This document provides a summary of a presentation given by Rawn Shah at the IBM Academy of Technology 3rd Conference on Humans and Technology in 2011. The presentation discusses how the nature of work is evolving from traditional full-time employment models to more flexible models incorporating freelance and contingent work. It notes that lines between work and personal lives are blurring as people can work remotely and across time zones. The presentation argues this shift requires new work skills for managing workloads, networks, identity, reputation and personal data across different roles and employers. It also discusses how organizations can support these new work environments and skills through social business capabilities, transparency on data use, and training in future workforce skills.

1. IBM Academy of Technology
3rd Conference on Humans and Technology: Adaptation and Impact
Oct 12-14, 2011
The Blurring of Job Loyalties, Social
Collaboration, and Personal Freedom:
The Future of our Relationships with Workers
Rawn Shah
Social Business Strategist
IBM Collaboration Solutions
rawn@us.ibm.com
twitter.com/rawn
linkd.in/RawnShah

2. 1. How we work is
evolving

3. The Philosophy of Work in the Sloan Age
“The best way to harness human talent is through full-time,
exclusive employment relationships where people are paid for the
amount of time they spend at a common location. They should be
organized in stable hierarchies where they are evaluated primarily
through the judgment of their superiors, and what and how they do
their jobs is prescribed.”
- Michael Chui, Senior Fellow, McKinsey Global Institute
How often “Full-time, exclusive employment relationship.”
What for “Paid for the amount of time [spent at work]”
The Future of Work,
Where “A common location” Aspen Institute, 2010
For whom “Organized in stable hierarchies”
By whom “Evaluated primarily through judgment of their superiors”
How “What and how they do their jobs is prescribed”

4. Flexibility options for Full-time Employees
– On-the-road (e.g., salesforce)
– Work from home (permanent or part of the week)
– Remote & mobility offices
– Client sites (e.g., services business)
– Flexible work hours
– Short-term assignment redeployment

5. Business Agility Requires a Flexible
Work Environment
• To attract talent
– To draw creative skills and create an attractive employment environment
– To retain skilled employees or hire location-inflexible ones
– Generational differences are also driving the need for more flexibility in the workplace. The
younger generation of workers simply doesn’t view work the way their parents do1
• To distribute talent
– To access expertise from across the organizations
– To encourage individual innovation & idea cross-pollination
– To create career development opportunities
– To allow flexibility to work across many time zones & geo-locations
• To support client needs
– By working in client environments (location or hours)
– To reach client markets

6. Flexibility through the Contingent Workforce
• Contingent workforce: Contractors, Outsourced work, Consultants,
Temporary employees, Freelancers
• 14% of employers across the globe now turn to contingent employees
to:
– try out candidates prior to hiring for permanent positions,
– provide longer-term flexibility,
– quickly find talented people possessing specialized skills, and
– outsource non-core business functions
World of Work Insight,
• “Demand for specialist contractors and outsourced workers will Manpower Inc. 2009
rise, especially in knowledge-driven areas where technology
allows talented people to work from anywhere in the world.” 2
• 58% of employers said they will hire more temporary and part-
time workers – McKinsey Global Institute, Growth and Renewal in
the US: Retooling America’s economic engine, Feb 2011

7. Sloan Age Freelance
employment employment
Exclusive to one Non-exlcusive to a single
organization organization or org unit
Flexible hours –
Fixed hours – Time-based
Outcome-based
Choice of contract
Pre-defined location(s) of
defines location
work
requirements
Defined reporting Per contract Reporting
hierarchy definition & duration
Benefits offered by one Freelancer must manage
exclusive organization own benefits
Pays self-employment taxes
Taxation based on
exclusive employer
(varies per country)
Bonus pay determined by Bonus pay determined by
employer efficiency

8. Sloan Age Freelance
employment employment
Employer may direct who Freedom to choose
they should interact with contract
Other employees may Freelancer has to build
provide guidance, their own network of
mentoring or assistance mentors
Employer defines work Freedom to choose work
items & projects items & contracts
Employer may dictate
Specific work steps are
specific work steps
not defined (high flexibility)
(little process flexibility)
Work results / quality
Work results / quality
determined by identified
determined per project
superiors
Employers often offer Freelancer must develop
pathways to career and their career and grow skills
skills development on their own

9. Contingency unfortunately considered as
an option mostly by disengaged employees
“26 percent of workers indicated an “Research from the Center for
interest in becoming an independent Work-Life Policy shows that
contractor or consultant. between June 2007 and
December 2008, the number of
60 percent of those interested in employees expressing loyalty
becoming an independent contractor to employers plunged from
or consultant are either passive or 95% to 39% 4
disengaged in their current jobs.
Another report indicates the
Measuring the forces of
long-term change: The This suggests that the workers number of highly disengaged
2010 Shift Index
Deloitte Center for the most prone to considering the employees has increased from
Edge, 2010
option of self-employment are 1:10 to 1:5 since the first half of
generally those who are least 20075.
engaged in their current work.” 3
-- World of Work Insight, Manpower Inc.
-- Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change, 2009
Deloitte Center for the Edge, 2010

10. But why?
“Why would you hesitate becoming an
independent contractor?”
Need steady/guaranteed income 58%
Need for health insurance coverage 50%
Given the economy, I prefer to maintain my employment as is 47%
The benefits with my current profession make it worthwhile to stay 45%
I am comfortable in my current profession and see no need to change it 33%
I am not comfortable selling, which would be necessary to be successful 25%
Income potential is too low 15%
Other 4%
Source: 2010 Deloitte Worker Passion / Inter-firm Knowledge Flow Survey (n=2898); Administered by Synovate

11. Sloan Age Post-Sloan Age Freelance
employment employment employment
Exclusive to one Alliance to one parent org – Non-exlcusive to a single
organization non-exclusive to org unit organization or org unit
Flexible hours – Flexible hours –
Fixed hours – Time-based
Outcome-based Outcome-based
Choice of project Choice of contract
Pre-defined location(s) of
defines location defines location
work
requirements requirements
Defined reporting Per project reporting Per contract Reporting
hierarchy definition & duration definition & duration
Benefits offered by one Benefits offered by one Freelancer must manage
exclusive organization exclusive organization own benefits
Pays self-employment taxes
Taxation based on Taxation based on
exclusive employer exclusive employer
(varies per country)
Bonus pay factored by
Bonus pay determined by Bonus pay determined by
efficiency but also
employer efficiency
determined by employer

12. Sloan Age Post-Sloan Age Freelance
employment employment employment
Freedom to interact with
Employer may direct who Freedom to choose
relevant people per project
they should interact with contract
requirements
Other employees may Employer provides network Freelancer has to build
provide guidance, framework; employees their own network of
mentoring or assistance build networks themselves mentors
Employer defines project
Employer defines work Freedom to choose work
goals; employees choose
items & projects items & contracts
between projects
Employer may dictate Employer may define work
Specific work steps are
specific work steps practices, but allow
not defined (high flexibility)
(little process flexibility) flexibility to do steps
Work results / quality
Work results / quality Work results / quality
determined by identified
determined per project determined per project
superiors
Employers often offer Employers often offer Freelancer must develop
pathways to career and pathways to career and their career and grow skills
skills development skills development on their own

13. What becomes possible in the Post-Sloan
age?
• Collective Intelligence: From Theory to Practice, an upcoming
study from the IBM Institute for Business Value, describes new
models of work:
• Contests & Challenges, Idea Management, Collaborative Information
Mapping, Template-based Design, Parallel Tasking, Communities of
Practice, Serious Games, Distributed Q&A
• Open Innovation - company-external collaborations and business
models: Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation (Harvard Business
Press, 2005)
• Workers may now come from customers, business partners, even
competitors collaborating towards shared end goals, for financial or non-
financial motivation

14. Virtual Workers are already
worldwide
• Virtual Goods production / sale
– Estimate for virtual goods market: $6B worldwide by 20136 – Piper
Jaffrey, Inc.
• Virtual worker populations
– Full-time “Gold farmers” for online games in China: ~100K (in 2005) 7 –
New York Times
– InnoCentive = ~12MM ‘solvers’ possible8 (2011)
– Amazon MTurk = ~400K workers at any one time9 (2009)
– oDesk = ~1.8MM hours worked, 97K jobs posted in month of July 201110
• Creating a variation of Labor mobility & the contigent workforce
– Geographic immobility, Virtual occupational mobility
– People can live where they want, while they work elsewhere, without
physically moving around

15. “The early examples of Web-enabled collective
intelligence are not the end of the story, but just the
beginning. As computing and communication
capabilities continue to improve, there will be a
myriad of other examples like these in coming
decades.”
• Malone, T., Laubacher, R., and Dellarocas, C., 2009,
Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence,
Center for Collective Intelligence,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

16. 2. The line between our jobs and
our personal lives is blurring

17. Blogging or
Social
freelance
networks
writing
of contacts
Participation Live events,
in online meetings
communities
Personally-
owned Crowdsourcing /
A New Class of devices at work Collective Intelligence
Issues Co-working and
Location-
data
for shared physical spaces
sharing
Personal Life Work-Life Balance Personal Life
Work Life Work Life
IT / Working with
computing Remote
access coworkers &
employees
Workload
exceeds
the
Work-related
workday
Stress management Computerization
Working of Job tasks
across timezones
Central Issue: Central Issue:
“Take your work “Please bring your
home” personal life to work”

18. Personal Life
Work Life
IBM Institute for Business Value study:
“Today’s CMO: Innovating or Following?”
3M Australia: Corporate character grows more critical in the networked age…
‘Every employee has become a touch-point for the brand’
“We want employees to be excited about the company’s values and history as an
innovator, so they can be a constant touch-point for the brand essence.”12
Employers leveraging
“Please bring your
their Employees’
personal life to work”
“beyond-the-employer”
trust network

19. A New Class of Issues
• Personal data from online activity creates
“an emerging new asset class touching all aspects of society…
personal data will be the new ‘oil’ ” 13
– Individuals’ direct or indirect actions generated 70% of digital data in
20108 (IDC)
Personal Data: The
– By 2020, digital records will be 44 times larger than in 2009 (IDC)14 Emergence of a New Asset
Class
– Break from ‘industrial-age’ view of people as “consumers” World Economic Forum
2011
• Need an End user-centric view of transparency, trust, control,
value
• Juggling priorities and loyalties – to employer, to self, to
communities
• To keep with the pace of social network activity, there’s
increasing need for frequent of task & context-switching and
Future Work Skills 2020
cognitive load management15 of these priorities and loyalties Institute for the Future +
Univ of Phoenix Research
Institute, 2011

20. Berkman Center’s Project VRM & Goals
• Provide tools for individuals to manage their relationships with organizations.
• Make individuals the collection centers for their own data, so that transaction histories, health
records, membership details, service contracts, and other forms of personal data are no longer
scattered throughout a forest of silos.
• Give individuals the ability to share data selectively, without disclosing more personal information
than the individual allows.
• Give individuals the ability to control how their data is used by others, and for how long.
• Give individuals the ability to assert their own terms of service, reducing or eliminating the need
for organization-written terms of service that nobody reads and everybody has to "accept" anyway.
• Give individuals means for expressing demand in the open market, outside any organizational silo,
without disclosing any unnecessary personal information.
• Make individuals platforms for business by opening the market to many kinds of third party
services that serve buyers as well as sellers
• Base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs

21. 3. Our Work skills need to change

22. Managing our personal flow of work
& attention
• Between tasks within your primary job
• Between projects for your manager
• Between projects for multiple organizational stakeholders
• Between projects with external partners, customers, etc. for your job
• Between projects in multiple jobs
• Between crowdsourcing projects
• Between internal and external social networks

23. Future Work Skills 2020
Institute for the Future +
Univ of Phoenix Research
Institute, 2011

24. Managing Workloads, Identity, Reputation
and Personal Data
• A new environment for how people work:
– Flexible Full-time and Contingent employees
– Collective Intelligence & Open Innovation
– Beyond-the-Employer Professional Social Networks
• Emphasizes New Skills & Work Factors
– Manage your Flow of work
– Manage your Relationship & Trust networks
– Manage your Identity, Expertise & Reputation
– Manage your Personal Data
– Leverage your Social Analytics

25. Future work environments need
Social Business capabilities

26. Corporate Digital Citizenship
as a Quality-of-Life differentiator
Organizations need to support workers:
• Refactor work to outcome-based, collective intelligence, social business methods
– Improved employee work freedoms as an employee engagement driver and recruiting
differentiator: assignment/reporting, work styles, work hour flexibility, personal projects,
worker passion
• Incentivize it appropriately
– How would the average person get paid reasonably with this approach to work?
– How can they excel and earn likewise?
• Facilities for managing and monitoring personal data use
– Improving transparency, trust, control and value per End user-centric view
– End user-centric social analytics about “my actions, and use of my data”
• Commitment to worker digital reputation building as part of career development
– Don’t just make it a tagline
– Help your employees to demonstrate and develop their reputation
• Train in Future workforce skills
– When did your employee last get training in Sensemaking and Social/Emotional
Intelligence?

27. Corporate Digital Citizenship
as a Quality-of-Life differentiator
Workers need to support the organization’s goals:
• Support Corporate ‘asks’ of personal network & trust relationships
• Adjust to realities of flexible changing work
• Emphasize Corporate values of trust, integrity, influence through expertise
• Awareness of corporate policies on social media use, online activity
monitoring and maintaining privacy
• Educate yourself and Learn socially – learn while you apply future
workforce skills

28. Rawn Shah
rawn@us.ibm.com
twitter.com/rawn
linkd.in/RawnShah

29. References
The content in this presentation does not represent the views of IBM corp., and are solely the responsibility of the author
1. Manpower Inc., World of Work Insight, Nov 2009, www.manpower.com/researchcenter
2. Ibid
3. John Hagel, John Seely-Brown, Duleesha Kulasooriya, Dan Elbert, Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change: The 2010 Shift Index,
Deloitte Center for the Edge, 2010
4. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down, Harvard Business Press, October 2009
5. Improving Employee Performance in the Economic Downturn, Corporate Executive Board, 2008.
6. Piper Jaffray Inc, “Pay to Play: Paid Internet Services”. Piper Jaffray investment research, July 2009
7. J. Dibbell, Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer, New York Times, June 17, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-
t.html
8. InnoCentive, Facts & Stats, Q2 2011, http://www.innocentive.com/about-innocentive/facts-stats
9. J Ross, L Irani, M.S. Silberman, A. Zaldivar, B. Tomlinson, Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk, CHI 2010,
Apr 2010, http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jwross/pubs/RossEtAl-WhoAreTheCrowdworkers-altCHI2010.pdf
10. oDesk, The oConomy, July 2011, https://www.odesk.com/oconomy/
11. Rawn Shah, The Future of Work, Forbes.com May 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2011/05/17/the-future-of-work/
12. IBM Institute for Business Value, “Today’s CMO: Innovating or Following?”, 2011, http://www-
935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/ibv-cmo-prestudy.html
13. World Economic Forum, “Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class”, Jan 2011,
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_ITTC_PersonalDataNewAsset_Report_2011.pdf
14. IDC. “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” May 201W IDC 2010
15. Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute, “Future Work Skills 2020”, Apr 2011,
https://www.phoenix.edu/research-institute/publications/2011/04/future-work-skills-2020.html