DECEMBER 2012! We are at the threshold of another New Year brimming with anticipation about the changes it will bring. Time perhaps to take a step back and reflect on the events and milestones of 2012 that impacted our professional lives. Has anything changed majorly in the year that passed? Any disruption in the way we work? Here is my take on what I saw as the game changing trends in human resource management in 2012.

Welcome the Generation Flux
We have heard of Gen X, Y, and Z. But 2012 brought us Gen Flux — the new generation workforce not defined by age but by a certain mindset. A mindset which is willing to adapt and change depending on what the environment demands; a type of personality which refuses to get set in one way of doing things; the kind of professional who can flit in and out of careers growing and learning new skills in every stint. Scary? Definitely if you are the kind who grows roots and thrives in diving deep. Exhilarating? Sure if you are a Gen Fluxer like Elon Musk who at 41 was one of the founders of PayPal, which revolutionised online payment, oversaw the construction of the first modern day electric car, the Tesla Roadster, privatised space travel with SpaceX and is now the Chairman of Solar City, a Solar Power Systems company in the US. A transplant to California from South Africa, he epitomises the new age professional with his willingness to move locations, change industry while being focused on the end goal — which in his case was to solve ‘important problems that would most affect the future of humanity’. So let us toast to the arrival of the professional with neither white or blue collar who by refusing to fit into stereotypes will last longer than all his earlier Avatars.

The new look organisation is flat
It has been a long time in coming but finally 2012 has heralded the advent of the new organisation with very little hierarchy. When billion dollar organisations like Instagram are built with 17 engineers, traditional n-tiered organisations are shaken up from their roots by the after shocks. Can we justify rigid hierarchies or even the much vaunted ‘matrix’ organisation when the need of the hour is high-speed execution? It is getting proven time and again that small but high profile rockstar teams working together with minimal ‘management’ are able to achieve stupendous results. So even larger companies are now creating smaller skunk teams to work on key projects. These teams report directly to the CEO, work under the radar and are shielded from the conventional pulls and pushes which afflict all large organisations. Eric Ries in his highly popular book Lean Startup argues passionately that it is more important to take time and get the product-market fit right than to grow big. The embrace of Agile Management will force more and more organisations to rethink traditional structures. Workflows and not functional roles will define organisations in the Agile world.

Holy grail no more
Do you really need annual performance reviews when your need is for results today and now? How material is age and experience when nobody has done what you are doing before? Can we divorce job descriptions from experience? Can we redo designations to reflect what the individual is doing? One by one well set HR traditions are being questioned and recast to reflect the reality of the fast changing work environment and demands of the new generation of workers. “Performance reviews reinforce the twisted view that a manager’s job is to sit in judgment on his employees. Your employees know how to do their jobs, and if they don’t, why are you waiting to tell them? Performance reviews make formal and stilted what should be an organic, continual conversation about the work, team dynamics, near-term and long-term priorities” says Liz Ryan, an expert in the new millennium workplace.

Innovation becomes a ‘must do’ from ‘nice to do’
Industries are getting transformed thanks to the huge push that new technologies and new ways of communication are affecting. Kickstarter has shown that crowd funding for ideas is not a pie in the air but a reality. Kiva has proven that reaching small amounts of money from lenders to borrowers, cutting out the middleman altogether is possible. The need to innovate has become mandatory pre-requisite for survival. We saw how Wal-Mart, the uncrowned king of retail is now recognising the threat it faces from an upstart Amazon. Realising that it will lose its customer base to the online retailer, it has now quickly scaled Wal-Mart Ecommerce strategically in Silicon Valley, away from headquarters, so that it can rekindle the innovative spirit it needs to fight the new genre of competitors. And this holiday season should demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy when Wal-Mart Ecommerce puts Amazon on the defensive.

Everybody wants Rockstars
Tom Friedman, the famous New York Times columnist and author puts it bluntly when he says ‘average is over’. He goes on to say that any job that requires average skills will be done through technology or ‘offshored’ to the cheapest possible foreign location (And India will not remain the cheapest location forever). Therefore any organisations that seeks to thrive in the current innovation and disruption driven economy will demand a class of talent that is completely off the charts. These are geniuses that are going to think differently and come up with completely different way of doing things. They are going to challenge status quo and while doing so take their employers well ahead of competition. Reasons enough for the new generation of employers to look for Rockstars when they hire. They are willing to pay what it takes to get such folks but they are very clear that they do not want to settle for anything less. No wonder then that being a geek has officially become cool now. The wild success of Big Bang Theory, a sitcom around Caltech and MIT alums validates and reflects this reality.

People management goes hi-tech
Every employee who walks in today is using smartphone, ipads and living on multiple social networks. It is impossible now to separate personal and professional life through walled gardens as we did before. Office gossip is public today on sites like Glass Door. Compensation to the last digit, culture nuances, personalities of various managers are all available on the web if you care to search. Same thing holds for employees as it is easy to find where they go after work to whom they befriend and what they say. So HR managers have been forced to rethink how they engage with employees. Do they use private networks or public networks as the medium of communication? How transparent should the organisation be? Should they dictate the ‘do’s and don’ts’ for what can be said and done by them on public forums? Can they even do it if they wanted to? These are all questions which have come to the fore now as new technology demolishes the concept of public and private persona.

The corner office turns pink
Virginia Rometty, Meg Whitman, Marissa Myer made news and set the trend for a growing number of iconic Fortune 500 companies to be headed by women CEOs. Think about it -Hewlett Packard, IBM and Xerox all traditional technology firms concurrently having women at the top can not be a coincidence. The next generation ones like Yahoo getting a woman as the turn-around CEO, Facebook with Sheryl Sandberg as the COO don’t look like aberration but as deliberate choices. And come January 2013, we will have Lockheed Martin, which is as near as you can get to a macho technology company having Marillyn Hewson at the top. Time for men to watch out for the glass ceiling.

Wish You A Very Happy New Year!