I’ve written before on my work with corporate culture change.  In particular, I wrote about how culture is unconscious and works at the implicit level. So the strategy to change it needs to make the unconscious and implicit more conscious and explicit.  So we identified and labelled behaviors that we felt were the critical few that needed to be addressed and then defined the new behaviors that we desired and recognized and reinforced those.

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As you may have noticed, I have a fairly consistent 26-27 replies to my blog posts. And as my husband figured out (he was moderately impressed with my “following” before he did), they are students in the Advanced Topics in Workforce Management course that I am teaching in UB’s MS Accounting Program. This post represents the last to which they have to reply. I’ll miss reading their posts here, but I will also miss seeing them in class every week as our time together runs out in 3 more classes.

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When you are looking for a pattern, you can see it all over the place. Just recently, a client asked me what I thought about job descriptions.   I could hear in her voice that she wasn’t sure what my answer would be and that it may have been a source of much discussion inside the company.

Here’s the rub … with the nature of work changing, with the speed at which technology is changing how we do our jobs and with the constant drumbeat of disruptive innovations in many industries it is just plain hard to keep a job description up to date and accurate.

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Technology is everywhere and is shaping how and when we interact. Workers everywhere are both enabled by and struggling with those implications, which is oddly (or expectedly depending on your perspective) driving the development of more tools and technologies at both ends of that spectrum – using technology to enable work as well as shut off technology to enable work.

Cisco did a research study, published as Workforce 2020, that states the challenge this way:

What all this new technology means for tomorrow‘s workforce can be summarized in [Marshall] McLuhan‘s dictum “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

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