Mobile, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) have changed the IT infrastructure landscape. These trends are equally disruptive and transformative for business processes such as CRM, logistics management and hiring. Recently, I spoke with David Hale, the CEO of Gigwalk, on how mobility is reinventing work.
Today, a massive amount of temporary positions aren't filled because companies can’t quickly match open opportunities to available talent. This issue is particularly acute when a company needs to hire temporary talent for short intervals, such as a day or a week. In the past a company had to call prospective workers to know if someone was available at a certain time and location and to confirm the person had the right skills. This manual process is cumbersome and many jobs went unfilled because it was too difficult to find a temporary worker.
The future of work is an environment where a company can easily augment its workforce with specialists and contract workers as workload demand fluctuates. It also requires better collaboration and management of a distributed workforce. These demands, while not new, have intensified as cloud computing and SaaS services made it easier for smaller companies to compete with larger firms. Cloud services and mobility have also enabled new service providers to enter the landscape to address these demands. Companies like Gigwalk provide a SaaS solution with a mobile app that connects people with work and helps companies manage large distributed workforces.
Gigwalk offers enterprise customers two distinct offerings. One is a Mobile Crowdsourcing network of 750,000+ mobile-enabled independent contractors affectionately called “Gigwalkers”. The second is a private distributed workforce management solution called Gigwalk Enterprise. The platform delivers:
- Simple messaging and collaboration tools
- Smart work assignment and scheduling, including job alignment based on certified skills, employee work and home location, and previous work performance
- A consistent set of data capture processes that improves quality controls and information, such as photo capture, GPS and date-stamp validation for all work completed
- Advanced capabilities such as barcode scanning, survey skip logic, and standard project templates
- Reporting and dashboard capabilities, improving visibility at all levels in the organization
- Full API integration with third party systems, including payroll, billing and compliance systems
In July, Gigwalk announced that CROSSMARK, a sales and marketing services for consumer-branded suppliers and retailers, is deploying Gigwalk’s Enterprise Platform as a primary platform for assigning work to its 30,000 field-based associates. Marc Rapp, Vice President of CROSSMARK Retail Operations, said “With Gigwalk, we create, assign, execute and report on thousands of tasks every day, generating real-time intelligence, allowing us to better serve our clients. This capability enables work to be created and delivered in the same day with agility, precision and speed that are integral to our new field-force activation system, named Axis. Our employees have embraced this new technology with enthusiasm as it gives them greater ability to influence their schedules, while providing a more predictable workweek.”
In order to deliver what I call a right-time experience (a best-in-class contextual business process), a company must connect its internal data sources and augment these with the appropriate third party data for enhanced. Gigwalk and Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) are providing an example of what this could look like. The month, IRI announced it's integrating data from Gigwalk into the IRI Liquid Data platform, a data management tool that offers real-time predictive analytics and insights on a mobile technology platform, to provide IRI's customers with enhanced data.
But how should you prepare for this brave new world of work? Hale believes, as do I, that mobile and SaaS will profoundly change the staffing industry. When asked for three pieces of advice on reinventing work in the mobile world, Hale said:
1. Make it digital. While hiring has improved for full time positions, it's still antiquated for part-time work. Workers are often assigned 15 to 25 hours of work a week, but the hours vary. This makes it difficult for workers to optimize their pay and for employers to secure talent on short notice. Making the process digital alleviates some of the pain.
2. Make it contextual. I believe executives that drive contextual services will become leaders in their respective fields. Hale spoke of using contextual attributes such as time, skill and location to match employees to work opportunities. For example, a company can use Gigwalk to assign work within certain vicinity and prospective talent has the opportunity to opt in to receive available job alerts that match their skill set and availability.
3. Embrace mobile to manage work assignments in a different way. Hale described how enabling a bring your own device strategy would allow companies to expand their potential workforce. For example, if you allow employees to bring their own devices (and provide them with the security software), any employee or temporary worker can receive and complete assignments on a smartphone or a tablet.
What does the future of work look like? In my opinion, it’s a future where companies utilize existing data more effectively and augment traditional data sources with new contextual information such as image capture, location data, path taken through a store, etc.) It's a future where a company can seamlessly collaborate with its employees. The future of work requires a company to have an easy and scalable method to supplement existing talent with specialized resources and temporary workers. None of these things are easy, but with the right technology, they are all possible.
