The future of work is collaboration, not employment
Remote Workers have proved that trust works. This is just the beginning.
It doesn’t take long for the typical remote worker to discover that working on the beach is mostly an Instagram fantasy.
The promise of fast Wi-Fi, a comfortable desk and decent hot beverages is more than enough for coworking spaces around the world to survive and turn a profit. These pragmatic workplaces cater to the serious side of the remote work spectrum, offering a more professional experience than awkwardly setting up shop in a café for the day.
These organisations aspire to be community hubs. By hosting events, talks and workshops, they hope to foster a truly collaborative culture — with some degree of success. Indeed, for a lot of professionals, coworking spaces provide the remedy to the ailment that haunts the remote work lifestyle: loneliness.
Nevertheless it should be noted that many remote workers choose this life to escape the distractions of the corporate office and really concentrate. Furthermore, in most coworking spaces there are not enough social lubricants or incentives to sustain any organic collaborative ‘buzz’. Professionals employed as part of a remote team can find this particularly frustrating — they tend to feel a responsibility towards their colleagues, leaving Slack and Skype as the only natural outlets for ‘workplace socialising.’
If the company’s communication culture is anything less than excellent, remote team members can struggle to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The remote work ecosystem is starting to understand that the balance between concentration and socialising in the workplace is delicate. All manner of innovative models have emerged, persistently challenging our assumptions about the relationship between life and work. Organisations offering digital nomad cruises, curated work-plus-travel experiences, and integrated coworking and coliving arrangements have all made their mark on the landscape in the last few years. These projects have a compelling proposition for young remote workers with plenty of skills and few commitments, but they have yet to offer something that appeals to mature professionals. In order to do that, an organisation would need to challenge the very definition of employment.
You’ll quickly notice a pattern if you ask enough remote workers what attracted them to this way of life. Freedom to set their own hours or to work from a location they enjoy both come up often, but these mask a deeper desire. Ultimately, remote work is about freedom in general; and this freedom has a lot to do with the balance of power between employer and employee.
Employers make all kinds of concessions to retain control over their employees’ behaviour; relaxed dress codes, events, flexi-time, and occasional work-from-home policies to name but a few. What employers struggle to do is let go and entirely trust their employees. This is perhaps an uncharitable interpretation; building trust takes time and employers have much at stake, taking on new risks with each new appointment. Knowledge is a company’s most important asset, and the ultimate owner of this knowledge is the individual professional, not the corporate entity.
In this context, a completely different kind of organisation is emerging.
The true value of a company is its capacity to bring together the skills of different professionals and organise them into an effective team. In stark contrast, the perceived value of a company (that allows it to compete in the marketplace) is contained by its brand. The old way of doing business is to build a company around a brand, while individual employees are built around a certain set of skills. The new way of doing business is for organisations to build themselves around the skills of their staff, with each team member having their own personal brand.
This shift is not as comfortable as the shift from fixed schedules and workplaces to flexible working and telecommuting. The unfortunate reality is that marketing and business knowledge is carefully guarded by those who have it, resulting in most businesses being dominated by their sales function. Design-led, culture-led or product-led organisations are rare because the received wisdom is that business acumen is an exceptional property, inseparable from leadership. When we understand that commercial intelligence is not exceptional, but rather just a set of skills that lies at the intersection of finance and marketing, a new universe opens up with an infinite number of definitions for the word ‘leadership’.
Agile development experts have argued for ages that the best leaders are ‘servant-leaders’; that’s because real leadership is not about power, but empathy and mutual respect. Trailblazing entrepreneurs discarded the old adage ‘your network is your net worth’ some time ago; that’s because your network is almost worthless without a sense of community and the mutual belief that more can be achieved in cooperation than in competition. HR leaders understand the very best teams are those that think of themselves as friends; that’s because friends swap skills fearlessly.
The urge to look backwards to a simpler time is pervasive. Older professionals talk fondly of companies that felt like families, with employers who believed they had a moral responsibility to ‘look after’ their employees. This is still a reality for many smaller businesses, and startups are increasingly realising company culture needs to be right from day one to ensure the future of the organisation. The very best company cultures extend this familial love not just to the team, but to the customers as well.
Much has been said about how the free users of social media platforms are, in fact, not the customers, but the product. The actual customers of these companies are the entities that purchase the data or the service of using the data to influence the users in a targeted way. Society can’t undo this trend; instead of going backwards, it will have to go forwards, eventually dismantling all notions of ‘customer’, ‘employer’ and ‘employee.’ The core mission of the organisation, then, is to facilitate collaboration. It becomes an ecosystem of overlapping mini-organisations, each with its own missions, policies and financial sensibilities.
For a glimpse of this optimistic vision of the future, look no further than organisations like Iglu — a community of digital expats based in Thailand. They help digital professionals relocate to Southeast Asia, turn their employers into clients and collaborate on new projects. In turn, they can provide access to a comprehensive talent pool for businesses looking to outsource affordably.
