Episode 201: The Key Role of HR In Successfully Integrating a Blended Workforce (Interview with Lynda Gratton and Diane Gherson)

 
 

Did you know that an estimated 35% to 40% of the global workforce will be classified as independent workers by 2025? So what does this mean for the future of organisations? Better yet, what does it mean for HR leaders who have to navigate this massive shift? 

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green sits down with two industry experts to discuss this very topic. Joining him are Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and Founder of HSM Advisory, and Diane Gherson, former CHRO at IBM and board member for several top companies.  

Both Lynda and Diane and well-known visionaries in the field of HR. Together, they have joined forces to write two insightful articles in Harvard Business Review (see links below) that explore the implications of this growing trend. Today, they share their experiences and perspectives on how organisations can adapt to the rise of independent workers, and what HR leaders need to do to manage this new workforce landscape effectively. 

Listening to this podcast episode, you can be sure to gain insights on: 

  • The factors driving the rapid increase in freelance work and how technology is enabling this transformation. 

  • The impact of a blended workforce on organisational structures and the evolving role of managers. 

  • Practical strategies for HR leaders to adapt workforce planning and recruitment processes to integrate freelancers effectively. 

  • The importance of building the right cultural infrastructure to support a diverse and dynamic workforce. 

Needless to say, this is an episode every HR leader must listen to, to ensure a successful integrated approach to merging external and internal talent effectively.  

We would also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to Visier for sponsoring this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Visier, is the people analytics platform for successful HR teams, bridging the gap between HR productivity and business performance, giving managers the insights they need to lead effectively. Learn more at visier.com. 

Links to Resources: 

Sign up for the Productivity Collaboration Jam held on the 10th of September: Sign Up Here 

[0:00:00] David Green: The workforce composition in many organisations is undergoing rapid change with the rise of the blended workforce.  A 2022 study by McKinsey found that 36% of the US workforce has chosen to work as contract, freelance, temporary, or gig workers.  Gartner predicts that this is not restricted to the United States either, estimating that 35% to 40% of the global workforce will be classified as independent workers by 2025.  This raises an interesting question: how does HR navigate this new world of independent workers and effectively manage and integrate freelancers into their organisations?  This is what Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton decided to collaborate together on to explore in their 2024 article for Harvard Business Review entitled, "Highly Skilled Professionals Want Your Work But Not Your Job".   

Today I'll be talking to Diane and Lynda about the shifting landscape of workforce composition and talent management.  We'll discuss how freelancing and project-based work is reshaping traditional roles and career paths within organisations, how this will shift the organisational structures that we know today, and how to address the cultural challenges integrating freelancers at scale.  We'll also explore the evolving role of managers and HR in this new environment.  So without further ado, let's get the conversation started. 

As you each briefly introduce yourselves and your backgrounds, I'd love it as well if you could explain what prompted you to come together to explore these topics.  So, Lynda, I'll come to you first.   

[0:01:53] Lynda Gratton: Oh, well, I'm Lynda Gratton, I'm Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School and I'm also the Founder of HSM Advisory.  Well, certainly for this one, David, it was just a sort of surprising piece of data.  And I remember Diane and I were just chatting about something, and one or both of us said, "Wow, I've just been talking to a company recently and do you know that 50% of their people are freelancers?" and we went, "Really?" and I think that really got us started.  And then we started to look at the McKinsey data and the Upwork data, and so on, and realised that quite a lot of people were now freelancers, perhaps more than we thought.  And that's really got us going.  But Diane, I don't know how you saw the beginnings of it all. 

[0:02:37] Diane Gherson: Yeah, well, I love writing with Lynda, and we had such a good time the first time and a good time the second time doing it.  Just briefly, myself, I was a CHRO at IBM, and now I'm on several boards, including Kraft Heinz and a few relatively early-stage tech organisations.  So, I wanted to just say, yeah, my fascination with freelancers actually goes back to the time, if anyone can remember, when Netflix announced their $1 million prize, because contractors have been around forever, but here they were saying, "We think other people can do better than us on coming up with an algorithm that will predict customers' preferences".  And it was an amazing experience to watch really online, as freelancers all around the world got to know each other and they paired together.  In fact, two different groups got together to win.  And it made me realise that actually, this is different than contractors.  This is actually bringing innovation to firms.   

Then, as a CHRO, when the Cloud started to come onto the horizon around 2016, I remember seeing Topcoder just literally, the cloud native programmers were all going there, right, if you wanted to use cloud native.  And now it's the same thing with Intangible, right?  All the AI firms, the Gen AI firms, are using Intangible because that's where the Gen AI guys are and they want to work that way.  So, I think the fascination started with Netflix, but it's just been continuing. 

[0:04:14] David Green: Why is the topic of workforce composition and the changing dynamics of talent management so relevant now?  What are some of the factors that you're seeing that are driving the shift? 

[0:04:25] Diane Gherson: Well, look, I mean we all know once work became remote, the question was, "Why do I have to show up at an office?"  And so, you've got a number of people who want the agency of working when and where and on what they want, and they have the skills that are in high demand and so they can do that.  And the second thing of course, which we write quite a bit about in the article, is all the friction around running your own business has probably gone away.  I mean, you can have a tax accountant who's also a freelancer, right, you can have a legal advisor.  All the things that made it tough to have your own business, now freelancers can do that.  And then there are the platforms that serve up work to you, just like LinkedIn serves up work to you, or jobs to you when you're working.  So, it's not that hard slog of finding work.  So, I think all those things have helped.   

I think the biggest thing though is that it's moved from being business to consumer, like Uber and Lyft, those platforms for serving up freelancers to meet your needs, your end needs, which is really big here, that to find a plumber, that has moved to business to business.  And that's really why we got interested in it because it really changes life for people in HR.  Before, it was a vendor management system, or it was managed services providers.  And, of course, they worked with procurements.  They were large contracts, and the people were somewhat fungible, right, "We just need somebody to be an admin for three weeks", or whatever that was, or, "to do our programming, maintenance".  And so many companies are in that business, including IBM and many, many companies.  And so, we're in a new world.  And what that means is, we're in the world of hiring people, not resources, which is what procurement did when they had their contracts, and continue to have their contracts with these providers.  And you're starting to see them start to buy some of these platforms because they realise they have to get into that business. 

[0:06:33] David Green: And Lynda, turning it to you on this specific point, I think as well as what Diane was saying, obviously the technology means it's easier to be found now perhaps.  And obviously preferences, I think, as Diane talked about as well, people want to maybe work on a freelance basis.  But at the same time, you've got these skills becoming in much, much higher demand and the demographics are working in the favour of the freelancers as well.  So, I'd love you to talk to that point.  And maybe the other one, Diane hinted at as well, is these are core roles as well, these are strategically important roles to the business, whereas perhaps before, typically you would go contract some of your non-core roles, but these are actually core roles to the future of the business as well.  So, maybe talk to those two points.   

[0:07:17] Lynda Gratton: On the point about where people are with their careers right now, when Andrew Scott and I wrote The 100-Year Life, one thing that became really obvious to us, and I think it's been something that really resonated with the people who read that book, is that the traditional three-stage working life of full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement just wasn't standing up.  If you think, "Well, I'm going to be working into my 70s", how could you do that?  And so, we began to realise that a multi-stage life was going to be much more appropriate.  And by multi-stage, I mean that you have different stages.  You might take time off to bring up your family, you might take time off to start your own business, you might take time off to do a side gig, you may work for a big company.  And that sort of variety, the diversity of experience, needs your capacity to be a freelancer as part of that.   

So, it's not necessarily that we would expect people to be freelancers as a lifetime choice, but rather that they might well be freelancers for a part of their life.  And to do that, they have to build mastery, skills, and they have to build skills which are verifiable, and we might come on to that later, but that turns out to be quite important.  And by the way, when Diane was talking about the technology platforms, one of the things that's been very important about those is that they've also created opportunities for these skilled people to verify their skills, and indeed to build them through communities.  But there's one other thing that Diane and I noticed when we were interviewing people about these high-skilled freelance roles, is that part of the reason people were choosing to do it is that, let's say you're an IT person in a large retail bank.  And so what you're doing is you're building up your experience of running IT in a traditional organisation.  But then suddenly the company changes, and you want a whole new set of contextual skills.  And so what we're noticing is people are choosing the sector to broaden their contextual skills.  So they may, for example, be working in a large project with a retail bank, because that gives them a sense of how do these large bureaucratic companies function.  But then they might hop across to a much faster-developing business, because then they learn their skills but in a different context.   

So, what I think we're also seeing is from the freelance perspective, they're actually curating their work experiences to really broaden.  And do you remember, Diane, I think we've got it in the article, we interviewed, I think, someone from J&J, Johnson & Johnson, who said, "We want people who've got different skills.  We don't want them to have always worked in an industry like ours.  We want them to have come from a different company".  So, I think that notion of curation is also important from the individual's perspective. 

[0:10:20] Diane Gherson: Yeah, it's a great point.  This is the thing that I think is starting to emerge, is that mastery, the point that Lynda just made, is what they're after because they realise that's their ticket.  It's not knowing the company, which used to be really important, but at least for a segment of the working population, they really realise that their ticket isn't working with the same company because they'll do the same thing over and over again; it's working with different industries, working in different experiences that they can then bring to bear and make them more marketable.  So, it's really fascinating to see.  And they are able therefore to say, "No, I don't want that work, because that's not going to grow my skills", which of course inside a company, much harder to do. 

[0:11:06] David Green: So, Diane, can I ask you to put your old HR hat on for this question.  So, obviously, as we've spoken about before, and I know you did at IBM, organisations are creating internal marketplaces to support gig working within companies.  But these won't obviously always necessarily fill the skills gap that external talents such as freelancers can help fill.  And this means that we need to change perhaps, I mean you've both hinted it would change the way we approach workforce planning and recruitment within organisations.  One option is HR taking ownership perhaps of the recruitment of freelancers, rather than it being a responsibility of procurement, where it perhaps has been in the past.  How do you suggest HR leaders start to implement this shift effectively?   

[0:12:34] Diane Gherson: Yeah, well look, I mean as I said, I do think it's moving to HR because we're moving away from the sort of vendor management system model more to a recruitment model, and you have to recruit them in, as we said in the article, we have to track them.  This isn't that, "Oh, we've got a job", as when you're hiring someone from Manpower, you just go, right?  That's a very different proposition.  So, yes, I think the internal career marketplaces are absolutely necessary as companies build out their skills and people want to try out new skills.  But along with that, you need the cultural infrastructure, where your manager lets you spend time learning some new skill, (1) which I've discovered in some companies is not part of their culture; and (2) the anti-hoarding mentality, letting somebody go who you've relied on to do the same thing over and over, right?  So, I think a lot of companies are trying to build that cultural infrastructure to make opportunity marketplaces work.   

What we saw in the article though, was while they had the makings of opportunity marketplaces in many of these companies, they didn't have the time to build these skills.  And so, they ended up with more generalists and then they would hire specialists to do the work.  So for example, at J&J, they had robotics specialists coming in doing really important work in their next generation of development, and then they had generalists on the team; or we saw the same thing at March, right, and even to sort of feed, are they developing new product?  But to maintain anything, they would bring them back, because they didn't have those specialist skills.  So, it's a melding for sure.  And you mentioned workforce planning.  That means when you do workforce planning, you need to think about all of the different options, right?  How fast do we need these skills?  How specialised are they?  Those are questions, but then you also have to think, what are the long-term skills we need to build in the workforce that eventually, even after a few years, we'll have a sufficient number of specialists maybe in a new area where we don't need to rely on these guys?  But it's very much an intentional decision that we saw. 

[0:14:45] David Green: Lynda, turning to you.  So, with the rise of freelancing and project-based work, particularly in some of these key roles within organisations, how do you see traditional roles within organisations evolving?  Will there be a significant impact, for example, on how career paths are structured?   

[0:15:02] Lynda Gratton: Well, David, that was a conversation that Diane and I had right from the very beginning, because what was really obvious is that if 50% of your employees are freelancers and some of your most skilled employees are freelancers, why would you work full-time?  Why would you be a full-time employee?  And that was, in a sense, our opening question.  And particularly right now, the data shows that the younger you are, the more likely you are to want to do freelance work.  So, as you look forward to organisations, there's going to be some really talented people who don't want to work with you full-time. 

At the same time, what we realised is that the people in the centre who are there full-time play an incredibly important role.  They're the holders of the business strategy, they're the holders of the culture, and so you have to double down on, why would I want to be employed by you?  And that of course means the career mobility, the sense that your work is purposeful, the idea that you're in it for the long term, the idea that your success is the organisation's success, and also getting away from the barriers.  In the paper, we talk about toxic cultures.  Why would you stay at a place that's toxic when you could join another place as a freelancer?  So, everything that Diane and I believe about great organisations becomes even more important when you're bringing in freelancers, because you've got to differentiate the deal between a freelancer and a full-time person.  And a full-time person has got to feel that they're there for a reason.   

So if, for example, you're in a company where the full-time people are treated as a disposable asset, you just dispose of them whenever you want, nobody's going to stay with you, because why would they if they think that any day they're going to be let go of?  So, it's really a fascinating question, David, and it's one that my guess is, as Diane and I think over the coming years that that's something that we'll be coming back to, what is therefore an organisational form; what is it to be a full-time employee? 

[0:17:10] Diane Gherson: I had an interesting discussion with the CEO just last week of a Fortune 50 company, and this was exactly what he was thinking about.  He was saying, "Look, I'm not sure I can offer anything that is so valuable that people would want to stay, and the people I would want to stay would stay, because what you end up with are maybe more risk-averse people, which isn't what you necessarily want in a business that's trying to innovate".  And so he said, "Maybe what we need to do is actually just talk to people about shorter-term contracts, right?  Maybe we should set an assumption that every three years, we're going to have a discussion about whether it still fits your life needs to be in the company, and set up compensation in a way that there is a sort of three-year term, even though it might not be a contract, per se".  In so many countries, that's not possible, but at least make it an open discussion that is had so that what you're doing is you're continuously refreshing even that full-time workforce with people who it's right for them right now in their life stage, to Lynda's point, in their point in their career to be in it full-time.   

The thing that really struck us as we looked at this was we saw people working side-by-side with these freelancers, but the freelancers were working from Bali, and they were finished when they were finished, they were paid for their deliverables.  And the people on the inside, something came up on a Friday afternoon, they had to do it, and they were not working from Bali.  And so, you've got this tension potentially, so you've got to make sure that you're making this attractive, to Lynda's point.  And one company that we talked to, which we mentioned in the article, Saatchi actually decided to offer profit sharing to the people who were on the inside to make them more sort of entrepreneurial and feel like it's their business.  And you're seeing there's a collective here in the US called Ownership Works.  That's starting to take off, this whole idea of, "Hey, let's make it worth people's while to be inside the company, because we want that sense of ownership.  We're going to bring people in all the time that don't own, they just bring their skills, but we want that sense of entrepreneurial ownership.  And so it's possible that we'll start to see more of that change, I don't know, but certainly it's starting to cause people to rethink the whole concept of employment and what it means and what that deal is.   

[0:19:52] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I think I wanted just to reinforce that point about the deal, because that also comes back to the piece we wrote about managers.  And it's very clear in the work that I've been doing on hybrid, which is to say there's all sorts of ways of structuring work right now, and hybrid of course is one.  I tend not to have a view about what's the best way, but what I do have a view on is everybody's got to know what the deal is.  And I think that, as Diane says, what is really important that if you're working full-time or if you're working freelance, you understand what the deal is so you can make an adult, thoughtful decision about whether you join that organisation or not. 

[0:20:31] David Green: What does this mean for organisational structures?  How do you see organisational structures evolving to complement the blended workforce, and the world of work generally is?   

[0:20:44] Lynda Gratton: Well, I think we've touched on it, so it's probably at this stage more of just a recap.  One is, work becomes projects; the second is, individuals develop skills and mastery, which is an area that I'm writing about quite a lot at the moment; and third is that you have workflows.  And we've been talking about this for years.  I'm thinking back to some of my colleagues at London Business School talking about these sorts of organisational structures years ago, but until you had digital platforms, it was almost impossible to deliver on them.  I think sometimes we forget how important these platforms have been to reduce friction, to speed things up, to make things clearer, to bring clarity to situations.  And with those platforms, we can move to the sort of organisational form that we've always dreamt about, project-based, skills-based, flow-based. 

[0:21:41] Diane Gherson: I would just add smaller too, right?  Smaller. 

[0:21:44] Lynda Gratton: Well, yes, who knows?  I mean, we could write another HBR article on that, couldn't we?  Because we've been saying for years that organisations are going to get smaller.  And in fact, what we're finding is they also get bigger.  So, I think what we're going to see, and I'm seeing this in hybrid at the moment, is just a great deal of variety between organisations.  If I were to predict one thing about the future of work, it would be because of all of these different organisational frames, you are going to see a lot of variety between organisations.  I think that's great because what it gives the individual employee is more of a choice about what it is they join.  And as long as you're open about the deal, it comes back again to transparency, you can choose whether you want to stay in a company for your life or you want to come back in and out as a freelancer, because each one of these choices have trade-offs associated with them, trade-offs for the individual, trade-offs for the organisation.  And I think in both of the HBR articles that Diane and I have written, we've tried to help our readers understand the nature of these trade-offs. 

[0:22:53] David Green: One of the things you do, certainly in the latest article, is you bring it to life with your protagonist, Marta.  She's apprehensive about how integrating freelancers at scale will affect the company culture.  Diane, how can organisations go about this challenge?   

[0:24:02] Diane Gherson: Lynda mentioned toxic cultures, and no matter which data you read, it seems like that is pretty pervasive still in organisations, and if not becoming more.  And also I think Gen Z and Millennials have a lower tolerance for what perhaps was grinned and bared in the past.  And if organisations don't rise to that challenge, they won't be able to hang on to their really valuable employees.  That's become really clear, and that's one of the things that Marta has to wrestle with, because she realises that she needs her full-time workforce to be all in.  And while there are things you can offer, benefits and so forth, and you're seeing that, I think one of the interesting ones here is that Bank of America just offered a sabbatical to people with a certain number of years of experience, and the sabbatical is six weeks for those with, I think, 25-plus experience, and then it goes down from there, but that's an add, right?   

But the subtraction is just as important, the things that cause people to just turn off, right, and Marta realises that she needs to focus on that too in order to have the culture carriers that she needs and the people who will jump in at moments when it's necessary that's outside of their brief, their job description.  And I think that was probably the biggest takeaway for us. 

[0:25:33] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I think I just want to really reinforce that.  There's some very interesting data coming out at the moment, and I've written about it in my column for MIT Sloan, which really is that, why do people stay?  Well, actually, flexibility is part of that; I have autonomy over my work.  But I think that we sometimes forget that autonomy is about what happens when you're not working, but actually what's really important is what happens when you are working.  And what people really want now is the idea that that they're part of something that's growing and that they can learn from.  And so, taking all this stuff away is a good thing, taking toxicity away, giving people autonomy; but the thing that you want to put in to the mix is that people feel the organisation is growing, they're growing, their skills are growing.  And that fundamentally is a leadership narrative.   

So, that's one of the reasons why I think leaders -- we talked about managers in our earlier HBR article -- are absolutely crucial, but I think we're beginning to see, I don't know, Diane, if you would agree with this, but a real refocus on the role of leaders as the narrator of the growth of the organisation.  David, you can see how HBR articles come between us, can't you?  You just heard the genesis of one! 

[0:26:59] Diane Gherson: Yeah, I mean I agree.  I think this issue of having so much on the manager's plate is one of the biggest ones, because if they're not feeling a win-win for themselves, then their employees aren't going to feel that either.  Again, AI is coming to the rescue, as we mentioned in our first article, but now you're starting to see the ability to do coaching at scale to teams using Gen AI just starting to emerge, and that will take some of the burden off the manager too. 

[0:27:28] David Green: We ask a lot of managers, don't we?  And the managerial role seems to be becoming increasingly complex.  Yes, technology is helping, but how, Lynda, coming to you first, how does the manager's role need to evolve to support the shift in workforce composition? 

[0:27:44] Lynda Gratton: Well, we looked at a number of areas, and in many ways, this resonates with the conversation, David, we're already having, which is we saw the manager's role evolving as part of the digital workflow.  One of the things we saw, for example, is that some companies have actually separated the role of the manager into managing work and managing people, but you can't really do that unless you've digitalised your workflow.  So, these fundamental structural issues are really important.  And then you can, for example, make it clearer that some people have a job which is about managing the work itself, some people have a job that's more about people.  I think as Diane has said earlier, the role of coaching and support becomes very important in the manager, and you have to give people space to do that and acknowledge it.  And again, we saw in some companies that the coaching became a really important part of the managerial role.  It just wasn't something that was seen as, "Oh, you do it when you've got time", it's absolutely central to your role.  And in some cases, as Diane said, that's happening at scale, that the capacity to coach is happening at scale.   

Then finally, we saw the role of a manager to actually think about the whole organisation in terms of its capabilities and skills, and to really encourage the transfer of skills between parts of the company.  So, rather than the manager being a hoarder of talent, the manager then becomes assessed in part on how you built your own talent that then became important for the rest of the company.  So, it's a new type of job, and we think a really exciting job, but it is a job that requires structural change and also develop mental support. 

[0:29:37] David Green: And suggests also that the, I don't like to call it this, but you'll know what I mean when I say it, it also suggests that the manager's scorecard needs to change, as you said, influencing things like coaching and development and the ability to almost incubate talent and let it flow to other parts of the of the organisation as well.   

[0:29:55] Diane Gherson: And you're starting to see that.  I mean, I was very interested to see how many companies now are looking at, are you developing the skills of your people; and asking their people, has your manager encouraged you to develop your skills?  And the same thing around career conversations and giving meaningful feedback.  You're starting to see that pop up in surveys and then managers being held accountable.  And at IBM, we took the bottom quartile of people in that category and said, "You need to go to training.  And if you don't go to training or you don't improve, you're still in the bottom quartile the next year, that means that we should question whether you should be a manager".  And that was a very frank discussion and it really rang home when the first 100 got fired in India, fired as managers, because they were just resolutely in the bottom quartile and not improving.  Because manager isn't a status anymore, it's actually a job.  It's a really important job, and it's not something that you just wear as a shoulder badge, making you more important, which I think in many cultures continues to still persist. 

[0:31:07] Lynda Gratton: When Diane and I first talked about that experience, it seems a bit sort of tough.  And then you just remind yourself of the dreadful impact that bad managers have on the people around them.  The toxicity that you see in organisations is very often created by poor managers.  And so, although it feels tough to say, "You have no role here", actually it's much better for the organisation to not have those toxic managers who do an enormous amount of damage.  I love, Diane, your idea about the licence to manage, "Do you have a licence to manage?" 

[0:31:47] Diane Gherson: Yeah, licence to hire, actually, licence to hire. 

[0:31:51] Lynda Gratton: Oh, licence to hire, yeah. 

[0:31:52] Diane Gherson: Yeah, a certification that we gave managers, and they weren't able to hire without getting that certification, which of course includes a lot of anti-bias training and hiring for specific competencies, and so forth. 

[0:32:06] David Green: Technology, we've talked a little bit about it.  It's going to play a big part and is playing a big part in making the blended workforce successful.  We've talked about some of them, so maybe we can bring them together here and maybe talk about some of the advances that we have.  What technological advancements do you think are crucial for further supporting this, and are you seeing any evidence at the moment of these platforms, Diane? 

[0:32:30] Diane Gherson: Yeah.  So, I think that the digital workplaces that are out there where everyone is doing their work on the same platform, and asynchronously or synchronously, that has enabled managers, as I said before, to have visibility into the workflow and to unlock problems that are coming up and to redirect, and so forth.  So, I think that's critical.  It's critical anyway when you've got a remote workforce, frankly.  And so, this I think is number one.  Number two is, you've really got to have an ability to find the skills that you need, so you've got to have access to platforms.  There's some really good ones out there.  What we're starting to see are more specialised platforms coming out, and that is just really starting to emerge, I think, more and more as companies start to realise that they don't have the same vetting procedure as they might have for an employee. 

[0:33:34] Lynda Gratton: I mean, it's a fascinating topic and it's one that Diane and I have talked about a lot because both of us, in our different perspectives, are sort of in the centre of the development of these ecosystems; I, because I sit on the advisory board of one of the major investors; Diane, because she also does that and also is on the board of some of the platforms themselves.  So, it's one of the things I try every now and again to draw the ecosystem of these platforms to get a sense of the development of them.  If I think about my MBA students, so many of them are building platforms at the moment in this field.  And people who would normally have gone into investment banking and would have gone straight into Goldman are now building platforms, not always successfully, by the way, but they are.   

It seems to me that there are three areas where these platforms are going to make a big difference.  The first, which is the one we've spoken of the most today, which is the connections across the labour market, so reducing friction from individuals to organisations, that managing that flow of talent.  The second, of course, is inside the organisation, which is the workflow that we've spoken about and the digitalisation of the workflow.  But the third, which I think is the one that's emerging fast, which is the verification platforms, because if you move into a skill economy where people are moving in and out, how do you verify those skills?  Generally, you would say, "Well, I've been at IBM for such and such a time", or IBM would be the badge.  But now we're saying we're individuals, and that turns out to be much more difficult than you think.  It's (a) having any agreement about what skills are, (b) saying you're certified, I think that certification is going to be really important, the badging.   

Then finally, one of the things we realised when we talked to freelancers is that they've got to learn, how do they learn fast from each other?  And so, I think that the final area that we're seeing real development in the ecosystem is the learning platforms, that both deliver learning to individuals, but I think more importantly, support the development of communities of practice so that freelancers can work from each other, and in a sense, create the sort of atmosphere that you'd get in a high-performing organisation.  So, it's definitely an area that's really worth watching.  Another possible article for us, Diane?! 

[0:36:03] Diane Gherson: Well, we've got one even in our own field, right?  RJ Milner started People Analytics and that's exactly what he does, he creates a community. 

[0:36:10] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, so it's definitely an ecosystem that you have to watch very, very carefully; very fast evolution. 

[0:36:17] David Green: Very true.  Before we talk about potential next work, although I think you've covered about three or four different areas of further exploration, is there anything that we haven't talked about this topic that maybe we've missed around the blended workforce?  That's the first one. 

[0:36:33] Lynda Gratton: I've got one, yeah.   

[0:36:34] David Green: And then the second one, probably related to that, is how do you think this will evolve?  Because I know in your article, I think it was quite consistent actually, McKinsey, Gartner, Upwork, they're all around 35% to 40% currently of the workforce working freelance, which is a big, big number and is only set to get bigger.  So again, Lynda, you said you had one. 

[0:36:53] Lynda Gratton: Well, the only thing I was going to mention, David, is this notion of experimentation, and I can see it in the hybrid.  I also follow the evolution of hybrid work.  And in both of these evolution of work forms, you see a lot of experimentation taking place.  And in some cases, you see it between companies, you compare one company with another.  But also interestingly, sometimes you see it within organisations.  So, M&C Saatchi, for example, have got, I don't know, maybe 60 business units and they actually experiment with using freelancers.  So, one, and it's one that we spoke about in the article, is almost entirely freelance, and then there'll be another which uses no freelancers at all, and there'll be a lot of variety in between.  And it seems to me that when you are moving fast, as we are now, with freelance or with hybrid, the more that you can experiment, the more that you can learn from what works, what doesn't work, and start to put a sort of stake in the ground. 

So, that would be my point, which actually also links, David, to your second question, which is where are we going?  I would still say we're in an experimental mode as organisations.  Think particularly about trade-offs.  Quite often when you experiment, what you realise is there are trade-offs that you have to face up to.  I see those in hybrid even now that trade-offs in hybrid are still being talked about.  And so, understanding what's possible, understanding the trade-offs, understanding therefore what the deal is, that's the sort of experimental cycle that I think we're going to see more companies engaging in. 

[0:38:32] Diane Gherson: I think one of the things we haven't talked about is, what happens to the ecosystem that Lynda just talked about, right?  I mean, I think we've sort of all grown up in a world where there are enterprises, they do the work, and then there are these sort of intermediaries that help you do the work.  And whether it be a search firm, whether it be a travel agency, whether it be a vendor management system or a systems integrator, right, they've all evolved and they've all been sort of contracts, and that playbook is well known.  We're now entering into a new phase where we're in new playbooks.  Now obviously, we've already done the search firm one.  Many companies have, because of the nature and the capability of platforms, they no longer need a search firm for many of their searches, they can do it internally.  And so, the role of search firms has evolved, and they've become more assessment-focused and things like that.  So, you've already seen a shift in that environment.   

I mentioned vendor management organisations.  You're going to start to see a change there because, again, we can use the platforms.  Will they continue to exist, or will they have to reinvent themselves?  And what does that mean for the enterprise?  You've got the same thing with systems integrators, right?  I mean, we interviewed many companies that were using freelancers instead of systems integrating firms because they got the people they really wanted.  And consulting firms, that's the other one.  So, you already have one, I think, called Catalant, where people who didn't like the whole career path inside of a consulting firm, where you have to do and then sell, and so forth, but were just really good consultants, joined the Catalant platform.  And now, you can hire the really best consultant without paying nearly as much.  But they're not a partner and they don't have to sell because, guess what, everyone goes to the platform.  

So, you're starting to see this ecosystem evolve and it's just going to require HR, I think, to be able to manage those kinds of relationships and in a way that's quite different than the way procurement managed those other relationships.  And I think we are only just at the cusp of that. 

[0:40:42] David Green: So, Diane, following on from that, it's obviously an exciting time to be an HR practitioner, but probably a daunting one as well.  Any sort of advice or guidance you'd give your former brethren as they think about this? 

[0:41:01] Diane Gherson: So, I think it's really all about living on the edge, always looking at other organisations, what they're doing, not just looking internally, not just focusing on what HR is doing but what other fields are doing, and building relationships, and building out a network outside of the organisation with some of these organisations to get to understand what they're doing.  I'm on a consortium that just -- I basically just listen in to what they're talking about, about freelancers, because it's so interesting.  I heard a Fortune 100 CIO, and I'll leave you with this one to kind of rack your brains on, but he said, "I think talent is becoming like an electrical grid, where you pull what you need, but when you don't need as much capacity, you can give it back".  And I thought, "Whoa!" that is such an interesting analogy, but that came from a CIO, not from an HR person.  So, I think the more that we can listen to what other users of talent are saying, that the more we'll be able to think creatively. 

[0:42:11] David Green: Is there any upcoming work we can look forward to from you both in the future, either together, or maybe something that you might individually be working on at the moment that's about to emerge? 

[0:42:21] Lynda Gratton: Well, the piece that I'm working on at the moment is productivity, and I ran a webinar just recently.  We're running out a worldwide jam on 11 September, yeah, 10 and 11 September.  I think this will be out by then.  If you're around, please join it.  We're expecting 1,000 people to come online in one of our research jams to talk about productivity.  So, that's where I am at the moment.  I'm writing a book, but I've been spending a lot of time writing it.  It's now, I think, on its third or fourth year of writing, which is about how do you build a great working life.  So, that's me. 

[0:42:58] Diane Gherson: It's a great book! 

[0:43:00] David Green: Something to look forward to.  And Diane, what are you working on next? 

[0:43:03] Diane Gherson: I don't have any plans.  I'm still learning a lot about what's going on in this world, but I don't have an immediate plan.  So, I've been focusing quite a bit on the role of human capital risk for boards, because boards don't have the faintest idea what metrics to look for and what they should be asking for, and HR people are still not there in terms of developing a really good dashboard of cultural health to share with their boards.  And so, I'm doing a fair amount of work on that topic on both sides of the table, and as a board member. 

[0:43:40] David Green: Well, I'm going to stay with you, Diane.  How can workforce analytics enhance HR decision-making and drive business success? 

[0:43:4] Diane Gherson: Like, in general, not just around the freelancing?   

[0:43:50] David Green: In general, but you can bring it back to the freelancing if you want to as well! 

[0:43:54] Diane Gherson: Oh, heavens.  I mean, I think it's the engine room for HR, and it just should be at the centre of everything that HR does.  It certainly was for us at IBM, and it enabled us most importantly to forecast and deploy skills in a way that was a win-win for the employee and for the business.  I think that's at the heart of what workforce analytics can do, understanding with the sentiment analysis and skills, but also understanding what the business needs and translating that.  And that's the engine room. 

[0:44:34] David Green: Yeah, the engine room, that's good.  Lynda, anything to add from you on that? 

[0:44:38] Lynda Gratton: Well, only to add, I love Diane's engine room.  And I think it operates at three levels.  It operates the level of the individual to help them understand more about themselves; it operates at the level of the team to understand where they're working, how they connect with others; and it operates at the level of the organisation.  And I think those three levels of analysis are just incredibly important.  If you want to be the best that you could be, you need that sort of information and feedback. 

[0:45:06] David Green: What a fantastic conversation.  It's always great to speak to each of you; it's even better when you're both together.  So, thank you very much for sharing your time, expertise and examples of work, with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  For those that want to follow you on social media or connect with you or learn more about your work, what's the best way for them to reach you?  Lynda, I'll start with you. 

[0:45:30] Lynda Gratton: Well, I have a website and I'm also relatively active on LinkedIn, so if you just drop me a LinkedIn, join me on LinkedIn.  And I actually post, I write a lot, so I post all of that on LinkedIn, so it's always a good way to connect to me.  I do have a reasonably good website as well. 

[0:45:47] David Green: You do, and you also mentioned your column in MIT. 

[0:45:51] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I have a column in MIT and I have a column in the Times of London.  I'm a columnist for the Times of London. 

[0:45:56] David Green: Fantastic.  And, Diane, how can people stay in touch with you and learn more about what you're doing? 

[0:46:01] Diane Gherson: I've none of those things, I just have a LinkedIn profile.  But I would love to have people join my LinkedIn community and I would look forward to connecting with that. 

[0:46:10] David Green: Well, Diana and Lynda, thank you very much for being on the show today, and I look forward to hopefully seeing each of you in person at some point in the future as well. 

[0:46:19] Lynda Gratton: Thank you, David. 

[0:46:20] Diane Gherson: Always fun, always delightful, David.  Thank you. 

Remote WorkDavid GreenHybrid Work, remote workingComment