Understanding the change
In the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the world faces a series of
unprecedented challenges in the history of humanity: depletion of food and energy
resources, climatic changes, devastation of habitats, overpopulation, urbanization and
global ageing, and profound alterations in the world economic and political order.
These events combine to trigger deep changes in all aspects of our lives: in the way we
relate to our family members, colleagues, and friends; in the way we travel and
communicate; and in the way we shop, the way we eat, and the way we work and
relax.
This change inevitably transforms organizations as economic agents and social
institutions and significantly affects the factors - mission, products, participants,
resources, and culture - which define and rule their activity. These changes also require
innovative responses to the way organizations manage their human capital - their
workers and the knowledge they possess and apply in the exercise of their activities.
In order to understand the meaning and reach of such responses, we need to identify
the factors which have the most direct impact on the situation of organizations and
their policies and practices of human capital management.
The selection of these factors is always subjective, rather than exhaustive, and dictated
by the author's preferences. There was, however, a preoccupation in selecting
processes sufficiently discreet and independent, which do not represent two facets of
the same reality, and concurrent enough so that their effects may be felt in the same
period of 10 to 20 years. The selection identified the following eight factors:
- Growing importance of knowledge as a factor in production
- Globalization
- Global ageing
- Technical evolution (in particular, but not exclusively, in the area of ICT -
Information and Communication Technologies)
- Growing importance of the role of women in organizations
- Changes in the psychological contract between the worker and the organization
- Erosion of traditional forms of authority
- Emergence of values such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the balance