Future of Work Archives - Page 2 of 6

Updated on March 20, 2024

Transforming Tomorrow: Harnessing the Future of Work

The future of work unfolds with boundless potential and transformative opportunities awaiting. As we stand on the cusp of exponential change, a new era emerges in which the skills imperative for success diverge from those of the 20th century. The rise of automation, artificial intelligence, and the gig economy is changing how we work. To thrive, companies and individuals must be proactive in preparing themselves for the future of work.

Embracing Automation

The rise of automation is one of the most significant changes in the future of work. Automation encompasses various technological advancements aimed at reducing or replacing human labor with machinery or software — and is expected to reshape almost every industry. Many low-skilled jobs, such as assembly line work or data entry, will likely be automated, leading to a transformation in job roles and skill requirements. Automation isn’t about replacing humans entirely — instead, it’s about augmenting human capabilities and efficiency. Companies must invest in training and development programs to ensure their employees have the skills required to adapt to this evolving landscape. While automation may displace some jobs, it will also create new opportunities for those who can design, build, and manage automated systems.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence

In tandem with automation, artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the future of work. AI technologies — including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics — are increasingly integrated into various aspects of business operations. While many fear that AI will lead to widespread job loss, the reality is more nuanced. AI has the potential to enhance productivity, streamline processes, and unlock new possibilities. However, individuals who resist or fail to adapt to AI may find themselves at a disadvantage in the job market. Companies must invest in AI education and training to empower their workforce to leverage AI technologies effectively. Every senior executive should be thinking, “How can my team use AI to augment themselves?” By embracing and integrating AI, companies can gain a competitive edge and drive innovation in the evolving landscape of work.

Navigating the Gig Economy

Simultaneously, the gig economy continues to grow, redefining traditional notions of employment. More people are taking side gigs, to hedge against potential layoffs and to sharpen and learn new skills. And more individuals are gravitating towards freelance or contract engagements, thanks to the rise of online platforms facilitating flexible work arrangements. To adapt, companies must embrace the liquid workforce — and learn to cultivate and work with a virtual talent bench engaged in project-based work.

Shifting towards Project-Based Work

The future of work will also see a shift towards project-based work. This trend is driven by the need for agility — and for organizations to constantly be responsive to changing market conditions. Project-based work allows companies to quickly assemble a team of experts with the necessary skills to complete a specific project, rather than maintaining a large permanent workforce. Companies must invest in project management and collaboration tools — and create a documentation-first culture — to ensure that their employees and contract workers can work effectively in project-based teams.

Cultivating Skills and Adaptability

To prepare for the future of work, companies must be proactive in developing their employees’ skills and abilities. This can be achieved through a variety of methods, such as on-the-job training, online courses, and formal education programs. Companies must also invest in leadership and management development programs to ensure their employees have the leadership skills required to succeed in a rapidly changing workplace.

Individual Agency in Career Development

Individuals must take ownership of their career development and professional growth — honing their skills through lifelong learning and side gigs. By actively cultivating adaptability and resilience, individuals can position themselves as indispensable assets in the dynamic landscape of the future workplace. Individuals must also be proactive in building their personal brand and cultivating professional networks. Today, everyone is a brand — and individuals must curate their online presence and narrative to authentically reflect their values, expertise, and aspirations. Doing this stratgeically can help find uncover new opportunities. When combined with a strong network of weak ties, individuals can leverage diverse connections to achieve their career goals.

The Imperative of Work-Life Fit

The future of work is also likely to see a greater emphasis on work-life balance, or as I prefer to call it, work-life fit. We’re already seeing this with some countries exploring a four-day work week and others have made it illegal for companies to contact employees outside of the workday. Executives, policymakers, and workers are realizing that work-life fit is essential for both individual well-being and organizational success. Companies must adopt flexible work arrangements, offering employees the ability to work from home or on flexible schedules. They must also invest in creating a workplace where mindfulness, compassion, and grace are commonplace.

Take Action to Transform Your Future

The future of work is here — and it’s teeming with promise and transformation. The time for action is now. Whether you’re a company leader or an individual contributor, the future of work awaits. Embrace change, augment yourself, invest in growth, and seize every opportunity that comes your way. Together, we can shape a future where innovation thrives, and success knows no bounds. The journey starts today — let’s make it count.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Tips For Scaling Customer Success

By Yolanda Lau

If you’re building a startup, you’re probably wondering how to start and scale customer success (CS). While the first step is to hire the right first customer success lead, the next step is scaling customer success to increase the impact and turn CS into a profit center that increases revenue. Here are my top tips to help you scale customer success at your startup. Hopefully, your first CS hire has already created a culture of operational excellence and started accelerating your one-to-many strategy, as most of my tips for scaling customer success rely heavily on customer success ops.

Meet customers where they are.

Scaling customer success means you’ll need to make it more effective and efficient. At Liquid, we’ve found that it’s imperative to meet customers where they are and where they prefer to engage. While some customers enjoy talking to a customer success manager, others prefer to get help on their own online. Some users prefer emailing, while others like chat. Some prefer personalized meetings, while others find more value in attending group office hours or webinars. Offering one-to-many experiences increases CS productivity — but more importantly, offering a multitude of options allows your customers to get help in ways that they perceive to be most valuable and efficient. Add new initiatives prudently; do so only when you have confidence that it fills a need. In addition, you should be analyzing the metrics of each new initiative to assess effectiveness. Experiment and iterate.

Build a knowledge base.

At Liquid, we recently released a customer-facing knowledge base (KB) based on customer requests for a dedicated help center to help themselves and to direct their additional users to train themselves up. Since its launch, KB usage has grown rapidly while also decreasing the volume of communications from customers. To be clear, our KB doesn’t prevent users from contacting humans — it simply helps users help themselves before asking for help.

When building out your KB, start with the most complex features and sticking points — get feedback from CSMs and support staff about what needs to be covered. As new support requests come in, support staff should create new KB articles. Similarly, as new features get released, work with your product team to add new KB articles at each release. Always include images and videos to be inclusive of different learning preferences. Don’t wait to put out your KB; in my experience, it’s better to put out a 60% completed solution and iterate and add to it.

Lastly, look at KB metrics to gather additional insight. For example, what are people clicking on? This might give you insight into problem areas. Who is looking? A customer with lots of KB views might need extra attention; a customer with a sudden drop in views might be at risk of churning out. What are people searching for? Repeat searches might mean your product team needs to resolve some underlying issues.

Create (and automate) repeatable systems and processes.

Scaling customer success also means dealing with an increasing number of customers. To manage volume, you need repeatable systems and processes. Operationalizing processes by creating playbooks and other documentation helps your team provide consistent service quickly and efficiently. When done properly, this also allows you to provide pooled CS where customers are not assigned a single CSM but instead get help from whoever is available. Start working on this early and iterate often.

As you work on this, also segment your customers and determine how your approach will differ for each segment. For some companies, it may make sense to segment by account value but for others, segmenting by behavior may be more suitable. Growth potential should also be considered in segmentation, along with other factors specific to your industry, company and product.

Another way to improve the efficiency of your CS department is to take your repeatable processes and systems one step further and automate where possible. Be strategic in your use of automation. At Liquid, we use Zapier to automate a few customer success emails and have a few other automations to provide more value to our customers at scale.

Separate customer support and customer success.

While customer success is meant to be proactive, customer support or customer service is reactive by nature. When the same team members manage both support/service and success, the most urgent requests (typically service requests) get worked on first. Unfortunately, this means the proactive work — of managing customer health and actively reaching out to customers who may be at risk of churning — sometimes falls lower down the list. In addition, the skills needed for customer service are different from those for customer success. From my experience, companies achieve better results when separating the reactive customer service team from the proactive customer success team early on.

Know when to grow your customer success team.

Dave Blake, CEO of Client Success, has some great tips on when to add additional staff to your customer success team. Specifically, he recommends looking at three factors:

• Annual Contract Value (ACV) Target Per CSM: Each CSM should be handling about $2 million in ACV.

• Product Complexity: The more complex your product, the fewer accounts each CSM can handle.

• Volume Of Customers Per CSM: Each CSM can generally only create meaningful relationships with about 50 customers (sometimes a bit more if automation is used).

Assess these factors against your own product to determine when it’s time to grow your customer success team. I’ve found that about 30 customers is the sweet spot — with automation required to manage more than that.

Scaling customer success will allow you to deliver more value to your customers, keep them happy and ultimately get them to grow their business with you. Whether you start with operationalizing processes, adding automations, building out a knowledge base, or separating customer service from customer success, be sure to meet customers where they are. Deliver more value in their preferred channels and your customers will eagerly turn into advocates, referring new customers.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Let’s Go Liquid: One Million Liquid Businesses

By Yolanda Lau

Today, we launched a new website for Liquid, the operating system for agile businesses. I’m so excited to share what we’ve been working on, and so proud of how far we’ve come from when we first started our consulting firm together many years ago.

With that in mind, I wanted to share some thoughts on our vision for Liquid and the future of work, how we got here, and why I believe we’re building something important.

Shifting from role-based work to project-based work

For years, I had seen my friends — fellow MIT alums — leaving their careers behind because they couldn’t find a way to make work fit into their lives. Whether it was making more time for their children or parents (or not wanting to be tied to a job and an office), highly educated women were leaving the workforce in droves. I had long found project-based work to be a means of finding work-life fit and I wanted to build a way to make it easier for anyone to do project-based work. And as a long-time consultant, I had seen for myself how tapping into on-demand talent enable businesses to scale quickly and efficiently. I realized project-based work was a win-win for all parties involved.

Project-based work and the future of work

I’ve been a big proponent of project-based work as a critical component of the future of work. Project-based work allows small business owners, entrepreneurs, creators, and enterprises to grow and scale their businesses while also expanding opportunities to bring in diverse talent. Working with on-demand talent is a good business decision for agile businesses. On the talent side, project-based work is a means to find work-life fit, particularly for lifelong learners eager to strengthen and develop their capabilities.

Starting FlexTeam

It was with that goal in mind that I co-founded FlexTeam — we wanted to build a world where previously sidelined professionals could engage in challenging, meaningful work when it fit into their lives. In addition, we envisioned a world where anyone could build an agile business, bringing on just-in-time talent to complete only the specific work that needed to be done.

Building FlexTeam’s platform

As we built FlexTeam, we initially used half a dozen different platforms to get signatures, manage contracts, agree to scopes of work, make payments, etc. We realized a tech platform was needed to manage this. Bringing on a CTO, we built an operating system for our modern consulting firm. Our proprietary platform allowed us to vet, onboard, manage, and pay FlexTeam’s consultants, while also enabling our clients to approve scopes of work, communicate with our team, and make payments.

Going Liquid

FlexTeam grew to over 700+ independent contractors working on strategy projects with hundreds of clients, from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. But we realized that to accelerate our vision for the future — to help more businesses Go Liquid — we needed to reduce the friction for every business to work with on-demand talent.

We saw several main trends: workforce was becoming more flexible and global and agile companies succeed by tapping into the best non full-time workers. But working with on-demand talent can be really difficult because it’s not a regular recurring expense like payroll — and there are additional compliance issues and challenges with controlling costs / work.

So we created and spun out Liquid — joined Techstars LA, and raised venture capital. Today, the Liquid platform streamlines the way a business’ finance, operations and talent management teams work with its vendor and supplier networks in the U.S. and abroad. We simplify contracting and global payments while ensuring financial controls and compliance.

The Future of Work

It’s widely accepted that COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to the future of work. In 2020 alone, wages and workforce participation of independent workers rose by 33%. In 2021, we’ve seen the “ Great Resignation” / “ Big Quit” — which has led to further growth in the percentage of independent workers — and businesses becoming more comfortable with remote work, asynchronous work, hybrid work, and project-based work.

While others talk about the future of work being remote, I believe it’s much bigger than that. The future of work is about everyone and every business working together in a way that works for all parties involved. It’s a distributed hybrid world where some folks will remain employees, but more and more people will become independent contractors — some working through agencies, and others working directly with companies (with some growing to build their own agency and hiring their own subcontractors). The companies that thrive in the future of work are those that Go Liquid, embracing on-demand talent and virtual talent benches.

Liquid and the Future of Work

At Liquid, we are building the operating system for agile businesses to enable everyone and every business to succeed in the future of work — project-centric contracting, work orders, purchase orders, and payments for agile businesses and their global vendor networks. In addition, our platform allows businesses to quickly understand and control their variable non-employee costs. We want to help every company Go Liquid, and we want to make it easier for people to Go Liquid.

Every day, I wake up excited to build Liquid because I know we are changing how work gets done; we are building the future of work. I love our hectic startup life (for example, I previously led Marketing for Liquid on an interim basis) but I primarily spend my days leading Customer Experience and Customer Success at Liquid. With a consulting background and experience as a trusted advisor, I’m thrilled to be building this critical (and growing) department. I love partnering with startup founders, finance leaders, HR leaders, COOs, Chiefs of Staff, and other operations leaders to help them scale their businesses while saving them (and their teams) time and money. It’s been a joy to connect with our customers and ensure they are getting exactly what they need from our platform. I’ve seen our customers take their businesses from idea to Series A and from seed to Series B — and I love knowing that our platform has supported their rapid agile growth.

Today, hundreds of businesses spanning marketing agencies, startups, production companies, social enterprises, and SMBs are using our platform. These businesses use Liquid to contract, onboard, manage, and pay their on-demand talent and vendors in the U.S. and in 175+ countries across the globe. Thousands more are #GoingLiquid and engaging the liquid workforce in ever growing numbers. In just the last year, Liquid has securely processed millions of dollars in global payments. Our customers love our platform, rave about our helpful customer support team, and rely on Liquid on a daily basis. Liquid is becoming the operating system for agile businesses.

And we’re just getting started.

If you’re as excited as I am about what we’re building and our vision for the future, read more from our CEO. Then, visit our new website (www.goliquid.io) to learn more about Going Liquid or subscribe to our newsletter to follow our journey.

Are you ready to Go Liquid?

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

FlexTeam is a mission-based micro-consulting firm, co-founded by Yolanda Lau in 2015, that matches talented mid-career women with meaningful, challenging, temporally flexible, remote project-based work opportunities. FlexTeam’s clients are businesses of all sizes across all industries and sectors. FlexTeam’s most requested projects are competitor / market research, financial models, and investor decks. FlexTeam is also the team behind Liquid.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Time For HR To Manage The On-Demand Workforce

By Yolanda Lau

In many companies, freelancers are often the “hidden” workforce. The human resources (HR) team is not always involved in the hiring and management of freelancers. But as organizations shift to being project-based versus role-based, HR must take the lead in managing the on-demand workforce. We must rethink the role of HR in enabling the future of work.

I find there are five key areas that HR leaders should first focus on as they take the lead on managing the on-demand workforce.

Establish Hiring Practices

The HR team has the best expertise for hiring and engaging freelancers. Your recruiting resources are experts at sourcing and assessing talent — managers should be leveraging these recruiters to find the best freelance talent.

And just as your company has defined practices for hiring employees, hiring practices also must be defined for engaging freelancers and independent contractors. It’s just as critical when working with freelancers.

Set the minimum standards for what needs to be completed before a freelancer can be engaged for the first time. For example, specify that at least two interviewers should speak to the freelancer to assess qualifications and fit. Always require background and reference checks. Decide whether a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is mandatory or define the conditions that trigger this requirement. Establish benchmarks for hourly rate ranges for the types of freelancers your company will most frequently engage.

Provide Internal Training

The HR department should also provide training for managers on best practices for working with freelancers and independent contractors. This training is important for boosting project success rates and ensuring that managers understand compliance requirements.

When working with freelancers and independent contractors, managers need to be aware of local, state, and federal regulations regarding engaging freelancers. For example, the IRS considers the behavioral control, financial control, and relationship of the parties when evaluating worker classification. Understanding the regulations is critical to ensure workers are not misclassified as freelancers instead of employees, which exposes your company to legal penalties and liabilities.

Standardize The Onboarding Process

It’s a best practice for companies to have standardized onboarding processes for their employees. The HR team should establish a standard onboarding process for freelancers and independent contractors. This process will be distinct from the employee onboarding process and reflect the different needs and requirements related to freelancers.

For example, rather than collecting a W-2 during onboarding, your company will need to collect a W-9 from U.S. freelancers or a W-8 from foreign freelancers. Your onboarding process should include all the essential documents for a freelance engagement, like an executed contract, NDA, etc. Onboarding should also include the critical “welcome” elements, such as information on any tools that the freelancer will need to access.

Standardizing the freelancer onboarding process ensures that all the essential documents are completed for every engagement and saves your company significant time.

Set Performance Evaluation Guidelines

Establishing performance evaluation processes and standards is a key element of any HR team’s responsibilities. Performance evaluations with on-demand workers are both similar and different from evaluating employees.

Performance assessments should be done on a project-by-project basis and should include a recommendation as to whether the worker should be considered for future projects. In addition to the project evaluations, the skill sets of each worker should also be tracked. Insights into skill sets help hiring managers source the best fit for upcoming projects from already vetted on-demand talent.

Determine Supporting Tools And Systems

Many companies manage their freelance engagements through a hodgepodge of tools. For example, some companies manage freelancers entirely manually, tracking information in various spreadsheets. Manual management of freelancers can become time-consuming and is prone to errors. And with an assortment of tools, it’s hard to have complete visibility of all freelancer and independent contractor activity and expenses.

The human resources team should take the lead on defining the central tool or system for the company, making it easy for finance, legal, HR, and line managers to collaborate and have complete visibility of on-demand workforce engagements. Freelance and vendor management systems, like the solutions my company offers, provide the integrated capabilities critical for on-demand workforce management.

With a central tool or system, you can more readily develop an external talent bench to support your company. An on-demand talent bench can help your company be much more agile as well as digitally ready.

Leading The Development Of The On-Demand Workforce

HR should be leading the sourcing and development of all talent, not just internal talent. HR leaders have the expertise and the right skills and resources on their teams to develop an on-demand workforce successfully. A blended talent strategy will supplement and complement internal teams. It’s time for HR to lead the transition to the future of work.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Embrace Lifelong Learning To Thrive In The Future Of Work

By Yolanda Lau

In the future of work, the critical skills for success are increasingly soft skills like emotional intelligence, adaptability, and resilience. Success in the future of work requires becoming a lifelong learner. The world is changing faster than ever, and only through lifelong learning will we have the capability to adapt along with it.

Here are 11 strategies to develop a habit of lifelong learning.

1. Ask why.

Think back to when you were a child. Chances are you drove your parents a little crazy with all of your questions. Be like a child and always ask why — question everything. But be open to changing your mind. Seek out counter opinions and acknowledge alternative viewpoints — and you’ll learn more from these perspectives and push yourself further.

2. Learn to love challenges.

Challenges stimulate learning and bring a sense of fulfillment. I love challenges and welcome struggles and obstacles as the things most worth doing are often hard. Without challenges, we stagnate. While challenges and bumps in the road can be uncomfortable, these opportunities are the ones from which you will learn the most. Get ready to take risks by setting stretch goals for yourself. A willingness to take risks doesn’t mean you need to take on every challenge — it’s about taking measured risks that push you beyond your current limits.

3. Embrace failure.

Failing is something you do because you’re pushing yourself to do more. Every failure is an opportunity to learn. Don’t be ashamed or afraid of failure. You likely aren’t challenging yourself if you haven’t failed some of the time. I’ve found that failure has frequently been my best teacher, and my successes are a result of growth and learning from past failures and mistakes. Embrace failure and mistakes as opportunities to integrate valuable feedback and information. After all, as Albert Einstein once said, “Failure is success in progress.”

4. Practice mindfulness.

I’ve found that mindfulness is an essential soft skill to learn as it amplifies your other soft skills. Mindfulness can boost your mental agility, self-awareness, and resilience. Plus, taking a mindful brain break can boost your productivity and effectiveness while increasing the “divergent thinking” that results in new ideas. A plethora of apps and programs, such as Headspace, Yoga Ed., and Calm can help you practice mindfulness and build this essential lifelong learning skill.

5. School is only the beginning.

School should function to build a foundation for lifelong learning. Lifelong learners realize that learning doesn’t stop when school ends. Never stop seeking opportunities to learn, prioritizing both surface learning and deep learning. While surface learning is quick and easy, deep learning takes more effort. Both are valuable.

Coursera, Udemy, and EdX are great for consuming content. Cohort-based courses like Maven, On Deck, and Ascend take learning to the next level by bringing together groups of learners.

6. Be open to feedback.

Be proactive about asking for feedback. Surround yourself with mentors, personal advisors, and coaches and be willing to ask for help. I’ve found that having a community and network of peers and advisors has been essential in not only solving day-to-day problems or identifying new opportunities, but also in fueling my personal development. Frequent feedback has helped me to continually grow personally and professionally.

7. Become a polymath.

In the past, it paid to be a specialist — to accumulate as much knowledge as possible in only one area. But in the future of work, polymaths and expert generalists have the advantage. Developing deep knowledge in multiple areas, ideally with cross-disciplinary awareness, makes it easier to uncover unexpected connections and convergences. In a world where data is everywhere, pattern recognition and intuitive thinking have become more important than ever. Being an expert generalist or polymath requires continuous education — lifelong learning.

8. Teaching brings mastery.

In my experience, teaching brings mastery. I’ve been a teacher or teaching assistant for everything from entrepreneurship to ESL, citizenship to physics, biology to coding, sustainability to app building — each teaching opportunity was a window to deepen my understanding. Answering questions on the fly is the quickest way to test your knowledge and learn what you don’t know. Having spent my career advising entrepreneurs and small business owners, I’ve constantly been learning as I teach. I love it when I get to tell a founder, “I don’t know,” as it gives me something to learn.

9. Stay curious.

Talk to strangers. Be present in conversations and look for things that stimulate your curiosity. Pull on those threads and be open to learning from strangers. Follow your curiosity, and you never know where it will lead you. Sign up for that yoga teacher certification course, take that cooking class, try out a new sport, go for that art class. You need to keep that sense of wonder you had as a child to spark inquiry and continual exploration. This curiosity and openness will fuel your lifelong learning.

10. Prioritize process over goals.

Life is not about completing a series of goals. Most of us have had long and winding career paths, which didn’t necessarily make sense at the moment. When you prioritize the process of learning over the goals of completing the class or diploma, you’ll open yourself to new opportunities. Changing your mindset gives you the flexibility to follow your curiosity and may lead to opportunities you would never have otherwise thought of.

11. Give yourself the gift of grace.

But give yourself the gift of grace. It’s okay if you don’t know something. Embrace this as a challenge and as an opportunity to learn something new. It’s also okay to sprint and rest. In fact, giving yourself breaks is the best way to recharge and nurture curiosity. Breaks give your brain space to integrate your learning, developing connections between seemingly unrelated areas.

Become A Lifelong Learner

Lifelong learning isn’t just about preparing for the future of work. Lifelong learning also brings joy and a deep sense of empowerment and fulfillment — making life more meaningful. Grow and succeed professionally and personally by embracing lifelong learning.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Five Strategies For Building A Virtual Talent Bench

By Yolanda Lau

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a shift to remote and hybrid work while also increasing the number of independent workers. The future of work is now. As companies become more comfortable with building and integrating on-demand workers into their talent strategy, more companies are realizing the value of building a virtual talent bench.

What is a virtual talent bench?

A virtual talent bench is a pool of freelancers, independent contractors, vendors, and small agencies that you’ve sourced, vetted, and are ready to work with. Having a virtual talent bench allows your team to quickly staff projects as needed, particularly as work shifts from being role-based to project-based.

Why should you build a virtual talent bench?

Building a virtual talent bench makes it easier to deploy independent workers to work on critical special projects quickly. By creating your own in-house virtual talent bench, you’ll save time and money by reducing the time to find and onboard talent — and save fees you may have paid to sourcing agencies.

In addition, building a virtual talent bench well before engagement allows businesses to properly qualify, vet, and onboard talent. Having advised startups for most of my career, I’ve seen many companies bring on talent without formal contracts or vetting simply because of an eagerness to get to work. Without sufficient vetting and executing appropriate contracts before onboarding talent, companies open themselves up to worker misclassification risk and intellectual property issues.

Now that we’ve established the importance of building a virtual talent bench, here are five strategies for building your pipeline.

1. Start by assessing skills gaps.

Start by assessing the skills of your employees against the work you do and may do in the future. You’ll likely find areas where additional resources, specialized skills, or expert advice could be helpful from time to time. Once you have a sense of what kinds of people you need on your virtual talent bench, you’ll be able to start looking for and recruiting the external talent you need.

2. Identify experts and other independent contractors.

There are many ways to find experts, consultants, and other independent contractors, but I’ve found that trusted referrals are the best way to fill your virtual talent bench. Ask your existing virtual talent to refer other freelancers and independent contractors to you, and ask your network to share their trusted talent with you. Freelancer marketplaces like UpWork or Catalant are also another source of virtual talent if you’re having difficulty sourcing referrals. Or, if you are open to establishing a relationship with a company with a deep bench, consulting firms like Business Talent Group or our own firm, FlexTeam, are built on virtual talent benches so that companies don’t have to build their own roster of talent.

3. Develop processes to vet and onboard talent.

Once you’ve identified talent, it’s important to make sure they’re vetted. Check references, run background checks and make sure they are seasoned independent professionals. Then, when you’re ready to onboard your virtual talent, create a standardized onboarding process that makes it easy for your company and your talent to work together. Using automated and electronic onboarding processes makes it easier to ensure all the proper contracts and tax forms are signed quickly and stored safely. Vendor management systems can help you manage all onboarding, contracts, and payments for your virtual talent bench.

4. Develop relationships and prioritize communication.

Working with a virtual talent bench can be transactional, if you choose. But you’ll likely find that building relationships with your virtual talent bench improves outcomes. Not only does relationship building make it more likely that your virtual talent will want to work with you in the future, but it also makes each project run more smoothly. Make sure you’ve documented and communicated best practices and expectations to your virtual talent. Communicate frequently and clearly, both during projects and outside of projects. Engaging your virtual talent bench even when they aren’t actively working with you helps keep you top of mind — making it more likely that your virtual talent will choose to work with you when the time is right.

5. Create procedures for providing feedback and assessing performance.

Providing feedback to your virtual talent during each project is critical to building strong partnerships. Start by creating a procedure to assess performance and give feedback. Make sure all employees who have interacted with your virtual talent bench are asked to provide feedback. If appropriate, ask your virtual talent to provide feedback on the other individual freelancers or consultants they may have interacted with during projects at your company. In addition, store the feedback in your virtual talent bench database for future reference. This information should provide you with actionable insights to help improve future engagements.

Be sure to compile the feedback to share with your virtual talent. I’ve found that freelancers and consultants are eager for feedback, excited to learn, and keen to build new skills.

Transition to a blended workforce.

To successfully compete, companies need to be agile and have workforces that can flex to meet a variety of challenges and opportunities. With a virtual talent bench, your company will have a flexible, blended workforce. That workforce will be able to quickly tackle problems and take on new opportunities. Are you ready to start building your virtual talent bench?

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Remote Work: Creating A Documentation-First Culture

By Yolanda Lau

Before the pandemic, the growth of remote work was already a significant workforce trend as part of the future of work — remote work options increased threefold from 1996 to 2016. After the experiences of the last year, this trend has only accelerated. My current team is fully remote (with a mix of employees, independent contractors, agencies, and freelancers), and I’ve learned that one of the keys to success with remote workforce management is documentation. Whether your company is considering an entirely remote workforce or a hybrid workforce, it’s critical to be a documentation-first company.

Benefits Of A Remote Or Hybrid Workforce

Hiring remote workers, including freelancers or independent contractors, has many different benefits for your firm. One of these benefits is cost savings, with a reduction in onsite operations costs. Even more importantly, your company has access to a much larger talent pool with the removal of geographic obstacles to hiring. And remote workers can be even more productive than onsite workers. A study published in Harvard Business Review found that work-from-anywhere arrangements were even more productive than traditional work-from-home policies. And in a recent PwC survey of U.S. executives, 83% of employers reported that their companies found success with shifting to remote work.

Remote work arrangements benefit the company and the worker — increasing the attractiveness of working for your company not only for potential new hires but also for retaining existing employees. A Gallup survey found that 54% of office workers would leave their current job for one that offers flexible work.

Challenges Of A Remote Or Hybrid Workforce

But engaging a remote workforce does also create challenges. Managing benefits can become more complicated for your HR team, and communication can be a critical issue with the potential for not enough communication and/or remote employees feeling left out or excluded. Plus, building and maintaining your company culture takes more thought and dedicated effort and programs with a dispersed workforce. One of the ways to overcome these challenges is with a documentation mindset.

Going Beyond Onboarding

It’s common for companies to have a standardized onboarding process to complete and collect all the necessary forms, like W-2s for employees or W-9s for freelancers. A digital onboarding process makes it easy to assemble and organize all the required forms quickly. But when you have remote workers, it’s critical to go beyond the documents and deliver a comprehensive onboarding experience. After all, a 2018 survey found that 93% of employers concur that a good onboarding experience is critical to retaining workers.

You need a documentation-first mindset when engaging a remote workforce. Think about how you translate an onsite onboarding experience to a digital experience. How do you bring your company’s culture to life? How do you make your company’s resources and tools easily accessible and understood? What training do you need to provide?

Preparing and regularly updating documentation in advance is critical to success as you scale your remote workforce. This shouldn’t be an ad hoc exercise, but rather something that your company regularly dedicates time to create, maintain, and improve.

Increasing Knowledge Sharing

With my remote team, I’ve found that documenting our processes and best practices is essential to our success in working well together, regardless of location. Fostering knowledge sharing through “living” documents increases our ability to collaborate effectively and for employees and freelancers to quickly help with new projects or contribute impactful ideas. And one of the most important areas to document is related to communication.

Make sure that your employees and contractors have a dedicated place for communication. For example, we’ve defined Slack channels for a variety of topics and projects, as well as for sharing FAQs. We also have documented details like tips for communication styles, expectations for communication content and frequency for project updates, who to connect with for different types of questions, and more. Effective, two-way communication is even more essential when working with a remote team.

Plus, with a documentation-first approach, it’s much easier to shift to a project-based work model. Moving from a role-based to a project-based organization increases the speed and agility of your business. This type of organization is only effective with robust processes and communication.

Embrace The Remote Workforce

It’s time to embrace new models of work and grow your remote workforce. Hiring remote employees, freelancers and contractors strengthens your talent pool and helps make your company more agile. With a documentation-first mindset, your company can smoothly transition to a remote or hybrid workforce. And that mindset will also help you take a more agile and project-based approach to plan and execute initiatives. Get ready to thrive in the future of work by becoming a documentation-first company and growing your remote team.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

How Organizations Can Become Project-Based In The Future Of Work

By Yolanda Lau

The nature of work is changing: Companies are increasingly thinking of work as project-based rather than role-based. We’re moving toward a project-based economy, and this shift toward the future of work is accelerating due to the pandemic. The more you can think of work as project-based versus role-based, the more agile your team and organization will be.

What Is Project-Based Work?

Project-based work has clear goals, milestones, and deliverables, and a defined start and end date. Projects may take hours or months or longer — the duration varies with every project and business need. But the work is aligned against business needs and objectives, not specific roles.

The Benefits Of Project-Based Work

As business leaders, we all want our teams to be agile and nimble, and embracing a project-based work mindset helps you increase speed and agility. A recent MIT and Deloitte report found that executives are increasingly thinking of their workforce as an ecosystem — drawing on the diverse skill sets of their universes of full-time workers and freelancers to meet business challenges.

With a project-based approach, you can innovate faster, quickly pulling skills internally and externally as needed. You can also operate more efficiently, dialing up and down skill-based resources by drawing on your workforce ecosystem.

How To Shift From A Role-Based To A Project-Based Organization

So, increasing agility, innovating more quickly, operating more efficiently, etc. — it all sounds ideal, but how do you evolve from a traditional, role-based organization to one that is project-based? There are a few critical steps to support success in this journey.

1. Change work definitions: First, you have to redefine the work. And this is an ongoing effort, not a one-time fix. Consider your immediate, short-term, and long-term objectives. How do you define these objectives in terms of projects? What skill sets do these projects need? Consider how your current workforce maps against these opportunities. Which skills do you need to source from freelancers and contractors? By developing what Deloitte calls “an adaptable network of teams,” you can build the flexible organization you need. Using a consulting firm that is experienced in project-based work can help you shift away from role-based work.

2. Focus on planning: For this model to work well, you must put an ongoing emphasis on planning. One of the advantages of working with on-demand talent is that you can pull in resources at short notice. However, when shifting to an overall project-based work approach, you need to plan ahead and have a project road map. Your road map will continually evolve to adapt to business strategy and needs, but you should always be thinking about the next project(s), particularly for your full-time employees.

3. Evaluate your processes: A flexible, on-demand workforce will not function well without robust processes and communications. The probability of redundancies, missed handoffs and other unforced errors will only increase when some or most of the team delivering the work includes freelancers, contractors, and consultants. Also, consider how you can improve the connections and communications with your team.

4. Build your talent bench: As you map the skills of your full-time employees against project-based work, you’ll find areas where you may need additional resources or different skill sets. Developing a bench of external talent makes it easy to pull in the right skill sets when and where you need them. I’ve shared my tips for building and integrating your on-demand workforce — this advice can help you scale your flexible workforce.

5. Hire and train for critical thinking skills: Soft skills, like adaptability and self-motivation, are essential in the future of work. Critical thinking is one of the keys to success with project-based work. Asking the right questions is critical. Employees and freelancers need to ensure they have the right level of clarity and detail so costs and effectiveness aren’t compromised.

Project-Based Work Is The Future Of Work

Not only how we work is shifting toward project-based work, but also how we hire team members and promote our own experiences. In the future of work, roles and buzzword-filled online profiles will become less important while project-based identities become more meaningful.

A project-based work model can help your team be more nimble and innovative. It’s time to start thinking about your team’s skill ecosystem and how you can organize and deliver in a project-based environment.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Scaling Your Flexible On-Demand Workforce

By Yolanda Lau

The future of work is now, and it’s more important than ever to develop a modern business strategy that relies on building and scaling your liquid workforce as a critical component of your blended workforce. The pandemic has made it clear that enterprises need to build and develop a flexible, on-demand talent pool to be prepared for changing market demands and trends. In fact, a recent HBS and BCG study found that nearly 90% of business leaders expect that working with on-demand talent will be important to the success of their future strategic initiatives.

But scaling your liquid workforce is easier said than done, especially for companies without the structure or processes in place to develop and manage this at scale.

Scaling Your On-Demand Workforce As A Competitive Advantage

When you’ve built your on-demand workforce in a scalable way that anyone in your organization can access, it is a competitive advantage. Business leaders can quickly find, hire and deploy deeply experienced talent such as consultants, project managers, researchers, or even interim executives to lead or support mission-critical projects.

It becomes possible to deploy temporary resources to strategic initiatives in supply chain, logistics, pricing, operations, product, finance, marketing, strategic planning, digital transformation, R&D, data analytics, or market research — for both high- and low-complexity work — to overcome capability and capacity gaps. This allows for increased speed to market as it becomes easier to find the right people at the right time to help you enter new markets, launch new products or move into new regions.

The rate of innovation is increased and seen through new business models by testing new products and ideas more efficiently without committing internal resources — and by accessing broader talent pools. The increased labor force flexibility allows companies to try new ideas without increasing fixed costs in the form of new full-time employees.

Whether you’re a consumer packaged goods company, a social enterprise, a life sciences conglomerate, a tech startup, a financial services firm, an agency, or any company in any industry, developing and scaling your liquid workforce can help you grow your organization more efficiently.

Understand Your Existing Capabilities

The purpose of the liquid workforce is not to replace all employees with contractors, consultants, and freelancers. The goal is to build an elastic set of skills that can be deployed on-demand whenever and wherever they are needed — and those skills can come from both internal employees as well as external talent.

Begin with building visibility into the skills available both inside and outside your company. This is about more than job titles and salary history — it’s about creating a repository of skills and background knowledge.

Make sure all executives and leaders are aware of all consultants, freelancers, and vendors that all teams have worked with. This kind of holistic and centralized approach to integrating the liquid workforce is important. I’ve seen different teams inside the same company hiring different outside consultants and researchers to achieve similar goals, resulting in 50% to 100% greater costs.

Furthermore, make sure all leaders and managers know what skills are available within the company. Sometimes it may make more sense to pull an existing employee to work on a short-term project rather than hiring external talent.

Find Or Designate An Executive Sponsor

As you may have noticed, companies struggle to develop a flexible, on-demand workforce without a companywide strategy for building a digitally ready liquid workforce. While I believe that human resources departments can spearhead a blended workforce strategy, most companies benefit from having someone at the executive level who can internally advocate for liquid talent as a strategic advantage. From my experience, this person is typically the COO, CFO, or CHRO but can also come from procurement or other teams.

This C-level advocate must believe in the importance of shifting talent strategies to include external talent. They must be passionate that shifting talent strategies is a competitive advantage. But more than that, they must have cross-functional relationships to change how employees perceive external talent, fostering much-needed change.

Integrate An Operational Platform

Managing the on-demand workforce is both like and unlike managing a full-time workforce. To effectively scale an on-demand talent pool, companies must have an operational platform like Liquid (our offering) that will support end-to-end management. This platform is the key to enabling visibility and transparency, which provides a companywide view of all projects, costs, and talent. Plus, an operational platform can help standardize, streamline and automate the core processes involved in managing an on-demand workforce — a critical requirement for successfully scaling.

Embrace The On-Demand Workforce

It’s time to move to a blended workforce and build your on-demand talent pool. A flexible workforce provides the agility that companies need to quickly take advantage of opportunities, grow in new areas and respond to challenges. To compete and thrive in the future of work, engaging the on-demand workforce is no longer optional — it’s essential.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Interested in the Future of Work? Join the Work of the Future #FutureOfWork Facebook Group.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.

Updated on February 24, 2024

Eight Practices Of Successful COOs

By Yolanda Lau

Being the chief operating officer or head of operations is hard work. In many organizations, from tech startups to social enterprises, the COO is the director of “getting everything done.” While COOs need to have strong organizational, analytical and project-management skills to solve problems strategically and create procedures, there’s much more to the job.

Whether you’re a new COO or an experienced VP of operations looking to level up your game, you’ve come to the right place.

The following are eight things successful operations leaders do:

1. Build COO-CEO partnership and alignment.

The COO role is unique at every company and depends on company specifics and the CEO’s needs. Align with the CEO early and often on what you can take off their plate. This might be a mix of company-wide alignment and planning, owning departments or teams and taking on special projects or initiatives. Never forget that the CEO and COO are partners in growing the business together.

In some ways, the COO role is a lot like the chief of staff role — you are a sounding board and thinking partner. Like any meaningful relationship, trust, empathy, and communication are foundational. Building and maintaining trust requires maintaining confidentiality when needed, being transparent with the CEO, and thinking through situations and problems using the lens of what is best for the organization and the CEO. Always own up to any mistakes made and lead with grace and compassion.

2. Develop relationships.

Yes, you need to be intelligent, perceptive, and organized, but operations is also about knowing the right people and getting them together to get stuff done quickly and efficiently. One COO I know told me that the biggest value-add this past year has been running workshops to help people decide what their priorities are — not the analytical bits she was hired for.

Make time to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Adapting your style to what others need allows you to develop more robust relationships with your team and colleagues. Be willing to shift how you talk and act, depending on what is appropriate for that specific person in that particular conversation.

Put the work into understanding the power dynamics and politics in your company. In every organization, there are people who are not necessarily senior in role or title but who are very well respected. These are people you don’t want to overlook — you want them on your side.

3. Develop adaptability, flexibility, and resiliency.

Just as soft skills like resilience and adaptability are essential for the future of work, these same skills are needed to be a high-performing COO. Adaptability fosters creative thinking, which is critical for planning and executing strategic initiatives. Flexibility enables you to quickly pivot to any opportunity or challenge, while resiliency helps you overcome those challenges.

4. Prepare, prepare, prepare.

As a COO or director of operations, your time is limited. Preparation is invaluable. Have a clear plan of what you need to get out of each discussion before going in. Prep your presentations and workshops with as much detail as is practical. The more work you put into clearly understanding what you need out of each meeting or event, the more likely you will get it. And the more efficient you are with each meeting, the more people will know you appreciate their time and, in turn, will appreciate you.

5. Develop a data-driven mindset.

For COOs, a data-driven mindset is essential for tackling day-to-day and strategic decision-making. Successful COOs rely on data and metrics as critical inputs when determining recommendations and decisions. But being data-driven doesn’t mean using any and all data. You need to know which data matters, why, and for what purposes, while being mindful of any data limitations. A data-driven mindset requires open thinking, not rigid thinking — data can yield unexpected possibilities and opportunities but can also leave questions unanswered.

6. Keep it simple.

Don’t overcomplicate things. You may be tempted to demonstrate your intelligence by using fancy words or phrasing things in a complex manner. Instead, make it a point to create simplicity and clarity with straightforward questions, clear reports, simple explanations, easy-to-follow presentations, and uncomplicated plans. The more you can distill complex concepts into something easy to understand, the better. While your work is complex, present it so that anyone can follow along — which will make work more efficient. Simplicity breeds speed, scalability, and success.

7. Build your team.

Like any leadership role, as COO, you’re only as good as your team. But as the future of work evolves, how you build, grow and adapt that team is changing. A 2020 HBS and BCG study surveying business executives found that 90% expect that talent platforms will be critical for their competitive advantage. As COO, you need to draw on the right skills and expertise at the right time — on-demand freelancers and consultants can add and supplement the skills and expertise of your team to accelerate strategic initiatives and ensure success.

8. Don’t forget the strategy.

There is never a lack of high-priority things to get done. It can be too easy to get down into the weeds and neglect the high-level strategy. Spend some time each week thinking about the largest obstacles to the company delivering on its goals — like needing more output from a particular team. While you might not be able to address everything immediately, make sure you’re making significant progress each quarter and over the course of a year.

Take operations leadership to the next level.

Following these eight practices can help you achieve success as COO, regardless of industry. Evaluate to what extent you’ve already adopted these practices and what you can do to continue to improve in each area. You’re no longer just the COO — you are the critical partner in helping to grow and evolve your business.

This article was originally published in Forbes.

Yolanda Lau is an experienced entrepreneurship consultant, advisor, and Forbes Contributor. She is also an educator, speaker, writer, and non-profit fundraiser.

Since 2010, she has been focused on preparing knowledge workers, educators, and students for the future of work.

Learn more about Yolanda here.