What are your 2013 Project Management Resolutions?
Am I the only one who sees the year 2013 and thinks, How did that happen? It seems like only yesterday it was Y2K and yet, so much has happened and changed since then.
I feel the same way when I think about work. So much is different now than it was 13 years ago—or even five years ago—when it comes to how we do work. In fact, if you compare today’s workforce and habits to those that existed when traditional project management came to be (about 60ish years ago), the differences are dramatic. And yet, many project managers and PMOs are still using project management processes that were designed for the way work got done back then, even though today’s workforce does things so differently. For example, here are five ways the workforce has evolved:
1. People are more social and collaborative.
Welcome to the technology age—where people live in a constant state of connectivity made possible through mobile devices and social networking. These kinds of interactions weren’t available 60 years ago, but they’ve been around long enough now to have a dramatic effect on the evolution of how people do work. A recent research study conducted by Dell and Intel reports the validity of this evolution:
“Around the world, work attitudes and work practices are evolving rapidly, fueled by technological development and widespread connectivity. As cheap connectivity shatters physical boundaries and facilitates the free flow of information, ideas, talent, and other knowledge resources, the world of work is being redefined and traditional expectations of workers, managers, and organizations are being challenged.”
This redefinition, especially in the IT project management space, has come to include the increased use of social tools on project teams in order to facilitate collaborative team atmospheres. In fact, 83% of project managers agree that social media tools improve the way they manage their projects.
2. Teams are becoming more distributed.
Today’s workforce has evolved such that teams can operate with any number of team members working remotely or even globally, thanks to advances in technology that make it possible to stay connected to your team—no matter your time zone or location. Research by Forrester shows that 66% of information workers in North America and Europe already work remotely and that number is likely to continue to grow.
3. Team members are more technologically reliant.
Most knowledge workers of the younger generations have been raised and educated using advanced technology and social tools to do all of their work and networking. Technology, for them, is an integrated part of regular life—not merely a tool for doing things more efficiently if they want to. In a recent article entitled, “The New Concerns of an Evolving Workforce,” Jada A. Graves projects that:
“By 2020, today’s young entry-level employees will be tomorrow’s middle management, professionals who were nurtured in a digital age where everything—from talking to family, to checking the weather, to sending an important office email—can be done on the go. Where Facebook is important, but face time? Not so much. Their philosophies and practices have changed and will continue to change how we work.”
4. The workforce is more autonomous than ever.
Gone are the days when individual workers responded well to being micromanaged or expected to be closely monitored as they performed their one or two specific functions or duties. Today, knowledge workers need and expect to have more ownership over the work that they do. They want to have a say, to be empowered to make decisions about their workloads and the way they do their work. And even further than that, they want flexibility and to be engaged at work. As Tony Schwartz recently stated in a research article in the Harvard Business Review:
“For organizations, the challenge is to shift from their traditional focus on getting more out of people, to investing in meeting people’s core needs so they’re freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work, more sustainably. Specifically, Towers Watson concludes that organizations must create policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their workload, live more balanced lives and exercise greater autonomy around how, when, and where they get their work done. Policies focused on flexibility and working remotely contribute to a more energized workplace, we’ve found, and so does setting organization-wide boundaries around the length of meeting and the hours during which people are expected to respond to email.”
5. People are no longer motivated primarily by money.
Today’s workforce values—and even craves—something more to motivate them at work than monetary reinforcement. Team members are looking for projects that they can buy into, feel like significant contributors to, and that push them to be creative and innovative in how they work—a stark contrast to the days of factory workers and assembly lines. For the modern worker, satisfaction at work isn’t about how much they’re getting paid. It’s about being engaged in their work. It’s about feeling excited to work on a project because they feel that their knowledge, skill set, and effort is adding noticeable value. In a recent Forbes article, Dov Seidman wrote:
“This is a Eureka moment for employee engagement: we’ve cracked the code on what truly inspires employees. The source of engagement has nothing to do with breaking bread (or bread sticks) and everything to do with the extent to which trust, values and mission actually inspire and drive daily activities and interactions.”
Perhaps thinking about all these ways the workforce, how they do work, and their needs have changed will help you come up with some project management New Year Resolutions for 2013—How will you keep up with the evolving workforce? How do your project management practices need to change in order to support today’s workforce?
