The task:
You have been recruited as a management consultant to deliver a report about how organisations recruit, retain and engage employees in a fast changing business environment. Drawing upon appropriate theoretical frameworks you should examine three specific areas and report on how these inform an understading of the changinfg nature of work.  The assignement requires you the student to produce a series of compelling recommendations about how your organisation can achieve success in the future world of work.
You should identify an appropriate orgainsational context for your study – ie, public sector, private sector, third sector.  You can further section the sector into service and industrial etc.  It may help you to idetify a company and use that as your focus but this is not necesaary.
Choose three tehory based elements of the module for the purpose of your analysis, but remember, these dhould inform the reader about their connection with recruitment, engagment  and sustainable talent and organisational development
o    Flexibility and work and changing requirements.
o    Psychological contarcts, are they still relevant?
o    Aesthetic labour – to what extent is image a part of the modern professional tool kit?
o    Control in post bureaucratic organisations, how do we achieve a balance between hard and soft systems?
o    Conflict –  will conflict be eliminated or will it take new forms.  The nature of agency.
o    Sustainability – how will organisations of the future achieve a triple bottom line perfomance: economic social and environmental.

Narrator
Attempts to predict the future of the world of work beyond a limited time-frame would be presumptuous and most certainly inaccurate.  Twenty years ago for example, academics, business consultants and governments were predicting business and employment contexts that would be more technologically driven, project based, flexible and responsive to 24/7 consumer led demand.  (UKces 2014).  But there were other predictions, experience of work would be more balanced; work-life balance would improve as more leisure time was created by technology removing the mundane creating space for creative engagement. (Lewis S., 2003)  The reality for many is not the contraction of the working week but rather as OECD illustrated, the UK for instance is recording an increase of 1% per year of people working beyond 50 hours per week, higher than the average of OECD countries.  (OECD, 2015) (UKCES, 2014)
A question thus arises, in high performance work contexts to what extent do millenials working in high performance contexts  expect from their world of work?
It is not only issues such as work-life balance that tax employers and employees:  it is how an orgainsations coordinate,  develop and sustains its talent base and as studies in the post -bureaucratic society indicate, the notion of regulation, command and control are no longer relevant.  Behaviours at work will be shaped by an understanding of those behaviours; management becomes more about nurturing talent and coaching rather than direction.  It could be argued that the future of work is likely to involve more remote types of working make managing the employment relationship more difficult.
How do organisations develop relationships with employees in a future facing work contexts?  Are trust loyalty and commitment no, longer relevant?
The UK government posed a question  ‘What will be the characteristics of the UK’s job landscape in 2030? Which will be the skills needed to drive the competitiveness of UK businesses and push the employability of the UK’s working age population’  (UKces, 2014)
While from an academic position these questions provide opportunities for endless research papers, books, publications and policy papers  the practical implications of the changing nature of work often fall upon the HR professionals in high performance organisations.  How do organisations recruit, develop and retain the talent necessary to remain competitive in a fast changing business environment?  How do businesses position their resources to ensure sustainability in line withn the concept of the triple bottom line:  a stustainability that is economic, social and environmental?
For employees the future of work presents additional challenges of mainating skills in order to remian attractive to employers.
What might the employee of the future look like? What skill sets will they require in order to be personally sustainable?  What will motivate the employee of the future in high performance contexts?  What attributes are employers looking for in an employee and how might that reflect work demands, for example, will employees be more engaged in presentational activities where image becomes increasingly important to the employment function?
Control: in post-bureaucratic contextsdefined by  autonomy and a professional bureaucracy, what models of business controls become relevant?  As an example, in networked organisations, how is intellectual property protected?  Is there a need for a re-empahsising or rebalancing of hard and soft control system?

All these questions and more are relevant to the study of contemporary organisations and are likely to become greater challenges for managers in high performance organisations.  As such this coursework examines the issues that arise from the future of work and the challenges facing HR professionals of building talent, engaging that talent aligned with orgainsational values and outcomes, and developing  sustainable business futures.

Word Count:  Max 2500
Due Date: Submission in Week 13 (19th April).  Given the size of the module the feedback will not be avaiable until the end of week 15
All learning outcomes will be assessed through this work.

Guidance Notes:
The following notes are there for you to reflect on and should not be considered as an instruction to produce exactly what is here.  The choice of approach is yours.  What you will need to do however is to familiarise yourself with the literature that relates to the chosen theoretical underpinnings.
The process:  The assessment asks you to produce a report on what the future of work will look like for a company or within a given sector of the economy, for example nursing.  You should conduct what is called contextual research.  This will include an examination of the company/sector, the identification of changes that have been taking place within working practices and the challenges of finding employees who will fulfil the requirements for the future.
Some sectors of the economy are more labour intensive than others so will require a different arrangements of skills, variables such as these should inform your choice of theory.  Once you understand more about the context, you can identify a number of key issues that are evident in literature.  For example, a challenge for the sector might be in gender balance in the workforce.  This will inevitably lead you down the path of flexible work arrangements.  But the challenge is not only to recruit employees, it is how to retain and engage key talent.  For example, in the Unify (2016) and Deloitte (2016) reports there are suggestions that future knowledge workers regard corporate values as critical to career destination; this could lead you perhaps to explore the psychological contract as an important consideration.

Guidance Notes
Questions you should ask yourself before writing:
1.    What are the key challenges facing the sector?
2.    What evidence are there that recruiting, retaining and engaging key personnel is an issue?
3.    How do the challenges identified relate to the concepts in the theory base: PC, flexibility, emotion labour etc.?
Once you have completed this background research you should commence your writing with an argument at the back of your mind.
The structure:
a)    Introduction and remit – what is the brief? (no executive summary is required)
b)    Introduce a background to the challenges facing the sector bearing in mind that the purpose is to relate them to, recruitment of key talent, engagement, retention and discretionary effort.  (note, not all the background information might be relevant)
c)    Theoretical basis of argument.  Which theories are you drawing upon to inform the reader of those challenges?  This is a critical part of the paper.
d)    How does theory inform us about the challenges in b)?
e)    Recommendations for consideration by the report commissioner?
f)    Conclusions and recommendations