By the year 2025, most workers (70 percent) and employers (68 percent) agree a majority of the workforce will be employed in an agile working capacity as contractors, consultants, temporary or freelance staff, according to a study released by Randstad US. The Workplace 2025 report of more than 3,100 workersand 1,500 HR and c-suite executives across the US found that as early as 2019, as much as 50 percent of the workforce will be comprised of agile workers, as nearly 4 in 10 (39 percent) workers say they are likely to consider shifting to an agile arrangement over the next two-to-three years. The study claims that this movement is fueling an equally aggressive adoption of new workforce models that tap into both permanent and agile employees to combat staffing shortages, leverage globalization and fuel greater innovation for organizations.

• Approximately half (46 percent) of workers surveyed said they personally chose to become an agile worker. The Workplace 2025 study uncovered the primary motivations behind this:
• 68 percent agree it better fits their lifestyle.
• 63 percent believe working as an agile working employee will make them more qualified in the future workplace.
• 56 percent agree agile work makes them more money.
• 48 agree agile work offers them better career growth than working as a permanent employee.
• 38 percent agree they feel more job security working as an agile worker than they do as a permanent employee.

Via workplaceinsight.net >

Americans are no strangers to spending hours of their lives stuck in traffic jams as they make their way to and from work.

Congestion has become so bad in many U.S cities that commuters lose 42 hours a year – around a full week’s work, up from 18 hours in 1982, according to the 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard.

The worst places for gridlock include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and New York City. Figures from navigation services firm TomTom show they all suffered from rising levels of congestion over the past year. Yet there’s a good reason for having so much traffic on the roads. “We noticed that cities that went up significantly are also employment hot spots,” Nick Cohn, a senior traffic expert at TomTom tells USA Today.

Via jllrealviews.com >

The fourth industrial revolution is creating prospects of a future that few fully comprehend, but the implications for the world of work are already taking shape. 

Trying to make sense of the future, in the face of such significant change and disruption, can leave you sympathizing with Alice of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century writings.

We’re confronted with such a dizzying array of shifting macro-environmental forces and rapid technological advances that most of us struggle to keep up with, let alone decipher. We read of countless innovations and new possibilities that not too long ago would have been written off as the result of an overactive imagination or simply material for a Hollywood plot.

The reality, however, is that the relationship between technology and humanity is changing – fast. And it’s no longer a distant future but already here, shaping not just the way in which we live, but the way we work.

Via raconteur.net >

Long before it was fashionable or even, let’s face it, socially acceptable, freelance workers had grown used to being on the move. Whether it was using the free wi-fi at a local coffee shop, or cadging desk space from a colleague or client, “anywhere, anytime” working was not so much a slogan for people who peck at keyboards for a living, as a way of life.

These days some work from places like Second Home, a sumptuous co-working space in East London, sharing foliage-filled corridors, space-age meeting rooms and “silent roaming areas” with a variety of tech-related businesses and the odd lone gun. Yet while it may sound exotic to those with fixed desks and labelled staplers, they are hardly outliers. Not only are co-working spaces now commonplace in most large cities around the world, WeWork, the best-known of the new players in the market, which has just opened its 100th site in Berlin, recently raised $430 million (£345 million) from investors giving it a valuation of $16 billion (£12.8 billion).

Via raconteur.net >