Preparing For The Future Of Work: Anna Zarudzka of Boldare On The Top Five Trends To Watch In The Future Of Work

An Interview with Phil La Duke

Self-management. For teams and organizations it means a group of employees who take full responsibility for delivering a service or product through peer collaboration without a manager’s guidance. For us, as individuals, it’s about physical, mental, social, and spiritual capabilities to be able to prioritize goals, decide what must be done, and be accountable to complete the necessary action, without the orders from someone else. In our product teams, for many years we have not had a project manager — responsibilities are distributed among people on the team.

There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute that estimated automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.

To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.

As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Anna Zarudzka.

Anna Zarudzka is the Co-CEO and Founder of Boldare, a company that specializes in building digital products and accompanying businesses in their digital transformation. Zarudzka founded the web design agency Chilid twelve years ago, then three years ago she merged Chilid with Xsolve. The result: Boldare, a holacratic company which now employs more than 200 people. In addition to her expertise in digitalization,, she is also well-versed in democratic education, polyphonic singing, and self-organizing work culture.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers like to get an idea of who you are and where you came from. Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you come from? What are the life experiences that most shaped your current self?

I’ve always been a very curious person and loved learning new things. I’ve sung opera, tried my hand at high jump, obsessively studied biology, painted, and much more. My interests would change every few months, but this would typically brand a person as volatile or easily bored. I find this to be a strength in lean startup and adapting to changes in the current world.

When I left TV and media, I wanted to enter the digital world. It was much more attractive to me to start a company in a new industry that was growing rapidly, than stay in a rather old school TV industry. This way I started Chilid, which then merged with XSolve to create Boldare. Prior to merging, we decided to choose a different, rather unique and unpopular business organizational model — a holacracy. Why?

Instead of following the path of other software development companies, like a typical dev shop that offers body leasing, we decided, together with my Co-Founder Piotr, to go off the beaten track. We grew slowly but entirely on our own terms. We rely on a culture of empowerment that gives our employees opportunities to grow and develop themselves, but also allows space to make mistakes and learn from them. We use holacracy and agility as the operating systems for the organization, and it was one of my best career decisions to date.

Our story of implementing holacracy is a little different than most. We didn’t implement it as a way to self-organize, or lean into modern management — it’s not a story of hierarchy to holacracy. We have been working in a self-organizing way since the company’s inception. We reached for holacracy when, with 100 people, we were looking for something to better organize our work while maintaining distributed decision-making and autonomy (and avoiding chaos!) We needed something that lent itself to more order, and holacracy is very ordered…

What we have now is the combination of a self-organizing company culture with agile methods and lean startup principles, and the last few years have deemed it successful. In principle, lean startup and agile companies have the self-organizing company culture in their DNA.

What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?

COVID-19 has shaken traditional companies and their cultures. A company, like a family, is a social entity that has an impact on people and their communities. If you have a feeling that an outdated business approach or management style isn’t working for you and our rapidly changing world, take the risk and try something else for the good of your team. Self-organization, radical transparency and distributed decision-making is what will bring your company great results and your team’s peace of mind.

The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?

If you’re lucky enough to know what you want to do, start by looking to people who are on track to achieving what you hope for yourself, or are in the position you want. What was their path like? How can you emulate it, and how can you use their stumbling blocks and advice to avoid your own obstacles? Whether that’s going to college, incurring debt, or something else entirely.

I highly encourage you to go to college whenever your situation allows you to. The difference, however, would not be in IF, but HOW to experience it. Don’t be afraid to change, and don’t treat college as an all-in choice you’re making for 4+ years. Try to work at the same time, preferably in an industry that really matters to you. If you need to support yourself without help, don’t stop looking for work you like.

College is the time, and often the best one in your life, for strong self-reflection. Observe what triggers you, what bores you, and what flows easily. There is a wealth of knowledge hidden there about what you can do later. In film school, I learned I was in love with… budgets and technology. Not very obvious aspects of cinematography, is it?

And the most important: don’t focus on skills, the hard ones, or knowledge itself. Remember that anything that cannot be digitized or automated will become extremely valuable: creativity, imagination, intuition, emotions, and ethics.

Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?

From my perspective, the most important thing that will always be at a premium is being open to variability, and being very iterative in everything you do, including your development. Also to what the position is, the responsibilities and the “job/work” in general, as a concept. Nothing is fixed, and the needs of the market change. Being able to take advantage of that variability and keep your path in line with your interests will be the key to success. If you want to work according to your talents, develop them at work, taking into account that seemingly unrelated activities or tasks are a good basis for development.

Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

The pandemic put values into perspective — family, education, work/life balance, and even integration. We are seeing a massive shift in employees wanting the flexibility of working from home because they want more agency over their work and their time.

Work-life integration creates a mindset that allows an individual to look at the big picture and the synergistic interaction of all of these elements. How is work-life integration different from work-life balance? According to UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, work-life integration is “an approach that creates more synergy between all the areas that define ‘life’: Work, Home/Family, Community, Personal Well-Being and Health.”

This could mean working later hours so you can focus on a personal project in the morning, or checking email after hours, but also checking and responding to private emails during the workday. In other words, work-life integration sees each activity during the day as part of a whole and focuses less on divisions.

The concept of balance inherently implies competing, divided interests. For some, this definition and mindset can be stressful when thinking about allocating time and energy for work, caring for children or aging parents, spending time with a significant other, enjoying time with friends, exercise, social obligations, cleaning, health, hobbies or relaxation. Work-life balance seeks to achieve an ideal state in which work and life coexist and thrive separately; work-life integration is about bringing work and life closer together.

What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support the fundamental changes to work?

Education, education and more education. Until we get out of the Prussian mindset of what education is and should be, we will continue to “produce” people incapable of seizing the opportunities (rather than fending off the attacks) of the new job market.

Apart from Scandinavia, there is currently no place in the world where we realistically prepare people for the new reality at the level of the whole country. There are some where the elite have a chance to touch it, but also some where change is happening only in small, independent, non-system entities.

Another thing is psychological safety, which is, without a doubt, one of the principles of building effective teams, especially now, when employees are no longer able to discuss their actions or ask advice of their teammates or supervisors in person. It lies in using failures as lessons to learn and improve from.

In a team with high levels of psychological safety, members are more eager to make meaningful and effective decisions. And this is extremely important during uncertain and risky times, like the current pandemic. If the team feels safe, they’re not afraid to make bold decisions, and in case of mistakes, they’re not blocked from moving forward and improving their decision-making.

What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employers to accept? What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employees to accept?

A key decision facing the leaders of any company is how much information to share internally. What are you going to tell your workforce about company strategy, performance, financial results, etc. On a spectrum between the absolute minimum and everything, the answer usually lies somewhere in the middle.

But there is a growing school of business thought that says real business efficiency, from top to bottom, relies on sharing everything: a policy of radical transparency. This can present as a challenge to both employers and employees, but when the pandemic arrived, our radical transparency was a key factor in our seamless shift to 100% remote working, without a drop in efficiency or performance.

Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

I, in general, have a pretty positive view of what the future of work will look like. We have, as a planet, more serious reasons not to be optimistic, but we humans can handle this change in overall approach. Every watershed moment in the market and development economics comes with a price, and we pay it with every major change.

Right next to the hundreds of jobs and opportunities that disappear, there will be a slew of others. Not only those that require tremendous skills to process the change, but also those that will be a return to what was already there. The turn away from globalization builds more space for small, artisanal businesses. The return to creativity opens up many places that technocratic thinking has closed us off to. The need for soft skill development allows for a return to humanism and activities that have lost weight in recent years, non-governmental institutions, independent media, sustainable agriculture, local services — these are the things that will be places for more people. All of these places and activities are hard to automate. It’s the people that matter.

Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?

As a long-term approach, what we should be betting on is fundamental changes in education. Accelerating them is something that I think cannot wait a moment longer. Current changes are too slow and too small.

On top of that, strengthening access to information and support with training in modern skills should first include regions and places most threatened by change. This can happen globally, but also regionally — the change will not be global as each region experiences it differently. Nevertheless, my approach is from the other side (that’s why I’m not a politician, but an entrepreneur). Let’s change our small places, small environments. Let’s change the companies in which people work, for such, that in addition to generating revenue, give our employees new skills, open before them the image of their own capabilities and teach them to be ready for change. Let each employee who leaves our company go to the labor market richer in skills, especially since no one stays in one company for 15 years, only for 3, so we become responsible as employers for who and how we “raise” successive employers.

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Self-management. For teams and organizations it means a group of employees who take full responsibility for delivering a service or product through peer collaboration without a manager’s guidance. For us, as individuals, it’s about physical, mental, social, and spiritual capabilities to be able to prioritize goals, decide what must be done, and be accountable to complete the necessary action, without the orders from someone else. In our product teams, for many years we have not had a project manager — responsibilities are distributed among people on the team.
2. Outsourcing. We have become very fuzzy on this concept thanks to the development of outsourcing. What used to be just the practice of using outside companies or organizations to provide a service you choose not to tackle in-house, is now increasingly becoming team augmentation, where the combined forces of two companies build something together from the idea stage all the way through to validating its sense on the market.
3. Flexibility. Flexibility is the first step to agility, which leads to full readiness for change and the ability to reap rather than nullify it. Flexibility is the beginning of everyone’s path to full peace of mind from the changing reality, and in an organization to real validation of the legitimacy of the existence of the business.
4. Transparency. For us it’s especially important because we have radical transparency within the company — from all documents being open to financial details. In my opinion, this is a particularly important aspect that is required in order to be able to disperse decision-making within the company. If I do not have the information, I cannot make a decision. Transparency today is also an important factor in building trust inside and outside the company. Transparency between employees, but also with the outside world: honest relations with customers and suppliers, and even competitors.
5. Resilience. Since Nassim Taleb collected the thought of anti-fragility, the term has lost much of its meaning. Building resilience (a bit of a reserve, a defense against something), is something that can be the first step to real anti-fragility, or full adaptation to change.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?

Every once in a while, it changes, like everything else. I have two that have guided me for a long time now:

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” — Albert Einstein

And the second one, though I don’t know where it originated, is, “Are you driving change, or are you being driven by it?” This is a question I try to ask myself as often as possible.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

This list is very long… My shortlist would include:

• Gerd Leonhard, futurist and humanist at the same time
• Brené Brown, for her constant food for thought and the way in which she brings forth courage and vulnerability in people,
• And Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for his courageous research and analysis of organizations, and his search for the How and Why that outlines the way forward for businesses, especially in the New Normal

I’d most like to gather these people by the sea, in a remote area, and hold a potluck that would allow us to talk to a few of the deceased characters, whom I appreciate immensely, like Niklas Luhmann, a man whose departure from systems theory influenced all thoughts about self-organization and the future of work.

Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?

We’re constantly updating our blog and sharing on LinkedIn, along with posting some team musings on our Instagram, @boldarecom.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.