Unconventional ideas or creativity?
Some of my innovative and early reflections on working and career flexibility were almost lost to the tip recently. I’ve just found some cue cards I wrote 20 years ago for a presentation I delivered about future careers. I’ve referred to this remarkable time previously and today I was astonished by some of the things I’d written. And quite naturally, my astonishment created this story!
There’s nothing I love more than a good “turn-out” and I’ve written before about my dislike of clutter. For me that applies to just about everything from physical stuff like random paper, clothes and anything else that’s outlived its usefulness, to digital archives. It seems that digital decluttering is my nemesis. Oh, so easy to delete and delete forever, then whoops I’ve done it again! That’s another email I meant to keep. Shh, don’t tell my husband, he keeps just about every email he’s ever written and oh, so many PowerPoint presentations. I’m pleased to say that I have kept all my blog stories safely, not just on my website, but in a Word folder on the Cloud. Maybe fun to read in my dotage, whenever I admit to that.
There are a few papers which I don’t think I’ll ever throw away, not because they are valuable or useful, but because I’m proud of what I wrote and what they achieved. For me that includes faded IPM assignments which I produced on a typewriter in the early 90s and a newsletter I designed about a planning application from the early 80s. At that time, I was a bit of a tree-hugger and fought hard to preserve some ancient oak trees and prevent the demolition of a beautiful Victoria Villa a few doors away. My more recent MSc assignments and a copy of my dissertation are filed for posterity and that’s where I discovered the cue cards, buried among the miscellany of handwritten job applications and presentations which landed me great roles with London Underground and KPMG.
I’m no clairvoyant although I like to think that I’m reasonably creative and insightful. My newly discovered cue cards bear testament to what some people might label, my unconventional ideas for 2001. It seems I was on a mission to get people employed by an organisation and then associated with a convenient or local workplace (according to their personal preference). I was also promoting the idea that independent workers shouldn’t be herded into workspaces where they didn’t want to be, let alone wasting hours on commuting just for the privilege of a “hot desk”.
I was sponsoring choice some 20 years’ ago, so that those of us who enjoy face to face collaboration didn’t get banished to the living room at home. And I was floating the idea that some of us like to have more than a job or a single role in an organisation, while others simply want to deliver their key objectives. Yes, this was all about flexible careers, flexible lifestyles and dare I say it, flexible rewards? But would it catch on?
“The possibilities are endless and the links with the heart of the business can be as tenuous as they are effective. Select as many or as few roles as you need to be happy. Mobility is no longer an issue – associate yourself with the right group of people, a particular way of working and the best location for you to do business effectively”.
Who’d have thought that it’d take a pandemic to bring some of these ideas to life for so many organisations, let alone divide CEOs on what’s best for corporate cultures as we emerge from lockdown? I’m hopeful that so many of us who’ve developed portfolio careers will continue to enjoy the flexibility to be had and I’m determined to promote choice at every opportunity.
It goes without saying that candidates who aren’t treated well during recruitment processes, won’t choose to join you, and employees who have felt loved will choose to stay. So that’s just flexible careers and lifestyle choices to conquer! Any ideas for 2041? Let’s chat if you’d like to consider some of your choices, or tell me about what you’ve kept.
PS – check your piles of papers for hidden gems before you banish them to the tip for recycling
