Leading the “Free Agent” Virtual, Flexible, Digitally Native Workforce
9 Future Work Trends Post COVID-19
1. Increases in remote working | Jobs will shift more towards remote work |
2. Expand Data Collection | Increasing use of employee monitoring tools and health/safety data |
3. Contingent worker expansion | Companies will consider introducing other job models such as talent sharing and 80% pay for 80% work (32% of organizations are replacing FT employees with contingent works/contracts, “gig-work”) |
4. Expanded employer role as social safety net | New policies such as enhanced sick leave, financial assistance, adjusted hours of operations, childcare provisions |
5. Separation of critical skills and roles | Companies will focus less on roles and focus how to drive competitive advantage and workflows. They will encourage employees to develop critical skills that open up horizontal career opportunities rather than just vertical. |
6. (De-)Humanization of Employees | Many employers still prioritize work over well-being and push employees to work in conditions that are high risk with little support. DO NOT DO THIS. Engage in team culture and culture of inclusiveness |
7. Emergency of new top-tier employers | Progressive organizations communicate openly and frequently in order to support their employees. |
8. Transition from designing for efficiency to designing for resilience | More companies will design roles and structures around outcomes to increase agility and flexibility and formalize how processes can flex rather than rigid. (Adaptive and flexible roles means cross-functional knowledge and training) |
9. Increase in organizational complexity | Enable business units to customize performance management, because what one part of the enterprise needs might not work elsewhere. |
The World is Your Oyster
Adaptive and flexible roles equal cross-functional knowledge and training.
Example of employment experiences:
Positive Article: Flex hours jobs: More firms offer variable schedules (usatoday.com)
The Roundtable Participants (All CEOs):
- JOEL GASCOIGNE, Buffer, social media management
- JASON FRIED, Basecamp, project management software
- JESSE MECHAM, You Need a Budget, personal finance software
- JAKE GOLDMAN, 10up, digital strategy and web design
- BRANDON GRIGGS, Knack, data management
- MATT MULLENWEG, Automattic, publishing platform
Future Outlook
Agile methodology
1. Standups | Standups are one of the most important ceremonies in an Agile team and increases individual responsibility to get work done as well as enforces shared accountability (What you actually did yesterday is because it might differ from what you said you would do yesterday; and if that’s the case, other members may choose to raise that discrepancy with you if a reasonable explanation wasn’t provided as to why.)
Keeps member up to date with the overall status of an ongoing sprint and encourages individual accountability by requiring members to discuss what they’re working on and any impediments that might be affecting them. Meet every day for roughly 10 minutes (2 minutes per person) for approximately 2 weeks. Discuss what tasks were done yesterday, what we’re doing today and any blockers we have encountered or might encounter. |
2. Sprint | A Sprint is a time-boxed period during which a Scrum team must complete an amount of work. At the start of Sprints, there must be a special meeting called the Sprint Planning. Sprint Planning. The Scrum Team primarily attends the Sprint Planning to discuss the current items and map out a structure to achieve the product goal. Sprint is a part of the Scrum framework. In Scrum, large projects are broken down into a series of iterations of smaller manageable bits that teams can handle. These iterations are called sprints. Sprints are pivotal to the Scrum framework, and companies can help teams produce high-quality software faster and more frequently if they get them right. Sprint team members enjoy more flexibility and become more adaptable. |
3. Create a Backlog | Think about what you want to bring forward in the future. The Backlog is a prioritized features list that contains a short description of the functionality needed to develop a working version of a product. In scrum backlog, the list might not be complete when it is being created in the first place |
→ Project Management: Sprint Planning and Best Strategies
Best Sprint Strategies for Project Management
- Highlight Roadmaps
- Groom Your Product Backlog
- Define When a Task is Done
- Make the Sprint Planning Interactive
- Incorporate Feedback and Insights
- Use Estimates to Define What Success Looks Like Based on Team Capacity
- Don't Rush to Finish the Sprint Plan Meeting
The Importance of Sprint Planning
- The product owner highlights the objective of the Sprint and what would contribute to that amidst the backlog items.
- The Scrum Team then joins forces to define a Sprint Goal that communicates why this Sprint is valuable to the product owner or stakeholders. The team selected items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint. This is quite important as it helps Developers know their past performance, the upcoming capacity, the Definition of Done, and how the Done relates to the new Sprint, enabling them to be more confident in making Sprint forecasts.
- The Scrum Team develops a plan to determine how the Sprint Goal will be achieved. The Sprint plan is a product of a negotiation between the team and the product owner based on value and effort. Each Product Backlog item is examined, and the work necessary to create an Increment to the Definition of Done is highlighted.
Building a Workplace Culture that supports Remote, Virtual Work
Role-based planning puts strategy execution at risk | A recent Gartner survey showed that 80% of the workforce, 92% of managers and 77% of senior leaders already felt poorly prepared for the future. A significant 40% of employees said they frequently completed responsibilities outside of their role. When tasks and responsibilities change quickly, as they do during business disruption, roles become less and less useful as a proxy for required skills. All top companies are already rethinking their hiring strategies, focusing MORE on underlying skill sets. |
How to differentiate skills for competitive advantage | Work for different companies; even the same job may have completely different functions as seen in FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google) |
5 imperatives to develop a skills-based plan
To shape a skills-based workforce plan that ensures you build the workforce of the future:
- Analyze skills and job posts from industry leaders, competitors and nontraditional competitors to understand the emerging skills landscape. Determine how these skills are different from those you have traditionally sought or are still seeking.
- Review and disaggregate critical roles into critical skills, and benchmark them against emerging trends.
- Share and contextualize data for business partners to help them understand the implications of skills trends as they build the capabilities needed by the workforce of the future. Ask what short- and long-term business strategy, talent and cost priorities to take into account.
- Create an enterprise-wide view of talent pipelines for key skills. Create a skill-based future workforce plan to determine what skills you need to develop, borrow and buy to move your organization into the future. Ask which skills give you a competitive advantage now and going forward.
- Create a realistic and aspirational talent development and acquisition plan driven by data on the supply-demand profile for, and location of, critical skills. Ask what adjacent skills sets you can develop and hire for competitive advantage.
Article: HR’s COVID 19 Response Defines Brand | Click to view summary
“Employers that find sustainable, cost-effective ways to support their employees across all these dimensions will be well positioned to rehire and re-engage employees after the COVID-19 pandemic has abated and recover faster as the global economy gets back into gear”
Article: Humans Hate Being Spun: How to Practice Radical Honesty | Click to view summary
“Your people can handle the truth, straight and in person, and so can you.”
Building a Workplace that Supports the Remote & Free Agent Post COVID-19 Workforce
Leading and the future (Work will NOT return to the way it was pre-COVID)
Post COVID-19, we see and will continue to see: Link Back to 9 Future Work Trends
Increase in remote working | 48% of employees to work remotely at least part-time (30% pre-COVID) |
Contingent worker expansion | 32% of organizations replacing Full-Time workers with Contingents a cost-saving measure |
Designing for Efficiency & Resilience | 55% of organizational redesigns are focused on streamlining roles, supply chains and workflows to increase efficiency. |
“Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What’s the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities. A wasted life” —Brad Blanton, an Authority on Radical Honesty
Leading with Technology as an “Enabler” & “Coworker”
Robotic examples of a “co-worker” are Slack, Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, HipChat
Video: Mark Cuban on AI, Jobs & Taxing Robots
Speaker: Mark Cuban
This conversation is part of the Future of Work Pioneers Podcast. Today we are joined by Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur, investor, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
→ Basics
We take a look at two companies
- Slack: Solutions to Remote Work
“Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.”
- With all of your communication and tools in one place, Slack lets you stay flexible, connected, productive, and aligned with your team remotely.
- 83% of employees don’t want to go back to the office full-time; of those, 20% want to remain remote full-time
- 44% of people with flexibility of where and 57% with flexibility of when they work report higher work-life balance scores
- Catalant: Reimagining how work gets done
- They help companies go from strategy to execution — fast.
- Catalant Technologies, Inc., is a freelance marketplace that uses a machine-learning algorithm to recommend independent consultants whose skills and expertise are needed for client projects. More than 70,000 independent consultants are listed on Catalant. Business leaders around the world turn to their Expert Marketplace for on-demand access in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.
- The Catalant platform enables clients to post projects, receive bids, interview and select experts, track projects, and make payments all in the same place. Clients use Catalant's software platform to access and deploy people in different talent pools who will work both inside and outside of their organizations. These talent pools include employees, alumni and retirees, and independent consultants and firms. More than 70,000 independent experts and 1,500 boutique firms are listed in Catalant's "Expert Marketplace."
- High-performing executives and their organizations use their Platform to align their goals, work, and resources on the fly.
- Rapidly evolving market conditions and remote work is forcing leaders to accelerate the enablement of a digital workplace, adapt plans, and quickly reallocate resources to achieve their goals.
- As of 2018, Catalant served more than 30% of the Fortune 100 and 20% of the Fortune 1000, including GE, Pfizer, Staples, and Shell
→ Advanced Tech
Article: Intelligence Agents: 50 America’s Most Promising Artificial-Intelligence Companies | For more information, click here
Artificial intelligence technology is powering big changes across all industries, but it’s tough to separate out the companies with truly transformative applications from marketing hype. That’s why Forbes is compiling a list of promising startups that are emerging as leaders in this space.
→ The pillars of Revenue Success (Gong: Revenue Intelligence Platform)
- People Success: Replicate what your best reps do. Transform your team into quota-shattering super soldiers.
- Deal Success: Stop deals from stalling. Keep every deal on a path to close. Solidify next steps every time.
- Strategy Success: Hear the unfiltered voice of your market. Guarantee success when rolling out new initiatives