The Networked Employee — a look into the future of work

Can you imagine the future, what life will be and how it will mold work? I constantly find myself to ride the wave of thought in that direction. We live in a coherent world, and change is persistent, continuous, touching every aspect of our lives.

Work is no stranger to change. From disappearing jobs to new ones, created just in the last few years, we all see how work is being reshaped by new technologies.

What I am mostly interested in, however, is how we do the work, what work we do, and who we do it with. All three super-connected to new technologies.

HOW

Cloud technologies allow us to be fluid workers, we can work in an office, from home, or from a hotel. The fixed workplace is not a relevant concept anymore. Some jobs are affected more than others. From accounting to wholesale, to design, and mostly everything else is in the cloud. Even small restaurant owners can browse their stats on the phone, tablet or computer, making decisions on the go.

WHAT

Liberation of office restrictions frees people to chose what to work on. The freelance movement is powering up vast sectors of the economy. Just a quick look at websites such as Fiverr.com shows how many tasks, and services can be outsourced to a fluid network of independent service providers — each one with reputation, and feedback left by other clients, ensuring certain level of quality control. This reputation model, pioneered by Ebay in the peer-to-peer commerce, now moves to other services, such as recruitment, and freelancing. On one hand, we can choose what to work on, and on the other, we can check the professional reputation of those we want to work with. Developing our own ideas, or working on a team, work restricts us no more.

WITH WHOM

The most essential question: Who are the people to get together with around a project? How are they connecting, initiating new ideas, and working with each other? We can check all of our colleagues on Linkedin. For the matter of the fact, we can see all of our friends, schoolmates, neighbors, competitors, and anyone else we might think of. Everyone with their full professional info, past/previous jobs, skills, education, hobbies, etc. We don’t work with all those people, but we could, if at some point in time our work paths cross. And work paths cross whenever there is a project to connect professionals, through their skills.

Nowadays, innovation is pushed through startup projects outside the traditional organization. And we have a pretty clear idea how it works: people pitch ideas, get accelerated, work on them, succeed or fail. Intrapreneurial innovation projects, however, are another matter. Some organizations are open about it; we all know about the 20% free time for own projects at Google. Others, like Apple, are quite private about their inner workings. Those are two big companies that we hear about all the time. The fact is that there are millions of other organizations, with vast pools of knowledge, open or locked, whose employees are sitting there, waiting to connect work paths.

The Networked Employee

Future of work is exciting! I can imagine that in the near future more organizations, big and small, will venture to open their internal projects to freelancers driven by tax reasons, or by the need of fresh talent. It is already happening, mostly in design, coding, and consulting. New technologies push the envelope for many other professions to be outsourced, and interconnected with multiple organizations across industries, countries, and cultures. I assume the influence of freelancers on organizations will lead to new dimensions in the employee-company relationship. Our generation will witness the birth of the Networked Employee. People who are employed in one organization but also outsource their skills to other ones. Recently we discussed this with our Rockajoint.com advisor Todor Popov, CFO at SumUP.com. As he suggested, what if a company has a team of employees that is only 70% involved in the day-to-day tasks in their organization. Then we can assume that the other 30% can be beneficial to some other project — internal or external. The recent example is the Obama Care case where a few of the best technology companies sent over some of their best employees to help. It showed how people from different organizations got together for a third-party project.

Where does this leave intrapreneurship? Can we conclude that intrapreneurial initiatives can be boosted by cross-company collaboration, where interested employees get together and work on joint projects. Such practices would lead to plenty of complications in terms of company culture clashes, budgets, IP rights, etc., but it’s nothing short of a possibility to stimulate innovation in many sectors, to bring in fresh ideas, and to cultivate better company cultures. Surely, we will need a new type of change managers to bring this forward, and I am sure the Generation Y managers are already setting the cornerstones for this to happen.

Next: Circles of Professionals.

Since this essay was first published on my Linkedin profile, I have ventured into a new #FutureOfWork company — Coworkies, focusing on connecting people between coworking spaces, follow it for updates.