Employees’ Values Today Signal a Workplace Paradigm Shift
As workplaces diversify and millennials increasingly occupy the majority of company leadership roles, the way employees do their work is changing. Fortune asked several chief executives how today’s employees differ from the workforce of 10 or 20 years ago.
The CEOs who share their impressions in the video above include Western Union’s Hikmet Ersek, Ancestry’s Margo Georgiadis, Ellevest’s Sallie Krawcheck, Silicon Valley Bank’s Greg Becker, Intuit’s Sasan Goodarzi, and Guild Education’s Rachel Carlson.
“40 percent of our customers are small businesses and now actually hire contingent workers to work for them, versus full-time employees,” Goodarzi said. “That’s very different from what it was 10 years ago.”
Freelancing has steadily come into favor across the country over the past decade. Since 2014, the number of freelancers in the United States has increased by 4 million, now making up 35 percent of the U.S. job market, according to a study by Upwork.
Employees are also less tied to their desks than they have been in the past, with approximately 40 percent of the workforce working remotely at some frequency, according to Global Workplace Analytics.
“People care much more about the integration between their personal and their professional lives,” Georgiadis said. “They’re really seeking cultures and a place of work that has meaning to them personally.”
For those who make the commute, collaboration is the new normal because of the increased value employees place on workplace friendships. Gensler’s 2019 Workplace Survey found that employees spend 49 percent of their time at work collaborating or socializing with coworkers, which is greater than the percent of time they spend alone.
Plus, many employees today want to make a positive impact on their companies and their communities. Many companies place a growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility.
“They want to really give back,” Ersek said. “They want to have an impact. It’s not all about money … It’s about how much I can give back. How can I change the world?”
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