Winning by Sharing

Age of the part timer

January 2010 and Businessweek's front cover on the new permanent temporary worker.

February 2011.  London's Daily Mail newspaper's headline is;

Age of the part-timer: 200,000 jobs were created last year. Only 3 per cent were full-time

The Guadian Newspaper on the effectiveness of Job Centres in the UK for white collar workers.

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise. (2001-2005)

Many are culled.  Few are chosen.

Many are culled. Few are chosen.

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

So the Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced the details of his Comprehensive Spending Review and although the blows are being softened by spreading public sector job cuts over the life of this parliament, many will be culled with few people being chosen.  Those people who will find themselves in the court of the unemployed, in which there is no chance of appeal, will ask questions. Where and when will I find another job?  Where will I live if I can’t pay the rent or mortgage?  How long can I last before signing on? How will I keep the lights on?  When will things get back to normal?  They have.  This is the new normal.

But there is hope and there are alternatives but to exploit them, we’re going to have to see the world of work through a completely different lens, a world that has been impossible to perceive during the good times by workers and especially by the government. That lens can be defined by a single statement; the unit of work is no longer a whole job. The nature of work in the developed world has changed forever and the prospects are particularly grim for middle class, white collar workers, so called knowledge workers that form the largest group of those people directly affected by the cuts.

The perfect labour storm

In the past fifty years some 1.5 billion people have been added to the global labour pool  setting up what has increasingly been described as the perfect labour storm brought about by the wholesale offshoring of work to low wage economies.  This isn’t just about factory and call centre workers.  It’s about lawyers, medical specialists and the entire category of knowledge work. Research by Professor Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, suggests that somewhere in the region of 40 million jobs will be lost in the West across 817 categories of knowledge work within a generation.  In 2008, 1.4 million qualified people applied for jobs with one of India’s largest IT services company, Infosys.  In Japan, Yuji Genda, Associate Professor, Institute of Social Science University of Tokyo published a book in 2008:  A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity.  His research predicts that only one in two people will be employed in Japan in the year 2050 if current trends and policies prevail.  Earlier this year research in the US predicts that all new jobs are being created by start-ups. Recently IBM announced it would make almost 300,000 employees redundant and hire them back as freelance workers between now and 2017, although the political backlash it created forced them to retract the strategy.  In any case, the fact that many companies are thinking this way should send a powerful message to knowledge workers.  Big firms and the government aren’t hiring and traditional jobs in advanced economies are not coming back anytime soon.

The new permanent temporary worker

In January 2010, BusinessWeek published an article on the new permanent temporary worker in which it describes the story of a home based call centre worker living in the US who handles customer enquiries for consumer brands managed by a service provider called LiveOps. She logs on in the morning for 45 minutes then takes her child to school and returns to work for another couple of hours.  She is paid by the minute, in this case, 25 cents per minute. Last year Odesk, a kind of ‘eBay for work’ service that brings together buyer and sellers of ‘knowledge work’ had 350,000 workers registered and a value of jobs posted of $285 million and during the credit crunch grew by 400%.  The founder of LiveOps is starting a new ‘on-demand’ workforce service called ReadyForce.  The UK equivalent, PeoplePerHour.com has 68,000 experts and a £13 million value of jobs posted.  The nature of work is increasingly fractional.  Fractional workers derive their income from multiple sources online and offline.  Unfortunately public policy is still based on the assumption that careers are the most desirable form of employment, and that they can be offered to more and more of us. The government’s Work Programme initiative aims to provide services to white collar workers who’ve never had to look for a job until the onset of the global financial crisis.  Job centres refer these workers to private service providers, contracted by the government to help them prepare for another whole job. These service providers such as MyWorkSearch, CareerPlan4Me and many others are funded by the government to provide online tools to help white collar workers in a way local job centres can’t, others like The Plus Team provides an offline service that at least gives job seekers an opportunity to receive group coaching and network with each other. The problem is these services guide people to prepare for whole jobs that simply don’t exist.  We’ve seen weak, modest ‘whole jobs’ growth in the UK but tellingly, ‘the quarterly increase in total employment was mainly driven by part-time workers, which increased by 166,000 on the quarter to reach 7.93 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992’. Charles Handy (The Empty Raincoat) and John Malone (The Future of Work) were right after all in that where in the past an organisation was like a castle, it will become more like a condominium: "an association of temporary residents gathered together for their mutual convenience".  This may take a generation to play out and the transition will be painful but the net benefits to individuals and society in the long term are far greater than those provided by traditional modes of employment.

The support economy

A promising new approach to harnessing the value of knowledge workers is being pioneered by Ki Work inspired by the ground breaking book, The Support Economy that has predicted the shift from ‘managerial capitalism to ‘collaborative capitalism’.  Ki work has developed a platform that enables individuals to form virtual companies that can provide services to any business anywhere in the world that in some categories can actually be cheaper than offshore labour because it can be provided on-demand.  It can be switched on and off.  With the right so called ‘deep support’, advice and guidance, knowledge workers in Britain can adapt and indeed thrive but need to realise that a ‘career’ has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life.  To adapt to new ways of working, knowledge workers need to prepare for, and seek out multiple sources of income.  More than this, they need to realise they’ll get better support from each other than from the institutions that are supposed to serve them.  They need to learn how to create value by collaborating to bring products and services to market that compete head-on with big brands.  They need to view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude.  An attitude everyone’s going to need. 

A summary of fractional work at the Tory party conference

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to actually speak about the rise of fractional work at the Tory Party conference on the opening day yesterday.  They outsourced the logistics of security passes to Fingerprint events.  Even though they acknowledge receipt of my application, passport and photo id my pass still wasn't ready. After taking two more photos of me at 7am in the morning, the police checking/validating id told me that due to my country of birth, extra checks have to be carried out.  Nice.  It was a Tory MP who invited me to talk there!  I got a text message saying it was ready at 10am, two hours after the speaking slot.  Thanks for that.

Fractional Work

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

The good news is that my hosts at JobsGoPublic and Career4Me presented on my behalf.  But here is the point I wanted to make.

The recent announcement by the Conservative Party's plans to cut the benefits of people on incapacity benefits is in some respects laudable because there are no doubt (statistically) some cheats, slackers and chancers on the list of 2.6m claimants.  But why such an emphasis on the supply side of the jobs equation? What's being done on the demand side, you know, to actually create work.  This presentation argues for the economic stimulus of an emerging form of work that has the potential to become the most dominant form of work within a generation.

As an aside, one of things that strikes me with all the political coverage right now on the EU is that politicians never, ever question the validity of their underlying organisational models.  In other words, it isn’t about ‘Broken Britain’ it’s about ‘broken system’.  Companies and governments won’t survive in their present form without decentralising some or all of their decision making.  But we can't go there can we?

Fractional work emerges

I've been writing about the emergence of fractional work for some time now.  The UK's Peopleperhour is a platform for sourcing people on a literally per hour/per day basis.  My contention is that the only area in which we've not seen serious innovation by large companies is with their labour models.  When big companies start to adopt a fractional approach to at least some areas of their workforce......

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

 

"Imagine organizations in which most workers aren’t employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want  to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life – money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families.” Thomas Malone, The future of work

 

Are you a loyal rebel?

Young people are now coaching online gaming fanatics to get them through difficult stages in the game.  They earn a living wage from it.  Other gamers derive an income from selling codes that unlock new game levels on eBay . Women still in their teens with huge followings on Twitter and MySpace earn six figure fees from cosmetic brands to influence their followers.  This work is frequently fractional in nature and so allows people to blend work with their passions, creativity and interests.  YouTube (owned by Google) has applied for terrestrial broadcasting licences in its major markets.  What opportunities does this create for our young people?  There should be little doubt in most people’s mind, that a tectonic shift in the nature of work has occurred, even though it is apparently ‘unevenly spread’.

Young people sense the internet has caused a fundamental change in their attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. They now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need.  We are not preparing our children for this kind of work.  We do not teach them;

•    How to collaborate
•    How to communicate
•    How to network
•    How to thrive on portfolio work
•    How to create sustainable, ethical wealth

It is hardly surprising that Facebook, Twitter, Google and MySpace were created in the US.  We simply don’t teach our young people “to have a healthy disrespect for the impossible”.

The Olympic Legacy – a 21st Century Guild

The most consummate networker of our time recently said;

“If you want to set something in motion on this planet, you need access to people you haven’t met. You need knowledge and information that is not yet at your disposal. You need ideas. You can always get them somewhere. From people.”  Martijn Aslander, Loyal Rebels

The internet and more specifically social software is enabling peer-to-peer connectivity on a breathtaking scale.  This is, historically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. One that’s easily as significant as the invention of the printing press in terms of its societal impact, velocity and rate of adoption.  

Social networks are communities of people who share the same cause, situation, or vocation. They facilitate professional exchange, allow members to establish a bond of common experiences and challenges online, and build networks of relationships which are leveraged offline. 

Research pioneered in the 1970’s by Etienne Wenger on what he called ‘communities of practice’ concluded that “learning is an inherently social process and that it cannot be separated from the social context in which it happens”.

These are in effect, early stage 21st century guilds.  There is an opportunity for the LDA to create a modern day guild that equips young people with the skills to thrive in the networked economy.  Social software means it’s possible to;

•    Provide a teacher for every student, on every subject, on a one to one basis and ‘on demand’
•    Enable the wider local community to contribute to student learning (“it takes a whole village”)
•    Make every component of the guild qualification a practical, real life project, that shifts mindset   from ‘job’ to wealth creation

There is a case for creating a platform that goes beyond online forums and ‘talking shops’.  By re-purposing social software used by existing global business communities, students can be provided with the freedom to organize themselves so that their practical projects can be realised with the help and support of their local communities. 

Members of this community will be drawn from the local business/social ecosystem to create a diverse population of people committed to coaching, mentoring and transferring their knowledge to students as an integral part of the qualification process.  The social, collaborative and communications skills acquired alone will satisfy employers increasingly vocal demand for these skills sets.  This will prepare the country’s Loyal Rebels for a wide range of models of work, provide them with the support networks that are now an essential aspect of achieving personal work/life balance aspirations, and more importantly, make them more ‘employer ready’.

A work survival guide

Great to see more output on the 'future of work' meme.  Ian Sanders's new book Juggle: Re-think work. Reclaim your life.

The book features an interview with the worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi who says, "Jugglers are living the most liberated, free, entrepreneurial, inspirational lives".

I guess I was way too early (circa 2004) with my book on the future of work;

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

Summarised by the statement.....

"The internet has caused a fundamental change in attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. I now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need."

Strong & Connected

Research to be undertaken on platforms for enabling group/team based collaboration as exemplified by ki work.

University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has published its Key transformative research focus on four main areas: Virtual organizations for distributed communities;  high-performance computing; data, visualization, and interaction; and education and workforce development.

NSF article goes onto describe....

PRAC is another smaller-scale program that provides money for people to travel and develop their collaborations. So you might say that's money to develop virtual organizations.

Signs of fractional work continue to emerge.

Fractional work. The next small thing?

Fractional work emerges in the developing nations. An archetypal example of Winning by Sharing. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones.  For example, mobile phone menus  are being translated into obscure African languages, small pieces at a time, to a large number of people.  Each translation earns pennies but projects a trebling of the average daily wage in some of the world's poorest countries.  Read the whole thing.

Workplace stress? An exit exists

Just discovered the Work Organisation Labour & Globalisation think tank, based in the UK, that's published research to support the arguments made in Winning by Sharing (A new way of working. A different way of doing business).

There is a downloadable abstract of a paper that "explores the shock experienced by people working in the publishing industry when faced with losing their jobs to the Indian labour market".  It also finds that contrary to perception Indian workers have equally insecure careers. 

There are also studies on the impact of globalisation in the context of work.  "As a result labour is also subjected to the dynamics of the global economy with consequences for working conditions, wages, job security, skills and benefits.  This is one of the reasons why the 'informal' economy is growing.  An exit exists:

from:

a fossil energy regime and its often precarious forms of labour

to:

the use of renewable energy, participatory and cooperative ways to organise production."

Shameless plug:  This is exactly what ki work enables.  The Japanese word ‘ki’ loosely translated means "trusted relationship".

Careers are dead. Long live careers!

Read this short article in the Evening Standard last night on the way home from the West End entitled
"City Workers quit to start new life as freelancers".  There was some early warning about this a few years ago;

...although the cause(s) were different.  Then: the dysfunctional corporate and the stress of command & control. Now: the credit crunch.   Perhaps the same thing?

PeoplePerHour is cited as the UK's answer to eLance, but ki-work enables team based peer production.

Download the whole thing. Download The future of work in 2005

Fractional work:  The Next Small Thing