Open Talent by John Winsor

• The post-Covid era has been an even bigger black swan, one that calls into question all our assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. According to Taleb, black swan events contain three elements:

  • The element of surprise, which catches everyone off guard
  • Impacts and outcomes that are substantial, with potentially global repercussions
  • The appearance of inevitability after the fact, given all the relevant signals and data
• Leaders who want to change their own minds may want to consider an important reframing of recent events. The millions of dissatisfied employees who are joining the Great Resignation aren’t rejecting work.

• They are rejecting jobs that pay them less than they feel they are worth and that constrain their creativity and stifle their potential. They are looking for ways to do more while doing better for themselves. The organizations that have been experimenting with open talent strategies and outside in innovation are capturing them and, as a result, continuing to push forward and succeed.

• How to change your mind.

  • Disruption offers new opportunities for grand change, especially since the supply of talent has already made the shift. Companies must begin to adapt to talent because talent is no longer adapting to corporations. Platforms fundamentally change how workers engage with their employers and vice versa, shifting the power structure so that talent has the edge. By removing the idea of a physical workspace, open talent is no longer hampered by office politics and can thrive, focused on the things that motivate people the most.
• Companies that can move quickly enough to profit from change don’t bog themselves down with a ton of bureaucracy when they set out to innovate. They don’t micromanage the process from the top down, and they don’t insist on owning all the means they employ to succeed. Their teams are light on their feet, have a sense of ownership over outcomes, and are empowered to make their own decisions and recruit all the help they need.

What Are the Goals of Your Center of Excellence?

• A COE’s overarching goal should be to take full advantage of all the talent opportunities that are available. Every organization is unique, but we suggest you start with these three principles:

  • Understand your readiness. While many people inside your organization may be using open talent already, there can be, as we’ve seen, many blind spots and roadblocks when you try to institutionalize it. The better you understand your readiness, the better your chances of a successful adoption.
  • Be prepared; things evolve rapidly. Understand that the ecosystem of open talent is quickly evolving, just as technology is. With the emergence of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), there has been a profusion of solutions to compliance concerns and security issues. These solutions dramatically remove the friction of adoption. A COE is necessary to stay on top of these changes and be ready to implement those that best address the needs of the organization.
  • Fit your digital transformation to your talent strategy. In many companies, talent acquisition is siloed between HR, procurement, and innovation. The COE should digitally transform all these silos by using internal and external platforms.
• Remember that open talent is about removing friction. It frees your people from the bureaucratic encumbrances that prevent them from moving faster than your competitors, from getting help from outsiders when they need it, and from capturing and applying the wisdom of crowds to the toughest problems. Companies that use those capabilities are like boxers, bobbing and weaving through punches, agilely sidestepping disruptions, and continually floating and testing new ideas and approaches.

• Accordingly, when developing your open talent strategy, keep in mind the following elements: responsiveness, agility, speed, efficiency, commitment, and staying emergent. These are attributes as opposed to goals; think of them as benchmarks to guide your decisionmaking.

• Assess. Before you can figure out where you’re going, you must know where you are. By asking the right questions, the COE leads the assessment process by helping leaders understand the organizational changes that are needed to develop open talent solutions.

• Learn. This phase aims to use education, culture, and communications to create a coalition of the curious and willing. It’s easy, especially for talent innovators, to race ahead quickly with new ideas or models. But such speed only works when a single entrepreneur is leading the charge or needs convincing. When the proposed changes are companywide, people need to understand what they are getting into and why. The COE lays the groundwork for the program through workshops and formal and informal communications.

• When companies encourage and support mobility within the organization, employees feel more valued and empowered to develop their skills continually-and therefore more likely to stay on the job.

• A company can lose good open talent candidates if it has rigid onboarding processes, especially those that take twelve weeks or longer. If at all possible, rearchitect your internal procedures such as background checks, drug testing, and IT security protocols to cut down on time–or allow the platform to carry out some of this due diligence.

• The biggest opportunity for you when you start your open talent journey is to tap into your current team to help you solve problems and do the tasks you need. There is always a combination of cognitive surplus and people inside your organization looking for mobility with upskilling and project work.

• Our research shows that, using platforms, it typically takes four days to hire a freelancer to do the work you need instead of the average two plus months to find the right talent in this talent-constrained environment through traditional methods. We also find that the freelance talent you hire on a platform is typically 30 percent less expensive and 40 percent more productive than the internal employee performing the same tasks. You see this massive gain in productivity because you’re hiring freelancers to do a task, not to play a role in the company. You are paying them to do the work you want, not to spend time at corporate meetings, office gatherings, and the like.

• External talent clouds for strategic advantages, cost savings, and flexibility. The ETC is a term we use for this growing practice; it’s an efficient and cost-effective way that companies can obtain the specialized talents they need from outside sources without sacrificing quality or productivity.

• How does an ETC work? The key to success in this phase rests on strong and trusting relationships with the right platform partners. Our recommendation is to take a two-fold approach. Revisit how you managed your full-time staff and determine which of these roles are better suited for freelance workers. The goal here should be to become agile yet to remain focused on the indispensability of certain positions for the company’s operations to run smoothly.

• Based on our analysis of research conducted by Michael Menietti and Karim Lakhani on Topcoder contest submissions across a range of software development projects, we’ve found that you don’t need hundreds of submissions to obtain that extreme value. You only need about twenty-two entrants.

• developing innovation strategies, firms must consider whether to make or buy them. In general, companies do not rely on any one strategy exclusively. One study found that 72 percent of firms that describe themselves as innovative actually rely on both making strategies and buying them. But there’s a third possible approach. Innovation contests add a fresh perspective to the make-or-buy discussion.

• Since 2018, when the platform Unilever uses-flex-work-was launched, the company has unlocked half a million hours of employee engagement and has seen a 41 percent improvement in overall productivity. Flex-work offers other benefits as well, such as helping employees whose jobs are in jeopardy because of automation to seek out opportunities for reskilling.

• flex-work platform was developed by Gloat and is used by over a hundred companies globally. Its founder, Ben Reuveni, got the idea for the platform when he was working at IBM and realized that it would be easier for him to find a job at a different company than it was to take his career in a new direction at IBM

• So, they did something much simpler. Sharma started an Excel spreadsheet with projects that his team needed help with and distributed it in a weekly email throughout the technology organization. Lo and behold, those projects were suddenly getting done-one hundred of them over two years, with a success rate of 95 percent. All that it required was getting the word out within SEI, says Sharma: “Now, managers start by looking for talent through a simple internal talent mechanism before they talk about going externally. And our talent is really engaged, as they have learned to use these projects as a way to learn and expand their career opportunities.”

• Break down silos. Traditional organizations have rigid talent hierarchies in which employees’ skills are hoarded. This structure prevents the overall workforce from achieving its full potential. ITMs (Internal talent marketplace) break down silos and allow for crossfertilization.

• Improve engagement and retention. If people in your workforce don’t see a future with your organization, they’re going to find somewhere else to build one. ITMs empower employees to move laterally and vertically and to learn new skills and seek out new opportunities that align with their passion, skills, and ambition. Empowering your employees in this way helps your organization meet its goals.

• Encourage experiential learning. Traditional development efforts fall short because they fail to include experiential learning (such as offering ways to learn by doing, rather than just by reading or listening to someone else). These efforts also ignore the employee’s acquired knowledge and ability to apply new skills in a real-time setting. ITMs create a unified workforce system that can act as a single source for skills management

• ITMs are not merely the next evolution of HR technology. They transform organizations by offering employees who have a cognitive sur plus the opportunity to work on projects they desire. In effect, these marketplaces also help employees with upskilling and reskilling while allowing them to maintain a sense of innovation and opportunities for professional growth. The ITM is best used to retain employees and can be quite powerful when combined with remote work and skill-building opportunities. For the enterprise, unlocking agility, breaking down silos and capturing the cognitive surplus are just a few benefits.