Careers 2.0 – its liquid ‘gold’ for the employable!

Imagine a future in which you are jobless, but not workless. A future in which each of us is a company of one, and in which large corporates no longer employ permanent employees, but keep a list of freelancers on their books. It is not only possible; it’s already a reality. Roze Phillips, Freelancer Extraordinaire has a future.

Digital’s gift to the employable is the emergence of a ‘liquid’ workforce. It’s a modern take on outsourcing that allows businesses to reach into a global pool of specialist and generalist talent to rapidly create ad hoc teams that get the job done beautifully – without the overhead of permanent staff. We already know that it’s good for business. I believe it can also be very good for individuals and, if applied properly, can contribute towards addressing unemployment amongst the skilled higher-education graduates currently unable to access employment and extend the work-life of retirees.

Let’s face it, before digital, there were simply not enough jobs – and not enough of the scarce skills – to go around. Now, as digital continues to disrupt traditional markets and processes, automation is taking over manual and routine tasks. New roles are being created and new models of employment are emerging, but the talent that companies demand is rapidly outpacing the speed at which individuals are able to traditionally acquire those skills. It’s making ongoing training an integral part of talent management, but it also makes the ability to tap into a liquid workforce attractive.

The workplace of the future demands it:

• Expanding workforce: 51 percent of workers believe that digital technology has expanded the number of individuals they work with outside of their organisation says Pew Research.
• On-the-job tech: by 2019, 17 percent of workers will only use mobile devices to do their job according to businessinsider.com.
• Rise of freelancing: Intuit predicts that 43 percent of the US workforce will be freelancers by 2020.
• A new generation of digital natives: in 2015, Millennials became the largest share of the workforce; by 2025, that number will be 75 percent globally according to Pew.

Digital dissolves the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds. Collaborative platforms and technologies make it easy for businesses to find talent, for people inside and outside the organisation to team and for a distributed, geographically remote ‘liquid’ workforce to take a virtual step right through the front doors of a business to power it. This model ‘peoples’ the agile business models needed to compete in the Digital Era, giving businesses on-demand access to a large universe of talent on demand.

It gives businesses elasticity, allowing them to scale up or down fast; and it delivers the efficiencies that come with optimised utilisation and disintermediated resource allocation. But the liquid workforce model is also especially good for stimulating the economic growth of markets like South Africa’s where youth unemployment is at 70 percent, and for extending the working life of an older workforce that is living longer. It can give a lot of people little bits of work, which has an immense knock-on effect.

The right project can offer a short-term opportunity to people to access work. The organisation gets a diverse cross-functional team that is challenged, engaged and innovative, and the ‘liquid’ worker builds skills and experience and achieves economic upliftment of self, family and, indirectly, the community and the economy. Armed with a smartphone and the right motivation, much can be achieved.

The liquid workforce will compel individuals to approach work differently and businesses to manage people differently. Big companies, like Accenture, have adopted the model in response to the need to be agile and to leverage the power of an anywhere, anytime, digitally connected workplace ecosystem. It has taken the organisation from a single hierarchy to many crowds; from managing a fixed team of resources to orchestrating ad-hoc teams of resources sourced on demand from internal and external talent pools. What it requires is:

• Mastery of growing landscape of public talent markets
• Investing in tools for workplace collaboration and multi-device integration anywhere, anytime
• Development of an “Accenture Crowd Platform” to integrate, automate, streamline
• New thinking in terms of HR, legal, procurement and data security
• Establishing repeatable methods for effective crowd orchestration
• An experimental mindset that allows you to pilot solutions in certain areas

What will it take to get there?

The transformation starts with making continuous learning a core competency to ensure you have the right skills for the right jobs; becoming more agile and more project-, and less function-oriented while empowering collaboration and new ideas; and effectively managing a distributed workforce with an organisation that is built to facilitate and not impede.

Creating an agile and liquid workforce might sound challenging, but the rewards on offer are immense. Once organisations start to harness the power within such a workforce, they will find that they can grow smarter and faster than they ever imagined. In a Digital Age characterised by rapid change, that’s not just desirable – it is mission critical.

The liquid workforce is rising. How will your business harness it? Is it already doing so?