The Hindu Business Line : Managing the knowledge workers

The breed that will make a difference in a service economy is clearly the expert or knowledge worker, although the Internet, by making knowledge more open, will cut the ground beneath the expert's feet. Mere possession of rare facts and figures would no longer signify expertise, but the skill in applying judgment to discern the cost-effective solution will. Managing such knowledge workers presents a peculiar set of problems in work organisation, motivation and compensation structure.

In our already over-crowded metropolitan areas, favoured destinations for the investor and specialist, the pressure on time and space is increasing everyday. Getting and retaining talented people used to be a challenge to people management only in a few specialist fields, such as mutual funds, actuarial science, technical research and product design or advertising; now more and more businesses are beginning to resemble them.

Journalism, market research, management consulting, faculty for higher professional degrees, design software, project management are already seeing severe shortages of quality people.

The present inflation in salaries is bound to be a permanent feature of the economy. The young, already prone to greater mobility, will succumb to the lure of more money, while complaints of disloyalty and poaching will be heard from the employers. The latter have to re-jig their mental models of what constitutes a job.

For anyone under 30, three years' stay in a job is par for the course. Loyalty consists not of staying on regardless but it means total dedication just as long as one is on the job. The employer can ask for no more, since often there is no guarantee of the company itself remaining in its current shape and form for decades.

CEOs and HR chiefs, therefore, must try out many practices that might have seemed outrageous a few years ago. Part-time workers should be accepted at almost all professional levels. Others might moonlight with the employer's permission; one company neither needs their expertise all the time nor can afford to keep them at the remuneration levels they can command as consultants. As it is difficult to retain the enthusiasm and motivation of the people in very narrow specialisations, one ought to be willing to share them with other organisations.

If it is difficult to recruit them in the first place, one must be ready to treat them as volunteers, and use their time to train internal staff, who in turn must be encouraged to learn multiple specialisations. Variable pay cannot be an exception any more; so too lumpsum bonuses for one year, without assurance of continuance in future. The corollary might be that some employees who want more stable environments might leave, but the more venturesome ones might stay on.

The powerful foreign competitor is no longer the main source of tempting offers to one's valuable talent but rather the new industries and categories that hunt for talent across the traditional industry borders. This has already happened with software and media firms. Almost all jobs will have to be flexibly structured with small, self-managed teams assuming responsibility for the output. Medium-size companies that follow a niche strategy should consciously not clone their organisation structure, compensation plans or people policies on the market leader but try to make the work culture, climate and structure a competitive advantage.

S. Ramachander