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businesses are increasing their dependency on contingent labor – even if the global economy is improving.

growing reliance on consultants, intermittent employees, or contingent labor.

businesses are increasing their dependency on contingent labor – even if the global economy is improving.

This development has been dubbed “The Open Talent Economy” in Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2013 study: the evolving workforce is a mixture of full-time employees, contractors, freelancers and, increasingly, workers with no formal ties to an enterprise.

But one area people haven’t thought much about is the aging of the workforce. As people live longer, they will still be vigorous and want to have income, but they might want to change the nature of their status within the workforce.” She points to a Boston company that provides its clients with C-level executives who take on limited-run consulting engagements. This is the type of high-level “temporary worker” that is outside the bounds of traditional workforce planning—and is usually not captured by traditional technology.

INCIVILITY also hijacks workplace focus

According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.

incivility miss information that is right in front of them. They are no longer able to process it as well or as efficiently as they would otherwise.

All a hacker has to do is use personal information that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.

Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying. Our digital lives are simply too easy to crack.

The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.

hy forward thinking? Because I think that hierarchical learning isn’t conducive, in fact is obstructive to creating businesses fit for purpose for innovating within disruption. I think the behaviours it creates slows down people’s learning as they go higher up ‘the ladder’, limits their behavioural flexibility and creates a culture where people are afraid to challenge the status quo. And what do I mean by networked learning? I think this has something to do with letting go of words like ‘expert’ and accepting that we are all learning, all of the time. And I think if we can do this, and ask any question without fear, we can shake things up and make things happen.

So how could companies themselves encourage and create a safe environment for networked learning? A few ideas: 

Cultivate a culture of celebrating failure

Online discussion forums and bulletin boards provide a means to share our ideas in a format that is not constrained by time, that saves all our thoughts, and that allows students to return to their contributions and even change them once they’ve read others’ posts.

I cannot imagine returning to a non-collaborative environment. I find that everyone learns so much more this way.

The technologies of online learning serve many purposes for me. My main loves are the organization of the material, the easy access to web-based tools, and the ability to building bridges for collaborative learning.

In Axonify’s platform, assessment and training are directly tied together. Because many employees use Axonify regularly, the platform is able to constantly track employee knowledge and intelligently provide the information needed to close an employee’s individual knowledge gap, says Leaman. The app also leverages learning research to optimize retention by repeating the questions in specific time intervals. Even after an employee “graduates” out of a specific topic, the questions will still be revisited about seven months later to help lock in the knowledge.

Tin Can, on the other hand allows companies and employees to record more common learning events: attending a session at a conference, say, or researching and writing a company blog post. “Companies are starting to recognize how employees actually learn and allowing them to do it the way they wish to, rather than forcing them into a draconian system,” Martin says.

more open environments.

Keeping Your Skill Set Current Can Be Key to Keeping Your Job Small and midsize companies can’t afford to not keep up with technology, and neither can enterprise-level companies. This past fall, IBM notified employees, who it had determined needed additional training, they were required to step up their technological game, and that they would receive only 90% of their salary while embarking upon this additional training. Talk about an incentive to stay on top of changes in technology ! According to the article in the New York Times covering this move, some IBM workers received an email letting them know that an assessment had determined certain members of the team had “not kept pace with acquiring the skills and expertise needed to address changing client needs, technology and market requirements.” While some criticized the move, the reality is that employees can no longer be complacent when it comes to their grasp of technology and how to use it to help their businesses grow. That’s something to keep in mind, for sure, whether you’re just embarking on a career or whether you’re already in the workforce and want to make sure you have the skills you need to stay marketable.

The Modern Worker Needs to Be Constantly Learning

alary history must die too. And while we’re at it, can we put an end to the equally archaic and bizarre corollary practice of asking people for their salary history during negotiation? How is what someone made in a previous job relevant to the current position? Do we care what snacks they ate in their last job too? Salary history is a great way to ensure that people who are underpaid—again, a lot of women and minorities—remain underpaid. I have a friend who passed by several jobs that would have paid her three times what she is making; because she loves and is loyal to a small organization, she decided to remain there as ED, earning $45,000. When she finally left on good terms, a bigger org asked for her salary history and then offered $49,500 to be its ED, because that’s a “generous 10% increase” from what she was making, even though the industry average for an ED of an organization of that size is about $60,000. That’s effed up. 

Wainhouse Research, a consulting firm in Duxbury, Mass., estimates that a knowledge worker — one whose job focuses on handling information — in the United States spends an average of 104 minutes each month in conference ca

lls. Such calls have become an orgy of multitasking, serving as a backdrop for a free-for-all of household chores, personal hygiene, online shopping and last-minute income tax filing

Mr. Reece asks his clients to use videoconferencing. He says there are always people who will resist, telling him their Internet connection is too weak, for example. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he asks that they put up a still photo. “Even if you only get a photo, it’s more humanizing,” he said.

Is the gig economy just an intermediate step in the progression toward a fully automated robotic workforce?

my fictitious medical device firm would need to adjust to a team-based deadline model, with incentives to make sure the job gets done on time by somebody, even if the 5-hours-a-week-employee and the 10-hours-a-week-employee both decide not to work this month.

With the opt-in work week, everything changes.

40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit.

And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.