The Distributed Innovation Playbook
written BY Braintrust / Images provided by Braintrust
What differentiates industry-leading companies from their competitors? Talent.
The talent that companies are able to attract and retain is what ultimately drives their success. The competition for the most highly skilled software engineers, developers, product designers, and UX/UI designers has never been greater. The old ways of attracting top talent— great benefits, high pay, the firm’s reputation, or some combination thereof — aren’t enough anymore.
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Braintrust is a SHACK15 resident startup that connects organizations with highly skilled tech talent, serving dozens of Fortune 500 companies including Nestle, Deloitte, Coursera, Porsche, and more. Our innovative business model helps organizations to find vetted teams to tackle their most complex projects, while empowering talent with a user-controlled, fee-free platform enabled by a blockchain token.
We recently released the Distributed Innovation Playbook, a step-by-step guide for leaders to develop high-performing remote teams and future-proof their talent pipeline accordingly.
We’re excited to share an excerpt from the Playbook with the SHACK15 community below, but there are so many actionable insights for leaders to unpack, so be sure to download the full playbook here.
Distributed Innovation Playbook
“For high-performing talent today, lifestyle has become just as important as work style,” according to Harvard Business School Professor James Ware. More and more of the most skilled, sought-after tech workers prioritize flexibility above all else, and the companies who recognize that fact and adapt their approach will win.
The flexibility this top tech talent craves is a two-way street that serves you, too. Businesses can leverage the expertise of leaders in a given field without having to carry the cost of that personnel year-round. Geography no longer constrains your ability to work with the best and brightest. Freelancers bring fresh perspectives that drive innovation and inject life into languishing projects.
The Talent-Led Revolution is here, and if you’re not tapping into the potential of distributed teams, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to innovate faster at a fraction of the cost. On-demand talent not only brings access to the skills your business needs but also the agility to scale your team up or down to match client demands and adapt to market conditions. The key to realizing these benefits for your business is to become an organization they want to work with… and that means changing how you work with them.
If you’re ready, this playbook will show you how to take advantage of this new normal, and future-proof your talent pipeline. But finding the right people only gets you part way there. The chapters that follow will give you the tools to get the most out of your team and build a program to carry you into the future.
After reading this playbook you’ll understand how to:
Identify skills gaps on your team that can be filled by freelance talent
Efficiently and effectively integrate freelance talent into your organization
Craft a company culture of inclusion and growth that maximizes your potential
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Innovation happens when you’re borrowing something that might be common in one discipline and applying it to another. The only way that you access that collaboration is to expand who you’re working with.
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Jenn Gustetic —Program Executive at NASA
The right tool for the job
According to the Harvard Business Review, almost all Fortune 500 companies are already using on-demand, highly skilled workers to some extent. Those companies are leveraging freelancers in all sorts of ways, getting help with both short- and long-term projects that can be specialized or general. However, HBR’s research shows that frontline leaders are the ones engaging freelance talent on an ad hoc basis. It’s a reactive approach without guidance from the c-suite. This process of finding solutions, while sometimes effective, ends up being costly and inefficient.
There’s a better way to work with freelance talent.
Brant Biggers, ADP’s Global Enterprise Vice President articulates three organizational approaches to engaging freelance talent:
The reactive model referenced above, which has a higher fixed cost and small spend for freelancers
The hybrid model, which is more flexible, variable, and managed
The agile model that is automated, scalable and on-demand
All three strategies can work depending upon the needs of your company, but Biggers says that an increasing number of organizations are leveraging the hybrid model. And the most advanced organizations are betting that the agile workforce model will dominate the marketplace in the future. However, according to Biggers, using an agile workforce “is a more advanced concept and will require a shift in how employers think strategically about their labor.”
Even if the agile model isn’t right for your company, thinking strategically early on gives you a huge operational advantage moving forward. How you choose to leverage freelance talent should dictate how your company plans and operates. And, careful evaluation of your current capabilities and second-order thinking about the future are how you create a successful plan…
To learn more about the tools and framework you need to make freelance talent work for you, be sure to download the full Distributed Innovation Playbook here and learn more about Braintrust on their website.