Similar to how organisms evolve, the same can be seen for
organization. The organizations and management strategies used
today are vastly different from what they were decades ago. As a
result, we can expect difference challenges, trends and
opportunities in the future. Here are some of these that we will
face in the future
Challenges
- Knowledge shortage: There is an expectation that by 2020, there
will be a shortage of about 40 million skilled workers. This is not
because there will not be skilled people, but because the skilled
people will likely move out of organizations to work with smaller
teams or to start their own venture. This will cause a challenge
for organizations to retain talent. A report from McKinsey Global
Institute titled “World at work” covers the details.
- Focus on experience: Products and services are going to be more
focused on experience. Features such as free trial, demo, etc are
already quite well known. However, some companies such as banking,
financial services, and medical services may face challenges due to
their conventional offering. The consumer mentality is likely to
shift towards experience based buying.
- Security and asset management: We have organizations that
implements cultures such as work from home, bring your own device,
flexible work hours. With these systems, organizations are going to
face challenges in efficiently managing their assets and overall
security of data and information. These trends are going to
increase and the security challenges are only going to get
bigger.
Trends
- Organization loyalty: The trend of being loyal to organization
is diminishing. In the future, there is likely going to be a
complete collapse of this concept. The trend of being loyal to an
organization will no longer exist. Changing companies rapidly will
not be seen as a negative property in one’s career.
- Technology: Companies are going to be even more dependent on
technology. Currently we have already seen how internet is key to
business operations around the world. Technology is eventually
going take over different operations from sales, marketing,
manufacturing, operations, and HR. Automation trends are going to
kick in very strongly in the near future.
- Communication: Once upon a time we only had a formal
communication in organization in form of email or memos. However,
in the future, we can expect many other forms of communication.
This could include the like so social media, messaging apps and
more. With more flexibility and mobility at work place,
organizations will adapt to these trends in the future.
Opportunities
- Systematic forecasting: In the future, we will be using
technology, past data and different data sources more efficiently.
As a result, we will likely be able to forecast many of the future
events within the organization.
- New leadership: Our leadership principles so far has been
traditional by standard. However, with employee loyalties shifting,
new challenges arising and heavy influence of technology, we will
likely see new leadership types emerging that could be a hybrid of
existing styles and new ones