The Future of Work: Respect & Innovation

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To find out what both the present and future of work look like from a digital leader's perspective, I had the pleasure of speaking with Evan Rudowski, Principal Consultant of Digital DNA LLP and co-founder of SubHub.

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I've been working in the digital sector for most of my career, which is about 35 years as an entrepreneur. I'm a company leader and adviser, among other things, so I have lots of experience in that sector and in working with growing companies to help them be successful.

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I like that. And I think that's valid. I'm an American, but I've been in the UK and working in the UK and Europe for a quarter of a century now, so that probably applies.

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It is challenging to compete with some of them because each of those companies has raised enormous amounts of venture capital funding. And of course, getting into Silicon Valley economics, the dynamic there is that they're essentially spending on customer acquisition and market share, and they aren't immediately required to get a profitable return on that spending.

It's kind of a land grab, but I think that's changing in the current economic circumstances. I suspect that, as in many companies, there have been conversations about how to slow spending and improve the path to profitability, because the next round of funding probably isn't going to be so easy to come by, and maybe it'll be at a lower valuation than they would have enjoyed previously.

They're probably trying to make their runway last a little bit longer, but at the same time, it would still be a nice runway to have, which we don't. So in our case, we have to focus a lot more on customer service and things like that. I think that's where we see how our reputation really shines, from people who sign up with us, use our service, and rave about the customer support.

Even if there's a feature that's maybe a bit rough around the edges, or it could be improved, or it isn't so easy to figure out, we have a great track record of being responsive and available. We'll even make videos for customers to walk them through something. That's not something that you can do at scale. I guess we're a little more hand-crafted and we don't scale as well, but we've made a choice to run a different kind of business.

Some of those competitors are focused on scale. It's not to say that they don't have a good product -- some of them do have quite a good product for what they're offering -- but we differentiate on the service and support alongside the right range of functionality, features, and capabilities.

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I think Brexit didn't affect SubHub very much because most of our customers are in the US. Even though we're based in the UK, I think that's probably a characteristic of the fact that Americans tend to be more entrepreneurial than Brits or Europeans, although there is still a healthy entrepreneurial world in the UK and Europe.

There's a good amount of entrepreneurship here, but it's different... I think the businesses don't scale as big here. That's probably one of the main constraints. And that probably ties back to the whole different risk-taking profile of investors. In the US, it's almost a liability if you already are generating revenue, because that enables people to project what your ramp-up is, and it might not be big enough.

So it's almost better if you're still pre-revenue and the sky's the limit, because US investors will invest in potential rather than in existing track record. Over here, investors want to see proof that you're already building momentum. They want to invest in a moving train so they can see where it's headed.

I think investors here are more risk-averse and they'd rather help to fuel a company that's already showing signs of growth and then invest in fueling that growth, but the company won't scale as big.

Americans are, I think, much more comfortable starting a business and starting a side hustle, and SubHub is perfect for that, so Brexit wasn't too much of a problem. As far as the pandemic and the transition to hybrid or remote working models goes, we'd already made that transition years ago.

When we first started SubHub, we had a team here in the UK and we were a typical company with people on the premises and everybody working together in an office, which has its advantages. But after we sold it, it became very much a virtual company. We sold it to a Dutch company and the team was in multiple locations, but even before that, we'd hired some developers in the Philippines. They stayed with it then, and they're still with us.

We're a completely virtual organization today. There's no office and we rarely see each other in person -- just on Zoom calls and things like that.

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With SubHub, we have people working for us in Western Canada and they're pretty chilled, the Canadians, so they're easy to communicate with. We also have people in the Philippines who are culturally very different. It helped that a number of years ago when we first built the team, I went over to the Philippines, so we established a face-to-face relationship during that visit.

After that, it's using communications tools like Slack that's pretty much the central hub of communication for SubHub. Also, just being respectful of people -- and I think that's probably true for any culture -- if you treat people with respect and dignity, then people will respond the same way. We've got all types, all personality types, but being respectful is the key thing.

If you're in the tech sector like I am, it has associations with Silicon Valley and the whole Silicon Valley mentality that people admire as being risk-taking and adventurous, and that creates bigger opportunities.

So if you understand that in the back of your mind as an American over here, you can use that to your advantage, because it comes with a brand that you can use in an advantageous way, if you do it respectfully. Sometimes I don't tone it down too much because I know people are kind of eager to see that, but it's always with respect towards people.

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That's always an interesting question, because there's a risk: if you're working for an established company, things are comfortable, and the company is doing fine, then there's an argument that you should just keep your head down and keep on doing what you're doing.

Hopefully you'll draw a good salary, you'll have stability and security, and you'll progress up the chain of command as you get promoted. That's the path many people take and it works pretty well, so you have to be a little bit crazy to put that in jeopardy by proposing something new.

If you take yourself off of that path, you're essentially setting yourself up for a much greater risk of failure. If it doesn't work, then maybe you're out or maybe someone has surpassed you, and the path that you're on isn't available anymore. If it does work, you might get the accolades, but at the same time, you won't get the equity upside, and someone above you in the chain might take credit for it.

Ultimately, I think if you're going to be entrepreneurial, you might want to go out and do it yourself, but there's something comforting about being entrepreneurial but being given a budget. Basically, intrapreneurship means that you already have your investors all lined up. It's your parent company and they're funding you, so you don't have to worry about that. You just have to worry about executing, but not so much about getting resources.

And I guess it's better than just continuing to work your way up the ladder in a very traditional way, which can be soul-destroying for some people.

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I've seen enough situations where traditional businesses knew there was a train coming at them through the tunnel and they could see the headlights coming at them at high speed, but they still didn't get out of the way or do anything different. There's always a reflexive resistance to cannibalizing one's own business.

But even when you know that someone else is working on cannibalizing you already, companies still don't want to cannibalize themselves, so they end up getting eaten and killed, essentially, by the external cannibals.

I think it's better to cannibalize yourself before someone else does it, but that's very difficult for companies. It's back to that same intrapreneurial question: who wants to be the person to stick their head up and say, "I think we're in real trouble here" when your boss is basically looking to retire in the next three to five years and doesn't want to have to deal with it?

That's the problem. Do you rock the boat or you just ride it out? Most of those talented people who can see the headlight coming at them end up leaving and starting their own thing because they know that it's not going to happen where they are. These companies lose talent because they're not allowing room for the talent to innovate, then you end up with the people who just don't care or haven't noticed... and that's why your company dies.

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There are two things. Number one, the traditional organizations are going away, some of them slower than others. Some of them are so big that they'll be here for years or decades to come. But the traditional way of working in those kinds of large organizations is changing, and I think with some of the layoffs we're seeing in Silicon Valley, there's some suggestion of that.

Some of the layoffs are purely mercenary, to improve the stock price and margins, but some of them are because they're actually able to do things more efficiently, and they're looking around and saying, "We don't even know what those people are doing over there."

Number two, the balance between people, tools, and processes is changing, and I think that's going to continue to change the nature of work. It's pretty clear that nobody should count on being employed long-term by any one particular organization anymore.

My 20-year-old son is just starting to make the early moves toward his future career, and I think it's pretty obvious that he'll be moving from place to place and charting his own course, because that's what people are going to need to do. I think our first loyalty has to be to ourselves, our own brand, and our own skill set, and now there are a lot of tools available that allow us to make the most of that if we're capable of it.

That does depend on people being sufficiently well-educated and having enough resources to be able to use those tools. That's obviously not true for everybody, which is a problem, because then you have digitally-savvy people who can make the most of things and other people who are left out of that.

We're getting into more of an economy for mental work as well as physical work, and I think things like ChatGPT and AI are going to accelerate that, so people are going to have to be more creative about how they make money from their skills. Even lawyers and doctors are going to find that some of their work is being done by AI, so they're going to have to try to figure out new ways of adding value.

It's definitely changing a lot. But being educated on things, whether or not it's a university education, and being savvy with tools, whether you're writing code, legal documents, or articles, I think that's going to be really important.

Everything is changing, and I do wonder what the working world is going to look like for my kids twenty or thirty years from now. I was probably one of the early people to embrace this digital world in my career, so I've always been supportive of it, but I think it's changing even more rapidly now than ever before, and we'll have to see. As we say, interesting times.

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Evan Rudowski has nearly four decades of experience in the digital sector and has played a role in the success of global businesses and fast-growing startups across two continents. His affinity for media and journalism led him to co-found SubHub, a leading SaaS platform for building and running profitable membership websites, and he recently joined Digital DNA as principal consultant. He also mentors graduate students at the London Business School Entrepreneurship Summer School and, as an RSA Fellow, he serves on the editorial advisory board for the award-winning RSA Journal.

Gina Longo ?is a Leadership Development Trainer and the owner of Gina Longo Consulting. A former airline Captain and flight instructor, she now takes her experience as a leader in the aviation industry into the corporate world, where she specializes in helping businesses solve talent development and employee retention problems.

? If you're looking to troubleshoot your talent development and/or employee retention problems, please visit?www.ginacall.com ?to schedule a complimentary Cause-Analysis Consultation.

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This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Future of Work.