People Can Work In All New Ways
Jody
Greenstone Miller
When
worked
as COO of Americast, the digital television partnership between
Disney and the regional telephone
companies,
she would fantasize about walking up to Disney CEO Bob Iger and
asking him if she could run a division. "But let me figure out
how to structure it," she would tell him, "so that I can
achieve the goals I want in the relationship between work and the
rest of my life."
In
2007, when she left to start a consulting
firm, she got her chance. AtBusiness
Talent Group,
which connects senior-level independent workers with the projects of
clients from a range of fields, half of the company's leadership
team works part time. "Everyone is talking about flexibility and
work-life balance, and I think those are becoming red herrings and
are stopping us from solving the problem," Miller says.
"Flexibility is not sufficient if you still have a job that
structured to require 50, 60 hours per week."
She
created a culture where high-level work is broken down into jobs that
come in truly different sizes, whether that's 40 hours a week or 20
hours a week. BTG contracts 3,500 independent professionals
around the world—more than 80% have graduate or MBA degrees—and
assigns them to clients' project teams based partly on how many hours
they want to work. Companies get the talent that is most appropriate
for each project, and workers get control over their schedules and
workload.
Part-time
employees at BTG are still expected to be professionally
available—for example, answer urgent emails—when they aren't in
the office, and they're paid less. But, Miller says, "that's a
trade they're willing to make." And while BTG's model involves
hiring and training a higher number of people than it otherwise
might, that hasn't hindered growth: Revenue has increased 60%
year-over-year for the past two years and is on track to surpass $25
million this year. "Retention and satisfaction are very high,"
Miller says. "People tell us they can't find another job like
this."
Meanwhile,
Miller is also helping clients such as Pfizer and the Carlyle Group
devise better ways to organize and utilize their own workforces. BTG
advises businesses to assemble small, fluid groups to take on
individual projects (such as creating pricing strategies, assessing a
new market, or developing a product) rather than rigid,
pyramid-shaped hierarchies. "In the 21st century, organizations
are going to put teams together for very specific projects and then
disband them," says Miller. "It's going to be a faster,
more fluid management function than what you see today." She
isn't the only entrepreneur who thinks work is ready for an upgrade.
ELANCE-ODESK
Take
the long view in thinking about your career.
Elance
and oDesk, which merged this year, are freelance- talent marketplaces
that connect people with project work that involves everything from
translation to microchip programming. CEO Fabio Rosati says he wants
to redefine what it means to be secure in today's working culture and
move from "job security" to "income security." If
someone focuses on keeping a job, he argues, she may focus on skills
that are applicable at that company but are outdated in the rest of
the world. If she focuses instead on earning an income as a
freelancer to many companies, she'll learn skills that are most
marketable across the board. "It forces you to ask yourself, How
many companies are using this technology?" Rosati says. "Is
this technology dated and old? Should I be learning new technology?"
In order to facilitate such a shift in thinking, the company mines
data from the 100 million job searches performed on its two sites
each year to show users which skills are most marketable—and how
much they should be charging for them.
CULTURERX
Work
wherever and whenever you like.
Just
get it done. Minneapolis-based consulting company CultureRx has
helped businesses such as Best Buy and Gap implement a somewhat
radical management system it created called ROWE (Results Only Work
Environment), which gives every employee the independence to decide
when and where they work. Instead of being assigned a particular
schedule, they're asked to accomplish predefined tasks within a
certain time frame. For example, a receptionist will decide to come
into the office not because his manager demands it, but because
that's the only reasonable place to get his job done. "Managers
get clear with people about what their results are supposed to be,
and they're managing those results," says cofounder Jody
Thompson. "[They] have to switch their focus from worrying about
where people are to the actual work."
ENCORE.ORG
Share
your vast experience with not-for-profits.
More
Americans than ever are working past retirement age—theU.S.
Bureau of
Labor Statistics reports that nearly 27% of citizens between 65 (the
minimum retiring point) and 74 were still working in 2012, compared
to 20% in 2002. Encore.org, based in San Francisco, is helping to
steer these individuals toward "encore careers" at
not-for-profits. It holds an annual "Purpose Prize"
contest, in which professionals over 60 compete for $100,000 and
$25,000 awards based on how they tackle various issues through their
work. It's also started a rolling 6- to 12-month fellowship program
that offers about 250 professionals with more than 15 years of
experience full- and part-time roles at mostly U.S.–based
organizations with a "social purpose"—i.e.,
not-for-profits, schools, and hospitals—that could benefit from
their expertise. The hope is that they will transition to longer-term
not-for-profit work after the fellowship ends. "It's almost like
a paid internship for older adults," says Leslye Louie, who
directs the fellowship. "Internships for young people are
focused on development. This is about contribution and using skills
developed over the years for a purpose."
THE ENERGY PROJECT
If
your company is attuned to your needs, everyone wins.
"Energy
is defined as your ability and capacity to do work," explains
Annie Perrin, SVP of faculty and content at the Energy Project.
"That's how it's defined in physics, so that's how we think
ofhuman
energy."
The firm, which has offices in New York; Amsterdam; Melbourne,
Australia; and Godalming, England, teaches companies how to design
workplaces that meet people's basic needs as human beings so that
they have more energy to
perform as employees. It splits "energy needs" into four
categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Improving physical
energy might
include healthy
food in
the cafeteria or a walking group that meets at lunch, while
improving spiritual
energy—as
New Age as it sounds—might just be a matter of making sure the
company is acting in a way that complies with its stated mission. In
addition to its consulting services, the Energy Project has run
seminars and classes for hundreds of clients, including Google and
PricewaterhouseCoopers.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3035188/165-ways/people-can-work-in-all-new-ways
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