Creative Class

Despite the recent The Economist magazine proclamation of pending equality in the workplace, evidence suggests that the situation is more complex.

Commentators on my recent post here at Creative Class raised several good points:

Alan Says:  Start celebrating when women earn 50% of total salaries – I expect the champagne will remain on ice for a long time/ probably forever.  Sorry of this seems pessimistic.

Jana Says:   There’s a big difference between women being 50% of the workforce and women being equally represented in the workforce. My guess is that the majority of the women in the study are in lower level positions than the men. An example being that in one company I worked for was that the majority of the accounting department was female, but these were people inputting invoices, doing reconciliations and payroll. The counterpart was that the head of the department was male.

Without a better look at the statistics I’m not sure if this is something to celebrate.

The folks at Economix blog also weighed in:

Furthermore, the Current Population Survey data show that women are more than twice as likely as men to work part time (24.6 percent in 2008 compared with 11.1 percent in 2008). A measure of equal participation in paid employment should take that difference in hours into account.

The Economist notes that women remain underrepresented in management positions but registers considerable optimism concerning current trends.

By contrast, recent research by the sociologists Philip Cohen, Matt Huffman and Stefanie Knauer showed that women’s entry into management positions in the United States slowed significantly in the 1990s.

The consensus seems to be that The Economist jumped the gun in declaring a female victory.

In light of this discussion, it’s worth re-examining and considering Penelope Trunk’s long-held belief that women — along with younger generations invading the workforce — have changed the entire workplace game. I agree with Trunk that for many women and men, the new career (or should I say life) goal isn’t to maximize salary but instead to maximize life experiences, including those of raising children, spending time with friends and family, and generally enjoying the rich offerings life gives.

From a 2005  Penelope Trunk blog post:

Forget the glass ceiling because it’s about to become irrelevant. Not because women are finally going to get to the top of Fortune 500 companies in forces of more than two companies at a time. That may happen, but no one’s holding their breath. The glass ceiling is going to become irrelevant because the women who are coming into the workforce now see what’s above that glass and they are uninterested.

…. five years after earning an MBA, 40% of women are working from home. Often the press writes about this statistic like it’s a travesty, but I think it’s great. It’s an achievement that these women have decided they can find success on their own terms instead of having to fit themselves through paths that were established for men, decades ago.

The disenchantment with corporate life is not limited to women: eighty percent of men aged 20 to 39 said that a flexible job to accommodate kids takes a higher priority than doing challenging work or earning a high salary.

Many women with children — and increasingly their male partners as well — will gladly forgo career advancement, and the higher salaries that go along with it, in return for a more flexible job that allows for a better and more fulfilling family life.

Moreover, many organizations have much less hierarchical structures today. This suits the many women and men who value life experiences over corporate ladder-climbing. Working on interesting projects and with great people is a life experience they treasure — climbing a corporate ladder increasingly is not.

Your thoughts?

Forty percent of employees in a survey were more interested in career development than pay and benefits.

From the Saturday Globe and Mail:

Career development prospects top the criteria for job candidates considering a new employer, a new survey finds.

Forty percent of 1,300 respondents to a survey by staffing service Right Management Inc. said the potential for career development is the most important factor when choosing a new boss.

That was followed by work-life balance (21 percent); innovative workplace (15 percent); and competitive pay and benefits (12 percent). Only 8 percent cared most about having good rapport with their manager.

My thought here is the answer likely depends upon where you are in your life. Certainly it makes sense for younger knowledge workers to prioritize career development opportunities as an investment — pay will come later. For those with young families (especially women, as per last-week’s discussion) work-life balance may be more important. And later in life the paycheck may trump everything as retirement looms and university-aged children are needing help.

What would you prioritize?

In University and the Creative Economy, Richard Florida and colleagues build an economic development case around a region’s ability to capitalize on innovative technologies and research being produced at universities. Silicon Valley and Research Triangle are exemplary models. What if a region does not have this ability? Appropriately, they suggest a region work on developing the capacity to absorb university output through campus-industry partnerships. Otherwise, valuable intellectual property goes elsewhere. Or, worse off, and probably more common, it disappears into a black hole of uncommercialized ideas and patents.

Now, for regions that have universities but neither the current ability to absorb, nor the means to create a working capacity, is there an additional solution? Is it time for the universities to build their own infrastructure to absorb and commercialize their own creativity? Maybe this is the crossroads where higher education and economic development policy can tango?

How about new policies that substantially invest in universities absorbing their own innovative output when a region is not equipped? Incentivize the universities to transform economy by building infrastructure to commercialize the talent and academic ingenuity they harness. Maybe University Hospitals is a viable model in health care, but expand into other industry development aligned with a university’s output. Maybe we can learn from Chinese university-run businesses. Let’s equip universities, as my grandma used to say, with the whole “kit and caboodle” so a region can benefit.

What’s the risk in doing so?

Though U.S. unemployment is in the 10 percent range and we continue to hear people are “just happy to be employed,” a new survey from The Conference Board finds that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. Even greater numbers of those under 25 are unhappy with their employment.

Here is an excerpt from the On Deadline column/blog at USA Today.

Only 45% of American are satisfied with their work, the lowest level ever recorded in 22 years of surveys, the Associated Press reports.

The figure is down from 49% in 2008, says the Conference Board research group, which conducts the survey.

Workers under 25 expressed the most dissatisfaction — about 64% of them saying they are unhappy in their jobs.

That is a pretty large number of young American workers starting their careers in a negative way. One of the key findings was that most workers don’t find their job interesting.

Doing something interesting — creating something new, solving a problem that is important to a group of people, and working in an industry one is passionate about — is a key driver for talented people.

For some of the talented, this wave of unhappiness in the U.S. workplace will lead them to form new firms or become self-employed. This should lead to greater innovation and societal wealth.

Moreover, smart existing organizations will continue to improve what they offer to talent. Even in the depths of a recession, talent must be satisfied with fair compensation, a stimulating environment and challenging work. This dissatisfaction trend, The Conference Board points out, has been growing for decades.

Every year, Computerworld asks people in the geek community for their New Year’s predictions. The full article is here.

My responses included:

We will see social networking fatigue, but savvy users will continue to use platforms to build their personal brands. For most people, updating Facebook gets tedious, and your “friends” really don’t care which Hogwarts faculty member you are. Twitter takes a lot of work, although it can be a great personal brand-builder, with enough effort. LinkedIn is improving, mostly because of its Answers section; users can become well-regarded authorities in their subject areas by investing an hour or two per week posting thoughtful questions and responses. Plaxo? Please stop pestering me. You’re too far down my social networking depth chart for me to spend any time with you.

And

While the concept of a social networking guru might seem quaint by 2013 (do you have a photocopier guru in your office?), there is an opportunity in 2010 for people who really understand how to make social networking happen within the enterprise. While there are still a lot of carpetbaggers and “gee-whiz” cheerleaders playing in this market, I still find that there are a lot of people who don’t have a basic understanding of social networking and are reluctant to ask for help.

What are your thoughts? What will 2010 have in store for social networking?

From The Economist, December 30, 2009:

The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace

At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50 percent threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times.

From another article in the same issue:

The rich world has seen a growing demand for women’s labor. When brute strength mattered more than brains, men had an inherent advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed the two sexes are more evenly matched. The feminization of the workforce has been driven by the relentless rise of the service sector (where women can compete as well as men) and the equally relentless decline of manufacturing (where they could not). The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”.

Or perhaps Rise of the Creative Class is a landmark book for demonstrating why women have increasingly found a fit in the wage-earning world.

Your thoughts?

(Thanks to colleague MW for drawing my attention to the article.)

In cities across the world, office buildings are becoming greener. New construction is now typically LEED certified — often LEED Gold. Some older buildings are being retrofitted to meet US Energy Star standards.

The result is new workplaces that theoretically are healthier for the individuals working inside as well as for the planet. To be certified under LEED, a building has to offer higher levels of natural air and light, for example, than is typical in conventional construction. Moreover, materials used on the interiors also may have fewer toxins, which can affect employee health.

Over the past decade or so, the real estate industry has discussed and even debated the benefits of green buildings (versus their costs). One aspect of the discussion has centered around the employee workplace experience. Are people who work in green buildings better off? And are the companies and organizations who pay the rent seeing a difference in comparison to being in non-green structures?

A recent report by Norm G. Miller of the University of San Diego and Dave Pogue, director of sustainability at CBRE, offers new survey results from the responses of 534 tenants (companies or organizations who occupy buildings) who had recently moved into green office structures.  Some data:

First, from a human resource perspective:

• 18 percent reported lower employee turnover in the new buildings
• 22 percent reported higher employee morale
• 23 percent reported easier recruiting of employees
• 45 percent reported fewer sick days while another 45 percent reported no change

Second, the question of employee productivity:

• 55 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “Employees are more productive,” while 43 percent were neutral and only two percent disagreed.

Finally, other benefits:

• 74 percent of companies surveyed said the new building provided “a good image for clients and public.”

The authors also noted that companies occupying green buildings tended to have employees with higher-than-average wages. They therefore speculate that because of the salaries being paid these people, employers may want to ensure they maximize their productivity on the job.

This data is consistent with some other, often smaller, survey samples out there — such as from Gensler.

But aggregate statistics do not always tell the whole, human side of the story. What are your experiences?

Do you work in a certified, green building? Do you feel more productive or healthier than you have in other environments?

Would you select an employer based on the job being in a green building?