Labour Clouds

'By 2040, I’m pretty confident that every skilled worker will have their own signpost. You will be your own enterprise, in a much more meaningful way than the lip service of today.'

Stephen DeWitt

This was a pretty fascinating look at what the future of work could look like, featuring Stephen DeWitt of Work Market, the rapidly growing platform that enables large organisations to create 'labour clouds' that connect skilled workers with tasks that the business needs fulfilling:

'The platform integrates all types of workers — contractors, full-time employees, and vendors — and parameterizes tasks and workflows against any number of data points and business rules. In short, Work Market hopes to instrument a wholesale rethinking of how work gets done in our society — from a world of traditional corporate employment to a world where every skilled worker can act as an enterprise of one.'

We hear a lot about the so-called on-demand or gig economy (Uber, Taskrabbit, Amazon Turk etc). There are potential downsides to this way of working that we absolutely need to be aware of, but it does strike me that digital has proved particularly adept at facilitating new types of relationships and efficiencies in all fields, and work is one area that still retains potentially big inefficiences. The scale of Work Market's ambition is impressive. Done right I do think that we could see a wholesale rethink in how work should work, and with it a reshaping of the operations and structure of businesses the like of which we haven't seen in decades.

Image courtesy