Today, organizations face rapid change like never before. Yahoo’s strategic change of calling their employees back to the office followed by Best Buy’s similar action is not the end of telecommuting and it may not dominate the industry in my perspective. In fact, it was imperative for these two companies to implement such changes according to their own business situation. It’s true that in a short period of time, working at home may be merely a supplement for the traditional form of work as it is indeed not fit for every firm in terms of business size, business performance, culture and other restrictions. However, the continuous development of technology will become the irreversible trend in the workplace and gradually overturn people’s tradition. Moreover, increasing organizations keep investigating the best-fit interventions to bring along innovative changes. These interventions may include flexible scheduling, job-sharing or a compressed work week to their employees to increase employee engagement for better productivity. Some companies may prefer the plan of occasional work from home allowing more flexibility for their employees as long as the quality of work is guaranteed. With the high-speed development of technology and those telecommunication tools around, people should no longer be obsessed by poor communication merely because of not working side by side. It can be foreseen that there will be more innovative ways to be developed in the workplace along with the continuous development of technology.

From the business practices of Yahoo and Google, we can also see that organizational culture will play an increasingly important role in the future workplace. Organizational change includes not only changing structures and processes, but also changing the corporate culture (Management library, 2012). Sometimes organizational change efforts are failed because of lack of understanding about the strong role of culture and the role it plays in organizations. The reason why Yahoo went to great length to end the telecommuting was because it expected to quickly change an organizational culture that supports the development of its business strategies. On the other hand, Google’s success mostly contributed by its open and democratic organizational culture and its positive corporate climate filled with creativeness and innovation. It is not difficult to see that organizations will place as much emphasis on identifying strategic values as they do mission and vision. It is also worth to mention that Yahoo and Google’s organizational change efforts may not fit for every organization. The culture in each organization is different and dependent on many factors. A company wants to sustain its business performance needs to design the tailored interventions based on its own environment, resources and desired outcomes.

Moreover, from the above organizational changes, we will see new leadership competency model will be widely used in the workplace. Today leader’s competency model is no longer only center on those core managerial competencies but how to identify and promote talents. In most of the successful companies like Google, corporate leaders understand the importance of talent management, and recognize that talent management strategies can help the organization grow and reach its business goals. It can be foreseen that the topic of talent management will continually be presented as a substantial part of leader’s job responsibilities and be evaluated through performance appraisal process. Organization will encourage managers to assess talent, identify key employees early, provide constructive feedback and coaching, as well as to lead by example.
In future workplace, more Career Development Programs will be in place in the organization. These programs are aim to support the managers develop their subordinates who recognized as talents. For instance, the Individual Development Plan is a newly developed career development tool in