangement, and the fee (as against a salary or wages). In fact, this kind of a worker would have the freedom to take on multiple employers. It would work fine for companies too because the specialist would come without the financial baggage of a regular employee: no medical, no paid holidays, and no ''time-based'' pay (irrespective of the work done).

Already, some companies are falling back on such options. Korean consumer goods company LG Electronics hires consultants for its knowledge-intensive R&D work. Underlines Y.V. Verma, Vice-President (HR): ''Typically, our decision to hire consultants is based on the need to access specialist skills.'' Internet Service Provider (ISP) Mantra, has hired specialist consultants to lead teams in fields like cutting-edge technology or communications where there is no internal expertise. Direct-selling organisation Amway has about 25 people on contract to impart training in distribution. These are but pointers to what a company's people-set will look like in the future. Concurs Smita Anand, Head (Organisational Change Practice), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC): ''Work templates are shifting. Specific expertise will be at such a premium that both companies and employees would want to opt for the consulting route. ''

The connected worker: Courtesy information technology, it would no longer be necessary for a worker to be physically present at her workplace. The connected worker would work from home, meet all her deadlines, and be available virtually to both her employer and customers. The first set of connected workers would be those who spearhead specific projects, typically in hi-tech industries. However, some low-end jobs and even direct selling functions would be carried out of home-office. In the US, an estimated 7.5 million workers telecommute and work in virtual offices, including employees of large corporates like IBM, AT&T, and Hewlett-Packard.

As did Dhruv Bogra, Regional Manager, Levi Strauss (India), when he first joined the company or Ashwani Windlass, when he was the CEO of Reliance Telecom. Says Bogra, who relocated to Bangalore a few months ago and went back to structured workdays: ''It was fun while it lasted. But I found that it needs even more discipline and self-control than working out of an office.'' But that isn't deterring companies. "Old economy" company SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare (SBCH) has just allowed two of its women managers to telecommute and put in a reduced hour work-week for a finite period. Affirms P. Dwarakanath, Executive Director (HR), SKBCH: ''The choice was between losing them or allowing them to work from home. In future, we see ourselves doing this more to attract and retain talent.''

PWC allows telecommuting, so do Korn/Ferry and Hewlett-Packard. Procter & Gamble has just started doing it, and so has Ericsson, which allows telecommuting under special circumstances. Motorola has started the practice in its software business in Bangalore. Underlines Anita Ramachandran, CEO at HR consultancy firm Cerebrus: ''Traditional employee moulds are breaking to give rise to the new prototypes. The accent will be on self-management rather than supervision.''

The interim worker: Expect to see more of this creature. As adhocracy becomes the norm, an organisation's workforce-right from the CEO to the temp worker-would do stints to serve specific purposes. Like a turnaround or the setting up of a new project, where all skilled personnel, including the project engineers to the accountants could move to other companies and assignments upon the project's completion. Or the interim worker could be super-specialist, whose expertise is wanted for a finite period in a particular industry or function. Grasim Industries has just hired a senior process technologist, an expatriate from Austria, for a period of three years.

Ericsson is in favour of short-term assignments within its global system. ICICI is hiring CEOs with a specific brief to turn around divisions in a specified period of time. Preety Kumar, managing director of search firm Amrop International, sees interim workers as a strong trend at the CEO level, as well as the board level. Says she: ''A lot of careers are going to be made out of specialised skills. I see CEOs having agents in the near future who would scoop out projects requiring their skills, for them. Or they would do it themselves.'' The ex-CEO of Reliance Telecom, Ashwani Windlass, is a prime example. According to market sources, he has been hired by an Indian industrial group for setting up a telecom project within a stipulated time period.

The new career: one size won't fit all

Higher employee ownership and profitability pressures would spawn a range of careers. The first and the most obvious is the intra-company career. The organisation of the future is likely to be a medium- to large-sized company with a flat structure. The steps would typically be harder to climb and there would be fewer of them. And the Gen X professional would be driven by knowledge, skill, and experience rather than branding, and while climbing them could follow a cross-functional path. Says Nalin Miglani, Vice-President (HR), Coca-Cola India: ''The emphasis would be on discontinuous activity, a continuous series of challenging projects that excites employees and helps them grow.'

The clash of organisational and employee imperatives will bring forth career scripts that are unique to a particular situation at a specific point in time. Here are four possible models:

• The concentric career: Such a career would be a specialist one, with a business, service or product at the core. The Gen X-er would build her career by expanding her expertise in this business, service or product, adding more concentric circles to the core skill. Says Sanjiv Sacchar, CEO, Egon Zehnder: ''Such careers would be driven by scalability and addition of new critical skills in the same area. A typical example would be in the human resource function.''

• The concurrent career: This is the most typical career that a Gen X employee is likely to have, with two or more major activities in tandem. The careers may balance each other, bring in added income, or be a rehearsal for a career change. Anand Prakash, for instance, a professor of psychology at Delhi University, is also a respected corporate trainer.

• The combination career: This would include a mix of activities, with the need for change and autonomy as the main drivers. Such careers invariably have a series of short-term projects and look like patchwork quilts. It could even be within a corporation, where the employee could flit from project to project, depending on skills, organisational needs, and individual inclination. Almost all major software organisations including Infosys, Wipro, HCL Software, and Aditi Technologies allow this. Says Dilip Ranjekar, Executive Vice-president (HR), Wipro: ''Employees in Wipro create their own careers by choosing to work on specific projects.'' HCL has self-directed project teams that assemble and disband with each projects. But in future, the teams would grow in complexity and scope.

• The contingency career: A Gen X-er could even have a contingency career, where she would work, only when she needs money or has an exciting project that would showcase her skills. Essentially an interim worker, she could be a mother of young children, a retired manager, or simply a selective professional. But since the contingency worker's primary goal is convenience, she will have to compromise on compensation and, possibly, on the nature of the work itself.

The New (Soft) Skills

High on the shopping list, are behavioural competencies like the ability to work in a flat, relatively unstructured organisation that would be the norm in the future, and an ability to be a team player, rather than a brilliant soloist. Points out Sachhar of Egon Zehnder: ''Businesses would be led by self-directed cross-functional teams in the future.'' Self-motivation is another desired attribute. Underlines Kumar of Amrop: ''Companies would just be providing the infrastructure for the employee to enjoy, but the motivation would have to come from within.'' High comfort with change and ambiguity, flexibility to move across industries, functions and positions, facility with multiple roles, and a blend of strategic and operational skills, are the other preferred skills. The other must-haves: global perspective, openness to learning and cross-cultural sensitivity. Affirms Sumer Datta, CEO at HR consulting firm Hewitt Associates: ''Employees of the future would be those who can discard and adopt skill sets swiftly and move across functions and industries with ease.'' Over the next two decades the changes could be even more dramatic shifts could happen from research to accounting, from marketing to environment management, from HR to CEOship.

Add to that the ability to take quick decisions without established reference points, risk-taking ability and emotional resilience. For, hardpressed for time and results, companies would increasingly resort to hire-and-fire strategies. The new worker would not only need to cope with the sack, but also quickly learn from her mistakes. Agrees Anand of PWC: ''Such decisions would increasingly be commonplace, and the emotional intelligence to handle them will be essential.''

Managerial competencies would largely be company and industry-driven. American Express Bank insists that its employees have thought leadership, result orientation, and relationship focus. At HCL Technologies, it is domain knowledge and business focus. At PepsiCo India, it is facility with technology and strategic orientation. Says Mahendra Swarup, Executive Director (HR), Pepsico India: ''Techno-savviness and strategic perspective are two attributes that would be common across industries.''

This is not all. The Gen X-er would also need to have high physical energy, as start-up situations would be common and increasingly work will get done across global boundaries and time zones. Says Sachhar of Egon Zehnder: ''It is difficult to get hired at a hotshot corporation if you have a beer gut.''

A no-beer gut is just another way of saying that the millennium employee would need to be more complete in terms of personality and competence than she has ever needed to be. The upside of all this would be that she would command her own market, choose her career better, decide how to shape it, and eventually build a workplace that is not only enriching professionally, but also rewarding monetarily. Since so much of tomorrow's corporation will depend on its employee, there will be a compelling economic reason to share wealth with those who created it in the first place.

-Additional reporting by Aparna Ramalingam, 
Jaya Basu, Nitya Varadarajan, Vinod Mahanta, & Venkatesha Babu

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