Consultancy Zinnov recently reviewed the entire online hiring market, looking in detail at 30 platforms like Elance and oDesk. They came to what may be a surprising conclusion for some – not only are women doing well with online work, they’re actually currently the majority of the online workforce. Of the approximately 4.5 – 5 million folks selling their services through these sites, 55 percent are currently women.

With women still carrying a larger share of childcare and household duties, this result makes intuitive sense in some ways. You’d expect those with greater time commitments outside work to be more keen on flexibility, and stay-at-home moms to be a significant portion of the online labor pool.  As VentureBeat reports,  ”Zinnov said its study showed women more willing to work virtually to give themselves a better work/life balance.” The study further predicts that going forward women will make up an even larger segment of the online hiring pool.

While the idea that women might desire flexibility seems reasonable (despite studies showing men want work flexibility just as much, if not more than, women), the image of online hiring as largely focused on technical jobs may have suggested to some that women, who are still relatively rare in these type of gigs, would be under-represented. But Zinnov’s data don’t back that up, though they did find online hiring is most mature in the tech sector. They report, however, that skills such as multimedia, writing and editing are growing rapidly.

As is the sector as a whole. In the next three years, ten to fifteen percent of the total workforce will be hired from online talent marketplaces, according to the research, which also claims the total online hiring marketplace will climb towards $1 billion by the end of the year. Zinnov also confirmed that small businesses are leading the way for larger firms when it comes to the practice of hiring online. If you’re interested in further details, check out the presentation below.

Are you surprised by these findings?

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Organizations are such a large and steady feature of the landscape that imagining a fundamental shift in their nature is a bit mind-bending– sort of like seeing a mountain flex. But that didn’t stop Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE and SVP of strategy at consultancy the Dachis Group, from tackling the problem not too long ago on his blog Communication Nation. The long post is a compelling read and worth checking out in full, but the central notion is that we need to re-conceive of companies not as machines but as organically growing cities. Gray writes:

Historically, we have thought of companies as machines, and we have designed them like we design machines. A machine typically has the following characteristics:

1. It’s designed to be controlled by a driver or operator.
2. It needs to be maintained, and when it breaks down, you fix it.
3. A machine pretty much works in the same way for the life of the machine. Eventually, things change, or the machine wears out, and you need to build or buy a new machine.

But of course, redesigning a machine while it’s in operation is incredibly tricky and that’s exactly what today’s fast-moving marketplace demands. Plus, as organizations grow larger they often choke under the weight of their own bureaucracy. There’s a better way to conceive of a company, according to Gray:

It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems…

What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?… If we start to look at companies as complex systems instead of machines, we can start to design and manage them for productivity instead of continuously hovering on the edge of collapse.

What does city-inspired organizational design and management look like? Gray begins to answer this question by pointing to research carried out by Shell in the 1980s that identified long-lived companies. Shell found that many of them had an organic, city-like organization that was decentralized, tolerated the eccentric, and featured a strong, shared culture and a dedication to actively listening and being responsive. Referencing this research, Gray has practical suggestions as well as philosophical points to make

He urges bosses interested in social business design to give everyone in their organization a home — “a place where they can put, and see, their stuff: their projects, the links they want to get back to, the documents they have created, their role, qualifications, expertise and so on” — and find ways to encourage serendipity. Gray also stresses studying the culture you actually have before you start to try and change it, so you can nurture and bring out your organization’s inherent character – there’s no use trying to turn Omaha into Brooklyn. And as you progress, listen and adapt. He writes:

Think about how city streets evolve: one small step at a time. One retailer moves to a larger space; another goes out of business. One old building is torn down and replaced; another is rehabbed and turned into lofts. Pay attention to the culture, and watch how people react to the tools you provide. Are they using something in a different way than you expected? Find out why and see if you can enhance that. And what are they ignoring? If they’re not using something you expected them to use, go talk to them and see if you can figure out the reason.

But it’s not just Gray who is examining the implications of shifting from company as machine to company as city.  Yammer’s blog recently suggested another consequence of this shift, one that should sound familiar to regular GigaOM readers. The post’s suggestion: empowering employees far more than previously.

“Companies are slowly realizing that without the right employees and the right internal culture and environment, they will never be able to compete externally and deliver goods and services at the speed of today’s business,” says the post. “The massive opportunity lies in a deliberate, collaborative and respectful partnership between the Company, the Employee and the Customer. To really capture this opportunity, we need to abandon our fear and figure out how we can work with our employees to harness their passions and their sense of power.”

Look at the future of work from the employee’s perspective and you see a move towards empowerment. Or start from an organization-wide view and you come to the same conclusion. Either way new ways of managing look more like supervisory urban planning, husbanding a network of individual citizens, rather than wrench-wielding managers tinkering with systems with that cast workers in the role of cogs.

What do you think of Gray and Yammer’s vision of the organization of the future as more like a city of empowered citizens than a machine?

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But where is all this interest in online labor platforms heading over the coming years? How will the uptick in interest in the so-called ‘human cloud’ shape business? In addition to statistics, Elance has also given GigaOM an exclusive sneak preview of three long-term industry trends it is predicting will shape the future of work.

One in three people will be hired online by 2020. The likes of Monster and LinkedIn are only the starting point when it comes to using the internet to find talent, according to Elance CEO Fabio Rosati. In future, it will be common for businesses not only to identify candidates online, but also to interview, hire and work with them at a distance. “The initiation of the search begins online already,” he told GigaOM in an interview. “The piece that we predict will be accelerating is the amount of hiring that will actually be completed online to result in an online working relationship. Within a few years, your ability to work remotely will be so extraordinarily compelling that we will literally not even feel the need to meet in person.”

Half of businesses will have online teams by 2020. Both a recent survey from Elance competitor oDesk and recent comments made to GigaOM by Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, have indicated that businesses increasingly see hiring contractors as a long-term strategy and competitive advantage, rather than a short-term stopgap or simple cost-cutting measure. Elance apparently agrees with Rosati explaining how more and more businesses will come to see the benefits of online hiring and come to view the practice as a normal, if not essential, business practice.

“We estimate probably less than ten percent of businesses have online teams right now. We are pretty much at the same stage where eCommerce was at the beginning of the last decade,” he said. “Around 2000 probably one in ten had a website and an online presence. By the end of the decade about half of businesses had an online presence and if they didn’t, they were planning to. We believe the same thing is happening to building online teams and having workers who work for you in the cloud. In the next eight years we’re going to see substantial acceleration of this trend and it will become a mainstream phenomenon.”

Global professional guilds will emerge online. It may be hard to imagine traditional labor unions surviving into a future featuring lots and lots of online work, but Rosati doesn’t expect that future independent pros will be left entirely to fend for themselves. Instead, Elance predicts they’ll band together in professional guilds. Citing the Freelancers Union and the Writers Guild of America, which went to bat for Hollywood writers a few years ago, as possible precursors and models to the phenomenon, Rosati explains that, “it’s easier than ever to create communities online. As online work becomes a mainstream phenomenon, the need for professionals with similar mindsets to come together and agree to guiding principles and what will be responsible behavior online professionally is going to emerge.”

He even predicts that these guilds could become a force advocating for the rights and interests of independent workers. “Independent professionals working online will coalesce around common standards, and as they coalesce and establish a united voice, I expect they will definitely play a major role in endorsing certain platforms and rejecting others. I think that we will see a greater voice and a greater influence,” he says.

What do you make of Elance’s predictions?

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Lilly Hanscom, communications manager at collaboration platform Podio, for instance, got in touch with an audio recording of a thought-provoking SXSW panel discussion called ‘Decentralized Organizations: Do They Work?‘ She thought it was a cool unpacking of the underlying philosophy that animates her company, but it also fits right in with the preoccupations of WebWorkerDaily.

In it, Thomas Malone, director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the seminal 2004 book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life, lays out how cheap, ubiquitous communication (i.e., the Internet) is empowering more workers to make decisions for themselves. Like a faint echo of the argument that new communication tools have been bad news for dictators around the world the last few years, Malone explains that getting more information to more people at work is also bad for office autocrats and good for knowledge-worker freedom and productivity (it’s a long excerpt but worth it):

It’s now possible for the first time in human history to have the economic benefits of very large organizations, things like economies of scale, and at the same time to have the human benefits of very small organizations, things like freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. And the reason that’s possible is because a new generation of technologies – email, the World Wide Web, the internet in general – are reducing the cost of communication to such a low level that it’s now possible for huge numbers of people even in very large organizations to have enough information that they can make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them in a hierarchy who supposedly knows more than they do.

It’s the technology, by reducing the cost of communication, that’s making this possible. But just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it will necessarily happen. What I think will actually drive the change in this case are the business benefits of people making more decisions for themselves. When people are making their own decisions, for instance, they’re often more highly motivated – they’ll work harder if it’s their own thing rather than just what somebody tells them to do. When people are doing their own thing, they’re often more creative. They’re willing to be more inventive, try more things, just be more innovative. They’re able to be more flexible if they can decide what to do in their own situation instead of just following rigid rules. Finally, people who are making their own decisions often just plain like it better.

Now, those benefits of decentralized decision making aren’t important everywhere in business. In some places, like making certain kinds of semiconductor chips, the most important thing is economies of scale. And in those cases, cheap communication may lead to even more centralized decision-making, but, and here’s the key point, in our increasingly knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, the critical factors in business success are often exactly the same things as the benefits of decentralized decision making: flexibility, motivation, creativity, innovation. That’s why I think that even though it won’t happen everywhere, we’ll see  in more and more parts of our economy, more and more decentralized decision making, more and more human freedom.

Other members of the panel went on to offer examples of what this movement toward office democracy could look like in practice. Kat Steinmetz, human resources manager of Burning Man, for instance, explained that the annual gathering has six founders, but no CEO, and decisions are made by consensus. That takes longer on the front-end and can be frustrating, explained Steinmetz, but results in faster implementation as all parties really buy in to a decision once it had been made.

Or, if Burning Man seems a bit far out of the corporate sphere to be really relevant, Zach Ware, campus community development director at Zappos, offered examples of how decentralization is affecting his firm, starting with space design. Their offices, he said, have no walls, to be a literally, as well as metaphorically, flat organization, and their new Las Vegas headquarters offers both internal and external coworking spaces to nurture community.

Finally, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale shared a radical but doable example of workplace democracy in action. At Linden Lab, bonuses were crowdsourced, meaning that the 300 employees were given an equal share of the bonus pot and asked to give away the money to their colleagues in any way they saw fit. The result was a rational allocation of bonus money and a very empowered workforce, according to Rosedale.

And how about Podio? How are they experiencing this tech-driven trend away from command and control at the office? Hanscom explained in an email that, “Podio was born out of the belief that the people who do the work of companies should have the power to choose how they do that work and that software (or any work tool) has an inherent value. If you force tools and processes on them that they have not had a hand in deciding upon, you are dehumanizing, disempowering them.” Their office is also open plan, they’re flexible in terms of remote working, and “we eat lunch together every day,” says Hanscom.

Is technology bringing more democracy to your work life?

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There are certainly limitations to this sort of broad brushstrokes description of who wins and who loses when the economy changes – subsets of populations may gain or lose more, other political or cultural forces complicate the chain of causation and obviously many individuals don’t fit the group average – but that doesn’t make these sorts of speculations 100 percent invalid either. So adding that hefty pinch of salt, what exactly does Susannah Breslin argue in her recent Inc.com column “Do Women Make Better Independent Contractors?”

Her case is that there are three main reasons that the ladies may be more suited to work as freelancers or independent contractors: their empathy, their creativity and their ability to handle the lifestyle. Before you start howling that a characteristic like empathy isn’t a pre-programmed characteristic of either gender, but instead is a cultural expectation women are taught, take note that’s exactly what Breslin is saying.

“Culturally, women are programmed to believe they excel at empathy,” she writes, concluding that whether it’s nature or nurture really doesn’t matter. It’s still a leg up: “As an independent contractor, it pays to be empathetic. It’s not about what you want. It’s about what the client wants.” The same goes for creativity:

According to a 2008 Pew Research Center survey… sixty-four percent of Americans declared women more creative, and 11 percent declared men more creative. My experience is that while both genders may have equal capacity to think creatively, it’s more culturally acceptable for women to employ their creativity than men…. Where men will fight—often effectively—for their vision, women are more likely to move into what I call “shape-shifter” mode, exploring various possible solutions to a challenge, rather than trying to drive one square peg through a round hole.

Finally, Breslin notes that being a freelancer isn’t exactly a secure gig, or one that conjures high status images in others – in fact it’s more likely to make folks picture you in your pajamas. And that, writes Breslin, bugs men more than women. “Men aren’t as comfortable with what the ad hoc lifestyle of the independent contractor might communicate — that they’re maybe less professional or perhaps unable to join the workforce because of an embarrassing social problem,” she writes.

Breslin isn’t the only commentator to have made this argument. Lindsey Donner, writing for the Young Entrepreneur Council last year, argued that the future of work is more female friendly, citing, like Breslin, women’s creativity, but also their relative ease with the kind of relationship building on which being a successful freelancer depends. “My sociability, my willingness to assign importance to emotional cheerleading, and my capacity to build personal relationships –virtually — have helped me cultivate a loyal client base,” she wrote, using her own experience as an example.

But there are also plenty of potential counter-arguments. Professional men have been in the independent contractor game for a long time, and many excel at it. In fact, the constant negotiation and advocating for yourself being a freelancer demands could be said to be better suited to men, who study after study shows are more likely to ask for what they want and stick up for themselves at work. And then there are the demands of raising kids, which while they should fall equally on both genders in current reality often don’t. Women might benefit more then from the defined hours, the pregnancy- and birth-covering health insurance and the relatively steady protective cocoon of a corporate job.

What do you think – is one of the genders better suited to the rise of the freelancer?

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Not according to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. To investigate the link between creativity and noise levels, researchers asked 300 participants to complete mental exercises like word association games and dreaming up as many ways as possible to use a brick while in environments that were either totally silent, moderately buzzing or straight up loud.

The results show that those who worked in moderately noisy environments with sound levels on par with your average bustling cafe (about 70 decibels) scored higher on these tests of creativity and were also rated as more innovative by other participants. The WSJ Ideas Market blog sums up the findings:

The study adds to research suggesting that small doses of distraction — including hard-to-read fonts — prompt the mind to work at a more abstract level, which is also a more creative level. (The possibility that sound energized people was considered but rejected: Participants’ heart rates did rise when they first encountered noise, but soon subsided.)  The effect of noise is inverted-U-shaped, this study suggested: There’s a sweet spot between silence and din.

That’s good news if we’re soon to be doing everything from studying to buying socks in a coffee-shop-like environment.

Do you find you’re more creative in a moderately noisy, buzzing environment?

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Yes, says lawyer and futurist Stephen T. Gordon on the blog the Speculist recently. Gordon agrees with the chorus of voices saying offices will become coffee shops, saying:

We’re going back to the future: the modern office was birthed in 17th century coffee shops. Steven Johnson has argued that coffee fueled the enlightenment. It was certainly a more enlightening beverage than the previous choice of alcohol.

The need for offices grew as the equipment for mental work was developed starting in the late 19th centuries. That need appears to have peaked about 1980. It was a rare person who could afford the computers, printers, fax machines, and mailing/shipping equipment of that time.

Now a single person with $500 can duplicate most of those functions with a single laptop computer. So the remaining function of the office is to be that place that clients know to find you. . . . Groups for one project will form and then disband and then reform with new members for the next project. What will that workplace look like? Probably closer to Starbucks than Bob Par’s cubicle.

That version of the future of work should sound familiar to any WebWorkerDaily reader, but it’s not just offices that Gordon foresees transforming (or reverting) into coffee shops. He sees retail stores and universities going that way as well. Citing the likes of MITx and the fact that the rise in tuition costs has outpaced inflation for years, Gordon writes:

Cheaper ultimately wins. Repeat that story a million times over the next few years and you begin to see how the local colleges – which already are overcharging for their product – begin to suffer in favor of free programs like MITx.

Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, and socialize – reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost. [Fellow Speculist blogger Phil Bowermaster] thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. I agree. Every education would be ad hoc. It would be student-directed toward the job market she’s aiming for.

And how will “coffeeshopification,” as Gordon dubs it, come to retail? Just compare the experience of shopping at Amazon.com for Christmas presents with braving your local big-box retailer. “Which is more enjoyable: Starbucks or Walmart?” asks Gordon, answering:

For the sane: Starbucks. So if you can accomplish your Walmart shopping at Starbucks, why do it any other way? Also, imagine the 3D print shop of the future. You put in your order, probably from your smart phone, and then go pick it up. What does the lobby of such a business look like? Again: a coffee shop.

Should we all prepare to drink a lot more coffee in the future (or invest in coffee producers)?

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It’s a question the BBC has been asking experts throughout the month, turning to Tom Austin, vice president at research firm Gartner for their latest article looking into the future of work. We’re only just getting started with this century, but already the tech revolution has radically altered how many of us earn our livings, and bigger changes may yet be on their way. So when the BBC asked Austin what he imagines for the future of work, he outlined systems and tendencies far different from those that prevailed for much of the last hundred years.

Some aspects of Gartner’s vision will be familiar to regular GigaOM readers, including a shifting of focus from work as a place to work as an activity we can do almost anywhere. “The workplace is becoming increasingly virtual: with meetings occurring across time zones and between organizations,” Austin tells the BBC. Nor is his prediction of a highly connected future exactly a bolt from the blue. “Hyper-connectedness will lead to more work crossing company boundaries in both formal and informal relationships,” he says. But some of his predictions are surprising and thought-provoking. These includes:

De-routinization of work. The core value that people add does not lie in processes that can be automated. It lies in the non-routine, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that people make, which often relate to discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning.

Sketch-ups. Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It’s important to try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns, and the process models will remain simple sketch-ups created as needed.

Spontaneous work. Spontaneity will trump reactivity. This implies growth in proactive work, such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.

Check out the complete article for full details on all ten of Austin’s predictions. In the industrial age the obvious metaphor for human workers was parts in a machine, as factory workers and office workers engaged in routine tasks creating standardized products at a fixed place and time and as part of a larger process. Like some futurists, Austin foresees a new way of working that seems far more human as business runs not on an arbitrary schedule according to pre-fab rules but instead is governed by the inspiration and unsteady pace of creativity and relies on human relationships rather than bureaucratic systems to get things done.

Does the future of work outlined by Austin seem plausible to you?

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Whether Zaino’s estimate of exactly when freelancers and independent professionals will outnumber regular employees proves correct, the general trend toward a rise in the number of independent workers is hard to deny. Online platforms connecting these pros to contract-based work are flourishing, and media chatter about the so-called “gig economy” is growing steadily louder. But is what is true in America also true abroad? Are other countries experiencing the same rise in the percentage of workers going independent?

A new piece of evidence suggests that freelancers are a growing part of the economy in the U.K. as well, at least when it comes to the small-business sector. Online labor platform PeoplePerHour.com recently polled 1,300 British small businesses about their use of freelance talent. The survey found:

• Eighty percent of responding businesses said freelancing had become more common in the UK small-business community over the past year.
• Thirty-two percent of respondents had started using freelancers for the first time in the past six months.
• Forty-one percent of respondents planned to increase freelance hiring over the next 12 months, compared with 16 percent who plan to hire more in-house staff.
• Thirty-three percent reported they now use freelancers on a weekly basis.

The release accompanying the survey also points out that the trend has been good for PeoplePerHour specifically, with total registered users doubling from 120,000 to more than 240,000 over the past year.

The technology changes that are enabling businesses in the U.S. to take advantage of independent workers are just as present in the U.K., as are strong economic pressures on businesses to cut costs and maintain agility, so the findings are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, the survey is interesting as a confirmation that these trends are affecting workers and organizations across the Atlantic as well.

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If you look at trends in the future of work, then maybe not, argued Daniel Jelski, a professor of chemistry at SUNY New Paltz, on New Geography recently. Despite being a science guy himself, Jelski looks at the ways work is changing and comes to an iconoclastic conclusion. He begins by laying out the basic forces he sees shaping the career landscape in the next decades:

Let’s start with the three Laws of Future Employment. Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do.

Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.)

Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

But instead of looking at these laws and suggesting students study the math and science needed to be one of those running the machines many fear are taking our jobs, Jelski comes to a different conclusion. He acknowledges that the number of science and math grads in the U.S. has been flat over several decades, but he disagrees that this means more students should be encouraged into those fields. Pointing out that competition in these areas is increasingly global, he notes that the amount of American tech and science geeks isn’t relevant. But the global number is, and by this measure competition will be fierce, especially as many technical tasks are now done by computers:

Laws #1 & 2 predict that there will likely be fewer STEM jobs in the future – they are both easily computerized and tradable. People will always be employed in STEM disciplines, many of them highly paid, but they’ll be paid for smarts rather than education. The disciplines will be much more competitive, with older and less talented workers left on the sidelines. Tom Friedman and Alex Tabarrok, reflecting conventional wisdom, are mistaken in maintaining that increasing STEM education is a key to future economic competitiveness.

“So if computerized, tradable skills won’t create much new employment, if any, what will?” he asks. The answer is “non-tradable skills that can’t be computerized. . . . these jobs depend on human-human interaction — empathy.” Counseling, teaching and management are examples. So who is best prepared for them?

Jelski tells of a student he had in a chemistry class, an English major who was busy writing a novel about cowboys while learning about chemical reactions on the side. “Conventional wisdom says this guy is all wet,” writes Jelski, but he feels this kid’s odd combo of interests in cowboys and chemistry might actually be a career winner. Not because anyone needs many cowboys these days, obviously, but because

the skill set needed to write a novel, of which writing may be the least of it. He has to have something to write about, which means nurturing a general curiosity about the world — not just cowboys, but apparently also chemistry. He learns to be a keen observer of people: their appearance, what they wear, their character, mannerisms, and language. He develops the self-discipline and self-confidence to finish a project because it is intrinsically important, not because people say “Wow, that’s wonderful. You’re writing a novel!” Because of his novel my student becomes expert in many skills that can translate into a wonderful career.

The conclusion of the post (which is well worth a read in full) is that skills rather than education count, and writing and empathy are among the skills least likely to be mastered by computers. Counseling might beat computer science in the future of work, according to Jelski, but critics could point out that clinical psychology majors currently have the highest rate of unemployment of any college degree and that being an empathetic, sociable engineer might be the best bet of all.

Would you push your kid toward engineering or empathy for a more future-proof career?

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