Last issue, I discussed the escalating shortage of skilled workers and growth of work/life balance - interrelated trends that will affect businesses and workers alike in the coming years.

The final three trends involve changing benefit plans (reflecting the huge wave of retirements just beginning and the pressures on remaining workers); better planning for security of information, physical safety of buildings and people, and recovery from disaster; and how climate change will affect our work and home lives.

Benefit Plans

"Happy employees are productive employees," says Ted Mallett, chief economist for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

Ted Mallett

But there's a limit on how much happiness any business can afford to spread.

Businesses will need competitive benefits packages in order to attract and retain the best employees, but they'll need to keep a lid on spiralling health-care and pension costs. "It's a squeeze play," Mallett says.

But more companies will be investing in new strategies that will probably save them money, once they get their heads around the fact that butts don't have to be in seats in expensive downtown space in order for work to get done and a job doesn't necessarily have to be done by one person sitting in one place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Flextime, telecommuting, off-shoring and home-shoring, and alternate work schedules won't be just buzz-words, but the new way to work - and an important part of company benefits.

Canadian business is watching to see if benefit plans will be affected by the Supreme Court decision that outlawed Quebec's ban on private insurance. The court found individual rights were being trammelled by excessive waiting times for publicly provided services. Now the question is, will the issue skip borders to other provinces?

Pensions will also become hotter topics as the Boomers move through retirement. Some Boomers were lucky enough to have a defined benefit plan, in which their employer made contributions according to salary and years of service. Such plans were funded and managed by employers, who took on the investment risk.

After several spectacular plan implosions, laws were made requiring private plans to be examined every three years and ensuring that employers of underfunded plans return them to solvency.

So, defined contribution plans grew popular. DC plans are funded by employers and employees, and managed by the employee, who shoulders all the investment risk.

Yet less than half of Canadian employees have an employer retirement plan now, and we can expect that number to dwindle, given the number of job and career changes facing upcoming generations.

We can expect employees to become much more savvy about retirement planning. Eventually, maybe we'll even see a decline for the first time in the amount of unused RRSP contribution room.

And we can expect more bitterness - and pleas for parliamentary action - when taxpayers begin to realize their tax dollars will shore up underfunded pension plans for government workers. Shortfalls include the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (more than $6 billion), the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (at least $3 billion) - and the list goes on and on.

Paying for someone else's retirement is a particularly bitter pill for Canadians with no employer pension plan themselves (and that would be most of us).

Security

Security needs of companies, even the small ones, can no longer be answered by an alarm system and police patrol cars parked outside.

Today's dangers come in through our computer connections and in molecules in the air, in our reliance on utilities and systems that can be taken out by natural disasters or terrorists.

All - 100 per cent - of Canadian firms that participated in the The 2006 Global Security Survey of top global financial firms by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu reported some kind of security breach.

The report talks about planning for the unimaginable. "The ability to continue to function after a major disruption is essential for all organizations - and doubly so for those whose services include providing real-time financial information to their customers," it says.

The past decade has shown us that we can't plan well for disasters we can't imagine, but we can have a plan in place for recovery from disaster, regardless of cause.

"Recovery is a much broader concept than disaster planning," says the CFIB's Mallett. It will ensure a business can keep operating or quickly get back on its feet during pandemics, after floods, if hydro service is interrupted or following a terrorist attack.

"What happens if your revenue stream is interrupted?" says Mallett.

It's better to negotiate now with your bank for a line of credit for that contingency, rather than queuing up when everyone is in a panic following an event. Having employees who can telecommute practise it now will reveal bugs that can be ironed out now, rather than add to the emergency later.

Even mom-and-pop operations can ask the pertinent questions: How will the work get done if your employees can't make it into the building? If there's a long hydro interruption? During a pandemic?

Kyoto

I think we're all going to get used to the art of coping with the unimaginable as every aspect of our work and home lives becomes affected by government and business initiatives to cut greenhouse gas production.

What is now "an abstract for the vast majority of people," says Mallett, will become grim reality as changes to business creates "cascading impacts all the way through society."

Just as the European Economic Union's restriction on hazardous substances directive of 2006 resulted in changes to manufacturing standards in other countries to cut back on toxic materials such as lead and mercury, Kyoto standards will begin to affect manufacturing, distribution and commuting - in ways we can't completely foresee.

Will we once again become a one-car per family society with more telecommuters? Will rail networks be revitalized and the trucking industry shrink? Will plane travel (and shipments) become exclusively expensive again?

We may not be able to predict the shape of change to come - but that change is coming on many fronts is perfectly predictable.

(Sharon Adams can be reached at sharon@businessedge.ca)