The 2020 Workplace

Sue Bethanis hosts Jeanne C. Meister, co-founding partner of Future Workplace, a consultancy focused on strategies to attract, develop, and retain talent. Jeanne is an internationally recognized management consultant, speaker, author, and entrepreneur who has been voted by her peers as one of the top 20 influential training professionals in the United States. She has consulted with over 200 organizations on launching, managing, and reinventing corporate universities, is an adjunct faculty member in the MBA executive education program at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India, and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author, with Karie Willyerd, of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today.

Sue and Jeanne cover a range of topics tied to how organizations can prepare for the evolving demands of talent and technology, including:

• The three defining characteristics of the 2020 workplace: increasingly global, multi-generational, and hyper-connected
• How Millennials are projected to make up 50% of the workforce by 2020, and what that means for talent strategy
• The rise of internal corporate social networks—and how companies like Cerner, IBM, and Bank of America are using them to change how work gets done
• Social recruiting and the concept of “reputation capital”—how candidates are increasingly being evaluated based on their online presence and professional networks
• Why social media literacy is becoming a core competency, not just a nice-to-have skill
• The role of generational mindset (vs. age) in how employees engage with technology and the workplace
• How organizations are using internal networks to accelerate innovation—with examples from Whirlpool and P&G
• The balance between digital collaboration and the continued importance of face-to-face connection

Listeners will come away with a clearer picture of where the workforce is heading and what they can do now to prepare. Whether you are hiring or job seeking, Jeanne offers straightforward guidance: start managing your professional reputation online, build a deliberate presence on LinkedIn, and recognize that social media literacy is becoming a baseline expectation in most professional environments. For organizations, the takeaway is equally direct—the gap between how employees live digitally at home and how they work digitally inside your company is a leadership issue, and addressing it sooner rather than later will be a competitive advantage.