Ten Ways to Survive the Corporate World

Copyright 2015 Leon Gettler.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6021-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6023-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6022-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907839

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Contents

Chapter 1 How to turn your company into an ideas factory

Chapter 2 Handling redundancy

Chapter 3 The 9 most common customer complaints — and how to inspire excellent customer service

Chapter 4 How to do presentations

Chapter 5 Making the most of social media

Chapter 6 Personal productivity

Chapter 7 The ageing workforce

Chapter 8 How to have difficult conversations

Chapter 9 Crisis managemernt

Chapter 10 Leading in an age of upheaval: how to be a 21st century leader

Surviving the office world is a big challenge these days. Be prepared. Have fun.

There is no such thing as a permanent job anymore. The future of work will be an increasing variety of contractual arrangements between a worker and an employer. We are now seeing the development of many hitherto atypical forms of employment, such as temporary agency work, fixed-term contracts, casual work, civil contracts, zero hour contracts, job sharing, on-call work, telework and working from remote locations. The twentieth century employment relationship was based on merging the needs of the manufacturing-oriented economy with mass production, full employment, collective behaviour and strong trade unions. All that has changed.

Society is in upheaval, moving towards a knowledge-based economy. As a result, we have seen a progressive increase of individualistic behaviour. People have now become brands. Welcome to the age of me.com, where there is a big focus on developing personal brands where people communicate what makes them unique and differentiated.

This trend will prompt a clear change in where, when and how people work. At the same time, it will enable organisations to be more agile and innovative. At one end of the scale, large multinational companies will consolidate and become even more global. But at the other end, temporary or ‘virtual’ small to medium sized enterprises will be set up for the length of punctual and targeted projects. These companies will have smaller regular workforces. And increasingly, they will rely on networks of contingent workers. The model used today in the construction or entertainment industries could become the norm rather than the exception: individual workers will be moving in and out of a company’s doors on a just-in-time, on-demand, project-by-project basis. The brand of me.com has now taken over the workforce.

Consider, for example, the growth of gigonomics. More and more people have taken redundancy and are working as individual traders. They don’t have jobs anymore, they have gigs.

How does a company handle that? How do gig-meisters interact with staff, company fabric and loyalty? How do companies protect intellectual property when they’re dealing with so many fly-by-night employees?

Gigonomics was always very much par for the course for certain industries. Musicians would be an obvious example. Now it’s reshaping the broader workforce. Bringing in a bunch of people focused on how much money they’ll make per gig will change companies and their cultures.

These workers aren’t lower end temps, either. They are a growing army of interim managers, even interim CFOs, taking on gigs for up to six months at a company.

As the interim army becomes more dominant, companies will have to rethink their management styles. They will have to rework their systems to accommodate interim personality types, while maintaining morale and a sense of lloyalty and trust. It’s a massive job. In his book, The Corrosion of Character, New York University professor of sociology Richard Sennett argues that the modern workplace, with its focus on temps, corrodes trust, loyalty and mutual commitment. Maybe, but it’s the way of the future.

Much of this reflects the changing economy and generational shifts. The numbers speak for themselves. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), there are one million contractors out there, about 8.7 per cent of the workforce. About 73 per cent are male. Most are in the construction industry (32 per cent) and the professional and technical services sector (13 per cent), covering such areas as law and accounting firms, bookkeeping and payroll services, architecture, engineering, design, computer services, consulting, research and advertising. About 76 per cent say they are able to work on more than one active contracat a time.

Companies need to develop strategies that enable managers to be more in touch with the temps, keeping them in the loop to ensure they are part of the company fabric. And they will need to develop systems to ensure they will not lose IP intellectual property, corporate loyalty and trust. Unfortunately, not many companies are doing that, simply. They reckon it takes too much time. They are stupid.

Add to all this the ageing of a workforce that’s creating fewer jobs. Research from US think tank the Aspen Institute has found that in the past 20 years, the US workforce grew by 44 per cent. Over the next 20, however, the projected growth rate is zip. In the past 20 years, skilled workers increased by 19 per cent but over the next two decades, the number will rise by just 4 per cent. More than 80 per cent of Australian workforce growth between 1998 and 2016 is projected to be among those over 45 years of age, according to the ABS. And there will be relatively fewer people of working age to support an increasing number of older Australians. This also means fewer jobs. Demographer Bernard Salt calls it the ‘baby bust’, a situation in which all of a sudden we have more people exiting the workforce at 65 than entering the workforce at 15.

This means that we will start seeing more experimentation as companies and industries try finding ways of using older contributors as subcontractors and freelancers. For many, the world of the contingent worker — variable income and no security — is looking more like the shape of things to come. The entire world of work is changing.

The corporate world is different now and only an outright fool would say this doesn’t create problems and challenges A revolution is transforming the corporate world. No sensible person can expect things to remain in the same job anymore. Welcome to the age of Individual Responsibility. It’s a world where the corporation is no longer responsible for giving you security. Instead, you make your own security.

This book is a handbook that presents solutions at the level of the individual, the manager, the business owner and the corporation. It’s for schools, hospitals, businesses, contractors and governments. The book examines issues like turning the workplace into an ideas factory; how to handle customer service problems; handling redundancy; creating presentations that blow everyone away; making the most of social media; how to handle an ageing workforce; and how to have difficult conversations. And much more.

It’s a handbook that leaves you with two choices. You can ignore it, which may leave you without the tools to manage the instability of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity, where identity is constantly fluid, creating unprecedented anxiety and insecurity as people splice together short-term projects and live fragmented lives in a world that requires them to be flexible and adaptable.

Or, you can use this book to dip in and out of chapters that offer solutions to the changes now confronting you. These solutions are drawn from insights accrued from my x years’ research and data as a business journalist, analyst and media producer.

You may not agree with every solution presented in the following pages. But this book maps out the problems and offers creative solutions that you can draw upon, kick against and use to devise your own solutions. If that happens, this book will have achieved its purpose.

CHAPTER ONE

How to turn your company into an ideas factory

There are many ways companies innovate. But all the most innovative companies have management systems to maintain their creative edge.

One example is MBD Energy. In partnership with James Cook University (JCU), MBD Energy is trialling the use of algae to capture and recycle carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and other major industrial emitters. The carbon dioxide abatement solution may also have massive potential spin-offs for the biofuel, animal food and health products industries, and because it’s a one-off, it could go global. We’re using exactly the same science that created the world’s fossil fuels many millions of years ago when algae flourished in response to a profusion of atmospheric carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions. But, instead of taking millennia, we’ve managed to crunch our process into just 48 hours, says Andrew Lawson, Managing Director.

Another example is Warrnambool-based Tasweld Engineering, on the cusp of creating new markets with its revolutionary RAM, or Rotated Arc Mixer. The small business developed this in collaboration with the CSIRO, Australia’s science body. The RAM is an industrial mixer with the ability to mix thick viscous fluids such as paints, foods, cosmetics or explosives. It’s the only one of its kind in the world. Conventional mixing technologies, such as static mixers, can clog and develop material build-up. This can result in production downtimes. But the RAM, which works with two cylinders, one inside the other, mixes materials without clogging or destroying ingredients. Once we get a commercial sized mixer in place and have the product trials and proven it, then we can go to market with a proven product,’’ says Tasweld Engineering director Richard Parkinson. It’s a matter of proving the technology in a full-sized industrial environment rather than a laboratory."

In Queensland, vegetation management business Technigro has developed the DriftProof Sprayer which features a patented shield that contains all of the spray droplets, ensuring the pesticides and herbicides remain on target, not out in the air. Technigro employs a chief innovation officer and a full-time R&D manager.

In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson says good ideas rarely come from a Eureka moment. Most of them take years to evolve, starting out as a hunch and often colliding with other hunches. He says the increasing connectivity now with the Internet might help facilitate more collisions and lead to greater innovation. Watch this space.

What is clear however is that these systems need to be made part of a company’s strategy and in each of these previously cited examples, systems have been created. It’s a way of staying ahead of the pack. Indeed, innovation is the life-blood of any company. Once written off, Apple, for example, restored innovation to its proper place and is now one of the world’s biggest companies. Different companies have different approaches.

Another strategy is to encourage entrepreneurialism and creative collaboration. Award-winning advertising agency Clemenger BBDO, for example, has employees who are film directors and artists or who run businesses designing laptop covers, selling bottled water and fashion labels. Clemenger BBDO managing director Peter Biggs says: If you’re going to attract creative people, you have to give them outlets for their creativity. It creates more ideas and more cross-fertilization. Biggs also has a policy of taking ideas from everyone. He recalls one time when a receptionist provided an idea. All ideas are tested. He freely admits providing ideas that never made the cut. That is part of his management culture.

Wesfarmers director Charles Macek says managers can get a lot of innovative ideas from the rank and file, simply because they interact with customers more and pick up what the market wants. The best ideas come from the shop floor, they come from the bottom up,’’ Macek says. People who are interacting with customers and dealing with the realities of whatever the business is will always be the source of innovation."

These different techniques all have certain things in common. They all have open cultures, and they are close to their customers. They have management systems that encourage innovation, systems that recognise it might take years to cultivate new skills and build a product pipeline. These companies also recognise that they need funds to create dedicated innovation teams and sufficient capital to rethink strategies. Innovation needs to be managed. Most importantly, the company needs strategic clarity.

Cultures of Innovation

3M is one company whose success is attributable to strategic clarity and an internal culture of innovation. Take the case for example of Spencer Silver. In 1968, Silver started working at 3M as a senior chemist. His job was to try and create a better adhesive for 3M’s tape measure. What he discovered instead was a glue that was still sticky but which came apart more easily because the contact are for adhesion was so small. The result: a glue that could be reused again and again. But how could this be used? Silver was a chemist, he was no marketing specialist. He struggled to come up with ideas and kept presenting it around 3M.

It was then that he ran into another 3M scientist, Arthur Fry. Now Fry sang in a church choir and to keep track of the hymns, he would stick a piece of paper in the hymn book. The trouble is these kept falling out. Seeing what Silver had produced gave Fry an idea: stick the glue on pieces of paper and put the hymn book. It worked a treat.

Fry then realised the glue had applications beyond hymn books – it could be used as an adhesive note. But how to manufacture it? Engineers at 3M told him such a machine didn’t exist. So Fry went home and built it himself. To get the support of senior management, he then sent samples of the notes to senior executives. They were intrigued and ordered more samples. Soon they were ordering so much of it that Fry’s machine could not