Business Brief Organisation

Business brief

Organisation

Businesses come in many guises, from the lonely-sounding self-employed person and sole trader, through the SME (the small or medium-sized enterprise) to the multinational with its hierarchy and tens of thousands of employees. But the questions about what motivates people in work are basically the same everywhere. The first question that self-employed people get asked is how they find the self-discipline to work alone and motivate themselves, with no one telling them what to do. Companies are also looking for this: job advertisements often talk about the need for recruits to be self-starters. Organisations want to attract the right people and find ways of motivating them to be ever more productive and creative.

The current buzzword is flexibility. This has a number of related meanings. One type of flexibility has existed for some time in the form of flexitime or flextime, where people can choose when they work within certain limits. Then there is the flexible working of the British Airways office in the main course unit, with some of its staff hot-desking, particularly those who are homeworking, teleworking or telecommuting and only need to come into the office occasionally.

A third type of flexibility is where employees are recruited on short contracts to work on specific projects, maybe part-time. Perhaps the organisation only has a core staff, and outsources or contracts out work from outside as and when required. Some management experts say that this is the future, with self-employment as the norm, and portfolio workers who have a number of different clients.

For the moment, most company employees still go to what is recognizably a job in a building that is recognizably an office, even if it is open plan with some flexibility. How long this will go on is an interesting question. The tradition of managers who like to see their subordinates working (or pretending to) has a lot of mileage in it yet, with some countries and industries evolving more quickly than others for all sorts of cultural and practical reasons.