Maybe Jeremy Clarkson was right. Someone should have been shot over the public sector pensions strike. His Jocular comment may have been a bit too close to the bone for some people’s appetite but he does have a point. People were disrupting public services for a day in order to protest against the inevitable. We cannot continue with employment arrangements that were appropriate for the 20th Century, regardless of all the changes going on around us in the 21st.

Demographic change is just one of the factors influencing the world of work. If you were born in 1950 you stood a 7.5% chance of reaching 100. For those born in 1980 it increased to 22.4% and for someone born in 2010 it’s 29.5%.

So in a world where nearly a third of the population will live to 100, how can we afford to pay pensions to people who retire at 60? If you are in education for the first 20 years of life, working for the next 40 and then retiring and expecting to live for another 40, it just doesn’t add up. If you put 50% of your salary into a pension plan you just might be able to make ends meet in retirement. Yet people are striking about an increase of 3.2%.

The fact that we are living longer has been obvious for years, yet we have chosen to ignore it and until recently were busy reducing retirement ages. Doing the opposite of what makes sense. Every 4 years, life expectancy from the age of 65 goes up a year. So without any new medical breakthrough we should be increasing retirement ages at this rate to maintain the status quo. If we’d started doing this in 1960 the retirement age would now be 78, yet people are striking because it will go up to 66 by 2020 and 67 by 2027.

If people are living a lot longer we can’t just tinker with retirement, we have to rethink how work fits into our lives. If we are going to be healthy and capable of working into our 80s and 90s what law of nature says we should expect to retire at 60 or 65? We can’t stop the population ageing and we can’t bury our heads in the sand and ignore it. Even Jeremy Clarkson wouldn’t suggest we just shoot people when they get to 80.

We also need to adapt to a world where more than half the students in universities worldwide are women and in Europe a third more women than men are on campus. Yet we still have a ‘male’ model of work that assumes women take the major role in childcare and we offer much better maternity leave than paternity.

Already female graduates in their 20s are earning more than their male counterparts so many more fathers should be taking the career breaks and part-time jobs while mothers go back to work. We still expect people to fit their personal lives around fixed patterns of work despite survey after survey showing that the top benefit requested by employees is flexible working. They are looking to improve their quality of life and are prepared to take a lower salary to achieve it.

The demographic arguments should be enough to make us review our outdated approach to work. If you add to them the impact of technology, the arguments ought to be overpowering. We are now able to work on the move or from home using broadband, smartphones and laptops.

We can choose when and where to work, and keep in touch with videoconferencing and social media. Yet instead of the technology liberating us from the drudgery of work, it has added to the hours we are working and introduced new stresses into our lives. We have not taken the opportunity to redesign work to take advantage of the technology, we have simply overlaid it onto conventional working practices. No wonder fewer than one in three employees is fully engaged with their work, with big consequences for productivity and business success.

We have known for the last 50 years how to engage employees and motivate them. From Maslow and McGregor through to Drucker and Handy, management gurus have been telling us that giving people autonomy over their work, trusting them and treating them like adults is the key to motivation.

So what do we do? We tell people that they have to come to work at their employers’ premises at fixed times, and if they don’t turn up they are disciplined. We have a command and control culture where people have to follow instructions from their manager. We are wary about trusting people who work from home because they could be spending all day watching TV or going out shopping.

This is all based on the notion that the employer ‘owns’ the employee for the time defined in the contract and can tell them what to do during those hours. On the basis that the individual would rather be doing something else, employers ‘compensate’ for taking away their freedom with some form of payment. This takes the form of a salary based on the number of hours worked. Part-timers get reduced salaries pro-rata, since they are available for less time. We are paying for input or effort, not for output or results.

If I employ a plumber to fix a leak and he's not very good, he might take two hours to do the job when a better plumber could do it in an hour. But if I’m paying by the hour I end up paying the less efficient one twice the money. It’s the same with most payment systems. If an employee could work twice as fast and double their productivity they could get the job done in half the time. But if they still have to stay until the end of the day they may as well slow down or they will only get given more to do. In fact, if they can stretch out the work further and stay late they will get recognised and rewarded by management. Yet the person who leaves early is seen as the ‘slacker’. We have got something seriously wrong in the way we employ people.

Gary Hamel in ‘The Future of Management’ says: “If there was a single question that obsessed twentieth century managers from Frederick Taylor to Jack Welch, it was this: How do we get more out of our people? At one level this is innocuous – who can object to the goal of raising human productivity? Yet it’s also loaded with Industrial Age thinking: How do we (meaning ‘management’) get more (meaning units of production per hour) out of our people (meaning the individuals who are obliged to follow our orders)? Ironically the management model encapsulated in this question virtually guarantees that a company will never get the best out of its people. Vassals and conscripts may work hard, but they don’t work willingly.”

In a survey we carried out for our new book ‘Future Work’, we asked managers if they thought there would be a revolution in working practices in the next ten years. Two thirds said ‘yes’. 56% also said that their organisations were not adapting fast enough to new ways of working. We suggested that flexible working might be a luxury in a recession and 69% disagreed. So there is a pent up demand for change now and the pressure is growing. What is standing in the way?

It seems that there are some very entrenched organisational cultures that built up over the last century and are resistant to change. Despite the demographic and social changes, the changing role of women, the expectations of Generation Y, the impact of technology and the economic pressures of a recession, we still cling on to low productivity, long hours and outdated working practices. And who is responsible for this? It’s the HR function.

HR reaction to the above statement: (PODCAST)

Matthew Jeffery, head of EMEA, Talent Acquisition & Global Talent Brand, Autodesk, speaks exclusively to Natalie Cooper about why some HR leaders need to hang up their boots, the power of brand recognition, gamification, globalisation, social media and why every HR director needs to be on the board in response to the above statement:

Every business needs to get the best out of its workforce by creating an environment that encourages productivity, creativity and loyalty. The Human Resources function has the responsibility for making this happen. They should be showing leadership by identifying the culture that will support the business and the working practices that reflect it.

In our research we came across a few great examples where this is happening, but they are the exceptions. It seems that the majority of HR people are busy supporting the status quo and discouraging change. They are there to stop renegade managers stepping out of line and taking risks.

When HR has been the leader in introducing new working practices, it has been to introduce ‘family friendly’ flexible working schemes. These are seen by many line managers as being good for the individual employee but bad for business and their own workload. They assume that productivity will go down and teams will fall apart.

If only HR would point out that flexible workers are significantly more productive, have less absenteeism and are more loyal. This would bring some credibility to the HR function as business partners who are there to help managers get results, not stop them from using their initiative.

In the research for our book we interviewed over 60 leaders and came across some good examples of ‘smart’ working. Sometimes these were clearly being driven by HR, leading an initiative in conjunction with other business functions such as IT, Finance and Facilities Management. Unilever’s ‘Agile Working Programme’, BT’s ‘Work Smart Strategy’ and Gap’s ‘Results Only Work Environment’ are good examples. But often HR was sitting on the sidelines ignoring the compelling business arguments for change.

The world is changing fast. Wake up HR and use this to show some leadership.

Peter is an acknowledged expert in the field of new working practices and regularly speaks at conferences on the subject. He has carried out research onto the management of remote teams and has appeared on radio and television as an expert on flexible working.

As a consultant, Peter works with senior management teams to help them gain the maximum business benefit from new working practices. He helps them with the cultural change and runs management workshops to ensure flexible working is implemented effectively. Recently he has focussed on the impact of technology on virtual teams and helps clients to radically improve their meeting processes. He is also author of Future Work.