Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more. Read more »
Establishing a startup’s business infrastructure early provides a number of critical benefits, including smoother financings and effective employee management. Sections of this paper discuss each of the above benefits and provide suggestions for management teams that will facilitate establishment of an appropriate infrastructure. Read more »
Backed by the founders of Jawbone and others in education, entrepreneurship and career readiness, New York-based Modern Guild aims to connect college students with professionals for fee-based online career readiness courses. Read more »
Helping to redefine this talent management is workforce analytics, a powerful combination of highly sophisticated computer algorithms and predictive models. Linking this market to business success can help HR professionals convince corporate bean counters to bankroll the crunching of human-capital data. Read more »
As careers become more fluid, diverse and self-directed and more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects, the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark. Behold the railway station/office and coworking space/daycare. Read more »
Google Drive joins a crowded field that’s polarizing between consumer and corporate offerings. Google is big enough to try to service both customer bases, but its lack of focus leaves a lot of room for competitors to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you imagine that online freelancing is mainly the preserve of male techies, it’s time to revise your understanding. A new survey of the sector by consultancy Zinnov reveals women make up 55 percent of the online labor pool, along with other insights. Read more »
How is the future of work changing whole organizations? A social business expert and the folks at Yammer weigh in on how we should re-jig our mental models of companies, conceiving of them more like cities with bosses playing the role of urban planner. Read more »
Along with some impressive new growth numbers, online labor platform Elance offers GigaOM an exclusive sneak preview of its predictions for the future of work online. Get ready for widespread remote work, commonplace use of the human cloud and global guilds for independent workers. Read more »
New communication tools have been credited with helping spur uprisings against some of the world’s nastiest regimes. In a very scaled-down way, is the ease of connecting also bad news for office autocrats? A SXSW panel delved into the question. Read more »
A long-time, female freelancer argues that, though the reason may be nurture rather than nature, women are often better equipped with the skills demanded of independent workers, including empathy, creativity and the ability to accept an uncertain, lower-status work style. Read more »
One futurist claims that we’ll trade our offices, universities and stores for coffee shops in the future, but won’t all this time in buzzing spaces disrupt the thinkers among us who chase eureka moments in quiet solitude? Not according to a new study. Read more »
The argument that work is increasingly untethered from the office and will take place more and more in coffee shop–type environments is pretty common, but one futurist is taking “coffeeshopification” a step further, claiming that universities and retail stores will resemble coffee shops as well. Read more »
The latest edition in a series of articles from the BBC on the future of work features thinking from Gartner. The company predicts that a less routine, more spontaneous way of working will emerge, freeing workers from the confines of the office and standardized processes. Read more »
At Net:Work Gene Zaino of MBO Partners made a bold prediction: Independent workers will be a majority in the U.S. by 2020. Can the same be said in the UK? A new survey offers evidence that at British small businesses freelancing is on the rise. Read more »
Not at all, argues one professor. Daniel Jelski looks at the trends governing what work will look like in decades to come and arrives at an unpopular conclusion: The best bet is to forgo engineering skills and develop empathy by studying psychology and literature instead. Read more »
After years of economic hardship and unsettling changes to how we work, how are Americans coping? Two new surveys suggest that while Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in cheerier historical periods, they are starting to come to terms with the changes. Read more »
For skilled professionals, the increasing prevalence of independent work can be a blessing, but the trend toward replacing steady jobs with gig-based careers is bad news for the economy as a whole and inequality in particular, argues a Canadian magazine. Do you agree? Read more »
As work becomes more wired and independent, managers and HR are rethinking their roles. But do facilities managers also need to wake up to the changing nature of work, spending less time thinking about cleanliness and costs and more about the future? Read more »
Connected, location-independent, autonomous, global, piecemeal: There are plenty of adjectives that have previously been employed to describe the future of work, but the author of a book on the topic is throwing another contender into the ring — adult. Time to grow up then. Read more »
The world of work has slowly but steadily changed over the past two decades, to the point where the word “work” itself has shifted from a noun denoting the place we went to do our job to a verb that describes the act of performing tasks. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A nonprofit research center that specializes in long-term forecasting recently released a report detailing the 10 key skills that will be relevant to the workforce of the future. What are they, and are our schools doing enough to instill them? Read more »
Work media refers to tools based on the patterns of interaction, influence and communication from social networks of the open web. Today, these tools are being adopted at a startling pace — perhaps the fastest of a class of new software in the business sector since the web itself. And, perhaps even more startlingly, IT organizations seem to be scurrying to pick company-wide solutions that utilize these new tools and ideas. This piece makes a different and largely positive case for the use of work media, based on what we have learned in recent years about human cognition. The bottom line? Work media is key for work productivity and innovation, in large part because it lines up with the way that the human mind works and the way that people’s thinking is influenced by their social connections. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Wi-fi has shown a remarkable ability to evolve, to meet increasingly higher expectations and requirements, and to become pervasively adopted in mobile devices. All of these factors are highly prized by the enterprise and public and safety agencies, as well as health and educational institutions that are increasingly deploying larger, high-performance and high-capacity Wi-Fi networks that have become fully integrated within the IT infrastructure. This paper follows the ascent of Wi-Fi and looks at how its expanding role within the enterprise drives more-advanced requirements. We also examine how these requirements will be met by further expansion in the Wi-Fi standards and by a new generation of Wi-Fi equipment and devices. And we discuss how the enterprise can benefit from the evolution of Wi-Fi by deploying future-proof networks that will organically improve performance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Gene Zaino, of MBO Partners, believes that by 2020 more than half of U.S. workers will be independent, leading to a new independent majority. But for this to happen, we’ll have to see some significant legislative and structural changes. Read more »
Being detained by U.S. Customs on my way to San Francisco for a conference on the future of work got me thinking about way that many people work now has changed in ways that make the job of governments — and border agents — a lot more complicated. Read more »
While it’s certainly premature to declare email “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise. Miguel Valdés Faures of BonitaSoft offers some alternatives. Read more »
New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework, supporting workers’ desire to work out of the office. Stowe Boyd discusses the implications involved in the increasingly popular post-industrial adoption of telecommuting, and explains why coworking may be the missing link. Read more »
Next week at Net:Work in San Francisco, tech geeks and forward-thinking business folks will gather to discuss the untethered, agile future of work. But apparently it’s not just these private actors that are cheerleading these changes; several governments are getting behind the idea too. Read more »
As work media — social media tools designed to get work done — become more ubiquitous, futurist Stowe Boyd sees an even greater need for well-defined standards that would help companies transport their data out of the current silos. Read more »
The iconic office design company sees a trend away from personal space and toward shared space. Don Ball talked to Steelcase about the changing state of the “office” and how it is designing spaces that allow people to be “on” — not “at” — work. Read more »
No segment of the economy looks exactly buoyant right now, and small business hiring is no exception, but what does that have to do with the future of work? Plenty, suggest new reports showing that tepid hiring, is partially down to rise of freelancers. Read more »
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s new book Race Against the Machine, about how smart machines are taking white-collar jobs, plays on popular anxieties about the future of work. But at least one futurist thinks a machine-filled future might actually make us more human. Read more »
The future of work, a lot of commentators seem to agree, is shaping up to have a lot more independent contractors, contingent workers, freelancers and the like, and fewer regular full-time employees. But these folks can’t join unions of bargain collectively. Does it matter? Read more »
When Tim Berners-Lee invited newsgroup users to the World Wide Web with the invitation “collaborators welcome,” he never could have expected how completely that concept would fundamentally transform work. Here, Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin shows the timeline of that transformation. Read more »
Everyone kissed goodbye to the jobs-for-life model long ago. Now pundits are arguing that for many of us jobs in their entirety are about to become a thing of the past, replaced by ‘the gig economy.’ Might women do better in this new work reality? Read more »
Embodied social proxies, basically robots that serve as in-office proxies for remote workers, helped involve remote workers in watercooler conversations and even deeper design discussions. However, the ESPs also made them late to meetings and created some etiquette issues around volume. Read more »
Politicians may be wrangling over various approaches to job creation, but the right and left seem to agree that with nine percent unemployment, America needs more jobs. Not author and marketing guru Seth Godin. He thinks we need to get over the whole idea. Read more »
