I came across a really interesting whitepaper today, talking about the rapid changes taking place in the workforce. Read it for yourself here:

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/en-us/default.aspx?ng=insights&ct=articles&id=1

Some of the trends are here already, albeit often in a much smaller form.

Home Work and Placeless Work

Rising gas prices and the need for work/life balance create a demand for home-based offices that complement or replace corporate offices. Many organizations will begin to downsize their real estate holdings and opt out of lease renewals as the Internet and related technologies blur the edges of the physical corporation. With mobile technology, people will also choose to be placeless, their user ID and presence information substituting for a cubical location.

Consumer Technology in Business

Just as the PC and instant messaging brought new capabilities to the workplace, so too will many emergent Web technologies. Consumer technology will impact business in many ways. Among them: building corporate brand on video sites; acquiring temporary virtual workforces through social networking to tackle individual problems; educating through mobile devices; and discovering relationships and patterns by combining data sets that drive innovation.

Corporate Language

Organizations will continue to choose a language for their business, but many will face the need to create a semantic layer that will bind their corporation together. Many companies have internal acronyms that define their corporate-speak. And the blurring of boundaries may accelerate this trend, to the point that institutional argots evolve into living linguistic constructs.

I wonder what the world will look like when these trends hit with full force, in 15 years time when the Baby Boomers are no longer the driving force in the workplace.