Catchword is integrity in modern workplace

By SELWYN PARKER

Forget loyalty. Don't even ask for it. Loyalty is passe.

It has disappeared with the baby boomers who were the last generation to think that loyalty towards employers mattered. And most of them are in their fifties.

The new word is integrity, and it places equal responsibility on employer as on employee.

"Loyalty has been replaced by integrity," explains Bonnie Maitlen, an American with 20 years in the career development industry (and a baby boomer). "It's a much healthier relationship than in the past."

As Maitlen defines it, the arrival of integrity as the bedrock of workplace relationships is due to the end of the "job for life."

Henceforth workplace relationships will mainly be temporary, mutually profitable, and more or less equal. Employers need employees as much as the other way around, and employees with skills to sell know it.

The implications for employers are deep, according to Maitlen, a senior vice-president of New York-based Lee Hecht Harrison, who has written a book on the subject, Mind Your Own Business, lectures at universities, and routinely counsels high-profile talent.

For a start, despite the Government's tentative steps backwards to old-style unionism, the future is individual contracts. Want to start a family and work five hours a day? Put it to the boss. If the company likes you and wants to keep you on your terms, they will probably say: "Go ahead." Want to work from home three days a week? Ditto.

The reason for employers' growing tolerance of their staff's individuality is motivated by the increasingly competitive market for skills. It is not just in the United States; it is everywhere.

"Employers are being pushed to it," explained Maitlen while watching the America's Cup on the harbour. "They can't expect loyalty, they have to earn it."

Maitlen generally dismisses as misplaced the reluctance of some organisations to train staff for fear of losing them. "They say 'if we teach them, they'll leave'. But in practice it fires up their energy for work. If they do leave, it's probably not a bad thing. The relationship may have run its course."

But while companies are being dragged, kicking and screaming into the 21st century, so are employees. In the competition for skills, it follows that the brightest and best will be able to pick the cherries.

That means workers of practically every type must endlessly hone their skills. "You have to manage your own talent," says Maitlen.

"Companies won't do it any more. You have to look to yourself to develop and reinvent your skills."

That might involve working closely with professional associations, which have rapidly become more powerful than white-collar unions. It will certainly involve a constant study of the job market to see how it is changing, who is paying what, where you fit in.

It will require employees to be more flexible - flexible about where they work, who they work with, what they offer. "We will have to love change," adds Maitlen.

It will require them to harness technology. And finally, require them to shed any false modesty.

Maitlen, who has worked before in Australasia, is intrigued by the general Down Under fear of "noting" ourselves. Last week she worked with a group of Australian executives who worried they would be "grandstanding," if they described too fulsomely their talents and achievements.

"In fact, you are doing the organisation a favour," explains Maitlen. "You are saying 'here's what I can contribute'. You are describing your deeds. Otherwise people won't know about them. It's not a question of being aggressive, it's being assertive, it's about managing your reputation.

"People sometimes take offence at [being told] this. But I tell them to remember that they have a reputation anyway, whether they like it or not. If you don't tell [hirers] what you've done, people make assumptions that may be entirely wrong."

The booming market for skills aside, one of the reasons for the rapid emergence of temporary, contract-type labour is Generation X. Restless but enthusiastic, they don't want to stick around too long but are prepared to work like dogs while they are there.

Generation X understands the "connection between work and life," as Maitlen puts it.

But does Generation Y, the 19-23-year-olds who will form the next working generation?"

Generation Y doesn't seem to see work as an ingredient in life," puzzles Maitlen, who is studying the issue. "They don't have the joy of work."