21: Ben Foulkes: The future of work

Shownotes Reams have been written in the recent past about the future of work. But, long before COVID upended beliefs on WFH and remote working, Hoxby founded in 2015 had a vision to create a world of work without bias; without the barriers to inclusivity created by the 9-5, one size fits all system. Today, this hugely successful social experiment has a workforce of over 1000 people spread across 30 countries and works with some of the world's biggest businesses including Unilever, Merck, Amazon Webservices, AIA, Warner Media etc. Full disclosure I have been stalking Hoxby for years and last year when I launched The Purpose Room it was hugely inspired by what it's founders were trying to do. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to have a wide ranging conversation with Ben Foulkes MD Hoxby Futureproofing. Listen to him speak about on the future of work; hierarchies; relevancy of HR; on what makes organisational culture; fostering creativity and innovation in a dispersed workforce etc👇🏾 Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts Memorable passages from the episode: 👉🏾 So Hoxby's purpose is to create a happier and more fulfilled society through a world of work without bias. And that really manifests itself with a, a principle, if you like, that everyone should be able to choose when and where they work. So for those, that don't know Hoxby it's a little bit of a social experiment. It's not your typical organisation. There are no employees for instance. Everyone within Hoxby is a freelancer. So we avoid the employee-employer, relationship and that dynamic. And we come together in teams to work on projects. And we do that with some of the biggest companies in the world, like Unilever and Merck and People like this, and smaller businesses as well. And we do it across a range of services from marketing comms and PR to strategic consulting. And I lead the future-proofing, which is the sort of strategic consulting arm of the business. 👉🏾 Yeah, it's a good question. It's a word I've been hearing an awful lot more. Everyone's talking about future-proofing at the moment. Organisations face a whole bunch of different forces. And a lot of them have been accelerated by the pandemic over the last year. So we've seen technology has radically changed the way that we can and the way that we enable work. So everything from cloud computing through to the video conferencing software which we're using right now to AI and how it's fundamentally changing the way that jobs and tasks can be performed. You've also, on the other hand got the way that people work. So an awful lot of forces are changing the way our careers, and we're going to be potentially pandemics, permitting, living longer, working longer, having this one job for life notion is a little bit archaic and a little bit that's certainly going to change. So what we're seeing is workforce demands really shifting to wanting more flexible ways of working, to be more purpose-driven to use our time for a meaningful end. And then also to be able to pick and choose a bit more about, about when and where we work and, and to be more like that. So you've got these kinds of forces and the fact that we need to, we organisations need to be cognisant of that to, to adapt. 👉🏾 And what we're seeing is that actually, it's organisations that are more agile and more able to adapt are more likely to survive in the future. So in the past controlling natural resources, controlling factors of production and scale and economies of scale were really important. Today it's much more about agility, agility to respond to technology and agility to respond to the needs of the workforce. And so Hoxby future-proofing helps clients to understand these forces and to adapt to it. So it's sort of two things it's really, how do you both actually be truly agile and then how do you kind of create the right conditions to empower people? And we'll come on to that I'm sure in