Some of the questions raised by my students were eerily prescient, like “Where is here?” Data made the move into the “ether” a decade ago. In many ways, work is woefully behind – still physically tethered to offices, desks, and phone lines.

Recently, Jim Ware and Charles Grantham, principal founders of The Future of Work, and authors of the recently published book Corporate Agility, joined SuccessFactors Research as thought leader partners for a webinar discussing remote work and productivity. The revelations were profound:

• Work will be spread throughout the day and week (24×7), no more 8 to 5 work schedules
• Work will be divided into smaller chunks with cycle times down from months to weeks
• Work will be accomplished in a wide range of locations, 35% home, 35% office, and 30% in-between

As we me make the transition to knowledge work, “here” is no longer a physical place. “Here” is the where the data is, “here” is where the project is. Virtual meetings take place alongside the data, in the ether, not tethered to the physical office.

This is just one example of several, coming, dramatic shifts in attitudes, demographics and the global economy. In the paper Talent Management 2017, Erik Berggren and Jason Corsello examine these changes and show how talent and performance management will actually drive strategy in the future. From this session, one question really sticks out – How can we better collaborate? With a distributed workforce, how can we even find each other when we need to? Software vendors are just starting to answer these questions. One successful innovation that we have brought to market is our employee profile module. It is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, in encouraging collaboration. An early adopter of this tool reported that 94% of their employees started using it immediately after deployment, indicating that interest in connecting people is strong. At the end of the day, how could you drive people performance if people can’t even find each other? Where is here? What are your ideas for bringing people together in a distributed world?

Well, with an average 20% of the working population (Manpower estimate) working for one company but technically being paid from another -so called contingent workers- the answer is not that obvious anymore. According to American Management Association 93% of U.S. corporations use some form of contingent workers.

However, far more important than getting an accurate headcount is how you get these value-contributors aligned with your company’s goals and priorities. How do you engage and motivate these people and ultimately, how do you get real performance from them?

The answer is that you need to include all value-contributors, irrespective of how they are being paid, in your strategic HCM plan and execution. Your process for

• aligning goals,
• setting expectations,
• monitoring performance,
• develop skills, etc.

should at a minimum include all your value-contributors and not only those on your payroll.

Whatever your strategy, make sure you include all of the individual value-contributors that participate in its execution.

The challenge of finding people and leveraging their strengths and interests is part of the reason why SuccessFactors today has launched a consumer-inspired Employee Profile solution. In its simplicity it’s genius. The product builds the social network framework automatically from the traditional HRIS information in the system, but then the ownership for enriching the content lies in the hands of individuals, encouraging workers to advertise their strengths and have fun creating and building their profiles. Of course, managers can build on top of the profiles in terms of performance and potential data, etc. This approach to user-managed and user-relevant applications is also inclusive of contingent workers. All value-contributors now have the opportunity to define their own value proposition to the business through self-completion of skill and competency inventories.

SuccessFactors Research and Thought Leader Dr. David Sirota hosted a webinar in which the link between engagement and camaraderie is revealed. Of course building this kind of community, or social network, is crucial to building camaraderie and driving the performance of these value-contributing contingent workers.

But at the end of the day how can you work and collaborate with people that you can’t find nor even know exist?

So the question remains: Do you know who is working for you today?

Dion Hinchcliffe, a well-known blogger and thought leader in the Enterprise 2.0 space wrote a post recently in which he talked about the next generation of business software – social, interactive tools easily delivered over the Web – and how they can make a dramatic impact on the hierarchy and culture of businesses. These new tools, Hinchcliffe said, can tear down traditional knowledge barriers and walls within an organization by making information fluid, collaborative and accessible to everyone who wants it, leaving the power of that knowledge in the hands of everyday workers and not just managers and executives. That’s pretty powerful, and the catalyst for this dramatic transfer of power and virtual flattening of an organization, he said, lies in these simple, lightweight next-generation tools:

“Because they are highly democratic and egalitarian; anyone can deploy (Enterprise 2.0) tools, anyone can quickly learn to use and benefit from them, and they can be used to communicate and collaborate openly with anyone else inside (and often outside) the organization, are inherently viral, they literally tear down the barriers that would normally impede their forward movement and adoption inside the organization. And, anecdotally at least, this seems to be happening.”

This is a great piece of insight. In the past, there was always a barrier between every day workers and the information they worked with. To use a practical, HR-related example, take first-generation performance management tools – they were useful, but in order to get real value out of them in the form of analytics, they had to be sorted out either by hand by HR managers or run through a database by IT folks. Useful, but not efficient or at all egalitarian. Enterprise 2.0 gets rid of that gatekeeper.

As a general philosophy, SuccessFactors has always advocated transparency and the free flow of information – both are core doctrines written into our software and promoted as part of our own workplace culture. With SuccessFactors NEXT Labs, we’re trying to help promote that openness on both the technology and cultural fronts. NEXT Labs is a Trojan horse of sorts, designed to introduce Web 2.0 technologies and concepts – blogging and tagging capabilities, social networking and sharing – that render the adoption and repeated usage of an enterprise application painless for people accustomed to using such tools in their personal lives.  

Rather innately, Performance & Talent Management systems are the ultimate in-house Enterprise 2.0 tools: They help employees easily see their performance by harnessing the power of collaboration, communication and visibility, giving them the knowledge they need to make what they want out of their careers. In a way, NEXT Labs is our ”spoonful of sugar.” It  helps companies and employees eaily swallow what is all too often a bitter dose of medicince – the adoption of a new enterprise-wide software system.