Vision for the future of work - part 3

I mentioned my vision around the knowledge-based-network-organisation, where organisations become communities.

You may say: “organisations were always communities”. What I see as different is the “power”-relationship. The old pyramid structure was made of the person(s) at the top, and the rest were “followers”.

Communities are carried together, where everybody contributes. From a HR perspective I can best describe it as follows: a community functions around norms and values. Some communities may say that if the meeting starts at 10am, it doesn’t start at 10.01am. For other communities 10am is more of a guideline. No written rules, but norms that are accepted and build on expected standards of behaviour.

I think this is very important and will significantly impact on HR. Writing an employment policy handbook and enforcing compliance is totally different than managing and designing an organisation culture.

I mentioned power-relationships. This has several impacts on the “future of employment” and more significantly on HR as well. I will come back to that later. But for now, I want to mention leadership. In my vision of the future of work, build around communities and knowledge-based-network-organisations, leadership will evolve quite significantly. Communities still have leaders and require leaders to function. The role of leaders will evolve and the best leadership model I can find thus far is “the distributed leadership model” as described by MIT.