This week’s Future of Work Exchange Podcast, sponsored by PRO Unlimited, features a conversation with Paul Vincent, at Randstad Sourceright. Paul and I not only unveil some sneak peeks of a progressive new research study on the evolution of services procurement, but also discuss why this arena requires a Future of Work and “business first” focus.
Tune into Episode 614 of The Future of Work Exchange Podcast below, or subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, Stitcher, or iHeartRadio.
For nearly the past two years, PRO Unlimited has revolutionized the way the contingent workforce solutions market operates. Through its mix of proprietary software, Wand Vendor Management System (VMS), longstanding Managed Service Provider (MSP) solutions, and a mix of exclusive partnerships and key acquisitions, the integrated workforce management platform provider has been perhaps the most aggressive in the industry since mid-2020. Through its unique “platform approach” (as an “Integrated Workforce Management” platform) towards extended workforce management, HR, and talent acquisition technology markets, PRO Unlimited continues to deliver on its ultimate vision.
This morning, the company announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire fellow MSP offering Geometrics Results, Inc. (GRI). GRI has long been an innovative and powerful solution in the MSP landscape (most recently evaluated as a “Market Leader” in the Ardent Partners/Future of Work Exchange MSP Solution Advisor report) through its robust Managed Direct Sourcing (MDS) offering, coupled with one of the industry’s deepest intelligence engines (Envision Analytics) and a dedication to a variety of key market verticals.
GRI is currently owned by MSX International, a technology-enabled business process outsourcing firm, which is a portfolio company of funds managed by Bain Capital Europe. GRI has 150 customers across the world, representing over $4 billion in spend under management (particularly concentrated in the United States, the UK, and India).
The GRI acquisition, according to PRO Unlimited CEO Kevin Akeroyd, is a multi-faceted move that will help the solution expand on many of its forward-thinking goals for the greater industry.
“Our mission is to be the centralized system of record and a truly holistic platform for the extended workforce,” said Akeroyd. “M&A activity is a key piece of our mission, and when we think about satisfying the many “flavors” of how work gets done, including managed services, end-to-end software, data and intelligence, payrolling, and the worker experience, this acquisition firmly supports that vision, allowing us to deliver something very special for the marketplace.”
The GRI acquisition will allow PRO Unlimited to continue expanding its growing market, particular within additional industries that GRI has long specialized and served, including automotive and light industrial. In addition, GRI’s long list of large and mid-market clients will be a nice addition to PRO’s Global 2000 portfolio of customers.
From a solutions perspective, the Future of Work Exchange believes that PRO’s acquisition of GRI is an ideal and complementary piece to key areas within several of the solution’s Best-in-Class offerings, particularly direct sourcing (DirectSource PRO) and data and intelligence. GRI’s Envision analytics tool is one of the industry’s deepest and most powerful, a “gold standard” for total talent data and insights across the workforce management solutions industry. PRO’s agile reporting functionality will benefit from GRI’s on-demand, Envision-driven data and intelligence, which helps users better understand the impact of the extended workforce and how to maximize it by using predictive modeling and scenario-building.
“GRI will harmonize PRO’s analytics and intelligence capabilities, which are already the largest data-led offerings in our space,” said Akeroyd. Pointing to its recent acquisition of PeopleTicker, its stout RatePoint offering, and the “jewel” of the Workforce Logiq acquisition (ENGAGE AI), Akeroyd said, “Envision fits really nicely into all of that and what we’re offering from a total talent intelligence perspective and will be a nice boost to that critical aspect of our solution.”
With the GRI acquisition, the PRO umbrella of solutions will account for over $22 billion in spend under management, a figure which would make them one of the three or four largest MSPs in the workforce solutions marketplace.
“This acquisition will continue to enhance our overall vision, with GRI serving as yet another extension of the end-to-end platform,” said Akeroyd. “Many of the best brands in the world rely on GRI as a world-class MSP; we now have the opportunity to help enable these household-name organizations with world-class workforce management services, worker experience solutions, technology, and total talent intelligence.”
In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dearth of the one thing that every person thrives on that, unfortunately, we had taken for granted for far too long: human contact. Every video conference with older family members, every Friday afternoon virtual cocktail hour, the absence of fun evenings at the local sushi joint down the street…there was always that missing sense of human contact that nipped at the back of our minds as we experienced a crisis together.
While we are clearly out of the “emergency phase” of the biggest health crisis of our lifetime, with vaccines and immunity leading to a more “normal” way of life (barring another serious surge of cases), it doesn’t mean we should be abandoning the newfound focus on aspects such as empathy, compassion, and emotional-led thinking both in our personal and professional lives, however.
The Future of Work Exchange has long been a proponent of empathetic leadership and its many, many benefits. We even wrote about it last week and discussed why the Future of Work movement required more humanity within its innerworkings. It’s with this backdrop in mind that business leadership must continue to evolve; what the Future of Work needs today is conscious leadership.
Enterprise leaders in 2022 sit in a very, very different position than they did just a couple of years ago. And while the pandemic played a very critical role in how leadership has changed for the better, the fact is that the business arena would eventually experience this revolution of leadership simply because the workforce, the enterprise vision, and getting work done all now require a reimagined and strategic approach towards leadership.
“For years we’ve recognized that people’s dedication to their work has shifted: whether that be in time, energy, or emotion spent. People have the opportunity to reap so much from their careers, but only if the environments in which they work recognize and honor that and play an equal part in the relationship,” said Ashley Andersen, Leadership Coach and Partner at 10X Leadership Lab. “No longer are people just happy to have a job. They want and deserve more from their work- they want to use their work to create a positive impact and they want their work to in turn have a positive impact on them.”
The realm of conscious leadership follows a similar path to the one paved by empathy, in that nearly every facet of human contact between an executive and his or her colleagues and staff is rooted in a meaningful, genuine purpose. A leader’s core approaches involve them becoming more aware of their actions, more aware of how kind and, yes, conscious, those actions and insights may be perceived by the organization’s workforce.
Andersen and her 10X Leadership Lab team are focused on helping leaders become more conscious in their overall styles and approaches, augmenting leadership strategies with positive psychology and an emphasis on the fundamental behavioral change that is required for executives to reboot their approaches towards revolutionary leadership.
“At 10X Leadership Lab, we see leadership as a tremendous responsibility and, in that responsibility lies to the opportunity to have real impact – not just on the bottom line, but on the overall well-being of those around you and the systems you work within,” said Andersen. “Think about the last time you felt really heard, seen, understood, and valued at work – what was the impact of that? The leaders who show up in that way are the ones we’re willing to go the extra mile for, the ones we want to stick beside and learn from, the ones whose feedback really matters.”
One of the most critical aspects of conscious leadership is purpose (which we’ve written about recently). Workers desire work that has purpose, that is fulfilling, and aligns with their own specific journeys, goals, and life objectives. Leadership must change and evolve to suit this critical Future of Work tenet. Leadership must have the capability to be influential, purposeful, and deliberate in how it drives the overall vision of its staff, its product, its culture, and the greater organization.
“Everything begins with purpose at 10X, whether you are working with us in 1:1 coaching or at the systems level through our Thriving Culture work, because it’s the foundation that determines how we operate, the decisions we make, the attitudes we hold, the language we use,” said Andersen. “At 10X, our purpose is to make the world better by making business better. If we meet with a prospect who doesn’t share an interest in maximum impact beyond profit, we aren’t the right company for them and we politely part ways. It’s not always an easy decision to make, but it’s one that leaves us standing in integrity, which feels a whole lot different than the alternative. This work isn’t easy, that’s not what it’s about, but it’s always worthwhile. It’s what the Future of Work demands and deserves from us, and it’s what we are most passionate about.”
I had the pleasure of joining SSI People’s Off the Cuff podcast to chat about the Future of Work, “The Great Resignation,” the “Talent Revolution,” and so much more related to the evolving world of work and talent. Hosted by SSI’s Christina Vinson, it was a delight to chat about these topics with EVP of Strategy and Development at SSI, Manny Vidal.
I know, I know; we don’t want to hear it, especially after so many restrictions were loosened over the past several weeks. The more transmissible Omicron subvariant, called BA.2, has been causing a bit of havoc in China, the UK, and other areas that had (even recently) experienced a dramatic down-tick in virus caseloads over the past month or two.
The hard truth here is that, by utilizing wastewater analysis, we can detect increased COVID caseloads before they actually occur…and, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, things aren’t looking so rosy for the United States regarding another Omicron wave.
“The last few days have been a little worrisome,” Larry Madoff, medical director of the bureau of infectious disease and laboratory sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said late last week. “It certainly bears careful watching.”
Wastewater sampling here and at hundreds of sites nationwide is once more drawing closer scrutiny from epidemiologists worried the spread of what appears to be a yet-more-contagious version of Omicron, known as BA.2, and rising cases in Europe could soon spoil the latest U.S. recovery. The number of wastewater sites indicating virus increases on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dashboard has risen in recent weeks, though the majority of sites still show declining levels.
In Boston and beyond, these systems during the Omicron wave helped quickly detect virus-concentration surges, declines and circulating variants, often before testing and case data. Health authorities believe it will become an increasingly important early-warning tool that can help guide public messaging and other responses, like marshaling resources to surging areas.”
There’s a lot to unpack there: the data shows declining levels, however, there’s more than enough concern to believe that rising cases across the pond predict the same here in America (historically, what happens in the UK is a crystal ball of what will occur in the United States three weeks or so later). “Still, the bottom line is that BA.2 is chiefly dangerous to those people who are not well-protected against the Omicron variant already. If you can’t be personally well-protected, then it is also important to be surrounded by large numbers of people who are. You need to evaluate local protective levels as well as personal immunity and decide on the precautions you want to be taking,” says Dr. John Skylar in his latest “COVID Transmissions” article, which is a must read.
Google and Apple are planning a return to the office early next month (in hybrid form, at least). Dozens of Fortune 500 organizations are doing the same. And then there’s Goldman Sachs, whose CEO David Solomon last year called remote work an “aberration” that needed “to be corrected as quickly as possible.”
I completely understand that business leaders crave normalcy (whatever that is today) and desire some form of in-person collaboration between themselves and their workforce, their workers and each other, etc. However, aren’t we past the back-and-forth now? Haven’t we reached a point when we can firmly say that remote and hybrid work are not only beneficial, productive, and flexible models, but should also be permanent fixtures of the contemporary enterprise?
There are millions of workers that cannot perform their jobs remotely and we need to respect that. However, there are millions more that can, and can do so effectively. We’ve gone through two years of this, particularly the discourse around return-to-office planning, whether it’s actually safe to do so, and how the workforce will react to a switch back to operating in-person.
Solomon said that remote work “is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal” at a finance industry conference in February 2021. What Solomon obviously has wrong here is that remote and hybrid work is the new normal, and, any conversations regarding full return-to-office plans are going to be spoiled by a virus that has not yet reached an endemic state. It would be foolhardy, and, to be honest, embarrassing, to mandate workers to return to the office five days a week (as Solomon recently mandated) and then have to re-pivot back to a hybrid model due to a rise in BA.2 cases.
We’re just so past these discussions by now and any CEO, executive leader, etc. that believes returning to the office five days a week is the best path forward is making an absolute miscalculation. The workforce wants to operate remotely. Top-tier candidates crave flexibility and the agility that are ingrained in remote and hybrid work. The Great Resignation, may we reiterate, is happening because workers are leaving jobs that don’t offer these flexible options. In a hyper-competitive, increasingly-globalized, tech-focused candidate market, do business leaders really want to miss out on talent because of their archaic, ignorant thinking?
We don’t know if the Omicron subvariant will cause a similar wave to what we experienced as a country from the 2021 holidays up until just a few weeks ago. What we do know is that even the slightest threat of another surge right now should be a wake-up call that any hesitation around hybrid work should be silenced…permanently.
The professional services market is estimated to encompass upwards of $5 trillion annually and only shows signs of increasing as global enterprises continue to integrate project-based work into their overall scope of operations.
External services are often considered a linchpin to organizational success. Businesses frequently require specialized and unique support that necessitates the sourcing of a wide range of professionally delivered services and SOW-based labor, the vast majority of which are often purchased and managed situationally. Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange (FOWX) estimates that as little as 30% or less of business services spend is actually and actively accounted for in foundational enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting, which elicits two critical questions: 1) how can organizations possibly be confident that they are achieving the best value on this expenditure? and 2) why has it been so hard for MSP programs to gain traction in facilitating SOW-based services/labor when their infrastructure would seem to be so ideally adaptable to the underlying problem statement?
Those services procurement programs which are anchored in a bolder vision from the outset (beyond cost savings) are much more likely to be sustainably successful because they are designed from the point of view of the business and not through the narrower prism of a buy-to-pay lens. The services procurement paradigm of a decade ago, when MSPs started to see the revenue potential in this area, is long gone. Today’s services procurement paradigm needs to follow a much more progressive pattern, one that is founded on “how work gets done” rather than “how we can structure the sourcing activity to reduce the prices paid?”
I’m incredibly excited to join Sarah-Jayne (SJ) Aldridge (
Click here or on the image below to save your spot for next week’s event. Hope to see you there!
That handsome man above turns six years old today. His name is Lincoln, and my family and I rescued him from a kill shelter in Mississippi in the summer of 2016. Nearly everyone that sees him for the first time remarks that he resembles a fox; his wild mix of pit bull, golden retriever, chow-chow, and border collie (confirmed via “doggie DNA” test!) resulted in the fox-like features.
Before the Future of Work Exchange launched in July 2021, its top-secret code-name in the Ardent Partners offices was “FOWX” as it went through months and months of development before we went live. Naturally, as we launched the site and its research arm, the “FOWX” vernacular made it into daily conversations with our gracious sponsors, the workforce management solutions industry, and, of course, the HR, procurement, talent acquisition, IT, and other business leaders that read this site every day.
So, making the transition back to our boy Lincoln and the wild animal he resembles: the dominant fox species (the common red fox) is currently living and thriving on all continents minus Antarctica due to their incredible adaptability, amazing flexibility, instinctive intelligence, and advantageous speed. They live and thrive in urban environments, rural areas, and rough terrain all across the world. From a 1998 Deseret article:
“Both the growing numbers of the foxes and their assurance in the presence of humans are signs of a remarkable ecological success story of global dimensions. In an age when so many wild species are under threat, their populations dwindling and their futures insecure, the red fox is thriving like few other wild predators. In fact, biologists say, it has become the most widely distributed wild meat-eating mammal on Earth, thanks to an evolutionary heritage that has enabled it to adapt superbly to the presence and activities of people.”
Let’s re-read those characteristics: adaptability, flexibility, intelligence, and speed. Sound like the hallmarks of an agile enterprise, doesn’t it? It seems like kismet that our beloved Future of Work Exchange’s acronym (FOWX), its cute logo, and the animal it was based on all revolve around the concept of agility (not to mention that fact that my sweet Lincoln resembles a fox). Agility has become the foundation of the Future of Work, and rightfully so:
What’s in a name? FOWX or fox…it’s all about agility and just how dynamic, flexible, and adaptive a business can be in 2022 and beyond.
I remember speaking with a Fortune 500 executive sometime around April 2020 during those scary, early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We chatted about her staff, the quick move to getting more of the workforce into remote environments, and the uncertain future ahead. What struck me most about the conversation, however, wasn’t the strategic approaches towards managing during uncertain times…it was her attitude.
“All I want my team to know is that I am here for them. The rest of the leadership team is also ready to support them as we go through this period together. Whatever they need from us, be it time with family, more flexibility…whatever struggles they may encounter, we will help them get through that.”
Some leaders are naturally gifted with empathy; those executives were the ones that successfully led their teams through the most tumultuous business period since The Great Recession of 2008-2009. Effective leadership over the past two years has involved shouldering a mental health load of numerous colleagues, when execs played the role of counselor and confidante to those workers that needed support. As times became better and as businesses moved more towards a “living with the virus” mentality, business leaders found that long-term empathy could be emotionally draining, considering that there were hundreds of other tasks and responsibilities that required their energy in an increasingly-globalized and complex enterprise landscape.
That doesn’t mean that empathy goes out the window, though. We’ve come too far to see a natural and beneficial by-product of the past two years lost in the newfound optimism that declining COVID caseloads and fewer restrictions brought about as of late. It does mean this, though: the Future of Work not only needs more humanity, it requires human-led tenets to underpin how work gets done.
The downside to empathetic leadership is that executives feel what their workers feel, and when too many instances of on-demand support pop up, these leaders risk burnout. A psychologist I spoke with told me this: “Experiencing empathy in the workplace is by far a positive development, however, just as we as ordinary people can become overwhelmed with a range of emotions by supporting others, this too can occur in the business arena. As leaders start to see their operations shift a little bit with encouraging conditions, they can still offer “modes” of empathetic support without it becoming a central focus of their overall leadership strategy.”
This is where the “human element” enters the picture. Today’s business leaders don’t have to wrap every one of their approaches in a sheen of empathy, they just need to integrate more humanity into how they manage and structure their workforce, as well as how the overall enterprise gets work done. This transformative strategy towards leadership requires a bit of “reimagination” and a dedication to emotions and being purposeful with those emotions.
The backdrop to The Great Resignation is a “Talent Revolution” in which millions of workers are voluntarily quitting their jobs due to the multi-faceted desire for more: more purpose, more career advancement, more work-life integration, and yes, more empathy and compassion. Leaders sit in an interesting position at this point in 2022; they have been drained of that empathy and are facing burnout along with their short-staffed workforce. The best strategy, after two years of balancing emotions and operations, is to understand that the wide spectrum of next-generation leadership begins with understanding the perspectives of workers, feeling what they feel, and using that knowledge to guide decisions and support.
What is needed now is an integration of humanity and work optimization, bringing together the emotional elements that define great leadership and an inclusive, positive workplace culture. Compassion and empathy are the cornerstones of the human-led elements of the Future of Work movement, and, if leaders can adapt to changing times and shift their thinking to include these attributes in how they manage, they will not only curb the negative ramifications of The Great Resignation, but will also ensure that their workforce remains engaged.
[Stay tuned to The Future of Work Exchange for additional coverage of the evolution of business leadership, including a feature next week that will discuss the impact of “conscious leadership.”]
This week’s Future of Work Exchange Podcast, sponsored by PRO Unlimited, features a conversation with Sunil Bagai, CEO of Prosperix. Sunil and I discuss the evolution of Vendor Management System (VMS) technology, how the “network effect” can impact the Future of Work, the continued growth of direct sourcing, and more.
Tune into Episode 613 of The Future of Work Exchange Podcast below, or subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, Stitcher, or iHeartRadio.
Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research finds that nearly 80% of leading organizations are currently leveraging digital staffing channels and talent marketplaces to fuel their talent acquisition strategies. And in today’s hyper-competitive, Great Resignation-led labor market, enterprises require on-demand solutions that not only align with their talent-based needs, but also support greater extended workforce management processes, operations, and programs.
Last month, the Future of Work Exchange partnered with Bluecrew for an exclusive webcast focused on the role and impact of talent marketplaces and digital staffing within the Future of Work movement. If you missed the event, now’s your chance to check it out: