The grey tide, the future of the Australian workplace and the pain of renting
Last November I posted the following to a private mailing-list in a discussion on telecommuting:
My feeling is that such arrangements will become more common in the future. The reasoning behind this is that as Australia’s population ages there will be an increasing shortage of skilled knowledge workers, and consequently working conditions will become more negotiable. Add to this the likely gradual increase in oil prices (reflected at the pump) and the continuing high cost of property near the city and this option will be attractive to many employees.
If the above holds (and I may very well be wrong) then this will start to really kick-in in 2010 (when the baby-boomers start to retire), peaking around 2015. But we’re already starting to see some of the effects, with companies going to lengths to hire and retain younger employees ….
The Australian Financial Review today had a article (paywalled so no link) on the coming hiring crisis that reflects a lot of what I’ve said there. Particularly interesting is this quote from the Terence Budge of the Australian Institute of Company Directors:
This generation want to live where they work and not just be in the office from nine to five … They want to do some work over a coffee at the cafe, something else on their laptop at night …
I think this problem is going to see a lot more attention over the next couple of years, and is going to have other side-effects that are as yet unseen. Certainly it is going to affect the tools that are used by these increasingly mobile workers; SaaS, wikis and other manifestation of the internet-as-the-platform are likely to have an even greater uptake than we are already seeing.
Another quote that caught my eye is this from Craig Perrett of act3:
Mr Perrett said only about 25 per cent of workers at retirement age believed they could afford to retire and many were rejecting the traditional notion of retirement.
If it is true that 75% can’t afford to retire then this is going to have some huge implications. The first one that springs to mind is that unless these underfunded retiree’s are prepared to work full time they are going to have to find money from somewhere, and for most the only significant asset they have is their home. This will lead to a glut of housing entering the market in the medium term. Ultimately this and the decentralisation of the workplace could have a far greater effect on the Sydney housing crisis than government intervention.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on May 13, 2008 at 11:57 pm Guy Fraser wrote:
With regards to working from home, everyone at Adaptavist already does, all the time. Having multiple communication methods (wiki, jira, various IM accounts, VoIP and even dreaded email) is essential to maintaining interaction with other members of the team.
There are some key benefits:
* Almost no meetings (we have about 5 meetings a year in total across the entire company) – _everything_ is done online
* Very low overheads, and good for the environment – eg. the 3 founders reduced mileage to and from work by more than the circumference of the earth (over 66 thousand miles) in the first year alone
* Extreme resilience to disasters (floods, power outages, viruses, terrorism, etc) – you’d have to hit the whole country to take us out
* No office politics whatsoever – because there’s no damn office lol
* New recruits don’t need to live local – they can be anywhere that has an internet connection
* Staff with disabilities can work in their preferred environment
* No fixed office hours – staff work when they are “in the zone” and can take breaks whenever they want
There are some key disadvantages:
* New recruits are completely lost at first – the distributed and seemingly random nature of the company is totally alien to them
* Staff tend to work too many hours – we’re having to force people to take time off (which is turning out to be a very difficult task!)
* Slackers can go unnoticed for up to a month – other members of staff will soon kick them in to shape though
* It’s difficult to maintain the social aspect – staff who live on the outer regions of our humble empire have a long way to travel to get inebriated with co-workers
* No fixed office hours – sometimes people aren’t around when you need them leading to _minor_ delays
It should be noted that once staff have worked from home (or wherever they want to – anywhere with an internet connection will do) they really aren’t keen on working for conventional companies (or even conventional hours) ever again.
More scattered throughout my blog: http://www.adaptavist.com/display/~gfraser/All Blog Posts