The Globe and Mail

Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne, authors of the bestseller Microtrends , recently wrote an interesting column that highlights three key “microtrends” in the workplace. The three main areas are “love and work,” “place and work,” and “age and work.”

They write that there has “been such an explosion in the number of choices in people's lives that the only way to really know what's going on, in work or anywhere else, is to look at the Microtrends - the smaller, counterintuitive forces that are pushing and pulling at society.”

Overall, they say that today’s workers “want their jobs and their workplace to match their sense of self.” This had led to what they deem a rise of individuality at work, and that larger trend is fed by these three microtrends.

Love and Work
The authors cite surveys that show workers appear to be increasingly open to office romances, and that many are also taking time in their personal lives to care for aging loved ones. To embrace these trends, employers should engage in “frank new discussions about dating, mating, and breaking up, in the context of colleagues, clients, and competitors…” and pay attention how they can support employees who are caring for the infirm at home.

Place and Work
We’ve all heard the tales of telecommuting, but there are also the so-called “extreme commuters,” the “3.5 million people [in the U.S. who] travel at least 90 minutes each way to get to work - almost double the number from 10 years ago.” Then there are another 3.5 million U.S. workers who “are living right by work during the workweek, but traveling back to see their spouses and families on the weekends.”

Age and Work
This is another area of great interest for researchers and workplace experts. Many offices now have a mixture of baby boomers and very young gen y workers. The age gap can be quite large. You have “America's Working Retired - the 5 million U.S. workers who are 65+, twice the number of such workers in 1980.” And you have the entrepreneurial “High School Moguls” who strike out on their own at an early age, or the “older” generation y workers who expect to be given real responsibility their first day on the job.

The authors conclude that, “employees want their work to accommodate, and even promote, the kinds of choices they are making elsewhere - from their love life to their family life to their newfound span of work life.”