On Monday 23rd March, 2015, across the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, thousands of commuters were stranded in their cars and on the roadsides due to an unannounced day of policing which involved roadblocks and individual examination of vehicles.
With many frustrated employees doing their best to get to work and begin their duties I wondered why aren’t they opting to return home and work from there. It has been a growing trend in other nations where “work from home” policies are readily set up for employees to enable productivity in situations such as this.
So what are the other work related trends?
It has been predicted that in some industries such as marketing, the once-familiar business tactics will start to die off—or will already be dead.
Here are 6 business tactics and norms that are expected to fall by the wayside in the next five years.
Siloed marketing departments
The era of companies having separate departments for brand strategy, digital, social media, or content production will be over. It’s all just marketing, which is totally focused on one thing: revenue generation.
Consequently, the CMO will become the second-most-important person in an organization—after the CEO—because he/she is responsible for overseeing and perfecting the customer experience to maximize the revenue generated from those efforts.
This also means there will no longer be an independent sales head. That person will now work with—and for—the CMO. This leads right into the next point.
Salespeople
We are moving into a user-driven sales environment where all the information a customer might ever need about a product is readily available on the Web.
Unless your salespeople bring real industry, insight, and consulting expertise to the buying experience, they don’t provide any value. The best (and last standing) salespeople will be those with real knowledge that customers need to help them make informed and intelligent buying decisions. The order-taker reps will have long been replaced with a website.
The cubicle and the 9-to-5
The traditional 9-to-5 world is ending, because employees are always connected and the lines between the workday and our personal lives are blurred. This has its good and bad points. Want to leave at 4 p.m. for yoga? Go for it, but when the boss emails at 9 p.m., she’ll be expecting a response immediately.
This will also affect how offices look, because no one wants to sit in boxes anymore. Open design is now the norm along with telecommuting, job sharing, and sabbaticals.
Personal branding
Very few people will still have an old-school paper resume. Instead we will have a curated (and, in some cases, not-so-curated) digital footprint—consisting of a LinkedIn profile, blog, social profiles, images, and other items that surface in a Google search.
These will be the go-to resources for companies looking to hire new talent and people looking to vet nascent personal relationships. This revolution in “getting to know someone” is a double-edged sword because the Internet is forever, which makes reputation management essential across all your platforms.
Imagine the future presidential election candidates that will be from the generation that grew up with Facebook. A potential disaster for all involved is highly plausible.
The printer
Very few annual reports, directories, or any internal or external documents will continue to be printed.
Online publications with interactive graphics and video can provide so much more value and ease of distribution. The same goes for B2B trade publications, as they will all move to online formats.
Retailers will also realize that most of the sale flyers they stuff in newspapers and mailboxes are going straight to the recycle bin. These paper products will turn to email, digital, and mobile delivery almost exclusively.
Travel
Teleconferencing technology will become better and more efficiently used. Everything from Google+ and Skype to enterprise-level systems that make you feel like you are in the same room will proliferate in the commercial space.
Audio- and video-enabled robots already exist with screens that can display the face of the remote party and be maneuvered around the office in and out of meetings as needed. Innovations like these will curtail the need to fly across the country for face time or for only one or two meetings.
Of course, face-to-face interaction will always be crucial in business relationships, but it can be reserved for a few essential instances.
Photo by RayBay
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