Opening up work
So much of what we’re trying to achieve with Somewhere is focussed on asking people to open up about their work lives. For many people the work-life balance is now a work-life mashup.
What we’ve seen, and what people on Somewhere have shown us, makes me think that future of work is already here. The problem is that we don’t know how to talk about what we do, without being provoked first.
At the end of last year we spent an evening creating new provocations because we wanted to vastly increase the number of questions we ask about work on Somewhere. There are so many different professions represented by our invite-only community and we needed to get better at helping people open up about work.
Those questions have now been in circulation for a few months. What we’ve seen and learned since then is valuable, and unexpected.
It’s clear that when we ask people to share their work, they enjoy doing so. It’s quite common to see people join Somewhere and share ten or twenty Sparks immediately.
And yet, it’s clear that some questions are more popular than others.
What we’ve learned is that people are becoming accustomed to talking around their work. The provocations we have which are focussed on how you get to work, conferences you recommend, great start-up advice and good books, for example, are much more popular than the provocations about what do you, who you work with, and often, how you really work.
If our mission to was create a better CV (and it’s not) then we would have failed by now. But it is our belief that the resume is irrelevant, because work counts for more than a job title and an unbroken list of employment.
Today we’ve answered some of our own questions about how to open up what it means to work, and we’ll continue to push forwards to open up the personal and the relevant parts of our professional lives. We’re not going to get there without you so, so please keeping sending us feedback and inviting your colleagues to join us.
