GigaOM » Future Of Work

Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

stoweboyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:19 +0000

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.

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11 steps for scaling a startup

David MacMillan — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:55:38 +0000

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.

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With $500k, Modern Guild targets college students with online career coaching

Ki Mae Heussner — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:56:45 +0000

Plenty of soon-to-be college grads will finish school with heavy debt loads and not a clue about how to get a jump in the market. But Modern Guild, an early-stage startup in New York, believes it can help students get a leg up on launching their careers by matching them with professionals for fee-based online career readiness courses.

In early 2012, it launched a pilot program with 100 students at ten schools, including Columbia, University of Michigan and Colgate. On Monday, the startup said it had raised $500,000 in seed funding from about a dozen investors, including Alex Asseily, co-founder of Jawbone. (Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman is also an advisor.)

Founder Adrien Fraise, a former consultant and Columbia Business School graduate, said the idea stemmed from his participation in a mentorship program organized by his alma mater Stanford.

“Kids in college aren’t tying their academics to where they want to go,” he said. “We’re giving them a line of sight.”

Through Modern Guild, students from their senior year in high school through their junior year in college can apply to be a “protégé.” And, if accepted to what the company describers as a new model of “apprenticeship,” they are matched with a professional in their field of interest. Over an eight- or ten-week course, the students meet with their personal coach for a minimum of 8 hour-long one-on-one classes, receive customized career-building exercises and interact online with other professionals in their area of interest. In addition to video conferencing through the site, students can schedule meetings, message with other students and complete their assignments. Fraise said the courses were created with guidance from advisors who are career center directors, education professors and recruitment professionals.

Given the significant expense of college and the shifting demands of business, it’s encouraging to see new platforms that help young people better connect with the working world. AfterCollege, for example, positions itself as a LinkedIn for college students and Pave is a new crowdfunding site in which established professionals invest money and time in exchange for a share of their mentees’ future earnings.

But one of my reservations about Modern Guild is the hefty price tag: $1,499 (about the same price as a Princeton Review test prep course). Modern Guild provides a higher degree of access to professionals and the opportunity to learn specific job-related skills but, as social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, continue to connect people of all ages and backgrounds around interest, I wonder how many people will be willing to pay so much for connections they might be able to make for free. When I pressed Fraise to explain why the courses were so expensive, he emphasized their “high-touch” one-on-one nature. While most online learning sites tend to offer free or lower-priced courses, the majority take a one-to-many, pre-recorded video-based approach. Modern Guild provides customized courses and live tutorials that, offline, could cost a student even more, he said.

Given its high price-point, it seems as though Modern Guild is targeting wealthier students and their parents – not necessarily the ones struggling with debt. But Fraise said the company is committed to supporting students of all economic backgrounds and that one-third, so far, are helped by scholarships. (Modern Guild pays all mentors but many choose to donate their earnings to the scholarship fund). In the coming year, he also said that they plan to offer online tutorials and workshops that are less comprehensive but free – for example, a speaker series on interviewing or specific industries.

To date, the company has attracted 200 mentors, which it says could support 2,000 students. In its first application period, which just closed, Modern Guild said it received 4,000 applications for 50 spots.

Image by iko via Shutterstock.

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How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

cwaxer — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:55:46 +0000

Once known for its online job boards and newspaper classified ads, talent management is now a $4 billion industry. Helping to redefine this age-old HR practice is workforce analytics, a powerful combination of highly sophisticated computer algorithms and predictive models. However, HR professionals face an enormous hurdle: how to make a business case for a high-priced technology that can often lead to IT headaches, hardware expenditures, and overturned HR processes. Linking these workforce analytics to business success can help HR professionals convince corporate bean counters to bankroll the crunching of human-capital data.

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Workspaces go slash

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:32:37 +0000

As the social contract between companies and employees that mandated loyalty in return for security breaks down and careers become more fluid, diverse and self-directed, more and more of us have become what Marci Alboher memorably dubbed “slashes” several years ago. Who’s a slash? Anyone with multiple career identities that can be separated by the eponymous punctuation mark – as in, ‘I’m a graphic designer/ entrepreneur/ tambourine player.’ (Sadly no, metal heads, the term has nothing to do with the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist).

Careers going slash is not exactly news (Fast Company recently dubbed the same phenomenon ‘Generation Flux’ in a fascinating series of articles) but one corollary of this shift is just getting started — the slash space. The boundaries between our different identities are blurring in time as many more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects throughout the year, week or even day, and it seems the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark.

At least that’s what a spate of innovative new space ideas that blur personal and professional space begins to suggest. In Europe, for example, Regus and other flexible office space companies are tucking workspaces into transport hubs to cater to a more location independent, office hours agnostic work style. Reuters reports:

Regus… is opening 15 on-platform railway business lounges in the Netherlands, 60 to 100 in France, and more in Switzerland and Germany. Regus is looking to do the same in shopping malls in the U.S and Shell service stations globally. The firm’s first motorway-flanking office opened in January in France on the A10 Autoroute’s Limours-Janvry service station.

In Britain, The Office Group has signed a deal to open five drop-in offices at railway stations, starting with London Paddington in September.

But it’s not just the railway station/office that’s going slash. How about coworking/daycare? Forget leaving your personal commitments at the door as you head out to the office, Plug & Play, a new coworking space in Austin, Texas is offering freelancers, entrepreneurs and remote workers office space and childcare under one roof, allowing members to meet parental and professional obligations in one place.

Do you think we’ll see more hybrid spaces along these lines as the rigid boundaries of traditional office culture break down further?

Image courtesy of Flickr user SashaW.

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First take: Google Drive

David Card — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:34:03 +0000

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 differentiate.

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Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

Mike Dover — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:28:05 +0000

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. This report examines that new ecosystem and how the above and more companies are changing the way businesses find and retain their employees. Small- and medium-sized businesses can benefit from innovative technology that will help their recruiting efforts, and the cost for doing so is reasonable (and decreasing). The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. This report provides examples and recommendations for employers.

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Women make up the majority of online freelancers, study says

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:03:57 +0000

In the past we’ve pondered whether the flexible, more location independent future of work is better suited on average to the talents and preferences of women. The answer to that question is speculation, but exactly how women are faring in the current market for flexible jobs online can be determined. So are they holding their own?

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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC.

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The case for manager as urban planner

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:40:03 +0000

Here on GigaOM we often talk about the future of work for the worker – more empowered, less tethered to location, perhaps more demanding – and about what this means for managers (Yup, it’s time to give up on points for attendance). But the same shifts in technology and the economy that are rearranging things for individuals and teams are also changing what works for whole companies.

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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mosman Council.

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Elance predicts the future of online work

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:00:07 +0000

Online labor platforms are growing strongly, a fact that’s confirmed regularly when leaders in the field like Elance and oDesk release their latest impressive-sounding statistics showing more and more firms embracing online hiring. Today, Elance is adding to this drumbeat of optimism in the sector, unveiling figures that show more than $500 million worth of work has been contracted on the platform (for the visually inclined, here are the numbers in an infographic).

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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user garryknight.

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