Think twice about giving up the day job
We all know that the way we work is changing but it is difficult to assess the strength or the direction of change. Equally, we can be seduced by images of change that portray a future of work quite unlike our existing experience. I became so attracted to the vision of portfolio careers, promoted by the management writer Charles Handy, that two-and-a-half years ago I stepped out of salaried work into the uncertain world of the self-employed. The experience has been a happy one so far. But I would hesitate about recommending it for everyone, not because of the usual worries about social isolation - I enjoy working from home - but because of the inefficiencies in this type of work that keep you away from the job you do best. Working for an employer meant that I could concentrate on research and writing - the essence of a news reporter’s job. Today I must invest time in marketing, sales, negotiating, networking, presenting and administration. This is fine. I always preferred to lick my own stamps anyway. But writing - still my chief source of income - has become a luxury that I struggle to make time for among all the other stuff. A new book* on the changing workplace has reinforced my belief that most of us should stick to our day jobs. Written by four leading employment experts, it is an impressive and comprehensive analysis of the forces of workplace change in Britain. Instead of engaging in populist futurology, the authors ground their observations in a 2002 survey of employment practices among 2,000 private and public sector workplaces ranging in size between five and 7,500 employees. The impact of the research is not so much in the practices it reveals - all of them are widely recognised - but the degree to which companies have been changing their employment policies. “The picture from the survey is one of tumultuous change,” say the authors. “The great majority of workplaces have engaged in new forms of recruitment, have added to flexibility, [and] have made a multiplicity of advances in their human resource development or people practices.” The book identifies four pervasive trends underpinning the transformation of employment policies: broadening competition, the rise of “knowledge work”, a sharper focus on the management of people and external regulation. It also sheds new light on the nature of flexible working practices, making a distinction between “bought-in” flexibility to substitute for permanent jobs and what it calls “intelligent flexibility”. This involves training, multi-skilling and varying work experience to equip internal employees with transferable skills that can be used in different parts of an organisation. Evidence from the survey, say the authors, suggests that the use of temporary and contract labour, now entrenched across the labour market, may be “running out of steam”. I would question the weight given to this observation since more employers than not were expecting to increase their use of temporary, contract and outsourced work in the three-year period covered. Even so, the distinction between two different types of flexibility is worth making as a counter to populist beliefs that long-term career paths will disappear from the labour market. In fact the evidence points to a continuing determination among employers to retain long-term career prospects for their best staff. The offer of long-term prospects, the authors argue, is an effective way of retaining good staff who might otherwise be lured away by recruiters skilled at identifying talent in competitor companies. The research is set against broad economic change in which manufacturing has given way to services as the dominant source of employment in the UK within a single generation. In the same period, manual work has shrunk from providing the majority of jobs to representing less than one job in three while managerial and professional jobs have increased their share of the market to 40 per cent. Another influential change in the latter half of the 20th century has been a big increase in the proportion of jobs held by women, up from one-third to almost a half of all jobs today. The book also notes the decline in trade union influence. In 1980, seven in 10 employees had their pay set by collective bargaining. In 1998 the proportion was down to four in 10, mostly in the public sector. No wonder employees are becoming increasingly individualist in their approach to their careers. Old-style collectivism is on the retreat across society. One of the most telling collection of statistics presented in the book is a table of selected changes in employment practices (in the three years to the survey date) that reveal broad-based change. Training people to cover other jobs, job rotation, the expectation of staff to fill varying roles, and team working have all shown a marked increase. The same is true for individual performance assessment and the use of group-based incentives. Although a significant number of companies among those surveyed were continuing to reduce the number of management grades and the proportion of managers to employees during this period, a far larger number were recording increases in both these areas, indicating a reversal of the trend towards “de-layering” of management grades. The research, however, should not be interpreted as a sign that employers are returning to traditional employment practices. It found that companies were experimenting increasingly with “hot-desking”, teleworking and home working. The most comforting finding for people who want to retain permanent jobs, however, must be the evidence suggesting that long-term careers remain a necessary feature of organisational strength. “Employees and managers have come through troubling years of insecurity in the early 90s. Relative to that experience, the current trends are much improved. Flexibility is turning intelligent, careers are back, knowledge and know-how are valued, recruitment barriers are lowered,” say the authors. But they do include caveats. Employers, they note, have yet to find ways of easing the burden of increasingly longer office hours keeping people away from their domestic responsibilities. Perhaps the biggest surprise of this research is that it should be regarded as surprising. Viewed separately the trends reflect what might be expected. Viewed together, however, with some convincing interpretation added, the findings portray a remarkable transformation in the British workplace. As the authors remind us: “Despite all the uncertainties and shortcomings, British workplaces are managing to change.” *Managing to Change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work, by Michael White, Stephen Hill, Colin Mills and Deborah Smeaton, is published by Palgrave Macmillan, price ￡50, as part of the Economic Social Research Council’s Future of Work Series
辞职单干前你要三思
我们都知道工作方式在不断改变，却很难估计这种改变的程度和方向。同样，我们常常会这种改变所诱惑，因为它描绘了一幅不用于当前体验的未来工作图。
我曾经被“自由职业”（portfolio careers）的前景所吸引，而管理学作家查尔斯?韩第（Charles Handy）又进一步让我陷进去。于是，两年半前我辞去了固定收入的职业，从此步入了一个替自己打工的，但充满着不确定因素的世界。
到目前为止，自由职业的体验感觉还不错。但如果要劝别人加入这一行列，我会三思。这不是因为自由职业将导致与社会疏远，而这点正是人们普遍担心的，实际上我很喜欢在家工作。真正的原因是这种工作的性质导致工作效率低下，让你没空从事你真正擅长的事情。
为雇主工作意味着我可以集中精力从事研究和写作，这是一个记者的核心工作。但是今天，我必须投入时间进行市场调研，推销，谈判，协调，做演示，管理等。这也还好。毕竟，我是一个喜欢事必躬亲的人。但是，写作――这仍旧是我主要的收入来源，――现在却成为一件奢侈的事情。我必须从其他事务中挤出时间来写作。
最近有本讲办公室文化的变迁新书*，进一步加深了我的看法，那就是大多数人都应该继续做一份全职工作。这本书由四位顶尖的职业顾问撰写。该书深入且全面地分析了英国社会中，影响办公室文化的各种力量。
这几位作者没有采用流行的未来主义的手法，而是把观点建立在2002年进行的一项关于职业体验的调查上。这项调查的范围包括了员工人数在5人－7500人不等的，2000多家私人或者公共部门。
这一调查的影响力不仅仅在于它在多大程度上揭示了人们的工作体验――这些体验很有共性，而是在于它在多大程度上揭示了企业正在改变的雇佣政策。
“该项调查展示是一个喧闹着变化的场景”，这几位作者说道。“大部分公司都采用了新的招聘方法，增加了工作弹性，而且在人事发展或者用人方法上作出许多改进。”
该书阐述了四种很具有普遍意义的趋势，并认为这些趋势进一步带来了雇佣政策的改变。这四种趋势是：竞争范围扩大，“知识型工作”的兴起，愈加成为焦点的人力资源管理以及外部监管。
该书给弹性工作制的本质也做了新的解释，把用来替代固定工作的“外来的弹性工作”与该书所指的“智力型弹性”区分开来。后者包括培训，让员工获得多种技能和各种工作体验以便具备各种技能，以胜任组织内的不同岗位。
这几位作者表示，调查中的实证显示，临时工或者合同工的使用，在劳动力市场上已经非常普遍，但“势头会减缓”。我有点置疑这一观点的可信度，因为在该书讲述的那3年时间里，更多的雇员希望能更多地利用临时的，合同制的，外包的工作。
尽管如此，区分两种不同性质的弹性工作非常有必要，因为这一看法挑战了流行观点。流行观点认为，长期的职业发展将从劳动力市场上消失。事实上，现在的证据表明，许多雇主一直希望能够为他们的最佳员工，创造长期的职业发展前景。
这几位作者争论说，提供长期的发展规划，是有效留住优秀员工的做法，否则这些人很可能受猎头诱惑离开公司。猎头总是最善于在各个竞争对手中发掘各类人才。
这项研究的背景，正是宏观经济发生的变革。总体而言，仅用了一代人的时间，制造业就已经让位于服务业，后者已成为英国最主要的就业机会来源。一度提供最多就业机会的体力劳动，现在所占的比例不到三分之一，与此同时，管理和专业技术岗位在劳动力市场中的比例已经上升到40％。
在20世纪后期发生的另一个影响深远的变化就是妇女的工作岗位大大增加，从原先的三分之一上升到了今天的将近一半的比例。这本书同时指出，工会影响力正不断削弱。在1980年，10个雇员中，7个人通过集体讨价还价来确定工资。到了1998年，这一比例下降到十分之四，而且大多数集中在公共部门。毫无疑问，现在的雇员更加在追求个人职业发展时，更加依靠个体力量。在整个社会，传统的集体主义正在不断消退。
这本书提供的一系列数字中，最具有说服力的是一张列举了若干雇佣做法（employment practices）变化因素（该调查进行的三年时间里）的表格，也充分反映了经济的总体变化趋势。培训员工以便让他们能够胜任其他岗位，岗位轮换，期望员工能够胜任各类工作，团队工作等现象都有很明显的增长。同样，对于个人业绩的评估和采用集体激励机制的做法都有增长。
虽然受访的企业中，不少公司都在这一期间削减管理层的设置，缩小管理人员所占的比例。但是同时更多的公司，在这两方面都有增加，说明企业中出现了“反扁平化”管理的趋势。
当然，这项研究也不应该解释成：雇主们正在回复传统的雇佣做法。这项研究发现，企业正越来越多正试着采用共用办公桌（hot-desking），电话工作，或者在家工作的方法。
对于那些想有一份固定工作的人来讲，可以感到安慰的一个发现那一定是：有证据表明，长期的职业对于保持一个组织的力量非常必要。“在90年代初期，雇员们和经理们都经历了颇没有安全感的烦恼时期。相对那段时期，现在的趋势已经好多了。弹性工作因人而宜，职业追求又被提及，知识和专业技能得到重视，招聘的门槛也降低了”，这几位作者说道。
但是他们也发出了一些警告。他们指出，雇主们还没有找到可以减轻员工负担的办法，因为办公室时间越来越长，让员工越来越没有时间去履行一些家庭义务。
或许，最让人感到惊讶的是，这项研究可以说是出人意料。分开来看，这些趋势可能反映了未来的趋势。然而，集中来看，再补充一些言辞凿凿的解释，这项研究的结论描绘了在英国的诸多办公室里发生的深刻变化。正如这几位作者提醒我们的：“尽管有着种种不确定因素和缺陷，英国的办公室文化正在成功地改变着自己”。
