The Post-pandemic Era Needs a New Way of Looking at Talent

All the way back in December 2019, I vowed to stop treating innovation as a buzzword and urged everyone to do the same. Little did I know (well, little did everyone know) that 2020 was going to come for us all to force that resolution down our throats. With the COVID-19 taking center stage, companies were cornered and forced to make a decision: either innovate or risk disappearing. 

Naturally, those with resources and enough strategic vision did the former, investing in the necessary technologies, training their employees in new work methods, and reshaping their entire workflows. In short, they innovated, either because they didn’t have a choice but to embrace digital acceleration or because they sped up a digitization process they already had in place.

Be that as it may, the business world collectively and instinctively innovated to face the challenges brought by the pandemic. But that response was just the start of a lengthy process that’s asking all of us to rethink how we are going to do business from now on in the so-called “new normality.” In other words - what will businesses do to fully recover from the consequences of the crisis and thrive again.

It’s not a secret that I think digital acceleration will play a central role in the years to come. But I don’t want to talk about technology adoption here, even when it will be a major deciding factor on who will be better suited for what’s to come. Instead, I want to focus on other of those pandemic consequences and how it relates to two of the trends I’ve been seeing over the last few years. I’m talking about the increasing remotization of the workforce and the rise of on-demand talent. 

An Underlying Trend, in the Spotlight

A lot of people have already written about the pandemic-related disruptions and how it can change the business landscape for good. Among those disruptions, the stay-at-home orders and mandatory lockdowns propelled a massive adoption of remote work as a way to keep businesses open. 

Thus (and as it happened with many other trends and phenomena), the Coronavirus accelerated the adoption of remote work, something that was already happening before the pandemic hit. In fact, I can safely say that remote work was already on the discussion table for many companies and (especially) their workforces. 

Businesses, on one hand, were already paying attention to how hiring remote professionals provide them access to a wider talent pool. Employees, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, were already seeing remote work through pink-colored glasses, as it allows them to better align their personal priorities with their professional lives. 

That’s surely why there were already plenty of exercises on remote work prior to the pandemic, with companies adopting a work-from-home method and then taking it back, creating a hybrid between in-person and remote work, or embracing it all together. But even with all these attempts, most businesses still had their doubts, which is why they shied away from it.

Why does this matter, now that the pandemic has imploded that resistance? Because now a larger portion of the workforce says they’d happily work from home even after the pandemic is over. And since many companies are waiting for that moment to bring back everyone into the offices, there might be a clash of aspirations there. Basically, companies will want to bring employees back, but they may not want to return.

That particular clash between two different perspectives will be greatly increased by another relevant trend - the rise of on-demand talent.

Highly Skilled Professionals, a Click Away

The internet has generated countless new jobs, especially in those fields where you don’t have to actually be in the office to get things done. This means that any experienced professional working in those fields only needs an internet connection to work with any company from anywhere in the world. That seems simple and convenient enough, but that wasn’t always the case.

When Paul Azorin and I founded BairesDev in 2009, some people looked at us in disbelief. Who was going to hire software engineers from other countries? Yet, we knew we had something there, so we put remote work and remote teams at the core of our business. More than a decade later, we’re one of the biggest outsourcing companies in the Americas and, funny thing, most companies from other industries are just now catching up with that smart working approach.

What happened in the middle? Several things converged. First, the release of many new communication tools that made it easier to work with someone from afar. Then, the increase in the agility of many industries, with software development leading the way, provided the foundations for new workflows to appear. Finally, the sharp increment in the need for talented and experienced professionals.

Thus, a lot of businesses that saw outsourcing just as a cost-cutting strategy, started to see that they could count on highly-skilled professionals for many projects - and just a couple of clicks away! Software outsourcing companies like BairesDev started to thrive. But we weren’t the only ones answering that demand. Marketplaces for premium talent and freelance workers as well as innovation crowdsourcing platforms all stepped up and made their contributions to the nascent gig economy. 

Both outsourcing and freelance talent became great alternatives for anyone looking for increased flexibility, quicker times to market, and new innovation pathways. The pandemic helped cement that. In fact, the outsourcing sector went through the pandemic with minimal adjustments (something I can personally attest, as this was a challenging yet rewarding year for BairesDev). It’s only natural for outsourcing companies and talent platforms to increase their presence in the post-pandemic landscape, especially for those companies that adopt remote working as a valid method.

Unfortunately, there’s a challenge hidden in there. Though a lot of companies across industries as varied as healthcare, manufacturing, marketing, and telecommunications regularly hire outsourcing companies and freelancers, they do so almost haphazardly. As strange as it may sound, many businesses lack a strategic approach to outsourcing and hiring remote talent, leading to many inefficiencies. 

In a context that’s moving fast towards remote work as the main working model, outsourcing without a proper strategy is high risk. Think about it. After it’s safe to come back to the office, many companies will want their employees back on the premises with the occasional staff augmentation for specific projects. Is that the right approach? On one hand, as I said above, people may not want to go back. On the other hand, without proper organization, the temporary staff can cause misalignments and other issues. 

You can surely imagine in-house employees thinking “hey, I’d love to work from home, yet the company doesn’t want me to but they still go out and hire outsiders that do so.” It’s a huge talent problem waiting to happen. Besides, who can safely say that talented employees don't take advantage of the rise of on-demand talent and start working under that model themselves?

A New Approach to Talent for the Post-COVID era

So, what can you do? First and foremost, you should have the necessary resources to tackle the imaginary scenario I mentioned above. How can you make your in-house talent stay while leveraging remote talent as well? I have a couple of ideas for that. 

The first one is - embrace remote work. I already talked about it in another post, so I won’t go into details here, but I’ll say this: people want to work remotely and you can benefit from it. Even a hybrid model will do wonders for both your company and your workforce, so don’t be quick to dismiss working from home. 

Think about the challenges you went through during the pandemic and how you solved them. But most importantly, analyze the impact remote working truly had on your business. Chances are things didn’t change that much and, if they did, they might have worked better. 

Then, you’ll need to consider a huge overhaul on how you approach talent from now on. Digital acceleration processes require a talent transformation. Thus, remote working is just one (necessary) step towards tomorrow’s workforce - you need to go deeper! By that, I mean some of the following:

• Reimagine your corporate culture. The pandemic was a seismic shift for the entire business landscape, something you should totally acknowledge. That means you’ll have to make some necessary changes in your corporate culture. Basically, I’m saying that you’ll have to get the entire team on board with the idea of a hybrid in-person/home model but also about the external talent notion. You’ll need outside help and partnerships for your digital acceleration, so you’ll have to convince everyone that this move is beneficial for the whole team. You’ll find some resistance at first, and that’s understandable. But you can overcome it by reassuring your in-house talent that no one will be replaced by outside professionals and that no one is forced to work from home. 
• Rethink ways to bridge gaps between in-house, remote, and external teams. Your workforce will likely have a core team in the offices, a remote team of employees working from their homes, and a team of staffers from a third-party. Ensuring that they all work in harmony will be a tall order, but you can manage that by articulating workflows that contemplate the perfect role for everyone. Thus, you can create protocols for outsourced employees to tap into institutional knowledge and channels to connect in-house workers with remote and freelance workers. The idea is to get everyone involved and build a cohesive team, regardless of their contractual status. 
• Break down tasks into easily manageable components. At BairesDev we’re used to doing this: breaking down each development sprint into tasks that a distributed team can tackle without any problems. Thus, when all the pieces get together, it all makes sense, even if they came from different professionals in different places. We can do so because we have thoroughly defined our projects before starting, so everyone is on the same page and we all know where we want to go. Additionally, Scrum meetings keep everyone in the loop, so all of our engineers know where we’re headed. That’s the way of working with the new remote and on-demand workforce - breaking down your projects into components that can be easily manageable by anyone in your team since they already have a clear picture of what the whole project looks like.   
• Analyze the capabilities you have and the ones you need. It’s highly likely that you won’t get all the skills you need in-house. That means you’ll have to make some concessions - either hire a permanent remote worker or outsource to a third-party company. And that’s fine! As long as you know which talent is better to have in-house and which one you should get from a reputable third party, you’ll have a better chance of balancing the components I discussed above. For instance, you can keep the core of the business in-house while outsourcing extremely specific parts of your projects (those that require hard-to-get talent).
• Adapt your organization to the new approach. How you see talent is just a piece of the larger puzzle that is your company. That means you’ll have to prepare your organization in other aspects, including security, intellectual property, and diverse regulations, to name a few. Thus, for example, you’ll have to figure out how to pay freelance and outsourced staffers on a regular basis or how you can maintain accountability for them. This implies a major redefinition of your organization’s structure, which can sometimes last for quite some time. Don’t feel discouraged about it, though. As you move forward, you’ll quickly figure out what things need to be done. You just have to keep a vigilant eye on them! 

The Time to Shift is Now

As digital acceleration processes are already underway across many industries, it becomes clear that this new approach to talent is something everyone should tackle right now. It’ll be impossible to succeed in your digital acceleration without a new way of looking at talent, mainly because of the convergence of the trends I’ve discussed here: remote work and on-demand talent. So, the time to make that shift in how you view talent is now.

That might be easier said than done (in fact, it’ll most likely be harder to do) but that shouldn’t deter you from doing it. The future of your company depends on it, so you have to break it all down, appoint a leader that will guide you through it all, and get your employees on board.