The Inside Gig. Edie Goldberg

to work. But then an interesting change occurred. “Casual carpool,” a new social phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of commuters used to travel to work, sprung up all over the East Bay. Every morning, people lined up at predetermined spots (generally bus stops) and waited for drivers to come by to pick them up to form carpools. The drivers then proceeded over the Bay Bridge and dropped their passengers off in downtown San Francisco. As an added bonus, carpools were allowed to cross the bridge for free and had access to expedited lanes. Never did these carpoolers imagine that less than a decade later, mobile technology and big data would be leveraged to create Uber, a ride-share service similar to casual carpooling, but now, of course, not free. This is just one-way technology has disrupted our world—in this case causing a massive panic in the taxi industry by launching a system where people are more in control of their transportation experiences.

       The Half-Life of Skills

      In 2011, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown stated that the half-life of the skills we learn is only five years. New technologies or transformations in business practices will make half of what we know obsolete in a five-year span.⁶ With the amount of change we’ve experienced in the past decade, the half-life of skills is even shorter today. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2022, the core skills required to do a job will shift by 42 percent, resulting in the loss of an estimated 75 million jobs.⁷ However, media drama about robots taking over jobs is a slight exaggeration. Although many jobs will be lost to automation, several sources also estimate a net gain of new jobs due to digital transformation.⁸ The World Economic Forum predicts this increase will amount to 133 million new jobs, a net gain of 58 million.⁹

      By 2020, 14 percent of the global workforce may need to switch occupations due to digitization, artificial intelligence and automation.¹⁰ As a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an unparalleled shift in the skills required by the workforce is occurring. The hot jobs today—full-stack developers, user experience designers, cloud developers, data analysts and AI engineers—didn’t even exist a decade ago, so who knows what the next hot skill set will be.

      In their book, A New Culture of Learning, authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown tell us that “the half-life of a learned skill is 5-years,” meaning that half of what we know will become obsolete in that time because of new technology or transformations in business practices.

      This new world of work has enormous potential to fulfill the desire of millennials to find more purpose and meaning in work. As the more mundane aspects of their jobs are removed, they are able to contribute to the success of their companies in completely different ways. Aaron Hurst’s book The Purpose Economy shares how millennials want to build opportunities for self-expression into their day-to-day roles. But that, of course, requires new skills.¹¹

      Fifty-three percent of U.S. CEOs think their companies should retrain workers when jobs are eliminated through automation.¹² Unfortunately, only the highest-skilled workers receive reskilling, if it happens at all.¹³ With the rapid pace at which skills are changing, companies must develop new strategies to upskill and reskill within the flow of work. It is not practical to expect employees to devote time to leave the workforce or take time away from their jobs to keep up with the skills necessary to compete today. However, if organizations don’t find new approaches to revamp their talent operating model, the world of work will move from one that can provide employees with meaningful work to one that increases the gap between the haves and have-nots.

      But not all the responsibility should reside with organizations. Employees must proactively pursue continuous learning opportunities to ensure their skills don’t become obsolete. Governments must provide incentives and facilitate the creation of public-private partnerships to encourage companies to invest in reskilling their employees.

      As we advance further into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is imperative for companies to rethink the way they work. The speed of change continues to accelerate. The need to adapt and pivot is becoming critical for everyone.

       The Rise and Makeup of Adaptive Teams

      According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016,¹⁴ in the face of the forces that are reshaping the world of work, companies understand the urgency of doing away with traditional, hierarchical and functional models. These models will be replaced with flexible teams that are more agile and customer-focused, and better connected and integrated across functional lines.

      Organizations have historically been built to be efficient and effective, which was appropriate in an era of predictability. The resulting business models established strong silos that discouraged cross-boundary collaboration. But in today’s era of unpredictability and constant business model disruption, companies must be designed for speed and agility to allow them to respond better to business priorities and customer demands. As a result, organizations are creating flatter, more fluid structures.

      Imagine work teams coming together to find solutions to business challenges or to innovate new products. These teams would assemble to achieve their objectives, and when they finished, disband and move on to different projects. While some organizations already operate in this manner, parallels are often drawn to the way work gets accomplished in Hollywood. A director pulls together a multi-disciplinary team that includes actors, scriptwriters, camera operators, makeup artists, visual effects people, costume designers and so on. When the film is completed, these talented and skilled people move on to other projects.

      Today’s business challenges are often too complex for one discipline within the organization to develop a solution or devise a fresh approach. To look at problems from different perspectives and arrive at optimal solutions, it helps to bring together diverse teams. This deliberate team structure is often seen in the biotech industry, where new product development teams are put together. To advance a molecule to a drug that will be a viable product, it takes the expertise of many disciplines to understand all the complexities. The shift to team-based work structures enables companies to be more agile because of the impermanence of these groups. These groups can be quickly formed, expanded, reduced or eliminated based on changing business dynamics. According to a 2019 Mercer report, the highest return on investment on talent will come from redesigning jobs to better deliver value.¹⁵

      Delivering better value to a large part will depend on the leader’s ability to align and optimize the talent and skill of team members who represent multiple generations, and so have different needs and approaches to problem solving based on their personal experiences. For example, baby boomers grew up with a mindset of “hard work pays off for an individual, and individual accomplishments matter.” Conversely, millennial employees were taught from an early age to work in teams to solve problems, were rewarded for their “collective success,” and have seldom encountered individual awards.

      Millennials’ inclination to collaborate has been of great benefit to them. They are entering an era of work that has grown increasingly complex and requires the input of people from different disciplines with different skills. Don’t underestimate this change in the nature of work. A study published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) reports that the growing complexity of work means that the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more over the past two decades.¹⁶

      So, for multiple generations, employee experiences that suit very different work styles and cultural backgrounds must be balanced with significant shifts in how work is accomplished. All of this is an outgrowth of the burgeoning complexity of work and the need to connect across boundaries in organizations in ways that were never done before. Outmoded talent operating models will not be up to the challenge.

       THE NEED FOR DIVERSITY AND CHOICE: A CONSUMER EXPERIENCE

      Looking at the five most prevalent forces driving change in the workplace (see Figure 2.2 Five Forces of Change), two themes illustrate why you need to offer employees greater choice in personal