The Shape Of Things To Come Begins To Take Shape - coming trends in business management - Brief Article

Nation's Business, Feb, 1999 by Thomas Love

Thomas Love is a business writer in Mclean, Va.

Service tailored for an electronic age; emerging workplace trends; a company environment with an ohana feeling.

Clues to what the 21st-century workplace will look like are beginning to appear, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based international outplacement company Applying these imminent trends to your business situation might help you get a leg up on your competition in the new millennium:

* As the ratio of people over 65 to working-age adults grows, companies might benefit from offering on-site elder-care facilities, much as some now offer child daycare centers. At the same time, the U.S. birthrate could reach record highs during the years 2000 to 2012. That could make companies offering day care better positioned to compete for employees.

* Today's adolescents and Generation Xers, many of whom have seen their parents downsized out of jobs, will harbor distrust for the employer-employee relationship, giving rise to a wave of entrepreneurship as they go into business for themselves.

* The trend away from jobs being perceived as "men's work" or "women's work" will accelerate, As manufacturing becomes more computerized, there will be a decline in the number of jobs that traditionally had been performed by men, and more men will pursue careers in growing sectors such as health care and business services, where many of the jobs are now held by women.

Women will compete on a more equal basis for the remaining jobs in manufacturing, most of which will require computer knowledge.

* Many retail stores will be forced to close because of competition from catalogs and the Internet, making jobs in marketing and sales among the most intensely competitive. Meanwhile, retail centers and malls that do survive will increasingly resemble amusement parks, providing movies, music, events, and other forms of entertainment.

* Partnerships between schools and business will increase in an effort to counter illiteracy and the lack of job skills. The majority of manufacturing employees will be college graduates or will have job-specific training beyond high school. The majority of the less-educated former factory workers will take lower-paying jobs in the service sector.

* Employees will find themselves increasingly isolated as voice mail and other technologies replace face-to-face exchanges, resulting in a decline in social skills that might hinder team problem-solving and threaten productivity. Companies might respond by developing social programs to bring employees together.

* The number of jobs in inner-city neighborhoods will continue to decline, and a shortage of entry-level workers will plague companies nearby. That will lead to partnerships between "edge-city" companies and inner-city social-service agencies.