Redefining Jobs
There was a time, during my glory days living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, I and my comrades spent time every day sitting in the eclectic coffee houses that ran all the way up and down Haight Street, with our notebooks in front of us, as we created our most eloquent written pearls of wisdom, most of which would never see the light of day. And by "notebooks," I mean spiral-bound sheaves of paper, onto which we would imprint mighty words using a ball point pen.
Working from home (or working from coffee house as the case may be) – once seen as the domain of wannabes and posers who pretend to be more important than they really are – has gained legitimacy and a full head of steam. Those who operate home-based businesses today are a vital part of the economy, representing not only a legitimate and rapidly growing industry, but a replacement of the traditional model of employment.
Changing patterns aren't just the domain of freelancers and independent contractors, though; midsize and large companies are getting into the act, too. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of employed persons who work at home on an average workday is surprisingly high. Those who hold multiple jobs are more likely to work at home, with 37 percent of multiple jobholders working from home, and 22 percent of single job holders. And BLS shows that it's not only those who are self-employed who are working from home.
Tech and new platforms are changing the game
While the majority of self-employed workers, 58 percent, work from home on an average workday, 20 percent of wage and salary workers are also working from home, indicating that the prospect of wearing a jacket and tie with no pants while videoconferencing isn't just for SOHO companies and independent contractors. The trend is evident in all types of employment, and we're seeing a broad-based redefining of the very nature of what a "job" really is.
Today's move towards creating one's own job is driven by the power of gig-based infrastructures like Upwork, Uber, and AirBnB, all of which allow individuals to work for themselves, on their own terms, and without a large capital investment.
The heavily regulated, expensive and often inefficient taxicab model for example, operated as a virtual municipal monopoly, with a handful of cab companies fighting over a very limited amount of permits. The barrier to entry was stiff – sure, you could become a cab driver by becoming an employee of the cab company, but to run your own cab service has always been impossible due to the high cost of licensing and limited number of permits available. Companies like Uber have changed all that, and now the barrier to entry has been lifted, much to the chagrin of veteran cab companies who up until now have enjoyed relatively little competition and the freedom to hire cranky cab drivers who drive too fast and yell at pedestrians.
"The taxicab model is a perfect example of how industries of all types are being forced to change – and that change is being driven from the bottom up. Until now, the taxi business has always been 'you take what you get,' and complaints have always fallen on deaf ears," said Jeev Trika, CEO and founder of CrowdReviews.com, a transparent platform for online reviews. "The presence of user-generated review platforms has changed the game for the larger incumbents in all industries, who often for the first time, must listen to user feedback or be replaced by younger, smaller, and more agile startups. Consumers today have more power than ever, and it has a democratizing effect across the board. Being the biggest isn't the most important factor for success – it's all about user feedback, and this phenomenon is letting newer companies have a seat at the table."
Redefinition of job, starting from the bottom up
The suits in the back office are no longer calling the shots, and they no longer get to decide what a "job" really is. The youngest generation now entering the workforce, known as the Millennials, has a different set of expectations from the workplace. They see the gig economy as a viable alternative, and if they do seek traditional employment, they demand (and receive) far more flexibility than the generations before them. Does today's employee expect to be paid fairly? Sure. Do they demand flex-time, telecommuting options, and a bigger say in how the company does what it does? Yes, they do. Do they expect to stay in the same job or with the same company for 30 years? Not a chance.
"We're seeing the younger generation today redefining how they want to work," said Aaron Ledbetter, CEO and founder of LendFu, a peer-to-peer lending organization. "And increasingly, the way they are doing this is not by relying on large institutions – but on each other. Banks frankly have no interest in supporting small, work-at-home and emerging SOHO businesses, but an emerging peer-based framework is beginning to emerge, giving small startups access to microloans."
Peer-based lending isn't the only option available when the banks inevitably turn you away, and send you packing with laughable advice about lining up a first round of "friends and family" funding before you return. The Internet economy has created new options, ranging from crowdfunding, to angel networking sites like AngelList, and even alternatives to borrowing such as factoring (borrowing against invoices sent out but not yet paid), and even borrowing against personal assets; to online loan comparison sites like MoneyLend.net and others which let borrowers compare terms from lenders which would otherwise be outside their geographical reach.
SaaS makes it happen — sometimes
It is overly simplistic to say that the cloud and the as-a-service model have enabled the career revolution that is at hand. Sure, those as-a-service tools now make it possible for a home-based business operator to have easy access to inexpensive business services, and the inherent scalability of as-a-service move all the way up the ladder to mid-size businesses who now have access to high-end tools that were once available only to the Fortune 500 willing to pay millions of dollars for licensing fees.
"What we're seeing especially in mid-tier businesses is new availability of as-a-service implementations of high-end enterprise systems like CRM and ERP," said Renat Zubairov, CEO of elastic.io, a leader in integration as-a-service. "It wasn't that long ago when rolling out an enterprise ERP system would be a multi-year, multi-million dollar project, but even the largest ERP vendors today are bringing out as-a-service versions of their systems that are more affordable and practical to mid-size firms. The next set of challenges though, especially for the mid-tier, is being faced with an often unwieldy cluster of as-a-service interfaces that are not connected." Ultimately, it is that integration layer – not SaaS itself – which will complete the ongoing redefinition of "job."
Cloud and SaaS first gave us the idea of gaining ubiquitous access to services from anyplace, which gave credence to the work-at-home movement and launched the latest redefinition of "job." But the full potential of SaaS was not realized right away, and because most SaaS apps operated in a vacuum, those working from home often found themselves without access to critical data, and often with far too many SaaS interfaces. The first wave of SaaS was not scaleable.
SOHO companies and independent contractors could manage it when they only had a handful of apps, but at the corporate level, there was another reality. Because of the low cost and ease of deployment, cloud became dispersed outside of the IT department, introduced at the departmental level on an ad hoc basis, and the end result was convenience on one hand, but there were unintended consequences. The Just-a-bunch-of-SaaS (JBOS) model introduced situations of data hoarding, where one department may be generating a process or collecting data through one of those low-cost apps, which might be useful to other departments or to the corporation as a whole, if only people knew what each other were doing.
The emergence of Job 2.0
In the last 25 years, the nature and definition of "job" has changed more than it has in 1000 years. Categories of jobs are disappearing, certain types of labor-intensive jobs are moving outside of the U.S. and creating emerging middle classes in India and China, and the "gig economy" is rapidly replacing the traditional 8-to-5 model that dominated the landscape for so long.
The late Steve Jobs, in response to President Obama's question on what it would take to get the thousands of low-tech assembly jobs that exist in China putting together iPhones, famously said, quite directly, "Those jobs aren't coming back." It's a common battle cry: "Bring back our jobs!" There was a time, when men wore pomade in their hair and women donned poodle skirts and sweater sets, jobs requiring unskilled labor were plentiful and paid enough to support a middle-class lifestyle, Eisenhower was President and all was right with the world. And there is a contingent which naturally wants those glory days to return. But the fact is, as powerful and insightful as Steve Jobs was, neither he, nor the President, nor Donald Trump nor anyone else can make it so. It's no longer a matter of political will or Congressional maneuvering. The reality is this: Low-skilled manufacturing is being replaced (1) by overseas shops, and (2) by domestic higher-tech alternatives and automation; and the traditional employment model is being replaced by the gig economy, self-employment and emerging SOHO businesses. Politicians and demagogues can and will debate for years about whether that is a good thing, but that debate is meaningless – these realities are not going away, and we must get used to living in this new Job 2.0 world, lest we relegate ourselves to being the 21st century equivalent of a nation full of elevator operators and full-service gas station attendants.