Gigs are not the future of work.
Eight employment models to solve different business problems.
Boolean logic — the 0/1 code — has been the foundation of our information revolution for the last few decades. It reasons through a series of yes or no answers. But of course, this isn’t new. Boole tried to systematize Aristotle’s form of reasoning, which some believe dates back to the Egyptians or further.
At this point, it seems, our brains are wired to like binary thinking.
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman called our binary reasoning, System 1. It allows us to make rapid, fight-or-flight decisions from heuristics, but is also prone to bias and error. In its extreme, psychologists view binary thinking as a cognitive distortion. When we can only pose choices as a dichotomy, we radically limit our ability to generate new and creative solutions.
At Brave, we study work: how people work, how organizations work, and how the nature of work is changing. In our research, we frequently encounter questionable dichotomies. Here’s a common one. There are only two kinds of labor in the world: Full-time or Part-time.
In modern parlance, employees are in the Job Economy or the Gig Economy.
Regardless of the way you label it, focusing on how much of a person’s labor you own, full time, misses the point. Economies are about production not ownership of time. Employee-employer relationships can exist on a broad spectrum based on differently complex outcomes.
Talent leaders should focus on the right people in the right place at the right time at the right price to achieve a goal. The HR industry calls this strategic workforce planning. And like all strategy, it starts by comparing options for achieving a goal.
Here are the eight, most common employment models we encounter:
Traditional Employment Models
The left four models are part of traditional employment where an employee is retained within a single organization for a long period of time.
The 9 a.m. — 5 p.m. model
Most of the time, we try to solve problems using this labor model. An employee sells all of their time to a single employer. They accomplish predefined tasks and, slowly, painfully, climb the corporate ladder.
Most educational systems produce workers to fit into this model. It works well when employees and employers prioritize security and certainty, not necessarily productivity.
Internal Career Marketplaces
Occasionally an organization looks within its existing team to fill new positions. For the employee, lateral shifts propel career growth in new directions. Employers get the benefit of new work, while avoiding the costs of hiring and training.
For example Google created an algorithm-powered internal job marketplace called Chameleon. As the name nicely captures, it allows employees adapt to the company’s needs and forces managers to be less possessive of their teams.
The tool evaluates a Googler’s experience and the job requirement posted then displays a color-coded match score based on the overlap between the two. Preferences are also ranked by managers and employees then pairing is done using the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance Algorithm. After six rounds of the program, Googlers and managers got one of their top three choices 90% of the time. And 80% of employees and managers reported their satisfaction with the process.
Tours of Duty
As mentioned in our previous post about changing career paths, rather than focusing on jobs and promotion paths, creative companies and their employees agree on a specific mission to accomplish over a 2–5 year period.
Because this starts off as a conversation that encourages the alignment of an employee’s personal and professional goals with the organization’s goals, it has a higher chance of keeping employees inspired and motivated.
Take the example of David Hahn, mentioned by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who went from a twenty-three-year-old with no business experience to one of the most sought-after executives in Silicon Valley by structuring 4 distinct tours of duty over 9 years at LinkedIn.
He started each new role by writing an objective with long-term benefits for him and his manager. He is a business analyst and by the end was running all of LinkedIn’s monetization products as a vice president.
Internal Project Platforms
As the name suggests, these platforms exist within an organization to curate projects that any existing employee can take on in addition to their day job.
These projects tend to last for a month or two, giving employees an opportunity to learn new skills and understand other areas of organization.
Dan Pontefract, the CEO of The Pontefract Group, provides a thoughtful analysis of such a platforms value. He believes it would not only tap into the trove of hidden talent within an organization, but also improve factors such as internal networks, job satisfaction, and psychological commitment as well as introduce talent to other parts of the organization.
The Gig Economy
While the traditional models outline an increasing degree of agency over one’s work while being fully dedicated to a single organization, the gig economy trades loyalty and dedication for more focused, on-demand labor. In the past, this level of specialization required a local agency to aggregate demand. However, due to remote communication and resource sharing technologies, work has become less limited by location.
Freelancers
Pretty obviously, these folks are hired on a project basis. They sign a fixed-term contract with the employer and commit to produce and submit deliverables in their area of expertise.
Gig Platforms
Rather than hiring a specific freelancer for a project, employers can also outsource a whole series of highly specific tasks without worrying who is doing it. New gig platforms are popping up daily to aggregate demand for either a wide diversity of one time tasks, like Amazon Mechanical Turk, or one specific but frequent request, like rides via Uber.
Temporary Workers
As an employer, this is the state of having a contract with a staffing agency that will replace workers as required by the organization. The main benefit of this is when the temporary positions are closed, there’s no financial commitment to continuous employment.
AI and Automation
From an employers perspective, robots and software, are also a resource. When analyzing a organization’s work, task by task, there is almost always a role for machines to play alongside any human employment model. Smart workforce planning is never about replacing human jobs. It’s about designing jobs for the right type of workforce. And machines excel at some tasks.
First, Get Clear on What Your Organization Needs
To illustrate a form of workforce planning, we mapped the eight common employment models along two dimensions*: interactive vs independent and repetitive vs variable.
At the intersections of each dimension, four work problem types emerge: collaborative innovation, coordinated production, precision tasks, and specialized problem-solving.
*The 2 dimensions mapping our employment models were taken from Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau’s HBR Article, “How to Break Down Work Into Tasks That Can Be Automated.”
Let’s look at a challenge using two extremes: Collaborative Innovation and Precision Tasks. Say an organization is trying to build its marketing strategy from scratch. It’s a huge project requiring a variety interactions with many different stakeholders as well as a potentially unpredictable creative processes. A Tour of Duty, where someone champions customer adoption through launch and growth phases of a project, might be the ideal type of workforce for this mission.
The same organization might need to track and manage customer relationships as part of their marketing process. However, the tasks involved, such as capturing customer data or classifying the type of communication, are far more repetitive and independent. Ongoing performance measurement might be solved best by an automated CRM tool.
By understanding each problem, in this case for Marketing, we can identify how some employment models would be more likely to succeed. The next time you’re company has a challenge, instead of asking, “Who do we need to hire?”, consider, “What kind of problem are we solving and what type of workforce is best designed to solve it?”
Authors:
Ibanga Umanah is a Cofounder and the Head of Strategy for Brave Venture Labs. Brave is a tool for spotting and ranking talent for companies building product teams in emerging markets.
Amina Islam has a Ph.D. in engineering and is currently putting her skills and academic background into doing evidence-based research on the impact of informal learning programs.
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