Being a flexible friend

The second factor is more difficult to pin down, but is equally worrying.

Employees today want more and more flexibility

If you can't provide flexibility, smart individuals with that lifestyle expectation will look for someone who can. This is particularly true as the economy warms up and there are increased job opportunities out there and employers vie with each other to hire the best talent.

But there is a second part to this flexibility issue. An increasing number of employees are opting out of mainstream business altogether. While there may be lots and lots of studies that say workers are toiling longer, there is an increasingly large body of evidence that the toil has taken on new purpose. Indeed, for every report of people working longer and longer hours, there is a counter report saying employees are queuing up at the exits. Look at it this way, putting the career first while robustly pursuing the bottom-line is being replaced by putting the family/personal life first while robustly pursuing a better quality of life. The lifestyle expectation is here to stay and no number of scare stories about jobs moving offshore and an influx of economic migrants is going to change that.

What employers are facing is a massive outbreak of disconnection disease. Rather than worry about how their personal life affects their work, employees today are more concerned with how their work affects their personal life. Any aspect of a job that has a negative impact on their personal life creates potential for personal disconnection. But we as employers demand more and more and so personal disconnection increases .

I am not claiming that every employee is headed for a life - or even wants a life - of milk and honey far away from corporate chaos. What I am saying is that at a certain period in their lives employees may willingly succumb to the corporate life while they build their stake for the future. But, once they have achieved that, other options, that we could only dream of a decade or so ago, are available.

Basically, it all comes down to one thing: choice . Until recently most people went to school, graduated , got a job, worked and retired . It just isn't like this anymore. In just a few months while planning this book, I have seen people in all age groups abandon what used to be called a ˜safe career' to go and do something completely different. And while only a handful of people used to make that decision, it is now becoming more and more common. Technology has much to do with that. Now, anyone with an armful of cheap[ish] software and hardware can stay in touch and often work from just about anywhere . The office drudge, the five-day-a-week commuter, now knows that you can have your cake and eat it too. Governments are worried about obesity; they should be a lot more worried that the couch potato generation ( specifically the smart couch potatoes) have realised that you can live, work and eat in Italy and do your London job on-line. So how do you compete with that?

If we don't make huge efforts to understand the motivations of our employees we will never meet their needs or get the best out of them during their bouts of productive activity.

This is particularly true of the next generations of employees. They are less likely to want a job for life, and don't feel the need for all the security their parents and grandparents built around them. They marry later, they buy houses later, they have children later. They are, essentially , free to go wherever they want. Thing is, they do just that. They have also worked out the deal that their manager or supervisor has about as much information about the future as they have. They saw their parents and grandparents downsized and re-engineered and they are, not surprisingly, totally unimpressed with any corporate newspeak. And they know that the corporate newspeak exists because they've heard all about it from friends and family. They probably have a more colourful word for it too.

In fact the whole working world is totally unimpressed with corporate newspeak and spin. As part of the research for this book, I asked a number of employees (see more details in Chapter 3) what they most disliked about organisations. Top every time was that managers don't ˜walk the talk': they say one thing and do another. Also on the list was the fact that they do not communicate well and they do not listen.

So, if you want a condensed version of this book's advice, here's what to do.

• do what you say you are going to do

• tell the truth

• listen to what employees are saying.

My concern is that in this complex corporate world we have created (or have bungled together) it is practically impossible to meet these three, very basic, requirements for a well-managed organisation.