Welcome to the inaugural issue of the LGE Execs Blog!  Let’s use this first post to explain why we decided to call it “The Future of Work.”   As some of you know, LGE is a cohort of about 130 former C-Level executives who are working as consultants and interim executives across a wide range of companies and functions.  We’ve been at this for six years and we love what we do.  On a regular basis, we get together to share observations and swap “war stories.” 

Lately these conversations have taken an unexpected turn.  Now, as we’ve started to emerge from the recession, we’ve begun to notice a trend across our client companies.   Instead of planning to rehire and staff up as the prospects for growth improve, they are instead looking for ways to keep headcount flat for as long as possible, if not reduce it even further over time.  So what’s going on?

At first we thought this was just conservative business behavior--  businesses not wanting to get ahead of themselves until they had a clear indication that things were indeed getting better.  Then it became apparent that there was a fundamental shift taking place in the way businesses were viewing their core staffing profiles.  Instead of biding their time before they rehire, our clients were instead, looking at ways to keep headcount at bare-bones levels indefinitely so any incremental profits from an upturn would fall directly to the bottom line.  The short story is that these jobs are not coming back.

And who can blame them?  Although the past two years have not been pleasant, many of our clients have been able to muddle through (some quite well) with fewer staff, doing more with less.  So instead of planning for an increase in full-time staff, we’re finding that our clients are looking at ways to re-engineer their organizations on a permanent basis to fit what they see as a “new reality” in the global business environment.  Our Partners hadn’t seen this before.

And what is this “new reality?” Our clients see slow growth, intense offshore competition, a relatively transitory, often virtual workforce, the immanent gutting of senior management ranks when the Boomers begin retiring, and a younger labor pool largely lacking the skills, loyalty and experience to manage and lead in a complex business environment.   Nobody sees a clear path forward.

Because we most often work with companies undergoing some kind of transition, LGE’s Partners are the “canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to workplace transformation.  We know that our clients feel that a sea change is occurring.  And we see that our clients believe that organizationally, things will never return to the way they were before the recession.  Our Partners are seeing these changes occur in  real-time.  

We think this is a big idea, and we think that fundamentally, it has to do with the “future of work”--   how organizations will reconstitute themselves to get things done.  Hence, the name of our Blog.  We’ll be posting regularly on what we’re seeing in the “coal mine” and we welcome your comments!