The modern workforce, part III: a changing culture of work

1. Summary

This report is the third in a series of three that analyzes the results of two global surveys: one of the vanguard of the modern workforce (workers ages 18 to 34) and one of IT decision-makers. This Gigaom Research study aims to help tech buyers and IT executives better understand:

• What the modern workforce thinks it needs to succeed in this rapidly changing world of mobile-first communications and new work-collaboration technologies
• How IT is supporting those needs and overall corporate objectives
• If there are gaps between worker expectations and IT requirements and how technology buyers can address them

Gigaom Research’s objective is to give technology decision-makers better insights into how their workforce is evolving so they can make them more successful and align people and technologies with corporate objectives. In this report we focus on the changing culture of work.

Key findings in this report, which focuses on the workforce and its leadership, include:

• We are seeing a rapid move toward more mobile workers, changing patterns of work and communications, and changing work-life balance. Those changes are creating the 3D workforce, which is distributed, discontinuous, and decentralized. Over a third of young workers work outside the office (34 percent) or after hours (37 percent) at least monthly, and well over half (62 percent and 55 percent, respectively) the IT decision-makers we surveyed could support that.
• The modern workforce and IT are largely in sync on communication and collaboration objectives. Both cite increasing productivity as the top priority: 42 percent of IT and 32 percent of workers.
• The surveys suggest that the nature of management is shifting, as older and more-traditional organizational cultures are slowly being shifted toward more egalitarian and agile models. The plurality of workers (42 percent) prefers the current entrepreneurial culture, and one-third (33 percent) prefer the coming agile enterprise.

With these changes in the workforce, technologies, and business practices, a more emergent leadership style may be necessary — where leadership takes on those 3D characteristics — as we shift toward an egalitarian style of work.

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