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Sunday, January 23, 2000
How we get along in the modern workplace
There'll be more teamwork, teleconferencing, telecommuting, surveys say
Back in the 1900s - well, actually the early 1990s - Rodney King asked the famous question: "Can't we all just get along?"
Well, here are some predictions, provided by several workplace surveys, on how we'll be getting along in the next few years:
Seventy-nine percent of executives say that self-managed employee work teams will increase productivity for U.S. companies, according to a survey of 150 executives with the nation's 1,000 largest companies by OfficeTeam, a national administrative staffing service.
Eighty-four percent of executives believe that employees have adopted a better team play mindset in the past five years, according to OfficeTeam.
E-mail (according to 73 percent of respondents) and video conferencing (12 percent) will be the leading forms of business communication for employees by 2005, according to the same survey.
Ninety-one percent of executives believe that managers are giving employees more authority to make decisions or take action compared with five years ago, according to the survey.
Companies are changing their benefits plans to attract candidates by offering: casual dress days (82 percent), flex time (53 percent), profit sharing/stock options (51 percent), upgraded health coverage (46 percent), expanded child or elder care assistance (45 percent), and telecommuting options (43 percent), according to the survey.
Forty-six percent of chief information officers expect that offices will be smaller in the year 2005, and 23 percent say workplaces will be more open to accommodate teams, according to a nationwide survey of 1,400 chief information officers, also surveyed by OfficeTeam.
By 2005, 77 percent of chief information officers believe, the increased use of technology will make it more important for employees to be able to communicate effectively and articulately, according to that survey.
The most prevalent technologies in 2005 will be wireless communication and personal digital assistants, the chief information officers survey says.
The Computer Industry Almanac predicts that 720 million people worldwide will access the Internet at least once a week from home or work.
Goldman Sachs International projects that the number of U.S. temporary workers will exceed 5 million by 2005, a 150 percent increase from 1995.
OfficeTeam also has found that employees discuss work-related matters more often than any other subject around the water cooler. Work-related matters take up 39 percent of water-cooler discussion, followed by office gossip (9 percent), sports (6 percent), politics (5 percent), stocks (4 percent) and the weather (1 percent).
If these surveys are right, it sounds like we'll all be getting along with each other just fine. And we won't be getting along without the Internet. But isn't that already the case?
Tom Whitehurst
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Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard
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