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We just recently released our newest whitepaper entitled "Our Emerging Workplace: Seven Workplace Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore."

Of course we want you to pore over it in great detail but (ahem) it is 22 pages so we wanted to give an executive summary for those who just don't have but a minute to check it out.

We have seen in our work with our various clients there will be some pretty important competencies organizations are going to need to get right if they want to stay viable and relevant in the future.

Rethinking and adapting for change takes courage, fortitude and a vision for what can be. The payoff for those who lead the way will be unprecedented creativity and innovation, and the opportunity to benefit from—rather than struggle against—the inevitable and relentless waves of technological and global workplace change.

1) Leadership: Those bottom-line-at-any-cost folks are costing you too much

Successful future leaders will earn the trust of employees by showing respect for workers at all levels in the organization. They’ll do that by listening, making a sincere effort to understand different perspectives and following through on their commitments.  In other words, those number gurus are costing you too much.

2) Sustainability: Care about the bottom-line but not only the bottom-line

Employees understand that an organization needs to bring in a certain amount of revenue in order to survive. But, beyond survival, workers want to feel that what they’re doing contributes to a greater good.  Young talent, in particular, is motivated to understand an organization’s overall purpose and broader goals and results.

3) Technology: Go social or get left behind

Collaboration tools—similar to the ones we use in our personal lives, Facebook, Twitter and the like—have made their way into the workplace. These social tools will be a significant catalyst for workplace change, enabling real-time and powerful channels to share knowledge, bridge performance gaps, find and tap the expertise of colleagues, fuel employee-driven innovation and harness the collective wisdom through “crowdsourcing.”

But we will only see the benefits if we do the hard work first of fostering these new behaviors and expectations into our culture.

4) Growth & Development: If they're not growing, they're going

Career development is an exciting, dynamic practice space right now. With the aging of the Baby Boomers and the entrance of millions of Gen Yers into the workplace, there’s an opportunity to rethink career progression norms and partner young and experienced workers in unprecedented ways. We believe the way people begin and end their careers must be recreated, offering audacious, strategic work experiences to younger workers at earlier points in their careers, and giving experienced workers the chance to reinvent themselves and take on coaching and mentoring roles.

Learn more about the new workplace GDP (growth & development path) in our whitepaper.

5) Culture: Culture is king; collaboration is queen

A commitment to a people-centric culture is needed to create the sense of community and mission that can be embraced by employees in the years to come. The first step is for leaders to honestly assess their current culture, with a willingness to admit and take action if the actual culture turns out to be different from what is stated in brochures or promoted in company folklore. Company cultures shift over time. New leaders, mergers and acquisitions and external market conditions all contribute to culture shift.

6) Communication: If you think you shouldn't share it, you probably should

Transparency is the name of the game.  Honesty is a good policy not just because we’re forced to do it in this Internet era, but also because telling the truth demonstrates respect for one’s audience and gains people’s trust. Honesty leads to deeper understanding and commitment. People are more apt to follow a leader they believe they can trust and comply with requests when they know they’ve been given the straight story.

7) Rewards: Meaning is the new money

Everyone believes they should be paid fairly for what they do. Absolutely. But, beyond fair pay is a deep need for meaning at work. People want to dedicate their skills and ideas to the achievement of an end game they understand and believe in. And they want to be appreciated for their specific contributions.

Learn more on these emerging workplace trends from our point of view >> get the whitepaper here

The other day I was meeting with a group of corporate leaders and one of them said “I’m sorry I just can’t think about using social media with our employees – it’s too daunting!  I mean, c’mon, wiki this, blog that, tweet what?”

Understandably yes, it can be overwhelming and confusing.  Platforms, vendors, tools, oh my!  Often this jargon can be enough to make your head spin.

But, there’s no need to be anti-social ....Here’s the secret - this shouldn’t be and isn’t about the technology.  Social doesn’t happen without the people – the definition of ‘social’ IS people… and as for having a Ph.D. in wiki-ology, blog-ology or RSS-feedology - you don’t need it.  The terms are actually more complex and mysterious than the tools themselves.

Social networking has the ability to be a real galvanizer for improving collaboration in our organizations – and helping to connect across the enterprise in ways we haven’t been able to do since travel budgets were completely unrestricted (umm, which was never).

Here are a couple of innovative ways I’ve seen these technologies used to help organizations solve their most pressing organizational issues.

Pfizer’s internal social efforts took off when they developed a solution to one of their organizational challenges – that is how to find a way to give employees access to critical info and to make sure the intellectual capital was retained and easily accessible internally. Pfizerpedia, their one-stop-shop for employees, holds more than 10,000 articles, videos and other content that their employees need to do their jobs everyday. As the effort continued, Pfizerpedia added more features and now allows employees to post blogs and collaborate with their counterparts around the world.

Numerous companies have been using CEO blogs to connect executives to employees (in other words: to humanize the leaders and show they're real people) – we all know that connecting employees to their leadership, in meaningful ways, has been an age-old organizational challenge.

At one Fortune 100 retailer, the CEO gets involved by participating in numerous brainstorming sessions through the online community groups. He also carefully listens to the contributions that associates are making each day in the community, and each quarter he cherry-picks a select group of employees for a virtual focus group to solicit ideas and provide feedback. For 3 months at a time, you have employees, across all levels, all able to provide their own two cents to their leader. As you can imagine, this translates to tremendous employee loyalty and enthusiasm for the brand and for the leader.

These are just a couple examples of the power of how these tools can enable change in your organization.

It’s true that to empower employees with a voice and tools like these requires leaders who are willing to be active participants in the conversation and managers who are able to facilitate and influence that dialogue.

For some companies that won’t be a far stretch and for others, there will have to be a complete resocialization.

More soon!