Work is broken: Teams from your desk, amazing results is not equal to success,....

We all get taught that working hard, being one of the best and delivering amazing results is what makes you successful at work. I have experienced quite the opposite.

Here is a story I haven’t shared publicly. I got made redundant multiple times after successfully launching award-winning products. Every time I expected a promotion which never came and instead I had to start all over again somewhere else. The reasons were varied: top management did not understand the importance of the award-winning innovation, had their own candidates to take over & grow my innovation or some key people saw the innovation as a threat to their careers and started making my life impossible. Or all of the above combined.

If Covid taught us anything, it is that remote working can be done very productively if companies are up for it. Many CEOs, however, have been quoted that they want everybody back into offices from 9 to 5. Lots of people have been suffering the “Teams from your desk” problem ever since, whereby you commute into an office to spend the whole day in Teams and other remote meetings. What a waste of commuting time and money. Your time and your money!?

So how can we fix work? What is the future of work? Most people are not working towards becoming a CEO. They work to earn money in order to spend more time doing what they love, e.g. hobbies, travel, family & friends,... So for many, providing them with better paid jobs they can do more productively, would put more money in their pocket and allow them to focus more time on what they really want to do.

What if we could divide work into smaller units, let’s call them jobs. By allocating those jobs very efficiently to experts, these specialists are able to deliver better results, in less time, while earning more. How does this work? Let’s take a lawyer for instance. If they would work in a regular company, they would likely spend around 20% to 80% “in meetings”, not delivering “real value” to the company.?

If instead a lawyer’s work can be synthesised into smaller specialised jobs, the work becomes a lot more productive. Examples can be to review a strategic plan, create a contract, write T&Cs, file a patent,... If large companies would have one head of legal whose task it is to distribute those jobs to remote experts and assure quality, then productivity would go up enormously. Some work would be hard to distribute, e.g. review a strategic plan. So we are aiming for an 80-20 solution, not a 100% remote working world.

These remote experts can specialise in specific jobs: creating contracts, writing terms & conditions, filing a patent,... They can use special tools, e.g. ChatGPT writes the contract and the lawyer reviews the work. The end result will be that for instance the “contract expert remote lawyer”, can do 50 contracts a day, while an in-house lawyer who spends 50% “in meetings” and 40% on other tasks, only can do 1 contract a day. So instead of many teams waiting for the lawyer to draft a contract, write T&Cs, file a patent,... All these tasks can be done in parallel by remote experts super efficiently. Nobody else in the company needs to wait.

If as a lawyer, I can write 50 contracts a day [thanks to ChatGPT for doing 99% of the work], then the price I charge per contract will be a lot lower but still I can make a lot more money. So I can be working less for more money while delivering better services to my customers. Companies who need experts will pay less by creating jobs that remote experts can part-time work on and through automation and specialisation, deliver faster, better quality and for less money, while they earn more. Everybody wins.

So what is needed and how can we prove this works? My plan is to create a solution but I need your help. First of all, I need to show that you care and believe in there being a more efficient way to organise work. This part is easy. Just like, share and comment on this article. If you don’t care enough, you can ignore it. If you want work to improve in the future, a simple click is the first step. We need to create a movement of people who are fed up with today's way of “Teams from your desk” working and want to see a better future for themselves and future generations.

If enough people show interest, then this proves that there is a problem worth fixing. So the next step is to focus on a small subset of work, because you can’t fix everything all at once. My preferred subset is the world of AI. If we want to make more meaningful jobs for people, then we need to be able to match them faster and better with the work they really like to do. This is an AI problem called “Recommendation”. Just like Amazon recommends you products you might also like, or Netflix tells you what you might want to watch, we need the jobs you are good at to come to you, instead of you having to chase them. That lawyer who can do 50 contracts a day is only going to earn more while charging less, if the contract work comes very efficiently to them. If they spend 70% trying to find work, then the model fails.?

For AI experts to do work in this new way, they first need a tool to do AI jobs. I have started prototyping this tool. Although I have trained in AI and deep learning since 2012, I want to deepen my understanding of the domain. I am looking for companies who employ AI experts and can use some extra help one or two hours a day. If I can learn what parts are most easily automated, done remotely or on the contrary need in-house experts, then the solution will be more successful. So if you are looking for a part-time AI consultant to better organise your AI expert’s work and make them more productive, please reach out to me.

Finally, there is the part of funding. I am looking into different options:

1. Bootstrapping - if I can work 4 to 6 hours a day on paid related work, then the rest of the time I can build more automation and tools while improving the productivity of my customers. Just invite me on LinkedIn if you have such work on offer.
2. Crowdfunding - if you like the story and want to help to create a community and organise a crowdfunding campaign around more efficient AI jobs, be a sponsor or would be a customer of a future solution, please fill out this form.
3. External funding - if you want to invest in “Making the Netflix of Work”, please reach out as well.

Conclusion

If like me, you think the world of work is broken, and would love to see a better future. Please help spread the word, help organise the crowdfunding campaign, put me in contact with companies that want a more productive AI team, or VCs who want to invest in “Making the Netflix of Work” with AI as the first use case. Help me make the world of work better. We all deserve to have more interesting jobs, better paid and have a better work-life balance. Work smarter, not harder and earn more…