Fit for the Millennium

Organisation and Motivation in the 21st Century

Working in the Next Century

From the start of the next century we will be working and managing in different ways. The pressures for change are enormous.

There is a continued drive to provide higher quality, better and faster service for a lower cost, against competition from ever increasing sources.
Demographic change means that by the year 2000, the high flyers moving into top jobs will be young enough to have lived all their lives with computers.
The hugely simplified human interfaces to information systems, and the rapid disappearance of any distinction between the use of all forms of communication, whether IT, telephone, fax, television, video or radio means that they are no longer "technology". The easier it all becomes to use, the easier it should be to manage.
Individuals' growing expectations are for more flexible working, and continual improvement of living standards.
The increasingly global nature of all communications leads to new competitors as well as new opportunities
There is a large and growing psychological pressure for change just because we are at the end of the century.

The Issues to be Addressed

We need to be able to plan for different working practices, because this is where the greatest savings in costs and the greatest increases in productivity and quality of service are going to come from over the next five years.

We need to become sharper at using new techniques as they become available, so that we can free ourselves from the maintenance burden of parts of procedures we no longer use, and can evolve our organisations continuously, ensuring that they never again become fossilised in their own systems.

These techniques will include the use of a variety of working methods over different parts of the enterprise: -

Home working and "Hot desking" where people don't have desks or workstations of their own.
Getting the customer or supplier to do more of the work by accessing information directly and integrating systems.
Staff working when needed, leading to the demise of the conventional Monday to Friday working week. This is particularly important for organisations supporting customers world-wide.
Focusing on the core business specialisms whilst building partnerships to provide the support services.
Reducing the paper; many offices only exist to support the paper. It is now possible to replace paper without extensive systems analysis, and without writing any programs.

A Strategy for People and Organisations

We can only intercept the new working methods if we start now. We must put in place the strategy for employees to embrace these new methods and for organisations to evolve to be able to support these. Success and innovation is dependent on our staff.

Of course, in order to plan the organisation structure, we will have to ask some very searching questions about what activities we want to undertake.

in our core business
in our supporting structure

What skills and knowledge are under-utilised, and can these earn us additional revenue?

Where do we have disproportionately high costs?

Which people could be replaced by "parts of people"?

Which contracts of employment could be replaced by short-term contracts?

What responsibilities will best motivate our key staff?

Loud and Bow Ltd. has developed a service based on its own experiences to help government and commercial enterprises to improve their effectiveness and competitiveness into the next century.