The economies of the world - local and global- have evolved a new gene pool of workers who now populate every conceivable business hub on earth. These economies have induced a diaspora of some sort sending Indian software engineers to the Western world, and Philippine nurses to staff-starved health care institutions in industrialized nations. Conversely, transactional work in the US and the rest of its G8 partners are outsourced to developing countries along with expatriates who carry with them their work styles and their "weird" ways of doing work. Indeed, today's new workers do work differently.
It's amazing what a decade can make in the lives of today's employees - the living, breathing, walking engines of our economy who are caught in the maddening whirlpool of technological shift. Not to be spared are those folks who feel that the phenomenon of the cyber age is nothing but a mere gossamer thought; and that their jobs are impervious to any form of exogenous influence. To those who happen to be in the latter category here are some reality checks.
Reality check No. 1: Junior is trading phone pictures with the girl next door and doing a computer cut and paste school project about the virtues of the Fantastic 4 superheroes without your help.
Reality check No.2: The paycheck you just received was calculated, processed, and printed by ADP - a pure automated check-processing enterprise.
Reality check No. 3: The person you complained to about that pesky door on your new refrigerator and walked you through an on-the-spot repair is actually a fresh business graduate of de La Salle University in Manila operating out of an offshore call center…and he still is in Manila.
One can look back to no more than ten years ago to realize - in the words of Dylan - that "times-are-a-changin'". Dotcom was just, a dot and a com character that made up a URL address. It wasn't until the late 90's that it meant to be the referent label of a business infrastructure built mainly on and of technology. Anyone who had the audacity and the gall to peddle that idea, say, another ten years earlier probably would been ran out of town. Worse, that poor soul would have been dragged to the center of town at early dawn and pelted mercilessly with out of style 8-track cassette decks. A bit of hyperbole there but one could already glean the portent of things to come if that were true. It is evident that nobody can tolerate an aging 8-track cassette even back then - much less now. The fact stays, however, that change was in the offing then, it is in the offing now, and will continue to be.
Fast forward to 2005. The US economy is back and roaring after the Dotcom bust of 2000. Dotcom redeemed itself and is more grounded in its tracks as a business model. Technology is on the march and the working sector has never been busier.
So who's making all of this tick?
The new workers of the millennium! These workers exhibit very discernable characteristics that distinguish themselves from the rest of us. To some degree, however, we are also those workers (try as we may) who happen to be excruciatingly slow in trying to keep pace with the beat of a technological drum that doesn't seem to carry down wind enough to be heard by the rest of us. The result: some are a bit off-step and others are tripping on their own feet.
So, who really are these new workers? Let's figure them out.
Displaying its impeccable preened image in glowing crimson color over the façade of an aging but decently spruced up building in downtown San Francisco is Red Envelope - a high-end e-tailing gift business that survived the Dotcom tumble. Deep in the bowels of the company premises are a bunch of young turks bouncing fist-sized rubber balls off their office walls while tinkering with the next "pet rock" for their upcoming catalog. In an adjacent room is some lady in a trance-like "Gyan mudra" or "asana" (to the uninitiated, that's your yoga posture that's supposed to bring balance to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems - it's a centering thing that induces creativity and sparks of genius, and who would dare argue with that). From these seemingly unorthodox practices emerge the hottest-selling products off the Internet. Proof positive of this work model is the company's record-breaking sales performance last quarter posting an impressive $47.5 million in revenues, up 32 percent from the same quarter last year. It's a world where R2D2 does Zen. It's surreal but it works!
Redback Networks (pardon the "red" theme) in the heart of Silicon Valley has an explicit policy that casual dress is fine provided one understands that the bottom line is getting the job done. Rolled up sleeves, Hawaiian tees, sandals, and bits of an unkempt tonsorial style constitute the working look. Their workstations become extended living rooms where employees work long hours, discuss overdue phone bills, and dispute unauthorized credit card charges. Engineers get to load up their laptops and bark software schematics and algorithmic instructions to clients while pacing their garage floors at home. Frederick Taylor would be calling this practice sacrilegious, while Henry Ford, to his chagrin, would be throwing transmission casings out of his Michigan high rise if both were alive today.
A twenty something Account Manager for Infinite Conferencing promotes reservationless phone conferencing. She breezes through the functionalities of Unix/Linux and Windows operating systems. She talks in dizzying fluency of dual-core processors, expanded PC capabilities, higher throughput and simultaneous conferencing. She tops the presentation with the compatibility features of Microsoft Outlook integration versus a Yahoo Messenger interface and closes with the inviting phrase, "when can we get the system going for you". Whew!
Similarly, a fifty- year old curriculum developer discusses with her the complexities of designing and posting online courses over a learning management system (LMS) while explaining proposed linkages with a robust B2B integration, collaborative e-Commerce connectivity, and synchronous tele/webconferencing. His lingo spout terms like synchronous and asynchronous e-Learning modalities, work-based Action Learning schemes and concurrent media interface level. Are we still on planet earth?
Two people. A generation apart, yet they talk in harmony and in agreement of a common lexicon and in consonance with a set of shared semantics. They talk about document file path choices. They discuss the merits and demerits of different digital media storage. One touts CD-R over plain CD while the other hails CD-RW and the future of DVD. What's amusing, if not dumbfounding, is what transpires when these two people talk. What arises from the conversation is a noticeable fusion of ideas; a spark of linguistic connectivity characterized by terms and jargons that would have made both sound like extraterrestrial geeks a mere ten years ago - a not too distant past if anyone remembers.
Not only do the new workers talk funny, they also have evolved into gadget-toting, cell-phone-carrying, and laptop-lugging creatures. They "click mouses" to send messages. They resort to Palm One commands to send and receive messages while on the run. They pay homage to a technology called Bluetooth.
Sony Walkman, the sine qua non of music lovers on the move in the eighties has given way to iPOD. With the latter they exchange music files and even walk on the wild side by flirting with pirated music. They take pictures using cell phones and digital cameras and transmit them to a network of friends in "real time" - meaning right here, right now, pronto! Replacing the ubiquitous phone booths - that claustrophobic structure by which all communication savvy folks lived and died, and once peppered every city block during the beeper days of the eighties (considering they were also Superman's dressing room, and incubated Colombo's breakthrough crime-solving ideas) - are chic and avant-garde cafes where today's new workers find safe haven for their weary minds and feet while browsing through magazines and the latest best sellers.
It would probably be a blast today to see Superman zooming out of a Starbucks and Colombo fielding his crime-solving thesis on a cell phone from a corner table at a Seattle's Best Coffee shop.
The reality is that a new generation of workers has sprung from the ranks of today's job-seeking population. They have blurred the gender divide, skipped ethnic lines, and crossed geographical borders, and bridged the generational gap. These new workers no longer adhere to traditional practices of qualification-based employment, and work-for-life philosophy. They have changed. As a working species, they have evolved (the Darwinian notion); to the behaviorally biased crowd, they have developed (the Skinnerian belief).
These new workers have embraced the thought that technology is here to stay and its necessity parallels that of indoor plumbing and microwave. Their work intertwines with information transfer, performance production, and speed of delivery. To deliver at work means they have to rely on technology - one that is changing and shifting at blinding speeds. Thus the need to keep up and be in step becomes mandatory. The consequence is a rather stressed out workforce. The stress springs from the pressure to keep up with the speed of change, and from the demands placed on those who have to shed old ways of doing work while equipping themselves with the new ways of getting things done through the aid of technology.
They resort to stress release devices, which to no one's surprise, have grown to become a burgeoning industry - thanks to our weary yet hardworking army of neo- workaholics. Similarly, they escape to see movies like Starwars and Matrix which unwittingly take them to the center of a world from which they are trying escape. Others retire to the cozy comfort of their homes and attempt to soothe their frazzled nerves with their favorite music from XM radio or their MP3's - again, end products of the very same phenomenon that brought on their strain. Some flick open their TV sets and unconsciously look to TiVo for a seamless and pleasurable viewing and instinctively expect unfettered choices from over 150 channels courtesy of DirectTV. The stark reality is that they are bound by technology - the very creation they seek to set them free.
The fact that these new workers are the creators of technology and the attendant changes it generates, they are also the actors and recipients of its effects truly making it a perplexing conundrum. What makes a more interesting study is how these hardy folks cope and habituate themselves to a world that is radically altering their old familiar ways of living. How they walk the tightrope of making a life, raising a family, and maintaining a distinctively defined self will no means be subjects of inquiry years ahead. How companies and employers keep in lock step with their workers' changing lifestyles and their views about work rests on a field of practice that will be under scrutiny as the new and emergent workforce marches ahead.
