What to look out for in 2014 at the office: After the famine @Economist

What to look out for in 2014 at the office.

After the famine

Prepare for a feast of fads

Lucy Kellaway: columnist, Financial Times

Nov 18th 2013 | From The World In 2014 print edition

Corporate life in 2014 will be a bit like the late 1940s in Britain. Rationing was coming to an end, but even though things were much easier, no one forgot how hard they had been.
And so it will be in the offices of big companies. The managers who survived successive rounds of layoffs will feel more confident as growth takes hold and will be triumphant to have made it through. But the new spirit of optimism will not be unfettered. Budgets will be there to be bid for; the winners will be those who take the most cautious risks.

Women will never have had it so good. The smart, self-assured (but not brash) young females who joined the workforce during the past decade will fit the new corporate mood exactly. They will be promoted, not just out of a craven desire to hit diversity targets, but more as a matter of course.
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"That doesn’t mean that working life in 2014 is going to be comfortable—or uncompetitive. Who is up and who is down will be decided less by Machiavellian scheming than by data. Companies will start assessing people according to how well they do on social networks. Nobody will be interested in simple statistics such as numbers of followers or moronic clicking on “like” buttons. Instead, a host of sophisticated algorithmic tools with ill-spelt names like Klout and Kred will increasingly be taken seriously. Everyone will learn to understand new maps that plot the extent of their social influence."

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"The year ahead will witness another large stride towards the paperless office. The under-30s, who never understood the point of paper anyway, will convert the stragglers. Anyone who insists on turning up to meetings with hard copies will look laughably yesterday. As everyone converts to tablets and the devices go on getting smaller, communications will become briefer. Jargon will still be managers’ language of choice, of course, but each helping of it will be smaller."
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"The two words that will be on everyone’s lips in 2014 will be “curator” and “intrapreneur”. Even the dullest corporate manager will claim that he has become both, on the basis that retweeting a few blogs makes him a curator of ideas and suggesting the odd idea to his boss turns him into an intrapreneur. This will be vaguely tiresome.

The phrase that we will hardly hear ever again is work-life balance. ...Complaining about a lack of balance will be tantamount to admitting that you can’t cope. Having it all is on the way back in.

Two old-fashioned things will make a big comeback in offices. The first is business clothes. ... most of his employees at Facebook and others who work in Silicon Valley will have tired of coming to work looking as if they’ve just been doing the gardening. Jackets and dresses and proper shoes will be back in.

Read the whole piece online here: Business: After the famine | The Economist

From The World In 2014 print edition