Workplace Trends 2015

W O R K P L A C E
T R E N D S
W O R K P L A C E
T R E N D S
W O R K P L A C E
T R E N D S

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COMMITTED TO DEVELOPING
THE NEXT GENERATION OF
STEM PROFESSIONALS
Michael Norris, COO Sodexo North
America and Market President
Increased public awareness combined with
massive spending across the private and
public sectors have brought STEM (science,
technology, engineering, mathematics)
education to the forefront of the nation’s
collective consciousness. Most everyone
agrees that improving the quality and
number of STEM graduates entering
the workforce is a national priority. The
important variable in this equation is private
sector employers who drive economic
growth through innovation and employ
the majority of Americans. Sustained
engagement and strategic investments in
STEM education by employers will be key to
solving the STEM shortfall.
Recognizing this important national
challenge, Sodexo has partnered with
STEMconnector, a national group working
to connect and convene organizations
that share a passion and commitment to
developing the next generation of STEM
professionals and current workforce.
STEMconnector keeps the nation informed
through STEMdaily, a free e-newsletter
that reaches nearly 15,000 thought
leaders in STEM education and workforce
development. STEMconnector convenes
a diverse range of stakeholders through
physical and virtual meetings, to share best
practices and facilitate unique partnerships.
STEMconnector also recognizes executive
leadership through its 100 STEM Leaders
series and encourages the mentorship of
women and girls through Million Women
Mentors. Sodexo currently serves as a
Vice-Chair of the Million Women Mentors
initiative, and Co-Chair of STEMconnector’s
Innovation Task Force, investing time,
resources, and leadership to develop
innovative partnerships and programs that
address the STEM challenge.
Sodexo’s interest in producing qualified STEM
talent continues to evolve, and follow in the
footsteps of Microsoft and Lockheed Martin.
However, it is imperative that every Sodexo
associate possesses at least a fundamental
comprehension of STEM skills in order to be
productive and grow professionally. Sodexo
maintains a commitment to improving STEM
education and looks forward to building
collaborative partnerships in the future. n
| FORWARD
George Chavel, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sodexo
One of the essential qualities in any strong leader is the ability to continually look
forward and ask the question: What’s next? The truth of the matter is that building
a successful business is so much more than business strategy and operational
savvy; it’s also about cultivating an environment where employees can thrive.
An employee’s level of fulfillment or satisfaction has continuously proven to be a
key indicator of their performance, engagement and commitment. Employees are
looking beyond money and title to something less tangible but far more powerful:
Quality of Life.
In the 2015 Workplace Trends Report you will read how organizations that place the
Quality of Life of their employees at the center of their thinking and pursue strategies
to support and encourage it, create a more engaged, committed and productive
workforce. In Creating Points of Connection, this report explores how workplace
design can foster a sense of community, belonging and personal empowerment,
by encouraging more meaningful employee connections throughout the workday.
Mindfulness at Work examines organizations that bring mindfulness programs into
the workplace to encourage greater balance, clarity and productivity for employees.
When the conditions and circumstances associated with Quality of Life are
compromised, the performance of the organization suffers. This report explores
current issues such as Redefining the Family-Friendly Workplace and issues of
the future like Rateocracy, which highlights how organizations prepare for an era
of extreme transparency.
Improving Quality of Life has always been central to Sodexo’s mission and values
and it is one of the reasons we believe it is imperative to study and report on how the
workplace can enhance quality of life. This year’s report is the culmination of research
that informs leaders about today’s changing workplace and the workforce of the
future. Sodexo has identified 6 dimensions essential to Quality of Life, that we believe
directly map to the trends included in this year’s report. The Table of Contents has
a key that indicates a symbol for each of the 6 Quality of Life dimensions and those
symbols are highlighted at the beginning of each related trend.
As leaders evaluate the potential application of emerging trends, the concept of
Quality of Life is becoming a core factor in positively impacting outcomes — not just
of the individual, but of each worker’s contribution to the overall organization. n
2 | 2015 Workplace Trends Report © Sodexo 2015
As a result of extensive research and analysis, combined with nearly 50 years of
experience, Sodexo has identified 6 dimensions essential to Quality of Life.
Social Interaction – Factors
that strengthen bonds among
individuals and facilitate
access to activities or events.
Personal Growth –
Everything that allows an
individual to learn and make
progress.
Ease and Efficiency – Ability
to devote your full attention
to the task at hand and carry
it out with ease, efficiency and
minimal interruption.
Recognition – Factors that
contribute to an individual
feeling truly valued and
appreciated.
Physical Environment –
Factors that contribute to a
person’s comfort and sense of
well-being.
Health and Well-Being –
Promoting a healthy lifestyle
through a well-balanced diet
and physical activity.

I THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE WORKPLACE
AND IMPLICATIONS FOR QUALITY OF LIFE
Thomas Jelley, M.Sc., LL.B, Director, Sodexo Institute for Quality of Life
Working methods, places and spaces are increasingly the
subject of close scrutiny and, in large part due to technological
advances, they are changing from both employees’ and
employers’ perspectives, as both strive for progress and
performance. By way of illustration, consider the following
developments in relationships between work, the workplace
and workspaces, and between employee and employer:
DISAPPEARING BOUNDARIES
We take our work home but we also bring a part of our private
lives to work. We are faced with a complex model: increasing
dependency on technology that encourages us to stay
connected all the time, but also greater freedom to be more
flexible. As individuals, we struggle to manage this complex
model which we’ve not yet learned to master collectively,
at the organization level. One explanation for this may be
that we remain troubled by tensions between assessment,
based on work output quality, and assessment based on
permanent availability as the hallmark of trust. A steady
state characterized by permanent change and the need to be
always available puts pressure on the identities of individuals,
as they strive to harmonize their work life with their personal
life. In essence, work was previously dictated by place: we
were either at work or not at work. It has recently become
more a matter of time rather than place but even notions of
a workday and a workweek are fast disappearing, as many
people can and do work anyplace and at any time. Should we
resist the temptation to continue separating work and life
and instead accept that it’s all simply a part of life?
BEYOND WORK CONTENT
Just as the focus for retail is increasingly targeting
“experience” in the face of stiff online competition, so the
workplace appears to be following a similar path. Indeed,
employers are feeling the need to reinvest in the workplace
and differentiate it from their competitors’ workplace, from
employees’ homes, and from cafés, airport lounges and even
working in hotel lobbies. Employees are increasingly mobile,
flexible and autonomous; as such, they can work from more
places than ever before.
COMBINING PLACES AND SPACES
Rather than an absolute necessity, is the physical workplace
becoming a rallying point for the culture of the organization,
a place that employees really only go to for face-to-face
dialogue and exchange with colleagues? If the center of
activity is the key link, how is this achieved and maintained?
By paying greater attention to employees’ well-being? By
creating an environment that makes employees feel almost
as if they are at home even though they are at work? The
fusion of “spaces” as home-like environments that are
actually workplaces within café environments appear to be
a feature of the workplace of the future. Organizations are
actively designing collaborative spaces like these to inspire
their employees and foster a culture or hub of cooperation
and innovation. They seek to break up the monotony of the
workday with high-quality interaction. A comprehensive
range of services also offers individuals improved quality of
life by helping them to harmonize their work and personal
interests. The resulting convenience may be seen as a
response to the pressures of work-life harmonization but this
prompts a number of questions centered on relationships.
The progressive “workplace” looks like an enhanced
community that benefits from access to both work and life-
related services and spaces that were previously available
to individuals only outside the workplace, if at all. These
amenities include fitness, nutrition, concierge services, social
and leisure facilities, and green spaces. At best, the workplace
is set to become a vibrant precinct, a hub for employees,
an environment characterized by services and amenities
designed to improve their Quality of Life at work and beyond.
With this development, the intersections between home, work
and the local community change.
If improved Quality of Life is to support the progress of
individuals and the performance of organizations, changing
relationships nevertheless raise questions of personal autonomy
and choice. For example, is there a risk that employees feel
they have neither work nor personal life choices other than the
options provided by their employer? On whose terms is work-life
harmonization possible and how can we ensure a Quality of Life
path that is smooth?
The answers to questions like these will no doubt require
multi-disciplinary approaches beyond the traditional remit
of facilities management or
human resources, as well as
the ability to demonstrate
measurable value for individuals
and organizations. n
© Sodexo 2015 Published by Innovations 2 Solutions | 3

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SIX | 39
EIGHT|49
SEVEN
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4
FIVE | 34
TW
O
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TEN | 58
NINE
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FO
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ONE | 08
FUTURE WORK
SKILLS 2020
MEET THE
AUTHORS
SPECIALSECTION
IN
TRENDS:
EDUCATING
TOMORROW
’S
FM
W
ORKFORCE
AEROTROPOLIS:
AIRPORTS
AS
THE
NEW
CITY
CENTER
RATEOCRACY:
WORKINGAND
MANAGINGINAN
ERAOFEXTREME
TRANSPARENCY
CASESTUDY
INTRENDS:
CREATINGPOINTS
OFCONNECTION
GLOBALREW
ARDS
AND
RECOGNITION:
BRIDGING
CULTURE
AND
GENERATIONS
THROUGH
LOCALIZATION
REDEFINING THE
FAMILY-FRIENDLY
WORKPLACE
MINDFULNESSAT WORK
W
HOLE
BRAIN
THINKING:
SKILLSETS
FOR
OUR
NEW
CONCEPTUALAGE
EAS
E
&
EFFICIENCY
HEALTH
&
WELL-BEIN
G
SOCIAL
INTERACTION
RECOGNITIO
N
PH
YSICAL
E
N
VIRONMENT
PERSONAL GROWTH
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Each of the trends align to Sodexo’s Six Dimensions of Quality of Life. Look for the highlighted icon in the section header.

TRENDS AT A GLANCE
FUTURE WORK SKILLS FOR 2020
This piece analyzes key drivers that will
reshape the landscape of work and identifies
key work skills needed in the next 10 years. Global
connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just
some of the drivers reshaping how we think about work,
what constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be
productive contributors in the future.
To be successful in the next decade, individuals will need
to demonstrate foresight in navigating a rapidly shifting
landscape of organizational forms and skill requirements.
They will increasingly be called upon to continually reassess
the skills they need, and quickly put together the right
resources to develop and update these skills. Workers in the
future will need to be adaptable lifelong learners.
Businesses must also be alert to the changing environment
and adapt their workforce planning and development
strategies, to ensure alignment with future skill requirements.
Strategic human resources professionals might reconsider
traditional methods for identifying critical skills, as well as
selecting and developing talent. Considering the disruptions
likely to reshape the future will enhance businesses’ ability
to ensure organizational talent has and continuously renews
the skills necessary for the sustainability of business goals.
A workforce strategy for sustaining business goals should
be one of the most critical outcomes of human resources
professionals and should involve collaborating with universities
to address lifelong learning and skill requirements.
AEROTROPOLIS: AIRPORTS AS THE
NEW CITY CENTER
Airports have become not just 21st century
business magnets, but also regional economic accelerators,
catalyzing and driving business development outward for
many miles. As aviation-oriented businesses increasingly
locate at major airports and along transportation corridors
radiating from them, an aerotropolis emerges, stretching up
to 25km (nearly 20 miles) from some major airports.
Analogous in shape to the traditional metropolis made up of
a central city core and its rings of commuter-heavy suburbs,
the aerotropolis consists of an airport-centered commercial
core (airport city) and outlying corridors and clusters of
aviation-linked businesses and associated residential
development. Some of the largest aerotropolis clusters
have become globally significant airport edge-cities whose
business tentacles routinely touch all major continents. The
aerotropolis, in fact, is the concrete urban manifestation of
the global meeting the local, with the airport serving as its
physical interface.
Corporate headquarters functions were once the domain of
downtown office buildings. No longer. Airports increasingly
serve as virtual headquarters for geographically dispersed
corporate staff, executives, and board members who fly in
for sales meetings, client contacts, and high-level decision-
making. The full-range of office services and business
support staff of a traditional corporate complex are available,
including meeting rooms, computers and advanced telecom,
secretarial and tech assistance. Propitious opportunities
await corporations and metropolitan regions that can
marshal the vision, planning skills, and coordinated actions to
capitalize on this new transit-oriented development era.
“RATEOCRACY”: WORKING
AND MANAGING IN AN ERA OF
EXTREME TRANSPARENCY
Today, consumers rate sellers on eBay, restaurants on Yelp,
and local companies on Angie’s List, providing detailed
product reviews online. Job hunters and employees can read
and rate employers on Glassdoor.com. College students rate
their professors on ratemyprofessors.com. Neighbors and
friends can view each other’s reputations (and their own) at
honestly.com. And Facebook’s more than 1.3 billion users
can endorse a product or organization by “liking” it.
Soon, we will also rate corporations on their behavior and
have real-time mobile access to the aggregated, stakeholder-
generated reputation scores of nearly every corporation on
the planet. We will use this information to reward and punish
companies by buying their products or spurning them. We
will have entered into a completely new era of corporate
reputation, one in which reputation is radically transparent
and extremely valuable.
This new era is called Rateocracy because it will combine
real-time ratings within a transparent and democratic
structure. In fact, we can anticipate that virtually every
person, place and thing will have a numeric social rating.
Corporations, managers and employees will learn to live
with “coveillance” — a world in which nearly everyone
observes and rates the behavior of everyone else. How

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
organizations, both large and small, operate within such
an environment is worthy of deep consideration. Existing
organizational models may be challenged.
GLOBAL REWARDS AND
RECOGNITION: BRIDGING
CULTURE AND GENERATIONS
THROUGH LOCALIZATION
Overall, 87% or more of the global workforce has
engagement levels that leave room for improvement. One of
the most effective ways to increase engagement is through
recognition and rewards programs; in fact, most regions of
the world rank recognition as one of the most important
drivers of employee engagement. In addition to promoting
higher engagement levels, such programs have the added
benefit of yielding 21% higher retention rates, 27% higher
profits, and 50% higher sales to those organizations
that implement them. In order to be optimally effective,
recognition and reward programs must be formalized
and designed to consistently and fairly reinforce desired
behaviors company-wide. When implemented on a global
scale, these programs must also meet the diverse needs and
preferences of a multinational, multigenerational employee
base, which takes careful assessment.
Recognizing and rewarding people in the way they wish
is a fundamental prerequisite to increasing employee
engagement, which can be particularly challenging for
multinational organizations. To successfully implement
a global recognition and rewards program, organizations
must be mindful of the ways in which their workforce may
differ culturally, generationally, and individually. For their
efforts, multinational organizations will not only reap the
extraordinary financial benefits of an engaged workforce, but
also show their employees that their company cares about
them and their preferences.
REDEFINING THE FAMILY-FRIENDLY
WORKPLACE
Over the past several decades, the composition
of the workforce has changed dramatically. The traditional
conceptualization of the male breadwinner and the female
caretaker is largely a thing of the past. Now, couples
are increasingly dual-career, and single parents with
children continue to seek outside employment at high
rates. Consequently, both mothers and fathers likely have
substantial responsibilities at both work and home. In
response, organizations are implementing “family-friendly”
provisions to help their more diverse workforce better
manage their work and family responsibilities and reduce
work-family conflict. While these family-friendly provisions
are ostensibly designed to reduce conflict between work and
family demands, the evidence to support this contention is
equivocal at best. Instead, the evidence suggests that family-
friendly provisions are more likely to improve organization-
focused outcomes, such as recruitment and job attitudes.
The reduction of work-family conflict, which occurs
when demands of one domain interfere with successful
performance in the other, has been shown to reduce job
strain, absenteeism, adverse physical and psychological
symptoms, such as sleep disturbances and depression, and
increase family satisfaction. As such, organizations that
implement family-friendly provisions that effectively reduce
work-family conflict will reap benefits in the form of improved
worker productivity and health. This piece addresses the
current state of the science on formal and informal family-
friendly provisions, including their utility and effectiveness,
and includes recommendations to better align family-friendly
benefits with employee work and non-work needs.
MINDFULNESS AT WORK
Several decades of scientific research have
confirmed that highly stressed employees are
subject to considerably greater health risks, productivity
losses, and medical costs than those with normal stress
levels. These issues are particularly pronounced for those
with metabolic syndrome. Given the burgeoning research
supporting the benefits of “mindfulness-based” programs
targeting the roots of chronic conditions that undermine
health and productivity, eMindful participated in two
randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating “applied-
mindfulness” content, and a scalable delivery platform that
allows employees around the world to participate in real-time
“Webinar-style” programs.
eMindful’s programs offer innovative ways to manage
stress and shift unhealthy lifestyle behavior patterns that
contribute to obesity and the risk factors associated with
metabolic syndrome. Both programs were found to be highly
effective: the first in reducing stress and the second in
reversing metabolic syndrome. Both programs also improve
satisfaction and health for employees, while simultaneously

TRENDS AT A GLANCE
improving productivity and the bottom line for employers.
The positive results seen in these studies offer evidence
that mind-body approaches to health improvement are an
effective and targeted solution for employers who want
to lower the costs associated with stress and help their
employees achieve better overall health.
WHOLE BRAIN THINKING:
SKILLSETS FOR OUR NEW
CONCEPTUAL AGE
IQ (intelligence quotient) is considered to be the measure of
an individual’s cognitive ability to solve problems, understand
concepts, and process information. EQ, or “emotional
quotient,” is far less studied or assessed and refers to an
awareness of one’s own and other people’s emotions, the
ability to discriminate between different emotions and to use
emotions to direct thinking and behavior.
While the value of the guiding genius and visionary leader in
today’s hyper-competitive, meta-entrepreneurial, “innovate
or die” business environment is still widely recognized, IQ
and EQ are not, in and of themselves, innovation drivers and
have never been guarantors of success. IQ has been used
for many years to predict a person’s success, educational
achievement, special needs, job performance and
income. EQ can forecast a person’s success or challenges
in interacting with the world (work, home, virtual). SQ
(“synchronized quotient”) adds experiential/design thinking
to the analytical and social thinking inherent in IQ and EQ.
In many ways, SQ is an amalgam of both IQ and EQ, with
the addition of specific abilities and strengths that are the
foundation of design thinking. In short, SQ may be at the
core of creativity and the basis upon which most, if not all,
sustainable innovation occurs.
CASE STUDY IN TRENDS
CREATING POINTS OF
CONNECTION IN THE
WORKPLACE: KEYS TO ENGAGING AND
MOTIVATING THE WORKFORCE
Employers and employees today face a tidal wave of
challenges. Organizations are facing ever-increasing
competition related to their markets, products, and services.
At the same time, employees are facing a deluge of demands
on their time. One of the ways that organizations are
succeeding in the midst of all these challenges is to create
holistic and positive experiences for their employees.
Mars Drinks, a segment of Mars, Incorporated, is 100%
committed to supporting businesses that want to provide
great working environments for their people. To showcase
their dedication to making life at work better, Mars Drinks
started at home with their own employees redesigning their
global headquarters to bring to life their vision “we create
great tasting moments at work” to life. After three years of
planning, research, experimentation and implementation,
the results of this campus redesign showcase Mars Drinks’
commitment to enabling points of connection. From
egalitarian seating and hybrid workspaces to natural light
and a walking trail, the entire campus was designed to
facilitate engagement, collaboration, productivity and well-
being. In addition, the open design, the zones for connections,
the variety of work settings, and the areas for privacy and
reflection all reinforce the Mars Drinks culture.
SPECIAL SECTION IN TRENDS
EDUCATING TOMORROW’S FM
WORKFORCE
The IFMA Foundation is a non-profit organization with a
mission to make facility management the career of choice for
young people. For a long time, the IFMA Foundation has been
focused on expanding the FM accredited degree programs
around the world. But the Foundation has identified a serious
problem that now must be addressed that leads us to focus
on how to encourage younger students in making FM a career
of choice, to fill the student seats in the growing number of
accredited degree programs worldwide.
By exposing more pre-college students to the FM profession,
we can start to close the growing workforce gap in FM. The
profession has an exciting story to tell students and their
parents – an exciting career in a field with jobs that can’t be
sent overseas and nearly a 100% job placement for people
graduating with an FM degree (starting salaries are $55,000
to $85,000 USD depending on level of degree). This story
simply needs to be told more often. The Foundation then
created a new initiative in the beginning of 2014 to combat
the problem of not enough FM degree programs, students
entering these programs, or graduates available to fill the FM
vacancies coming available. n

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| FUTURE WORK SKILLS 2020
©2011 Institute for the Future (IFTF) for the University of Phoenix Research Institute.
Authors: Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, Marina Gorbis. Used with permission.
INTRODUCTION
In the 1990s, IBM’s Deep Blue beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov
in chess; today IBM’s Watson supercomputer is beating
contestants on Jeopardy. A decade ago, workers worried about
jobs being outsourced overseas; today, companies such as
ODesk and LiveOps can assemble teams “in the cloud” to do
sales, customer support, and many other tasks. Five years
ago, it would have taken years for NASA to tag millions of
photographs taken by its telescope, but now with the power of
its collaborative platforms, this task can be accomplished in a
few months, with the help of thousands of human volunteers.
Global connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just
some of the drivers reshaping how we think about work, what
constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be productive
contributors in the future.
This piece analyzes key drivers that will reshape the
landscape of work and identifies key work skills needed in
the next 10 years. It does not consider what the jobs of the
future will be. Many studies have tried to predict specific job
categories and labor requirements; however, such predictions
are difficult. Rather than focusing on future jobs, this piece
looks at future work skills—proficiencies and abilities required
across different jobs and work settings.
METHODOLOGY
Over its history, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) has been
a leader in advancing foresight methodologies, from the
Delphi technique, a method of aggregating expert opinions
to develop plausible foresight, to integrating ethnographic
methods into the discipline of forecasting, and recently
to using gaming platforms to crowdsource foresights.
We have used these methodologies with an illustrious
roster of organizations — from Fortune 500 companies to
governments and foundations — to address issues as diverse
as future science and technology, the future of organizations,
and the future of education.
IFTF uses foresight as a starting point for a process we call
Foresight to Insight to Action, a process that enables people to
take future visions and convert them into meaningful insights
and actions they can take to be successful in the future.
In writing this piece, we drew on IFTF’s foundational forecasts
in areas as diverse as education, technology, demographics,
work and health, as well as our annual Ten-Year Forecast.
The Ten-Year Forecast is developed using IFTF’s signals
methodology — an extension of decades of practice
aggregating data, expert opinion, and trends research to
understand patterns of change. A signal is typically a small
or local innovation or disruption that has the potential to
grow in scale and geographic distribution. A signal can be
a new product, a new practice, a new market strategy, a
new policy, or new technology. In short, it is something that
catches our attention at one scale and in one locale and
points to larger implications for other locales or even globally.
Signals are useful for people who are trying to anticipate a
highly uncertain future, since they tend to capture emergent
phenomenon sooner than traditional social science methods.
We enriched and vetted this research at an expert workshop
held at our headquarters in Palo Alto, where we brought
together experts in a diverse range of disciplines and
professional backgrounds, engaging them in brainstorming
exercises to identify key drivers of change and how these
will shape work skill requirements. Finally, we analyzed
and filtered all of this data in order to identify the six key
drivers and ten skills areas that will be most relevant to the
workforce of the future.
SIX DRIVERS OF CHANGE
We begin every foresight exercise with thinking about drivers
— big disruptive shifts that are likely to reshape the future
landscape. Although each driver in itself is important when
thinking about the future, it is a confluence of several drivers
Global connectivity, smart machines,
and new media are just some of the
drivers reshaping how we think about
work, what constitutes work, and the
skills we will need to be productive
contributors in the future.

FUTURE WORK SKILLS
working together that produces true disruptions. We chose
the six drivers that emerged from our research as the most
important and relevant to future work skills.
EXTREME
LONGEVITY
01
EXTREME LONGEVITY: Increasing global lifespans
change the nature of careers and learning
It is estimated that by 2025, the number of Americans
over 60 will increase by 70%. Over the next decade we will
see the challenge of an aging population come to the fore.
New perceptions of what it means to age, as well as the
emerging possibilities for realistic, healthy life-extension,
will begin to take hold.
Individuals will need to rearrange their approach to their
careers, family life, and education to accommodate this
demographic shift. Increasingly, people will work long past 65
in order to have adequate resources for retirement. Multiple
careers will be commonplace and lifelong learning to prepare
for occupational change will see major growth. To take
advantage of this well-experienced and still vital workforce,
organizations will have to rethink the traditional career paths,
creating more diversity and flexibility.
Aging individuals will increasingly demand opportunities,
products, and medical services to accommodate more healthy
and active senior years. As we move toward a world of healthier
lifestyles and holistic approaches to what we eat, how we work,
and where we live, much of daily life — and the global economy
as a whole — will be viewed through the lens of health.
RISE OF SMART
MACHINES AND
SYSTEMS
02
RISE OF SMART MACHINES AND SYSTEMS:
Workplace automation nudges human workers out
of rote, repetitive tasks
We are on the cusp of a major transformation in our
relationships with our tools. Over the next decade, new
smart machines will enter offices, factories, and homes
in numbers we have never seen before. They will become
integral to production, teaching, combat, medicine, security,
and virtually every domain of our lives. As these machines
replace humans in some tasks, and augment them in others,
their largest impact may be less obvious: their very presence
among us will force us to confront important questions.
What are humans uniquely good at? What is our comparative
advantage? And what is our place alongside these machines?
We will have to rethink the content of our work and our work
processes in response.
In some areas, a new generation of automated systems will
replace humans, freeing us up to do the things we are good
at and actually enjoy. In other domains, the machines will
become our collaborators, augmenting our own skills and
abilities. Smart machines will also establish new expectations
and standards of performance. Of course, some routine jobs
will be taken over by machines — this has already happened
and will continue. But the real power in robotics technologies
lies in their ability to augment and extend our own capabilities.
We will be entering into a new kind of partnership with
machines that will build on our mutual strengths, resulting in a
new level of human-machine collaboration and codependence.
COMPUTATIONAL
WORLD
03
COMPUTATIONAL WORLD: Massive increases in
sensors and processing power make the world a
programmable system
The diffusion of sensors, communications, and processing
power into everyday objects and environments will unleash
an unprecedented torrent of data and the opportunity to see
patterns and design systems on a scale never before possible.
Every object, every interaction, everything we come into
contact with will be converted into data. Once we decode
the world around us and start seeing it through the lens of
data, we will increasingly focus on manipulating the data
to achieve desired outcomes. Thus we will usher in an era of
“everything is programmable” — an era of thinking about the
world in computational, programmable, designable terms.
The collection of enormous quantities of data will enable
modeling of social systems at extreme scales, both micro and
macro, helping uncover new patterns and relationships that
were previously invisible. Agencies will increasingly model

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
macro-level phenomena, such as global pandemics to stop
their spread across the globe. At a micro level, individuals will
be able to simulate things, such as their route to the office to
avoid traffic congestion based on real-time traffic data. Micro-
and macro-scale models will mesh to create models that are
unprecedented in their complexity and completeness.
As a result, whether it is running a business or managing
individual health, our work and personal lives will increasingly
demand abilities to interact with data, see patterns in data,
make data-based decisions, and use data to design for
desired outcomes.
NEW MEDIA
ECOLOGY
04
NEW MEDIA ECOLOGY: New communication tools
require new media literacies beyond text
New multimedia technologies are bringing about a
transformation in the way we communicate. As technologies
for video production, digital animation, augmented reality,
gaming, and media editing become ever more sophisticated
and widespread, a new ecosystem will take shape around
these areas. We are literally developing a new vernacular, a
new language, for communication.
Already, the text-based Internet is transforming to privilege
video, animation, and other more visual communication
media. At the same time, virtual networks are being
integrated more and more seamlessly into our environment
and lives, channeling new media into our daily experience.
The millions of users generating and viewing this multimedia
content from their laptops and mobile devices are exerting
enormous influence on culture.
New media is placing new demands on attention and
cognition. It is enabling new platforms for creating online
identity, while at the same time requiring people to
engage in activities such as online personal reputation
and identity management. It is enabling new ways for
groups to come together and collaborate, bringing in new
levels of transparency to our work and personal lives. At
the same time, our sensibility toward reality and truth is
likely to be radically altered by the new media ecology.
We must learn to approach content with more skepticism
and the realization that what you see today may be
different tomorrow. Not only are we going to have multiple
interpretations of recorded events, but with ubiquitous
capture and surveillance, events will be seen from multiple
angles and perspectives, each possibly telling a different
story of individual events.
SUPERSTRUCTED
ORGANIZATIONS
05
SUPERSTRUCTED ORGANIZATIONS: Social
technologies drive new forms of production and
value creation
New technologies and social media platforms are driving
an unprecedented reorganization of how we produce and
create value. Amplified by a new level of collective intelligence
and tapping resources embedded in social connections
with multitudes of others, we can now achieve the kind of
scale and reach previously attainable by only very large
organizations. In other words, we can do things outside of
traditional organizational boundaries.
To “superstruct” means to create structures that go beyond
the basic forms and processes with which we are familiar. It
means to collaborate and play at extreme scales, from the
micro to the massive. Learning to use new social tools to
work, to invent, and to govern at these scales is what the next
few decades are all about.
Our tools and technologies shape the kinds of social, economic,
and political organizations we inhabit. Many organizations we
are familiar with today, including educational and corporate
ones, are products of centuries-old scientific knowledge and
A new generation of organizational
concepts and work skills is coming
not from traditional management/
organizational theories but from fields
such as game design, neuroscience,
and happiness psychology. These
fields will drive the creation of new
training paradigms and tools.

FUTURE WORK SKILLS
technologies. Today, we see this organizational landscape
being disrupted. In the health arena, organizations such
as CureTogether and PatientsLikeMe are allowing people to
aggregate their personal health information to allow for clinical
trials and emergence of expertise outside of traditional labs
and doctors’ offices. Science games, from Foldit to Galaxy Zoo,
are engaging thousands of people to solve problems no single
organization had the resources to do before. Open education
platforms are increasingly making content available to anyone
who wants to learn.
A new generation of organizational concepts and work skills
is coming not from traditional management/organizational
theories but from fields such as game design, neuroscience,
and happiness psychology. These fields will drive the creation
of new training paradigms and tools.
GLOBALLY-
CONNECTED
WORLD
06
GLOBALLY-CONNECTED WORLD: Increased global
interconnectivity puts diversity and adaptability at
the center of organizational operations
At its most basic level, globalization is the long-term trend
toward greater exchanges and integration across geographic
borders. In our highly globally-connected and interdependent
world, the United States and Europe no longer hold a monopoly
on job creation, innovation, and political power. Organizations
from resource- and infrastructure-constrained markets in
developing countries, like India and China, are innovating at
a faster pace than those from developed countries in some
areas, such as mobile technologies. In fact, a lack of legacy
infrastructure is combining with rapidly growing markets to
fuel higher rates of growth in developing countries.
For decades, most multinational companies have used
their overseas subsidiaries as sales and technical support
channels for the headquarters. In the last 10 years, overseas
companies, particularly IT ones, outsourced everything from
customer services to software development. The model,
however, has stayed the same: innovation and design have
been the prerogative of R&D labs in developed countries.
As markets in China, India, and other developing countries
grow, it is increasingly difficult for the headquarters to
develop products that can suit the needs of a whole different
category of consumers.
Presence in areas where new competitors are popping up is
critical to survival, but it is not enough. The key is not just
to employ people in these locales but also to effectively
integrate these local employees and local business processes
into the infrastructure of global organizations in order to
remain competitive.
FUTURE WORK SKILLS 2020
What do these six disruptive forces mean for the workers of
the next decade? We have identified 10 skills that we believe
will be critical for success in the workforce.
While all six drivers are important in shaping the landscape
in which each skill emerges, the color-coding and placement
here indicate which drivers have particular relevance to the
development of each of the skills.
10 SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE WORKFORCE
01 | SENSE-MAKING
Definition: ability to determine the deeper meaning or
significance of what is being expressed.
As smart machines take over rote, routine manufacturing and
services jobs, there will be an increasing demand for the kinds
of skills machines are lacking. These are higher-level thinking
skills that cannot be codified. We call these sense-making
skills, skills that help us create unique insights critical to
decision making.
When IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated chess
grandmaster Gary Kasparov, many took this as a sign of its
superior thinking skills. But Deep Blue had won with brute
number-crunching force (its ability to evaluate millions of
possible moves per second), not by applying the kind of human
intelligence that helps us to live our lives. A computer may be
able to beat a human in a game of chess or Jeopardy by sheer
force of its computational abilities, but if you ask it whether
it wants to play pool, it won’t be able to tell whether you are
talking about swimming, financial portfolios, or billiards.
As computing pioneer Jaron Lanier points out, despite
important advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research it
is still the case that, “if we ask what thinking is, so that we
can then ask how to foster it, we encounter an astonishing
and terrifying answer: we don’t know.”1
As we renegotiate
the human/machine division of labor in the next decade,
critical thinking or sense-making will emerge as a skill that
increasingly needs to be capitalized upon by workers.

EXTREME
LONGEVITY
RISE OF SMART
MACHINES AND
SYSTEMS
COMPUTATIONAL
WORLD
NEW MEDIA
ECOLOGY
SUPERSTRUCTED
ORGANIZATIONS
GLOBALLY-
CONNECTED
WORLD
DRIVERS
Ability to determine the deeper meaning or
significance of what is being expressed.
01 SENSE-MAKING
Ability to connect to others in a deep
and direct way, to sense and stimulate
reactions and desired interactions.
02 SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
Proficiency at thinking and coming up with
solutions and responses beyond that which
is rote or rule-based.
03 NOVEL & ADAPTIVE THINKING
Ability to operate in different cultural
settings.
04 CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCY
Ability to translate vast amounts of data
into abstract concepts and to understand
data-based reasoning.
05 COMPUTATIONAL THINKING
Ability to critically assess and develop
content that uses new media forms, and
to leverage these media for persuasive
communication.
06 NEW-MEDIA LITERACY
Literacy in and ability to understand
concepts across multiple disciplines.
07 TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Ability to represent and develop tasks and
work processes for desired outcomes.
08 DESIGN MINDSET
Ability to discriminate and filter
information for importance, and to
understand how to maximize cognitive
functioning using a variety of tools and
techniques.
09 COGNITIVE LOAD MANAGEMENT
Ability to work productively, drive
engagement, and demonstrate presence as
a member of a virtual team.
10 VIRTUAL COLLABORATION
SHAPING THE FUTURE WORKFORCE

FUTURE WORK SKILLS
02 | SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
Definition: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct
way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.
While we are seeing early prototypes of “social” and
“emotional” robots in various research labs today, the range
of social skills and emotions that they can display is very
limited. Feeling is just as complicated as sense-making, if not
more so, and just as the machines we are building are not
sense-making machines, the emotional and social robots we
are building are not feeling machines.
Socially intelligent employees are able to quickly assess the
emotions of those around them and adapt their words, tone
and gestures accordingly. This has always been a key skill
for workers who need to collaborate and build relationships
of trust, but it is even more important as we are called on to
collaborate with larger groups of people in different settings.
Our emotionality and social IQ developed over millennia of
living in groups will continue to be one of the vital assets giving
human workers a comparative advantage over machines.
03 | NOVEL & ADAPTIVE THINKING
Definition: proficiency at thinking and coming up with
solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David Autor
has tracked the polarization of jobs in the United States over
the last three decades. He finds that job opportunities are
declining in middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs,
largely due to a combination of the automation of routine
work, and global offshoring.2
Conversely, job opportunities
are increasingly concentrated in both high-skill, high-wage
professional, technical and management occupations and
in low-skill, low-wage occupations such as food service and
personal care. Jobs at the high-skill end involve abstract
tasks, and at the low-skill end manual tasks are used.
What both of these categories of tasks have in common is
that they require what Autor terms “situational adaptability”
— the ability to respond to unique unexpected circumstances
of the moment. Tasks as different as writing a convincing
legal argument, or creating a new dish out of set ingredients
both require novel thinking and adaptability. These skills
will be at a premium in the next decade, particularly as
automation and offshoring continue.
04 | CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCY
Definition: ability to operate in different cultural settings.
In a truly globally-connected world, a worker’s skill set could
see them posted in any number of locations — they need
to be able to operate in whatever environment they find
themselves. This demands specific content, such as linguistic
skills, but also adaptability to changing circumstances and an
ability to sense and respond to new contexts.
Cross-cultural competency will become an important skill
for all workers, not just those who have to operate in diverse
geographical environments. Organizations increasingly see
diversity as a driver of innovation. Research now tells us
that what makes a group truly intelligent and innovative
is the combination of different ages, skills, disciplines, and
working and thinking styles that members bring to the table.
Scott E. Page, professor and director of the Center of the
Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has
demonstrated that groups displaying a range of perspectives
and skill levels outperform like-minded experts. He concludes
that “progress depends as much on our collective differences
as it does on our individual IQ scores.”3
Diversity will therefore become a core competency for
organizations over the next decade. Successful employees
within these diverse teams need to be able to identify and
communicate points of connection (shared goals, priorities,
values) that transcend their differences and enable them to
build relationships and to work together effectively.
05 | COMPUTATIONAL THINKING
Definition: ability to translate vast amounts of data into
abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning.
As the amount of data that we have at our disposal
increases exponentially, many more roles will require
computational thinking skills in order to make sense of this
information. Novice-friendly programming languages and
technologies that teach the fundamentals of programming
virtual and physical worlds will enable us to manipulate
our environments and enhance our interactions. The use
of simulations will become a core expertise as they begin
to feature regularly in discourse and decision-making. HR
departments that currently value applicants who are familiar
with basic applications, such as the Microsoft Office suite,
will shift their expectations, seeking out resumes that include
statistical analysis and quantitative reasoning skills.
“Situational Adaptability” — the
ability to respond to unique
unexpected circumstances of the
moment ~david autor

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
In addition to developing computational thinking skills,
workers will need to be aware of its limitations. This requires
an understanding that models are only as good as the data
feeding them — even the best models are approximations
of reality and not reality itself. And second, workers must
remain able to act in the absence of data and not become
paralyzed when lacking an algorithm for every system to
guide decision making.
06 | NEW-MEDIA LITERACY
Definition: ability to critically assess and develop content
that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for
persuasive communication.
The explosion in user-generated media, including the videos,
blogs, and podcasts that now dominate our social lives, will
be fully felt in workplaces in the next decade. Communication
tools that break away from the static slide approach of
programs such as PowerPoint will become commonplace, and
with them expectations of worker ability to produce content
using these new forms will rise dramatically.
The next generation of workers will need to become fluent
in forms such as video, able to critically “read” and assess
them in the same way that they currently assess a paper or
presentation. They will also need to be comfortable creating
and presenting their own visual information. Knowledge of
fonts and layouts was once restricted to a small set of print
designers and typesetters, until word processing programs
brought this within the reach of everyday office workers.
Similarly, user-friendly production editing tools will make
video language — concepts such as frame, depth of field, etc.
— part of the common vernacular.
As immersive and visually stimulating presentation of
information becomes the norm, workers will need more
sophisticated skills to use these tools to engage and
persuade their audiences.
07 | TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Definition: literacy in and ability to understand concepts
across multiple disciplines.
Many of today’s global problems are just too complex to be
solved by one specialized discipline (think global warming
or overpopulation). These multifaceted problems require
transdisciplinary solutions. While throughout the 20th
century, ever-greater specialization was encouraged, the
next century will see transdisciplinary approaches take
center stage. We are already seeing this in the emergence of
new areas of study, such as nanotechnology, which blends
molecular biology, biochemistry, protein chemistry, and
other specialties.
This shift has major implications for the skill set that
knowledge workers will need to bring to organizations.
According to Howard Rheingold, a prominent forecaster
and author, “transdisciplinarity goes beyond bringing
together researchers from different disciplines to work in
multidisciplinary teams. It means educating researchers who
can speak languages of multiple disciplines—biologists who
have understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who
understand biology.”4
The ideal worker of the next decade is “T-shaped” — they bring
deep understanding of at least one field, but have the capacity
to converse in the language of a broader range of disciplines.

FUTURE WORK SKILLS
This requires a sense of curiosity and a willingness to go on
learning far beyond the years of formal education. As extended
lifespans promote multiple careers and exposure to more
industries and disciplines, it will be particularly important for
workers to develop this T-shaped quality.
08 | DESIGN MINDSET
Definition: ability to represent and develop tasks and work
processes for desired outcomes.
The sensors, communication tools and processing power
of the computational world will bring with them new
opportunities to take a design approach to our work. We will
be able to plan our environments so that they are conducive
to the outcomes that we are most interested in. Discoveries
from neuroscience are highlighting how profoundly our
physical environments shape cognition. As Fred Gage, a
neurobiologist who studies and designs environments for
neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons), argues, “change
the environment, change the brain, change the behavior.”5
One recent study found that ceiling height has a consistent
impact on the nature of participants’ thinking.6
Participants
in the study were asked to rate their current body state or
feeling. Those who were in the room with higher ceilings
responded more favorably to words associated with freedom,
such as “unrestricted” or “open.” Those in the lower-ceiling
room tended to describe themselves with words associated
with confinement. This impact on mood was directly
transferred to mental processes; those in the high-ceiling
group were more effective at relational thinking, creating
connections and the free recall of facts.
Workers of the future will need to become adept at
recognizing the kind of thinking that different tasks require,
and making adjustments to their work environments that
enhance their ability to accomplish these tasks.
09 | COGNITIVE LOAD MANAGEMENT
Definition: ability to discriminate and filter information for
importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive
functioning using a variety of tools and techniques.
A world rich in information streams in multiple formats and
from multiple devices brings the issue of cognitive overload
to the fore. Organizations and workers will only be able to
turn the massive influx of data into an advantage if they can
learn to effectively filter and focus on what is important.
The next generation of workers will have to develop their own
techniques for tackling the problem of cognitive overload. For
example, the practice of social filtering — ranking, tagging,
or adding other metadata to content helps higher-quality or
more relevant information to rise above the “noise.”
Workers will also need to become adept at utilizing new tools
to help them deal with the information onslaught. Researchers
at Tufts University have wired stockbrokers, who are constantly
monitoring streams of financial data and need to recognize
major changes without being overwhelmed by detail. The
stockbrokers were asked to watch a stream of financial data
and write an involved e-mail message to a colleague. As
they got more involved in composing the e-mail, the fNIRS
(functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which measures blood
oxygen levels in the brain) system detected this, and simplified
the presentation of data accordingly.7
10 | VIRTUAL COLLABORATION
Definition: ability to work productively, drive engagement,
and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.
Connective technologies make it easier than ever to work,
share ideas and be productive despite physical separation.
But the virtual work environment also demands a new set of
competencies.
As a leader of a virtual team, individuals need to develop
strategies for engaging and motivating a dispersed group.
We are learning that techniques borrowed from gaming are
extremely effective in engaging large virtual communities.
Ensuring that collaborative platforms include typical gaming
features, such as immediate feedback, clear objectives
and a staged series of challenges, can significantly drive
participation and motivation.
Members of virtual teams also need to become adept at
finding environments that promote productivity and well-
being. A community that offers “ambient sociability” can
help overcome isolation that comes from lack of access to a
central, social workplace. This could be a physical co-working
space, but it could also be virtual. Researchers at Stanford’s
Virtual Human Interaction Lab exploring the real-world social
benefits of inhabiting virtual worlds, such as Second Life,
report that the collective experience of a virtual environment,
especially one with 3D avatars, provides significant social-
emotional benefits. Players experience the others as co-
present and available, but they are able to concentrate on
their own in-world work.

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
Online streams created by micro blogging and social
networking sites can serve as virtual water coolers,
providing a sense of camaraderie and enabling employees to
demonstrate presence. For example, Yammer is a Twitter-like
micro blogging service, focused on business—only individuals
with the same corporate domain in their e-mail address can
access the company network.
IMPLICATIONS
The results of this research have implications for individuals,
educational institutions, business, and government.
To be successful in the next decade, individuals will need
to demonstrate foresight in navigating a rapidly shifting
landscape of organizational forms and skill requirements.
They will increasingly be called upon to continually reassess
the skills they need, and quickly put together the right
resources to develop and update these skills. Workers in the
future will need to be adaptable lifelong learners.
Educational institutions at the primary, secondary, and
post-secondary levels, are largely the products of technology
infrastructure and social circumstances of the past. The
landscape has changed and educational institutions should
consider how to adapt quickly in response. Some directions of
change might include:
§§ Placing additional emphasis on developing skills such
as critical thinking, insight, and analysis capabilities
§§ Integrating new-media literacy into education programs
§§ Including experiential learning that gives prominence
to soft skills—such as the ability to collaborate, work in
groups, read social cues, and respond adaptively
§§ Broadening the learning constituency beyond teens and
young adults through to adulthood
§§ Integrating interdisciplinary training that allows students
to develop skills and knowledge in a range of subjects
Businesses must also be alert to the changing environment
and adapt their workforce planning and development
strategies to ensure alignment with future skill requirements.
Strategic human resources professionals might reconsider
traditional methods for identifying critical skills, as well as
selecting and developing talent. Considering the disruptions
likely to reshape the future will enhance businesses’ ability
to ensure organizational talent has and continuously renews
the skills necessary for the sustainability of business
goals. A workforce strategy for sustaining business goals
should be one of the most critical outcomes of human
resources professionals and should involve collaborating with
universities to address lifelong learning and skill requirements.
Governmental policymakers will need to respond to the
changing landscape by taking a leadership role and making
education a national priority. If education is not prioritized,
we risk compromising our ability to prepare our people
for a healthy and sustainable future. For Americans to
be prepared and for our businesses to be competitive,
policymakers should consider the full range of skills citizens
will require, as well as the importance of lifelong learning
and constant skill renewal. n
Businesses must also be alert to the
changing environment and adapt their
workforce planning and development
strategies to ensure alignment with
future skill requirements.
KEY INSIGHTS & IMPLICATIONS
§§ This research has implications for individuals,
educational institutions, business, and government.
§§ Individuals will increasingly be called upon to
continually reassess the skills they need, and
quickly put together the right resources to develop
and update these skills.
§§ Educational institutions will place additional
emphasis on developing new skills, whether by
incorporating them into academic programs or
including experiential learning in the curriculum.
§§ Businesses must adapt their workforce planning
and development strategies to ensure alignment
with future skill requirements. The new workforce
strategy for sustaining business goals should
involve collaborating with universities to address
lifelong learning and skill requirements.
§§ Governmental policymakers will need to respond to
the changing landscape by taking a leadership role
and making education a national priority.
LINKING TO SODEXO’S QUALITY OF
LIFE DIMENSIONS
§§ Personal Growth: Employees will be required to
develop a new set of work skills in order to advance
and be successful in the workplace of tomorrow.

AIRPORT CITIES
IAEROTROPOLIS:
AIRPORTS AS THE NEW CITY CENTER
This piece is adapted from Airport Cities: The Evolution, an article originally published
in Airport World Magazine.
Dr. John Kasarda, MBA, PhD, President and CEO of Aerotropolis Business Concepts LLC
THE RISE OF THE AEROTROPOLIS
Airports have become not just 21st century business
magnets, but also regional economic accelerators, catalyzing
and driving business development outward for many miles.
As aviation-oriented businesses increasingly locate at major
airports and along transportation corridors radiating from
them, an aerotropolis emerges, stretching up to 25km (nearly
20 miles) from some major airports.
Analogous in shape to the traditional metropolis made up of a
central city core and its rings of commuter-heavy suburbs, the
aerotropolis consists of an airport-centered commercial core
(airport city) and outlying corridors and clusters of aviation-
linked businesses and associated residential development.
Some of these largest aerotropolis clusters such as
Amsterdam Zuidas, Las Colinas, Texas, and South Korea’s
Songdo International Business District — near Incheon
International Airport — have become globally significant
airport edge-cities whose business tentacles routinely touch
all major continents.
The aerotropolis, in fact, is the concrete urban manifestation
of the global meeting the local, with the airport serving
as its physical interface. Among the most prominent
are Amsterdam Schiphol, Chicago O’Hare, DFW, Dubai,
Hong Kong, Incheon, Memphis, Paris CDG, Singapore and
Washington Dulles International airports (See Figure 3).
Each has attracted a remarkable number of businesses to
their properties and broader airport areas, generating huge
economic returns to their regions and nations.
For example, more than 1,000 firms have located in the
Amsterdam Aerotropolis (including the world headquarters
of ABN Amro and ING banks located just six minutes
from Schiphol’s terminal) in part because of the superb
connectivity this airport provides their executives.
Likewise, four Fortune 500 world headquarters are located in
Las Colinas, Texas, only a 10-minute drive from DFW, while
Chicago’s O’Hare airport area has more office and convention
space than most major cities. The Washington Dulles
International airport region is the second largest retail market
in the U.S. (just behind New York City’s Manhattan Island) and
has become a high-tech business and consulting hub as well.
5% 5%
8%
10% 10%
11%
19%
32%
ENERGY
HOTELSTERMINALRENT
&USEFEES
OTHER
RETAIL,F&B&
CONCESSIONS
GROUND&
FACILITYLEASES
PARKING
LANDINGFEES
NON-AIRLINEPROFITS
Figure 1. Aerotropolises as Economic Accelerators

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
Hong Kong, Incheon, Memphis, and Paris CDG boast leading
cargo and logistics complexes, with the former two airports
sustaining, respectively, Hong Kong Disneyland and New
Songdo IDB, an airport-edge city the size of downtown
Boston. Dubai and Singapore have emerged as full-fledged
aerotropolises with their large leisure, tourism, commercial and
finance sectors dependent on aviation. Both may legitimately
be described as global aviation hubs with city-states attached.
AIRPORT CITY EVOLUTION
Airport cities have developed along different paths. A portion
of them were planned from the start. Most, however, evolved
in a largely organic manner responding to (1) airport land
availability, (2) improved surface transportation access, (3)
growing air traveler consumer demands, (4) airport revenue
needs, (5) new business practices, and (6) site-specific
commercial real estate opportunities.
Regardless of process, airports continue to transform from
primarily air transport infrastructure to multimodal, multi-
functional enterprises generating considerable commercial
development within and well beyond their boundaries.
Today, virtually all of the commercial functions of a modern
metropolitan center are found on or near most major
air gateways, fundamentally changing them from “city
airports” to “airport cities.”
The passenger-terminal has led this transition. Airside
(past security), gallerias and retail streetscapes have been
incorporated into concourses, as have multiple leisure and
consumer services. Upscale boutiques offering high-end
fashion clothing and accessories, along with gourmet and
themed restaurants, have been complemented by health,
fitness and entertainment facilities including spas, clinics,
multiplex cinemas and, in some cases, museums, art
galleries, concerts and gaming venues.
AIRPORTS AS CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS
Corporate headquarters functions were once the domain
of downtown office buildings. No longer. Go to Terminal D
at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) or to the
concourse of Detroit Metro’s magnificent McNamara Terminal
and you will see business people with bulging briefcases
walking from their arrival gates into DFW’s Grand Hyatt and
Metro’s swanky Westin Hotel.
They are pouring into these concourse-connected business
class hotels not to sleep, but to meet. DFW’s Grand Hyatt
and Detroit Metro’s Westin increasingly serve as virtual
headquarters for geographically dispersed corporate staff,
executives, and board members who fly in for sales meetings,
client contacts, and high-level decision-making.
The full-range of office services and business support staff
of a traditional corporate complex are available, including
meeting rooms, computers and advanced telecom, secretarial
and tech assistance. Some airport hotels, such as the
Sheraton at Amsterdam Schiphol, Hilton at Frankfurt and
Sofitel at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 now even rank among the
most popular places to hold business meetings in Holland,
Germany and the UK respectively.
And airports in Asia are taking “doing business” in them to
a new level. For example, in 2010, Hong Kong International
Airport opened the world’s largest terminal commercial lounge.
Its 15,000 square foot facility is a full-service business center
TRANSFORMING
CITY AIRPORTS TO AIRPORT CITIES
Figure 2. Evolution of City Airports to Airport Cities
[Travelers] are pouring into these
concourse-connected business class
hotels not to sleep, but to meet.

AIRPORT CITIES
that supports up to 300 users with wireless office workstations,
projectors, meeting rooms, advanced videoconference stations,
and tech assistance. Large-screen TVs and an all-day buffet
provide the entertainment during any downtime.
In tune with today’s corporate needs for quick access to their
widely dispersed clients and enterprise partners, The Squaire
(designated “New Work City”) opened at Frankfurt Airport in
2011. This two million square foot, mainly office and hotel
complex, is over 2,000 ft long (650 meters) and nine stories
high. Its primary value proposition is speedy connectivity,
not only local and national, but also global. The Squaire
is just eight minutes via covered walkway to the airport’s
international check-in counters.
In addition to an adjacent high-speed motorway, rapid ground
connectivity to much of the region and beyond is provided by
the inter-city rail station underneath the complex. Served by
some 230 long-distance trains daily, The Squaire is without
doubt the best-connected office building in Europe.
Excellent surface connectivity, together with Frankfurt
Airport’s extensive international flight network, has fashioned
it into a magnet for offices of travel-intensive firms. One
prominent multi-national accounting, auditing, and
consulting firm, KPMG, has made The Squaire its European
corporate headquarters, occupying 400,000 square feet.
A number of major airports now actually exceed many
downtown metropolitan central business districts in office
space and employment. Rossypole, occupying 160 acres (65
hectares) in the middle of the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
has over 2.5 million square feet (230,000 sqm) of offices.
There are around 700 firms based on the 3,200-hectare (7,900
acre) airport property, employing a total of 87,000 people.
Proceeding outward, there is an additional 770,000 sqm of
offices in the immediate vicinity of the airport, along with
many hotels and logistics facilities. Approximately 250,000
jobs in the Paris region are directly or indirectly related to CDG.
Airport city and aerotropolis development is gaining
substantial traction, multiplying rapidly on a global scale.
Using qualitative and quantitative techniques, I’ve identified
over 80 airport cities and broader aerotropolises (airport-
centered urban economic regions) around the world that are
either already operational or in early stages of development.
AEROTROPOLISES
AROUNDTHEWORLD
AMSTERDAM
SCHIPHOL
DALLAS
FORT WORTH
DUBAI
INCHEONHONG KONG
CHARLES
DE GAULLE
CHICAGO
O’HARE
MEMPHIS
SINGAPORE
CHANGI
WASHINGTON
DULLES
38NORTH AMERICA 20EUROPE
7AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST
1SOUTH AMERICA
1CENTRAL AMERICA 17ASIA-PACIFIC
Figure 3. Examples of Aerotropolises Around the World

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T R E N D S2015
Their distribution is widespread with 38 identified in North
America, 20 in Europe, 17 in Asia-Pacific, seven in Africa
and the Middle East and one each in Central and South
America. Various criteria were used to designate operational
or developing airport cities and aerotropolises. Some of the
criteria are clearly subjective, so this list is by no means
definitive. Without doubt, new sites will be added, while some
shown here may fall by the wayside.
AEROTROPOLIS EMPLOYMENT SCALE AND
INDUSTRY MIX
The employment scale and industry mix of the aerotropolis
is much greater than many realize. Research by Dr. Stephen
Appold and myself on employment around the 25 busiest
passenger airports in the U.S., found that 3.1 million jobs
as of 2009 were located within a 2.5-mile radius of these
airports (2.8% of total U.S. employment); over 7.5 million jobs
within a five-mile distance (6.8% of all U.S. employees) and
19 million jobs (17.2% of the U.S. total) within 10 miles (See
Figure 4). Assessment of wages and salaries in these airport
radii showed that the respective percentages from payrolls
were 3.4%, 8.2% and 21.9%. This indicates that many jobs
near major airports are relatively well paid.
When we studied individual airports, we found that those
located a greater distance from the metropolitan city center
generated significant employment clusters of their own.
Fostered by these clusters, Chicago O’Hare has 450,000
jobs within a radius of five miles; DFW 395,000 jobs, and
Washington Dulles International almost 240,000 jobs.
Fully 9.3% of all U.S. employment in transport and warehousing
is located within 2.5 miles of the 25 airports we analyzed. The
disproportionately high concentration of these jobs continued
outward at least as far as a 10-mile radius of the airport fence.
Even traditional downtown employment sectors such
as finance, insurance, and administration are moving
to airport areas. Our research comparing airport area
employment with metropolitan central business district
area employment showed that zones within five miles of the
airport register 55% of the finance and insurance jobs that
are located within five miles of the city center and 78% of
the administrative and support jobs.
Hotels, of course, are mushrooming around airports. There
are 49 hotels within 2.5 miles of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta,
with the heaviest concentration just one to 1.5 miles away.
This compares to 51 hotels located within 2.5 miles of
Atlanta’s city center.
And, the largest concentration of hotel rooms on the entire
U.S. West Coast is adjacent to Los Angeles International
Airport’s fence. Areas surrounding airports are also attracting
businesses in a full range of professional, medical (life-
sciences) and information and communication functions.
Sports, recreation and entertainment complexes as well
as showrooms, exhibition and convention centers are also
gravitating toward them.
The aerotropolis is thus much more of a dynamic, forward-
looking concept than a static, cross-sectional model where
U.S. EMPLOYMENT NEAR AIRPORTS
17.2% WITHIN 10 MILES
6.8% WITHIN 5 MILES
2.8% WITHIN 2.5 MILES
Figure 4. The Aerotropolis’ Effect on U.S. Employment

5% 5%
8%
10% 10%
11%
19%
32%
ENERGY
HOTELSTERMINALRENT
&USEFEES
OTHER
RETAIL,F&B&
CONCESSIONS
GROUND&
FACILITYLEASES
PARKING
LANDINGFEES
NON-AIRLINEPROFITS
AEROTROPOLISES AS
ECONOMIC ACCELERATORS
U.S. EMPLOYMENT NEAR AIRPORTS
17.2% WITHIN 10 MILES
6.8% WITHIN 5 MILES
2.8% WITHIN 2.5 MILES
AEROTROPOLISES
AROUNDTHEWORLD
AMSTERDAM
SCHIPHOL
DALLAS
FORT WORTH
DUBAI
INCHEONHONG KONG
CHARLES
DE GAULLE
CHICAGO
O’HARE
MEMPHIS
SINGAPORE
CHANGI
WASHINGTON
DULLES
38NORTH AMERICA 20EUROPE
7AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST
1SOUTH AMERICA
1CENTRAL AMERICA 17ASIA-PACIFIC

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
much existing development reflects historic airport-area
growth over many prior decades, some in the distant past.
Future development of the aerotropolis will be driven
by further global integration and the need for speedy
connectivity. Both will be enabled and catalyzed by the
continuing expansion of aviation routes operating as a
Physical Internet moving people and products quickly
worldwide, analogous to the way the digital Internet moves
data and information.
With airports serving as key nodes (or routers) of this Physical
Internet, aviation, globalization, and urban development
converge, creating the 21st century aerotropolis.
CONCLUDING COMMENT
We have entered a new transit-oriented development era
where cities are being built around airports instead of the
reverse. In the process, the urban center is being relocated
in the form of globally significant airport cities and
aerotropolises. Propitious opportunities await metropolitan
regions (including their traditional central cities) that can
marshal the vision, planning skills, and coordinated actions to
capitalize on them. n
§§ Airport city and aerotropolis development is
multiplying rapidly on a global scale.
§§ Corporate headquarters functions are now found
in airports, with business travelers meeting in
concourse-connected business class hotels.
§§ In addition to creating employment clusters
for transport and warehousing jobs, traditional
downtown employment sectors are also moving to
airport areas.
§§ Future development of the aerotropolis will be
driven by further global integration and the need
for speedy connectivity.
§§ Success awaits those that can marshal the
vision, planning skills, and coordinated actions
to capitalize on the new opportunities created by
aerotropolis development.
LIFE DIMENSIONS
§§ Physical Environment: Airports designed with
comfort in mind contribute to a better travel
experience for employees — one that enhances
rather than detracting from their quality of life.
§§ Ease & Efficiency: The ability to work efficiently
while traveling allows employees to complete their
work with greater efficiency and less lost time.
Charles De Gaulle Airport

RATEOCRACY
IRATEOCRACY: WORKING AND MANAGING
IN AN ERA OF EXTREME TRANSPARENCY
This article is expanded and updated from ‘Real-time ratings will raise stakeholders’ expectations
of businesses,’ published in THE FUTURIST Magazine, Vol. 46, No 3. Used with permission.
Robert Moran, Partner, Brunswick Group
Today, consumers rate sellers on eBay, restaurants on Yelp,
and local companies on Angie’s List, providing detailed
product reviews online. Job hunters and employees can read
and rate employers on Glassdoor.com. College students rate
their professors on ratemyprofessors.com. Neighbors and
friends can view each other’s reputations (and their own) at
honestly.com. And Facebook’s more than 1.3 billion users can
endorse a product or organization by “liking” it.
Soon, we will also rate corporations on their behavior and
have real-time mobile access to the aggregated, stakeholder-
generated reputation scores of nearly every corporation on
the planet. We will use this information to reward and punish
companies by buying their products or spurning them. We
will have entered into a completely new era of corporate
reputation, one in which reputation is radically transparent
and extremely valuable.
I call this new era Rateocracy because it will combine real-time
ratings within a transparent and democratic structure. In fact,
we can anticipate that virtually every person, place and thing
will have a numeric social rating. Corporations, managers
and employees will learn to live with “coveillance” — a world
in which nearly everyone observes and rates the behavior of
everyone else. How organizations large and small operate
within such an environment is worthy of deep consideration.
Existing organizational models may be challenged.
All the necessary technologies and building blocks are in
position to create a real-time, reputational rating system
for corporations. Current rating systems will be knit
together, and “ratestreams” will become as significant as
“clickstreams” are today.
Corporations will closely track the rise and fall of their
reputational “credit rating.” They will begin to draw the link
between their numerical reputational rating and growth,
profitability, and employee retention. Corporate reputation,
something that has been traditionally tracked on an
annual basis, will have entered an entirely new era — the
Rateocratic era.
Rateocracy will be numeric and transparent, providing real-
time data that push corporations to “live their purpose.” It
will also increase public expectations, creating a virtuous
“race to the top,” forcing businesses to compete in areas they
may have never competed in before.
How it develops is another story, however, and there are
at least three paths to the era of Rateocracy. The first is
the growth of a robust, niche-by-niche ratings culture — a
simple extrapolation from where we are today. The second
is the emergence of a “middleware” system that ties these
disparate rating systems into one workable, searchable
whole. The third is the creation of an open, universal rating
platform for all people, places and things, something like
those envisioned in the novels Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom by Cory Doctorow and Super Sad True Love Story by
Rateocracy will be numeric and
transparent, providing real-time
data that push corporations to
“live their purpose.”
Growth of a
robust,
niche-by-niche
ratings culture
Emergence of a
“middleware”
system
Creation of an
open, universal
rating platform
Figure 1. Three Paths to the Era of Rateocracy

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
Gary Shteyngart. Doctorow explores a future world in which
reputation is currency, and Shteyngart explores a dystopian
near-future in which everyone has real-time image ratings.
Along these lines, the startup lab Milk Inc. created a universal
rating app named Oink in 2011 (though this first attempt
lasted only five months).
Regardless of how Rateocracy develops, it will need to
navigate the twin challenges of rater appeal and data
quality. These challenges are really two sides of the same
coin. Greater simplicity and appeal to raters increase the
number of raters and make the data more projectable. What
is gained in the simplicity of the rating scheme, however, is
lost in data granularity.
CORPORATIONS IN THE RATEOCRACY AGE
While there will be many unforeseen impacts from this
new age of corporate reputation, there are at least nine
implications that will flow from Rateocracy. These are:
1. The New Balance of Power
Customers, suppliers, and employees will gain power in this
new era of Rateocracy. And, relative to these groups, the
corporation will lose power as it controls relatively less of its
own reputation.
2. Role of Corporate Leader
The CEO of the future will need to work harder to align the
corporation, its employees, and stakeholders around a shared
vision. It will be increasingly difficult to sweep customer
service and employee morale problems under the rug. CEOs
of the Rateocratic era will have nowhere to hide, so they will
have to be strong communicators and even better listeners.
They will have to be as transparent as the new era.
3. 24/7 Reputation Management
While corporate reputation grows in strategic importance
for firms, the tactical, day-to-day management of
reputation will become critical. Corporations will build
reputational dashboards that aggregate multiple rating
sites and information flows, including customer relationship
management (CRM) data. The key will be managing
reputation in real time by improving the quality of
interactions with the firm and intervening before unhappy
stakeholders voice their concerns on rating sites. This
will undoubtedly boost the size of the current reputation
management industry.
4. Feedback Loop
Much has been made of Peter Senge’s ideas around a
“learning organization” and Henry Mintzberg’s “strategy
as learning.” Life in this new age of corporate reputation
will present the corporation with the tightest possible
feedback loop across its entire stakeholder footprint.
Some corporations will find unique ways to harness this
information for competitive advantage, using their rapid
learning as a core competency.
5. Employees as Leading Indicators
With employees already participating in rating their
employers on sites like Glassdoor.com, we can assume that
these internal rating systems will only intensify and that
other stakeholders will look to these internal ratings as a
leading indicator of business health. Employee assessments
will function as the canary in the coal mine. In fact, this is
already beginning to happen. As just one example, Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison had a 75% job approval from the 3,353 Oracle
employees who rated his performance on Glassdoor.
6. Statistical Projectability
How close will these aggregate ratings of a corporation’s
reputation track with statistically representative survey
data? Given limited participation in most rating sites at
the moment, we can only assume that this data is not yet
robust enough to match rigorously collected survey data. As
participation in these sites increases, the data should begin
to converge. Even then, however, survey-based stakeholder
data will still be needed to track a corporation’s reputation
among critical, but small, stakeholder communities and as an
independent check.
7. Great Expectations
Stakeholder expectations of corporate behavior will likely play
a large role in the scores corporations receive. But expectations
will vary by industry, region, and situation. For example,
consumers have very different expectations of quick service
versus formal dining restaurants, and those expectations
will be factored into their ratings. Moreover, we already know
The key will be managing reputation...
[which] will undoubtedly boost
the size of the current reputation
management industry.

TECHNOLOGY-EMPOWERED
CONSUMERS
Trust their
peers’ reviews
of companies.
Trust online reviews
as much as personal
recommendations.
Say positive
reviews make
them trust a
business more.
Believe a
company’s
claims about
themselves.
References:
Carlson, C. (2014). The Glassdoor Effect - Do You Know What Your Employees Say About You? Retrieved from
http://blog.pipelinedeals.com/pipelinefrontpage/glassdoor-effect
Howard, J. (2014). 3 Online Reputation Management Statistics You Need To Know. Retrieved from
http://www.jackmyrep.com/3-online-reputation-management-statistics-you-need-to-know/
“A one-star increase in Yelp
ratings leads to a 5–9%
increase in revenue.”
R AT E O C R A C Y
TURNING BIG CORPORATIONS
INTO SMALL TOWN BUSINESSES
RATINGS
CORPORATE CHANGE

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
that people in different cultures have very different standards
for rating products and services. We can anticipate that
aggregated, open-source corporate reputation data will reflect
these cultural differences. Finally, we can expect that the
macroeconomic situation as well as the track record of the
company will impact its ratings.
8. Information Trends
As these reputational information sets evolve and converge,
corporations will need to better understand seasonal
trends (e.g., retailers getting a reputational bump from
consumers during back-to-school shopping, but taking a
reputational hit during the Christmas rush), reputational
cycles, and event-driven data spikes. For example, in
the future, corporations will ask why a one-week rise in
employee ratings occurred. The data will show a spike,
but the cause or causes will need to be determined. Was
it positive earnings news announced by the CEO, the new
announcement on operations safety, the preceding three-
day weekend, or a combination of all of these?
9. Rateocracy Meets Augmented Reality
At some point late in this decade, corporate reputation
ratings systems and augmented reality layers will begin
to merge. Layar, the Amsterdam-based creator of the
world’s first mobile augmented reality browser, is already
turning mobile phones into devices that enrich the visual
environment of the user. When augmented reality and
Rateocracy merge, corporate reputation data will be
superimposed onto a company’s geographically based assets.
Consumers will be able to purchase and download many
different augmented reality layers that enrich the visual
overlay on their smartphones. These layers will “paint”
companies’ buildings based on aggregated reputation
scores. For example, imagine an augmented-reality layer
available on a smartphone or AR glasses like Google Glass
that aggregates all Yelp restaurant rating data at the
corporate and individual store level. This augmented-reality
layer will flash red for a restaurant with poor reviews and
an abundance of health department citations, but will flash
green for a restaurant with stellar reviews. This will play out
across all storefront businesses.

RATEOCRACY
IS RATEOCRACY A GAME CHANGER?
Some will contend that Rateocracy is an entirely new
ballgame for corporations. But, in many ways, it is a very old
ballgame and one that predated the large industrial societies
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As anyone who
has grown up in a small, rural town can tell you, a local
business’s reputation is very well known. There aren’t many
secrets in small-town life. It was only since the advent of large
cities, national markets, and labor force mobility that a level
of anonymity arose.
Rateocracy can be viewed as a tectonic power shift toward
technology-empowered stakeholders, but it can just as easily
be viewed as the construction of a digital village in which a
business’s reputation returns to the immediacy of small-town
life. But will employees, managers and leaders feel smothered
by watchful eyes in this new, digital village? Most of these
contemporary concerns have revolved around the growth
and impact of top-down social and workplace surveillance.
Rateocracy, however, scrambles the calculus and evens
the equation, introducing “coveillance” — where everyone
observes and rates everyone else. On the bright side, this
even playing field may chasten tyrannical bosses and quickly
motivate underperforming employees.
ORGANIZATIONAL CONFORMITY
Could Rateocracy severely constrain an organization’s most
visionary change agents and intrapreneurs? Jack Welch,
former chairman and CEO of General Electric, famously
asserted that his best managers had 3 Es — energy,
execution and edge. Will Rateocracy tolerate the hard-
charging employees with drive and an edge? Will it discourage
the most innovative employees, the ones with subversive and
disruptive new ideas?
Rateocracy may make us all better behaved, but will it
promote too much conformity at a time when pioneer
thinking is most needed?
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, Rateocracy will take the trend toward
transparency one quantum leap forward. And corporate
transparency is a HOT topic today.
§§ In the new era of Rateocracy, consumers will rate
corporations on their behavior and have real-time
mobile access to their aggregated, stakeholder-
generated reputation scores.
§§ The implications of Rateocracy include:
»» Customers, suppliers, and employees who are
more powerful than corporations.
»» CEOs who must work harder to align the
corporation, its employees, and stakeholders
around a shared vision.
»» Increased reputation management, including
reputational dashboards.
»» The tightest possible feedback loops across
corporations’ entire stakeholder footprints.
»» Employees as leading indicators of businesses’
health.
»» Statistical projectability of the aggregate
ratings of a corporation’s reputation.
»» Stakeholder expectations of corporate
behavior playing a large role in the scores
corporations receive.
»» Tracking of new information trends, for
instance, seasonal trends, reputational cycles,
and event-driven data spikes.
»» The merging of corporate reputation ratings
systems and augmented reality layers.
LIFE DIMENSIONS
§§ Health & Well-Being: Rateocracy is an example
of a macro-level or organizational approach to
understanding Quality of Life. Health & Well-Being
is the most relevant dimension, as the reputation
or “health” of a business is likely to be correlated
with the overall health status of a community and
vice versa.
Is Rateocray a game changer? There
aren’t many secrets in small-town life.
The Harvard Business Review has recently published
articles on transparency as diversely titled as “The Big
Idea: Leadership in the Age of Transparency,” “Why Radical
Transparency Is Good Business” and “The Transparency Trap.”
Rateocracy will radically test these assumptions and leaders
must prepare now by creating organizations that do what
they say they will do and act quickly on customer feedback.
They must also dramatically sharpen their communication
skills for a world in which they are always on the firing line. n

WORKPLACE
T R E N D S2015
I
GLOBAL REWARDS AND RECOGNITION:
BRIDGING CULTURE AND GENERATIONS
THROUGH LOCALIZATION
Michele W. Gazica, JD, MA, PhD Candidate at the University of South Florida
Researchers and industry organizations agree — employee
work engagement is essential to organizational success. In
fact, studies have shown that employees who are engaged
at work are better, more efficient performers who are loyal
to their companies, have higher levels of work motivation,
innovation, and customer service, and lower levels of intent
to turnover.1
These outcomes of engagement translate into
better financial performance for organizations. In fact, Aon
Hewitt (2013) reports that “each incremental percentage of
employees who become engaged [predicts] an incremental
0.6% growth in sales.” As a practical illustration of the
power of this relationship, for a $5 billion company with
a gross margin of 55% and 15% operating margin, if this
‘engagement to sales growth’ relationship holds true, a
1% increase in employee engagement would be worth $20
million in incremental operating income.2
WORK ENGAGEMENT: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
According to a 2011–2012 study conducted by Gallup across
142 countries, only 13% of employees are engaged at work.
Outnumbering engaged employees at a rate of nearly 2 to
1 are the actively disengaged — those who are emotionally
disconnected from, and possibly hostile toward, their
current employers.3
(See Figure 1)
The engagement continuum on which any given employee
falls profoundly affects organizational outcomes. Gallup,
for example, reports that those on the high end of the
engagement continuum (top 25%) demonstrate substantial
differences from those at the lower end on nine key
performance indicators.4
(See Figure 2)
Overall, 87% or more of the global workforce has engagement
levels that leave room for improvement. One of the most
effective ways to increase engagement is through recognition
and rewards programs; in fact, most regions of the world rank
recognition as one of the most important drivers of employee
engagement.5
In addition to promoting higher engagement
levels, such programs have the added benefit of yielding 21%
higher retention rates, 27% higher profits, and 50% higher
sales to those organizations that implement them.6
In order to
be optimally effective, recognition and reward programs must
be formalized and designed to consistently and fairly reinforce
desired behaviors company-wide.7
When implemented on
a global scale, these programs must also meet the diverse
needs and preferences of a multinational, multigenerational
employee base, which takes careful assessment.
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY: TOTAL
REWARDS SOLUTIONS
People across the globe differ along cultural and generational
dimensions. Thus, when implementing global recognition and
rewards programs, organizations that are multigenerational
and multinational in nature must be mindful of how different
groups of people prefer to be recognized. In fact, approximately
30% of people employed by U.S.-based multinational
companies work outside of the U.S., most of whom are native
to the country in which they work.8
Consequently, a “one size
fits all” approach to a global recognition and rewards program
is likely inappropriate to capture the needs, preferences, and
expectations of such a diverse workforce.
2011–2012
2008–2009
ONY 13% ARE ENGAGED
20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
ACTIVELY DISENGAGED NOT ENGAGED ENGAGED
24 63 13
27 62 11
Figure 1. Overall Engagement Among the Employed Population in 142 Countries Worldwide
(Source: Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workforce Report)

GLOBAL REWARDS AND RECOGNITION
To increase the chances that a company’s global recognition
and rewards program will enhance its motivational value
to the local workforce, the following suggestions should be
kept in mind:
1) Implement Uniform, Company-Wide Recognition
and Reward Strategies
Corporate recognition and rewards programs should be
consistent across the entire company. Furthermore, policies
should discourage distributing recognition, incentives,
and other rewards without pairing them with clear,
consistent sets of behavioral contingencies; otherwise, a
well-intentioned program may inadvertently reduce the
potential to achieve desired outcomes and result in decreased
employee engagement. Instead, recognition and rewards
should be tailored to drive desired behavior and contingent
upon the successful execution of specific behaviors. However,
the ways in which people are rewarded and recognized for
their successful execution of those behaviors should be
customized to capture local and individual preferences.
2) Know Your Employees
Cultural considerations. There is a strong relationship
between engagement and recognition across cultures.9
To
leverage the strength of that relationship, organizations
must be mindful of the cultural norms, traditions, and
superstitions in which they are geographically situated. For
example, rewards that are common in North America, such
as watches and clocks, are taboo in other regions, such as
Asia.10
Even good-intentioned, but ill-informed, recognition
programs can have long-lasting negative repercussions in
terms of employee engagement and morale. For example,
a U.S. company located in Hong Kong wished to reward
its Singapore employees with a red envelope containing
money — an Asian tradition to mark a happy occasion.
Unfortunately, the company chose to stuff the envelopes
with an amount that was equivalent to four Singapore dollars,
a number that connotes death in many Asian cultures.
Thereafter, employee morale, motivation, and engagement
were permanently damaged.11
As the foregoing example illustrates, understanding the
culture in which a recognition and rewards program will
be implemented cannot be overemphasized. However, two
warnings must be heeded. First, avoid making assumptions
regarding the homogeneity of any given region, no matter
-80% -70% -60% -50% -40%
LOW-TURNOVER ORGS. -65
Median differences between top and bottom quartile teams
SHRINKAGE -28
ABSENTEEISM -37
HIGH-TURNOVER ORGS. -25
SAFETY INCIDENTS -48
PATIENT SAFETY INCIDENTS -41
QUALITY (DEFECTS) -41
CUSTOMER 10
PRODUCTIVITY 21
PROFITABILITY 22
-30% -20% -10% 0% 10% 20% 30%
TURNOVER
Figure 2. Engagement’s Effect on Key Performance Indicators (Source: Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workforce Report)
Approximately 30% of people
employed by U.S.-based multinational
companies work outside of the U.S.

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