What is the digital workforce?
I just asked it and no one put up their hands
so, I was about to make a speech on the digital workforce
I have a website about the digital workforce
and I thought what is it,
I have no idea what that is a word
If I had to give a short definition,
I wouldn't know.
So, I started Googling online.
And there is nothing in the scientific libraries
that concept is way to new for science to catch up
Then I started looking on Google and
I couldn't really find any definition
of the digital workforce.
Basically, no one knows what the digital workforce is.
We do however,
know that the digital workforce is very important.
This Deloitte study of 2017
digital HR is there on top.
The percentages of respondents rating this trend
"important" or "very important".
Everyone said it was "very important".
But they have no clue what it is.
So I thought it would be good to first
take a look at what the digital workforce
actually is before we start talking about
how we can leverage it and how we can use it
in order to to to make better business
better revenue and in order to reach business goals.
So, it has something to do with mobile
with technology.
When I look at articles
that are written about it,
the term 'revolutionize' occurs quite often.
And it's about digital platforms and apps.
And still, what is the digital workforce.
We still don't know.
So I was trying to figure out
how am I going to define what the digital workforce is
'cause I need to give a keynote in two weeks.
And I still have no idea.
And then I remembered a book that was written about
I think three years ago, 2014.
And I hope some of you have read the book.
And if you haven't read the book yet,
read the book.
'cause if you are interested and excited about digital HR
you really need to read the book.
And I know all of HR people are readers
so check this book.
The book is called 'Exponential Organizations'
by Ismail et al.
And Yuri Van Geest who is one of a co-authors who has
a Dutch background, like myself.
Who has read this book?
No one.
Read it.
In that case, I'll explain what the book is about.
The subtitle says, 'Why new organizations are ten times
better,
faster,
and cheaper than yours,"
and this fits in to the trend that Fortune 500 companies
are starting to disappear at faster and faster rate.
And they are being taken over by Google,
by Facebook,
by Instagram,
by Snapchat,
by
you mention it.
The really, really fast growing companies.
Those companies, they start as start-ups.
And then they become ski ramps.
They start to grow really, really rapidly.
Those companies do something very good that
traditional companies don't do that well.
And this book basically describes
what makes these companies different.
First of all, these companies scale processes and people
so if you are a start-up,
before you can really start your scale work,
when you have a hundred people
added to your platform every day,
or thousands,
or maybe ten thousand people
added to your platform every day.
You need to be very, very efficient
in processing all those requests.
So, before you really start to scale up
you need to be very, very efficient.
So, you make,
you need to make all your processes highly efficient
and also, your people highly efficient.
One person needs to,
if you look at the revenue per employee,
it is highest for Google, for Apple.
Probably, because they have made all the processes
highly, highly efficient.
Second, an exponential organization,
or an organization that grows really really fast,
should be flexible, with real-time data
at low cost, with limited hassle and risk.
And I think a good example to illustrate this is
Richard Branson, when he started with Virgin Airlines.
Richard Branson, I think he got famous
with his Virgin Airlines brand,
but he was already working on it,
with his record label,
and he had a couple of other businesses.
And when he started,
he got the idea of hey I am going to start an airline
that is actually fun and that people enjoy flying with,
he, he gave a call to Boeing.
And he said hello this is Richard Branson speaking,
I would like to
lease a Boeing 737.
And the guy at Boeing said,
"lease a plane, like are you kidding me?"
He said, "No, I want to lease a plane.
I don't want to buy a plane.
I want to lease the plane."
and why did leasing make sense?
First, of all it is a smart business decision.
You don't need the upfront,
money in order to buy the plane.
But second, if Virgin Airlines would have failed
after one or two years,
he would have had to sell the plane.
If it fails, he wouldn't be stuck with a massive aircraft
that would cost him million and millions of US dollars.
So he wanted to lease the plane in order to limit risk
in order to keep the cost low
and in order to be very flexible with it.
Anyway, the the the previous speaker, by the way,
had a slide of the exponential lowering cost of products
that were developed
so if you look the DNA, a genome scan, that
went from I don't know how many ten thousands of dollars
to only ten or twenty bucks now.
Same with drones. They became really, really cheap.
That same trend,
right there
you see that same trend in organizations.
When we talk about the digital workforce
we know that the digital workforce is related
to companies that can scale really quickly.
And if I continue in this book,
I get to define five key characteristics of
the digital workforce. And I think that is why
the book is really, really interesting.
It says, "every organization should have
Massive Transformative Purpose."
which is a fancy word for having a vision
having a vision that some people are maybe all about.
You have ideas and then you have scale.
And what I want to focus on is the scale criteria.
Because if you want to have an organization
that can grow really, really fast,
you need a workforce
and you need digital capabilities for your workforce
that can actually enable you to grow
really, really, really fast.
And the five criteria of scale are
Staff on demand
Community and crowds
the A is for Algorithms
Leveraging assets
and in the end Engagements.
Engagement I think is a celebrated word
Here, we all love an engaged workforce.
and I want to explain to you
why an engagement becomes
more and more and more important.
The first criteria here
we have staff on demand.
And Barry already talked about that
when he talked about his - you had a really nice word for it
the inner core
and then the flexible, reliable people
that are around that inner core.
So you have a core team that is really key to business
and then you have a flexible layer around that.
How does that play out.
An example is Gigwalk.
Gigwalk is an application that gives you access to
1.2 million people.
Imagine you're a production company that produces biscuits
and you are producing biscuits
and you are selling them to shops all over all of Greece.
Now how do you check,
if those biscuits are really displayed
like you agreed with with your supermarket.
Top shelf because you're an A-brand
and you really want to make sure that
all the labels are right
and the display is really great
you have three rows instead of
the two rows of your competition, et cetera.
How do you check those kinds of things?
Well, you send an employee to check ten supermarkets a day
and then the next day ten other supermarkets,
take pictures of it
and do it that way.
But that would cost a lot of money.
Now Gigwalk,
enables you to in the morning say
"hey I want a picture of this product,
in this supermarket"
and by the evening,
all of the 1.2 million people that use Gigwalk,
went to the supermarket,
they got ping on their phone
they take picture and you have it.
It's instant, or real time,
almost instant data.
Now, this is very scalable.
This enables you to work with real time dashboard
to work with real time information
about products without really having
staff, in your own,
in your own core workforce.
So, you can focus on the people that build the business
and you have an external group of people
that can help you do certain tasks.
Who knows Fiverr?
I see four, five, six, seven hands.
Fiverr is I think especially interesting
for small and medium sized companies.
Fiverr traditionally started as a service,
where you could for five dollars
ask someone to do any job.
Or ask anyone to do any job.
When you need to make a design
you can put, say I would like to have a design
with these criteria
and different people can say
"okay, I would like to make it.
Give me the five dollars and make that design."
Now when our designer, in my company
if he needs to make a design,
he first goes to Fiverr and he sets out a job.
And he lets ten people take the job.
And ten people send in the design.
He then takes all ten designs
and he says, "I like that one the best
but, from this other design I like this small detail
and from this other design I like yet another detail."
He then throws it together
and he basically has a remote print store
with ten very very different people,
ten very different perspectives
and he doesn't have to spend a lot of time
on getting stuck in one picture
and not letting go
and then falling in love with you own products
and then not really ending up with a beautiful product.
So, whenever our designer needs to make a product
He goes to Fiverr,
gets the ideas,
and then builds a better design for a logo
or whatever he is trying to design.
So, those are ways to leverage people
that are outside of your organization.
People that are often times curated
so, you know that they will deliver quality.
and there are ways to get towards those,
to get to those people
and to leverage the stuff on demand.
So, that is the 'S' in scale.
The C stands for communities and crowds.
And communities and crowds are a bit fringe to HR.
HR is not really used to managing communities.
But, there is one really, really big platform
that relies for 100% of a huge community.
Who has any idea which platform might be?
Someone from the audience: Facebook.
Facebook does that for a big part.
Like all content on Facebook is produced by the users.
So, users come back because
they want to check out the content of other users.
So, that is a brilliant example.
I went for Wikipedia, which is basically identical.
Wikipedia has more objective information
compared to Facebook.
And on Facebook, we show our best self.
Wikipedia, has around, I think,
120 thousand Wikipedians,
who are active contributors to the website.
And every single day thousands of articles are added
and way more articles are changed
and small adaptions to those articles are made.
With the big crowd,
which in a sense, are the human resources,
the remote human resources,
for in this case
Wikipedia.
So, how do you manage this crowd?
That is something interesting to keep in mind
as we go forward.
So we're at scale, S-C-A
A for algorithms.
Algorithms is something
that we've talked about a lot already.
Algorithms make life easier.
How do they do this?
I think we've already had a few examples.
Hehehe I just missed my slide,
there's yet another example - and we'll skip that one
Algorithms help you do certain jobs better.
So, for example,
I write quite a lot of articles,
when I write an article
I put it through two programs.
First one is Hemingway.
It's here on top.
Hemingway is an editor
that points out all the sentences
that are difficult.
So, as you can see over here,
"Instead of relying on gut-feeling,
the head of Human Resources, HR,
decided to crunch the numbers
to see how effective the interview process really was
and how it could be improved."
Yes, that is a complicated sentence.
Now, that gets flagged.
So, I know that I should say
that "Instead of relying on gut feelings,
the head of Human Resource decides to do other-
to do it in another way. Period.
Then I start my second sentence
and I break a really long sentence
into multiple smaller parts.
And immediately the text becomes easier to read.
When people come across a blog
they want it easy to read
and easily digestible text.
It also points out passive voice.
So 'can be made'
...'to make' is more active
it is nicer to read
than 'can be made'.
It points out simpler alternatives
adverbs et cetera.
It's helped me to write a better text.
The second app is Grammarly.
Grammarly helped me to fix
problems in grammar.
I'm not a native speaker
so, when I write I make quite a few mistakes.
This prevents me from
having to hire a proofreader
who is reading all my work.
Of course it's not yet perfect,
but it's starting to get there.
A second example is FeeBelly.
Who has ever signed a contract?
I'll repeat, who has ever signed a contract?
That should be all hands.
All hands in the air.
Who signed a contract?
Everyone.
(laughs)
Some of you have signed two contracts.
When you sign a contract
you always, you're always a bit, a bit aware
or a bit scared of those those little letters
that you just skipped over
and you didn't check out, right?
That, that's my big fear
whenever I sign a contract.
FeeBelly is an app
that scans a contract
and it says like,
"hey you should pay attention to these specific clauses."
So, that's helped me to identify all the nasty things
in my contract.
So, I don't miss hidden costly details.
FeeBelly, can be used by me so I don't have to go a lawyer
and and check everything.
But, FeeBelly can also be used by the lawyer himself.
Just as a final check,
in case he didn't mention everything.
FeeBelly makes my life easier.
I don't have to pay the lawyer.
And it makes the lawyer's life easier
because he can do his work faster.
He might have less work,
but that's a whole other discussion.
Anyway, this is a way that algorithms
are starting to make work more efficient.
Very much like, Jake was using
algorithms, in a sense, a rule-based algorithms
to automate his own work.
And when we talk about algorithms
we can talk about making things more efficient
we can also talk about full automation,
which is of course is way more efficient.
Can you leverage technologies to
replace traditional functions.
And we just talked about, about writing articles.
Each and every one of you reads the news
so, most likely you've read multiple articles
that are written by "non-humans".
Given the right key words,
computers can write
can produce a perfectly fine article.
And that's not necessarily bad.
When I go to Reddit, a social media platform,
and I see an article. I got to the comment section
and there is always a "bot"
that summarizes the article for me.
And since there is only 5% of the length
of the original article
and the summaries are always spot on.
I don't know how they do it, but they are always spot on.
So, I don't need to read the full article anymore.
I can just check out the summary
and be more efficient.
It is just one of those ways
how how traditional platforms are starting to get replaced.
This is a study by "The Economist", 2014.
I think
multiple studies have been done on this topic
around what, what jobs are getting replaced.
I think The Economist's one is one of the best.
On number one there's Telemarketers.
There's loan officers on there.
There's tax administrators.
All the jobs that are,
that fit in a nice predictable box so to say,
that are quite one-directional,
are at risk of being replaced.
In the booth - and some of you
I think are listening to me in Greek.
There's a translator.
I think Google, a few weeks ago
came into the news for publishing a clip that would record
the voice coming into your mobile phone
and then record immediately be translated into
a different language.
Like that's what they used in "Star Trek"
the communicator or I think it was called.
Before my time.
Anyway, the communicator,
that's actually starting to become a reality.
So, so that may also be a job that is starting to disappear.
So, that.. it starts to become really close at home
And as HR, you need to pay attention to this.
We're still looking at what the exponential organizations
are doing right
SCALE
We are at the 'L' with leveraging actions.
The last one is the 'E' of engagement.
Now, when you have a small core team
that is really contributing
core value to your organization,
you really need to engage the workforce.
You can engage in multiple ways,
you can use gamification,
I think Jive was
just mentioned it in a previous presentation.
This is, I think, a nice way of gamification
in your recruitment process.
It's basically a recruitment board for Google.
They made a first 10-digit prime found
in consecutive digits of 'e' .com
So those ten numbers.com
then you end up on a website that says,
"congratulations, you've passed the first step"
then you get the second very difficult
mathematical problem that I don't understand at all,
but I thought it just looked good.
Another one is "K-nack" or "Knack"
depending on how you want to pronounce it.
That's really the doing the traditional predictive
recruitment tool, but then in a game.
Air traffic control, when you want to apply for
to go to become an air traffic controller.
Traditionally, you already had to play
all kinds of memory games.
Whether they would select you,
this is coming to normal every day jobs
where you play the game
and the performance on the game
is actually predictive of what you will be doing.
Anyway this is probably not new for you,
but it is a reality that is coming closer and closer.
So the five key characteristics of the digital workforce
and now we're coming to a definition of digital workforce
are SCALE.
Algorithms to make work more efficient,
Leveraging algorithms,
leveraging software and technology to fully automated work.
And in the end engage the workforce.
SCALE.
SCALE I think, offers a framework
to put everything we've talked about today
more into a business perspective.
What we want to achieve with the business,
what are the business outcomes of the year going forward,
and then how do we place it into perspective
into everything that we do,
talking about different tools.