Surviving the office world is a big challenge these days. Be prepared. Have fun.

There is no such thing as a permanent job anymore. The future of work will be an increasing variety of contractual arrangements between a worker and an employer. We are now seeing the development of many hitherto atypical forms of employment, such as temporary agency work, fixed-term contracts, casual work, civil contracts, zero hour contracts, job sharing, on-call work, telework and working from remote locations. The twentieth century employment relationship was based on merging the needs of the manufacturing-oriented economy with mass production, full employment, collective behaviour and strong trade unions. All that has changed.

Society is in upheaval, moving towards a knowledge-based economy. As a result, we have seen a progressive increase of individualistic behaviour. People have now become brands. Welcome to the age of me.com, where there is a big focus on developing personal brands where people communicate what makes them unique and differentiated.

This trend will prompt a clear change in where, when and how people work. At the same time, it will enable organisations to be more agile and innovative. At one end of the scale, large multinational companies will consolidate and become even more global. But at the other end, temporary or ‘virtual’ small to medium sized enterprises will be set up for the length of punctual and targeted projects. These companies will have smaller regular workforces. And increasingly, they will rely on networks of contingent workers. The model used today in the construction or entertainment industries could become the norm rather than the exception: individual workers will be moving in and out of a company’s doors on a just-in-time, on-demand, project-by-project basis. The brand of me.com has now taken over the workforce.

Consider, for example, the growth of gigonomics. More and more people have taken redundancy and are working as individual traders. They don’t have jobs anymore, they have gigs.

How does a company handle that? How do gig-meisters interact with staff, company fabric and loyalty? How do companies protect intellectual property when they’re dealing with so many fly-by-night employees?

Gigonomics was always very much par for the course for certain industries. Musicians would be an obvious example. Now it’s reshaping the broader workforce. Bringing in a bunch of people focused on how much money they’ll make per gig will change companies and their cultures.

These workers aren’t lower end temps, either. They are a growing army of interim managers, even interim CFOs, taking on gigs for up to six months at a company.

As the interim army becomes more dominant, companies will have to rethink their management styles. They will have to rework their systems to accommodate interim personality types, while maintaining morale and a sense of lloyalty and trust. It’s a massive job. In his book, The Corrosion of Character, New York University professor of sociology Richard Sennett argues that the modern workplace, with its focus on temps, “corrodes trust, loyalty and mutual commitment.” Maybe, but it’s the way of the future.

Much of this reflects the changing economy and generational shifts. The numbers speak for themselves. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), there are one million contractors out there, about 8.7 per cent of the workforce. About 73 per cent are male. Most are in the construction industry (32 per cent) and the professional and technical services sector (13 per cent), covering such areas as law and accounting firms, bookkeeping and payroll services, architecture, engineering, design, computer services, consulting, research and advertising. About 76 per cent say they are able to work on more than one active contracat a time.

Companies need to develop strategies that enable managers to be more in touch with the temps, keeping them in the loop to ensure they are part of the company fabric. And they will need to develop systems to ensure they will not lose IP intellectual property, corporate loyalty and trust. Unfortunately, not many companies are doing that, simply. They reckon it takes too much time. They are stupid.

Add to all this the ageing of a workforce that’s creating fewer jobs. Research from US think tank the Aspen Institute has found that in the past 20 years, the US workforce grew by 44 per cent. Over the next 20, however, the projected growth rate is zip. In the past 20 years, skilled workers increased by 19 per cent but over the next two decades, the number will rise by just 4 per cent. More than 80 per cent of Australian workforce growth between 1998 and 2016 is projected to be among those over 45 years of age, according to the ABS. And there will be relatively fewer people of working age to support an increasing number of older Australians. This also means fewer jobs. Demographer Bernard Salt calls it the ‘baby bust’, a situation in which all of a sudden we have more people exiting the workforce at 65 than entering the workforce at 15.

This means that we will start seeing more experimentation as companies and industries try finding ways of using older contributors as subcontractors and freelancers. For many, the world of the contingent worker — variable income and no security — is looking more like the shape of things to come. The entire world of work is changing.

The corporate world is different now and only an outright fool would say this doesn’t create problems and challenges A revolution is transforming the corporate world. No sensible person can expect things to remain in the same job anymore. Welcome to the age of Individual Responsibility. It’s a world where the corporation is no longer responsible for giving you security. Instead, you make your own security.

This book is a handbook that presents solutions at the level of the individual, the manager, the business owner and the corporation. It’s for schools, hospitals, businesses, contractors and governments. The book examines issues like turning the workplace into an ideas factory; how to handle customer service problems; handling redundancy; creating presentations that blow everyone away; making the most of social media; how to handle an ageing workforce; and how to have difficult conversations. And much more.

It’s a handbook that leaves you with two choices. You can ignore it, which may leave you without the tools to manage the instability of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity”, where identity is constantly fluid, creating unprecedented anxiety and insecurity as people splice together short-term projects and live fragmented lives in a world that requires them to be flexible and adaptable.

Or, you can use this book to dip in and out of chapters that offer solutions to the changes now confronting you. These solutions are drawn from insights accrued from my x years’ research and data as a business journalist, analyst and media producer.

You may not agree with every solution presented in the following pages. But this book maps out the problems and offers creative solutions that you can draw upon, kick against and use to devise your own solutions. If that happens, this book will have achieved its purpose.