Reimagining the workforce of the future

We are living in exciting times. We are sending space darts to deflect comet trajectories, spending $92m on digital art, doing highly creative work in the comfort of home that seemed impossible a few years ago. The pace of change is accelerating. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Source: Visualize Capital

As 2022 kicks off, the adoption of the gig economy of specialized talent is also soaring. Globally, the gig economy captured $347b in 2021, with 3.8% ($7.7b) coming from professional services. The largest talent supply pools primarily come from the US, UK, Brazil, Philippines, Ukraine, Poland, and India.

The exciting news is that the Middle East market is still in its infancy, with less than 0.5% specialized independent workers penetration capturing a total value of $200–300m. The headroom for growth is significant as the flexible team deployments gain pace. MENA organizations have realized the importance of this new way of working. Moreover, government interventions tailwinds such as facilitating independent workers’ residence and setting up businesses are adding required fuel to fire. For escape velocity adoption, the Middle Eastern market needs differentiated handling and innovative models to accelerate and embrace the gig economy.

Need for an evolving capability construct of the workforce

The capability construct implies the pool of skills, functional and industry expertise, and its concentration within the workforce of an organization. Such a construct is a live barometer of how well the people’s capabilities align with the organization’s goals and objectives.

The tectonic shifts required in this capability construct are pushing the organizations to reimagine the people engine and deliver higher customers and shareholders’ value. The necessary capabilities evolve dynamically, causing organizations to always play the catchup game in building a high-performing workforce. There are three core reasons to unpack what contributes to this phenomenon:

1. Technology developments enhancing the service portfolios and pushing the organizations to move at a warp speed to cater to ever-demanding consumers
2. Fringe demand use-cases becoming mainstream over the past 10–15 years, i.e., community-based business models, online vs. offline commerce, gaming, decentralized protocols, etc.
3. Struggling education infrastructure with roots deeply embedded in the industrial age while the earthlings are ready to explore the meta world.

These are fundamental forces at play, creating a vacuum when channeling necessary capabilities and creating fierce competition in capturing the limited talent pool.

The gig economy offers a dynamic solution to build the future workforce. Thanks to the unique T-growth gig workforce is experiencing, i.e., varied capabilities and skills joining the global marketplace in large numbers. This has given organizations emerging confidence and a real opportunity to consider the gig workforce as an innovative talent management solution.

“Soon enough, high quality and complex work will be available in gig fashion at scale. You will wake up in the morning, your phone will buzz with 5 different jobs with contract amount, you will get rated daily or weekly. Once you are done, you can turn it off and take a break. Smart people have already figured out to work remotely in this fashion.” — Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList and angel investor

Atomization of organizations — forcing workforce innovation

The information age is reversing the industrial age in many ways. One of the critical phenomena is the organizations’ shrinking size (atomization). The days of building larger workforces are mostly over. Let’s break this down to understand the underlying forces at play. Organizations operate through various types of internal and external transactions. The core question becomes how hard it is to do a specific transaction internally (in-house) vs. externally (outsourced); for example, does it make sense to build a complete last-mile delivery fleet internally or leverage third-party fleet providers. It is a nuanced choice governed by customer experience, SLA adherence, and financial analysis.

Entrepreneurs are leveraging technology, shaving off a tiny part of organizations, and building unicorns and decacorns. Technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally, causing the optimal size of these organizations to shrink continuously.

The gig economy plays a central role in accelerating the atomization process and catering to the rapidly evolving capability needs sourced through the limited talent pool. StrategyConnect is privileged to contribute and experience this phenomenon first-hand and help organizations atomize people operations steadily.

Atomizing a local bank by providing a flexible closed marketplace of data engineers, market researchers, strategy consultants, ex-corporate banking customer experience experts, and blockchain researchers accessed by various BUs and functions to deliver tons of micro-projects.

Atomizing a wealth fund by providing flexible hiring of niche industry experts supported by an open marketplace of strategy talent to deliver various portfolio transformations and structuring.

SMEs and premium talent — a misnomer? No more.

Specialized talent is hard to curate, hard to procure, and hard to retain. GCC, MENA, and EU have 1.5m, 19m, and 22.6m SMEs — this is a massive base of businesses that have never experienced working with, as an example, ten years ex-McKinsey consultant turned operator working with blue-chip companies enhancing their revenue operations. Gig consolidation enables such talent to work with several smaller enterprises simultaneously. This takes care of the opportunity cost debate and allows a small enterprise to catapult its business growth.

StrategyConnect, with its years of operations in the Middle East, has productized service offerings capturing 90% of repeat demand, enabling setting up defined boundaries of delivery furthering network utilization.

Case-in-point: An ex-PE associate worked with a promoter of an AED 15m plastic manufacturer on structuring a business plan to draw credit lines from the bank while working with a seed-stage entrepreneur simulating the cap table after raising capital from 15 angels via SAFE and convertible notes with interest rates.

The practical challenges

The organizations are tightly knit units composed of various functions and people capabilities. Leveraging technology to drive efficiency is one thing. Partnering with external service providers, especially independent talent, is another complex phenomenon. Let’s be mindful that on-demand platforms are not just supposed to be solving for talent access but also for the plethora of other questions that act as strong inhibitors for the industry to hit the escape velocity. Based on 5,000+ project requests and capability augmentation asks on our platform, we have identified the following prevalent challenges posed by our user base:

1. Quality: capability fit is critical for complex gigs, so how do we ensure the deployed on-demand team is best suited for the task?
2. Confidentiality and IP protection (tech and process): companies operate and scale with data, make fine tweaks, and iteratively refine the offerings. How do we ensure confidentiality is maintained?
3. Extreme ownership: companies are scaled with a culture of relentless focus. However, with a dynamic workforce, how can organizations imbibe that strong culture to raise soft power and influence?
4. Time to market: speed and execution matters; with such distributed and on-demand workforce, how can organizations deliver with the same zeal and discipline?

The practical solutions

After years of experience, we have observed four best practices that leading organizations and executives follow to leverage the gig model the best and scalable way:

1. The core should remain core: organizations identify the core — function and people — and have them orchestrate the critical projects while carving out micro-projects to be potentially managed by the fast-evolving gig workforce. This puts necessary controls to work quality and confidentiality.
2. Augment what you need: organizations lean on to gig workforce to augment identified necessary expertise — either functional (e.g., design thinking, PMO) or industry (e.g., logistics SaaS, polyethylene by-products) — to bridge the gap. Deploying relevant expertise is the most significant advantage that’s offered by such distributed and on-demand workforce.
3. Make it actionable: organizations set clear outcomes milestones and provide clear answers on what success looks like. This approach benefits all stakeholders and simplifies the onboarding process of the flexible workforce.
4. Leverage talent augmentation as a catalyst: organizations build an initiative roadmap and identify when such an on-demand boost is required, for how long, and to achieve what goals. This further optimizes hiring investments.

Leading organizations recognize the need to build a modular workforce model. Leaders adopting the model early on can ingrain this new way of working within the organizational DNA — furthering the foundations of the future workforce.

About StrategyConnect

StrategyConnect enables businesses and government organizations to execute strategic & tech projects via intelligent talent management and an on-demand marketplace. Our supply network comes from leading professional services firms and tech giants. Our clients represent a pool of relentless high-impact executives willing to go the extra mile in delivering fundamental business shifts. StrategyConnect’s proprietary subscription platform is used by leading specialized boutiques in managing their complex workflows. Visit strategyconnect.co for more details.