10

Transforming, Launching, and Incentivizing Flat, Fluid, and Fast Work

In 2013, I was sitting in Luxembourg, as part of a multicity talent mobility roadshow with a client. We had recently launched Topia’s first relocation product and were piloting it with a few companies that were transforming parts of their talent mobility program to meet the demands of their growing millennial workforce, international operations, and recruiting needs. At this client, we had started to implement changes first in certain European locations as part of a pilot population before considering a global rollout. Together with their other partners, I was now meeting with an array of company talent and business leaders across their European offices—London, Dublin, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Munich—to introduce the proposed changes, educate them on the context for the changes, and build local change champions.

Many of America’s most innovative technology companies were both F3 Companies and traditional companies when it came to talent mobility. From disruptive business models to dynamic project teams, many of these companies were designed to be agile amid the talent mobility era. However, like many fast-growing technology companies I’ve worked with over the years, talent mobility processes often lagged business strategy. Instead of making talent mobility a key part of operations and business strategy, this client, like so many others, had set up it up to mirror the corporate relocation designs of traditional companies. With rapid growth and strong demand to fill open jobs, some visionary talent leaders now recognized that it was time to innovate. I had met one of the talent mobility leaders at just the right time in 2013. And now we were—together with their other partners—looking at how to help the company harness the talent mobility revolution as it rapidly scaled.

After working together to redesign things for the future, we had kicked off a change management roadshow to make this transformation a reality. And that is how I found myself sitting in Luxembourg in the dead of winter—cold, exhausted, and excited—doing a presentation on transforming talent mobility for millennial workers.

Over the years running Topia, I have worked with countless traditional companies as they transformed for talent mobility. For some, this meant a wholescale redesign of talent mobility across the areas we’ve discussed in this book—from strategy to org design to policy changes to operational transformation. For others, it was implementing and connecting a new set of talent mobility systems, often starting with Topia’s GMM system, to support a new talent mobility strategy that had been adopted. For each of these, effective change management and company alignment were a critical part of a successful transformation.

At the same time, I watched many companies (like Automattic, Upwork, Netflix, and many others) start and grow with talent mobility at their core. These companies have agility in their DNA and are able to respond as disruptions and opportunities hit. They are increasingly the employers of choice for today’s talent. And this talent increasingly can work from anywhere—giving employees greater flexibility, companies larger talent pools, and workers around the nation the opportunity to connect to jobs outside of their local area.

With this model, companies can also increasingly be started from anywhere, like Teleport and Skype, which were founded in Estonia. Gone are the days where companies had to be based in a few urban hubs to attract the talent they needed. Today’s companies can be based in cities and towns throughout the world, accessing skills from a global talent market and allowing founders to live in their communities and create local jobs. With the principles of talent mobility in place, these companies make frequent travel a part of their operations, with people working from dispersed locations and traveling to urban hubs for meetings as needed. With 62 percent of new jobs in America since the 2008 recession created by small businesses and increasing numbers of traditional jobs at risk from automation, it is crucial to our economy and workers that we rethink the structure of work. This should include incentives for companies hiring remote workers from outside of urban hubs, and updated benefits, protections, and labor classifications so that workers may comfortably work in the freelance economy. To underpin this, we must update our education curricula to help students understand different job opportunities and career paths in this new economy.

This book has provided a lens into the Talent Mobility Revolution and a playbook on the steps to transform for success amid its forces. But once companies and business leaders know what to transform, they must make it happen across complex, global companies. At the same time, the Talent Mobility Revolution brings with it the possibility to start and grow new companies throughout the country in different ways, bringing opportunities to many. Once company leaders and entrepreneurs understand this, they must make it happen with new designs and norms at their companies. To make all of this happen in a way that is fair and inclusive for workers, government leaders and unions must rethink the structure of work as we have known it for decades.

We conclude the book with this final chapter that looks at how to unleash an F3 Economy across America by implementing the changes we’ve discussed at traditional companies, starting new companies with these principles at their core, and evolving government policies to ensure all workers can benefit.

Transforming Traditional Companies to Be Flat, Fluid, and Fast

In the first nine chapters of this book, we covered the nine steps to becoming an F3 Company and looked at how traditional companies should adopt them. Bringing all of these together into a comprehensive change management and rollout plan is the final and, arguably, most complicated part of this transformation.

Implementing a transformation successfully requires a comprehensive change management program. There has been lots written about change management across business literature, but in my experience, there are certain key elements to successful large-scale talent mobility change management. These elements include a transformation team, change management roadmap, critical context, global kickoff, pilot population, key stakeholders, support classification, change management roadshow, and information hub. Whether you’re making changes for talent mobility at a small company, large company, or within a team, you can apply these principles.

Principles for Successful Change Management

Companies have been designed a particular way for many decades, and changing their norms, operations, and behaviors can be incredibly difficult. A comprehensive change management program and team can make this happen.

Successful change management first requires setting up a dedicated transformation team led by your new Chief Talent Mobility Officer. As you start your journey, your first hire should be your Chief Talent Mobility Officer (CTMO). As discussed in Chapter 2, the CTMO often does not come from a traditional HR background—rather, she often comes from another part of the business. Regardless, she should bring exceptional leadership, communication, and transformation management skills. Once hired, she should immediately assemble a cross-functional transformation team. This team should have representation from across the company, with particular expertise in project management, communication, and internal selling. This is the team that will design your new F3 Company using this book as their guide and align your company behind it.

Once the transformation team is assembled and has established the design and goals for your new F3 Company, they should create a comprehensive change management roadmap. The roadmap should be a large, master project plan with work streams for key activities, milestones, and dependencies. This is the plan that guides your transformation and its progress should be tracked in regular team and management calls, as well as reported in summary across the company.

Large-scale change management is difficult to implement because changing established human behaviors is hard. But, it’s easier when people understand why change is being asked of them. Successful change management starts by setting critical context about why you are undertaking this transformation journey. Successful execution and adoption of your talent mobility transformation requires that everyone in the company understand the reasons, goals, and benefits of the transformation. You should design and lead a comprehensive program to educate the company about this context. This should start from the first day of your change management program and continue throughout it.

Once you’ve built your transformation team, designed your change management roadmap, and started your education program on your critical context, it’s time to hold a global kickoff for your talent mobility transformation. The global kickoff is a meeting, usually virtual, with everyone in the company to introduce the transformation initiative and team. If your CTMO has not yet been introduced to the company, you can introduce her here. Otherwise, she should lead this kickoff. Before this meeting, you should ensure that key company leaders understand the critical context so that they can support employee questions after the meeting. The global kickoff should present an overview of the transformation initiative and set expectations for the major milestones in the roadmap. It should also clearly tell employees where they can find more information and how to ask questions about what’s happening. Establishing clear communication and expectations starts to establish alignment across the company, which will be important going forward.

Pilot Populations and Segmenting Your Organization for Transformation

When launching a talent mobility transformation across a company, it’s helpful to start with a pilot population where you can roll out change first. With this population, you can launch new initiatives, gather feedback, iterate on that feedback, and then be well prepared for the broader rollout. Across Topia’s customers—from large global investment banks to consulting firms, consumer goods companies, and many more—I have seen the best practice be to first adopt changes in a pilot population, iterating on feedback from that population before rolling out across the company.

One of the key parts of becoming an F3 Company is the shift to being an agile organization with movement across geographies, jobs, locations, and employment. Inherent in this is deconstructing work into dynamic projects that can be done by employees, freelancers, or artificial intelligence. But not every part of your company can be agile immediately. For example, accounts payable analysts may continue with business as usual until automation becomes a priority, while data scientists may have skills that immediately get loaned across projects.

To identify an appropriate pilot population, you should first segment your workforce into those who would naturally become agile, project-based workers and those who are likely to remain in fixed roles for the near term, and then select your pilot population from your agile workforce. Because the nature of talent mobility is movement, it is best if this pilot population is “horizontal”—that is selected from across the company and not demarcated by geography or department. With a pilot population identified, your transformation team can execute the various parts of their transformation plan and easily gather feedback from them.

Building Support and Launching Change

As you start to implement your transformation, it’s important to identify the key stakeholders for change. While you will communicate your critical context to all of your employees in the global kickoff, all of your employees will not be key stakeholders. Once you’ve identified your key stakeholders, you should identify who supports your change and who does not, assigning a support classification to each stakeholder. These support classifications are:

•   Champion. A champion fully supports the change. She is willing to put her own time and reputation on the line to advocate for the change. She can eloquently articulate the critical context, explain the milestones of the change management roadmap, and rally people in support of the change. Champions should be included as close partners to the transformation team. They are your allies and incredibly important.

•   Coach. A coach supports the change and shares important feedback from the company that is useful in how you position and share things to the broader company. Unlike a champion, however, a coach does not put much of his own time or reputation behind the change.

•   Supporter. A supporter is generally positive about the change. A supporter agrees with the change but tends to be passive. She does not actively advocate for the change (as a champion does) or share regular feedback and advice (as a coach does).

•   Neutral. A neutral is not positive or negative about the change. He politely listens and generally does not engage in any way, positively or negatively.

•   Detractor. A detractor does not support the change. She is actively negative and advocates against it, regularly sharing concerns and criticism. If pushed, a detractor may block parts of your change and work to rally support against it.

It is important to classify each key stakeholder so that you can take actions to amplify the support for your change and to neutralize your detractors, who can create difficult roadblocks for talent mobility transformation. It is unlikely that your detractors will become supporters of your change, so your goal should be to neutralize them. Generally, this is best done in one-on-one conversations helping them understand the critical context more deeply. You should assign a champion to work with each detractor with a clear objective to neutralize them. You should also leverage your champions to convert coaches and supporters to new champions, and neutrals to new supporters. For these one-one-one conversations, champions should be trained deeply on the critical context and change management roadmap, and able to answer skeptical questions from stakeholders. Often detractors and neutrals just need more time to understand the critical context and roadmap to get comfortable with it.

The support classifications of your key stakeholders are important as you kick off your change management roadshow, the final component of a successful rollout. The transformation team should visit offices around the world to introduce the transformation and what’s ahead. It’s important that this is done in person and in fairly intimate settings, so that the team can establish relationships with key stakeholders in local offices and build local champions to continue to carry the flame of the transformation once the team departs. These sessions should be run as a presentation covering the critical context, change management roadmap, and immediate next steps, but also have a significant portion of time allocated for questions so that everyone is heard.

During these sessions, you should direct the key stakeholders to the information hub. The information hub should be a website (or location on an intranet) that the transformation team creates and updates to provide details on the transformation, including presentations, frequently asked questions (FAQs), key milestones, and status updates. The information hub should be updated regularly as new information and FAQs emerge. It is essential that progress toward the important milestones is up to date so that everyone can track progress of the talent mobility transformation and see the progress toward becoming an F3 Company.

With these change management principles, any company can follow the nine-step transformation outlined in this book to become an F3 Company and then successfully embed this change across the company.

Building New Companies That Are Flat, Fluid, and Fast

We’ve now looked at the nine steps to becoming an F3 Company and how traditional companies can implement them for agility and success amid the Talent Mobility Revolution. But the F3 principels are not just for large or traditional companies. They are for all companies in all parts of the world that want to succeed amid the forces of globalization, automation, and demographic change.

Small businesses are the economic engine of America. Since the 2008 recession, small businesses generated more than 62 percent of all net new private sector jobs created, and 42 percent of the American workforce is employed by small businesses. Small businesses face many of the same challenges and potential disruptions as large, traditional companies, and, like larger companies, they must be able to adapt as disruptions hit. While not all of these transformation activities may apply to small businesses, the principles do.

The F3 principles also have significant potential for new companies. Greater talent mobility means more movement across geographies, jobs, locations, and employment. It also means that companies can hire remote knowledge workers outside of where they are headquartered. Companies in urban locations can hire workers from around the country, enabling virtual work and travel to offices and cities when needed. Companies in rural or suburban locations can hire workers based locally and around the world and increase efficiencies by pairing lower real estate costs and travel to cities when needed. More than ever today, companies can be started from anywhere.

SeeMe is an art technology company that was set up like this. SeeMe connects emerging artists around the world with buyers. It showcases its artists at a series of major art fairs around the world—selecting those who exhibit through online competitions it runs and covering travel costs for the winners. In essence, these artists are leveraging F3 principles in their own work—connecting virtually to those who want to purchase their skills and traveling to collaborate when needed!

SeeMe was founded in New York City but operates a distributed team. Certain employees are in New York, but others work remotely from home offices and travel to New York to collaborate. The company also hosts in-person team meetings when team members come together at the art shows where their artists exhibit. SeeMe CEO Brendan Burns lives in rural Richmond, Massachusetts, and commutes to New York to work on SeeMe and to teach at Columbia Graduate School of Business. Otherwise, he works from rural Richmond working virtually with his global company of artists and employees.

Brendan is in the process of setting up offices for SeeMe. But he’s not centralizing everything in New York, as you might expect. Rather, he’s keeping with the company’s talent mobility DNA—he expects to have an office in the rural Berkshires in Western Massachusetts and a small office in New York to use to bring the virtual team together and carry out certain activities that need to be based there. Brendan knows that, amid the Talent Mobility Revolution, he can connect with both a global marketplace and his virtual employees through collaboration, messaging, videoconferencing systems, and frequent travel. SeeMe’s employees also work across the company on projects as they come up—and to fill in the gaps, SeeMe employs freelancers to augment project teams.

SeeMe embraces the principles of the Talent Mobility Revolution, and with them is showing that technology start-ups can now be founded and run from everywhere, even rural Western Massachusetts.

Founding Values and Norms

When starting an F3 Company, it’s important to define your culture and operating norms at the outset. This includes your company values, the systems you will use, and the expectations for workers. Your company values should embrace flexibility, autonomy, and inclusion of all types of workers, whether working from the office or home, and whether employees or freelancers. At Topia, our values included “be global citizens,” “learn relentlessly,” and “collaborate radically” (among others), embracing our distributed team, agile mindset, and focus on teamwork. A part of your success building an F3 Company will be in setting expectations early to the people you hire about what kind of company it is. This starts with the values.

After creating your values, it’s critical to establish your operating norms early. You should follow Sten Tamkivi’s framework to “write liberally, meet regularly, and congregate occasionally” and ensure that all early employees embrace this as a foundation of the company. We have discussed many of the other structures of F3 Companies in prior chapters—any company starting today should adopt these as a part of their standard operations from the very beginning. These include building a culture of worker movement, deconstructing work into dynamic projects with OKRs, including all types of workers in your workforce definition, setting clear communications and systems use expectations, and rethinking the purpose of your offices, among others.

It is critical that all of these norms are immediately embraced from the founding team and early employees, and then translated to every person that you hire going forward. During recruiting and onboarding processes, you must clearly communicate your company values and norms. This includes making sure everyone hired knows that a job at your company does not come with a promise of lifetime employment and a linear career path; rather it will include dynamic projects, flexible work, and exponential learning and skills development opportunities across geographies, jobs, and teams.

Finally, when starting a new F3 Company, you must understand the talent mobility systems roadmap, but implement it in line with company growth. You should immediately implement a collaboration system, messaging application, and virtual meeting software to make your company run. You may also want to immediately start to leverage a freelancer marketplace to augment your early employees with skills from freelancers before you are ready to hire more employees. As your company grows and geographic, job, and employment movement increase, you should adopt the other parts of the talent mobility systems roadmap.

“It is so much easier to build a distributed, mobile culture from the ground up,” says Sten Tamkivi, an expert on distributed teams from Skype and founding Teleport. “I saw this work at both Skype and Teleport, and then not work as well when Skype was acquired by eBay and people were used to working in another way.”

“If 100 people are all working in the traditional way in an office, and you hire one remote person, it’s not one person who needs to change, it’s 101 people who need to change how they interact with each other and the systems they use. This requires a massive cultural shift from everyone. Instead of shouting from a corner office, now you need to post in a messaging application. Instead of having casual conversations at the watercooler, you need to empathize that someone isn’t there and wait for the videoconference. It’s a very hard transition to do in later stages,” continues Tamkivi. “But it’s much easier to do from the start—adopting tools, apps, and behaviors from the beginning and aligning everyone around this. Every company in today’s era should be founded like this.”

Managing Company Growth and Challenges

Many start-up companies—like SeeMe and Teleport—are founded with F3 principles at their core. As they grow, they will naturally develop operating rhythms and team dynamics centered around particular locations. Companies should develop an office model of “hubs and spokes” with office hubs in particular locations that offer an easy place for workers to congregate and spokes of distributed workers farther afield. To maximize efficiencies amid growth, companies may start to align distributed workers to one of these office hubs, often in a nearby geographic location and time zone. This starts to build some structure on top of the project teams and provides a natural location if workers want to go into an office or need to dial into a regional conference call.

While talent mobility can attract top talent to new companies and unleash innovation, it can also be challenging to manage amid rapid growth. With change, opportunities, and challenges often comes the need to bring people physically together—whether hunkering down amid headwinds or gearing up amid tailwinds. While your F3 principles will be in your company DNA, it’s important to adapt to the needs of the company and workers at different stages. Yahoo famously banned remote work in 2013 when Marissa Mayer took over as CEO and worked to realign and reignite company growth. IBM brought thousands of remote workers back to offices in 2017. At Topia, there were numerous periods where we asked people to work from the office. This was often when we rolled out new products, completed acquisitions, or made changes to our business, all of which required more communication and alignment across the company. In this way, companies think about talent mobility like a rubber band—staff stretches across locations at certain points and comes together at other points. You should set this expectation early so that employees are not shocked—as they were at Yahoo—when changes are requested to ways of working and talent mobility is limited.

“Communicating and aligning for change—whether positive or negative—often requires face-to-face working,” says Tamkivi. “I always say that you build relationships face-to-face and maintain them through virtual work. Not vice versa. Rapid growth, business challenges, or big company changes often require a deepening of personal relationships and trust that must happen, at least for some time, in person. In these times, working together can also just be more efficient.”

Designing Policies to Unleash a Flat, Fluid, and Fast Economy

F3 Companies drive employee engagement, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth. Any traditional company can transform to be an F3 Company. Any new company can start as an F3 Company. And any team can adopt F3 Company principles. To be successful in the twenty-first century, all businesses must be F3 Companies.

The forces of globalization, automation, and demographic change have fundamentally changed the nature of work and brought the Talent Mobility Revolution to our forefront. Workers will increasingly work across companies, jobs, and geographies. They will do this as employees and freelancers, in segments or at the same time. They will work from offices, homes, and coworking spaces in all parts of the country. They will develop skills, loan them across projects, and pursue lifelong learning alongside careers. They will see their work become increasingly project-based, both inside and outside companies, with their skills increasingly decoupled from companies. My generation will work across more careers than our parents had job titles.

With this change in work, we can unlock a new future of work, where companies hire workers from a national talent pool, workers can live anywhere—rural, suburban and urban locations—and access jobs throughout the nation, and diversity becomes commonplace.

While there are many benefits to this future of work, it also brings challenges and uncertainty. For decades, work was based on the concept that traditional companies provided stable work, income, and benefits to employees. Employees worked for years, earned a good wage and benefits, and then enjoyed retirement. In the project-based economy, work can be inconsistent. Skilled workers can earn high wages (the highest paid freelancer on Upwork makes $2.5 million per year) and save for gaps in work, but other workers can be left behind or taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers who push full-time work to cheaper contractors to avoid paying benefits and protecting workers. Without the traditional benefits and protections provided to full-time employees and the collective bargaining of unions, these workers can struggle to earn a fair wage, save for retirement and have healthcare coverage, among other challenges. We must work together across government, businesses and unions to ensure our American workers are supported and protected as our economy undergoes the talent mobility revolution. This is our responsibility and most important job.

We must support this shift by redesigning our contract for work in America. Without this, the gains of talent mobility will fall to only a few and inequality will only accelerate. This starts with rethinking our long-held structure of work, and then creating new programs to support workers in our new economy. Finally, we must create tax incentives for workers to transition to new work, entrepreneurs to pursue ideas and continue to create new jobs, and companies to fill jobs with workers across America. These policies will create a new economy for all and ensure continued American economic competitiveness.

Our new contract for work in America should include:

A new structure of work. We must recognize that work is shifting to include an expanded workforce with more on-demand project and freelance work. At the same time, we must also recognize that certain employers are exploiting these trends to avoid paying workers fair wages, overtime pay and benefits. To address this, we should review labor law and consider a classification for on-demand freelance workers that allows employers to provide and pay for portable benefits, protections and fair pay while recognizing the different structure of work. These flexible project workers are different from traditional employees and contractors because they work when they want to, often with flexible schedules and rates set by supply and demand. In many instances, they work alongside other freelance work or employment to augment their income. (We must separately increase the minimum wage to ensure that workers who choose to work in one job are paid fairly and sufficiently.) We must ensure that these freelanceworkers, who value their different way of working, can maintain their flexibility and autonomy, while being protected from unscrupulous business practices and supported in basic needs. To do this, we should create a new classification of worker that extends many of the traditional employment protections (minimum wage, overtime pay, healthcare and other benefits, antidiscrimination, sexual harassment protections, and health and safety, among others) to freelance workers and allows for collective bargaining and representation. Alongside this, we must accelerate educational resources to help workers adapt, smooth income, and responsibly save.

Portable, protected benefits. For decades, companies provided employees a set of protections and benefits, like a minimum wage, healthcare, and retirement savings. We must ensure that as people work across more job types, all workers have access to affordable high quality and portable healthcare and other basic benefits, regardless of employment classification. We should start with creating a public option, that is exists alongside with private insurance, and can be paid for directly or by stipends from employers. Over time this will help to push down healthcare and prescription drug costs across all insurance types as the effects of a larger competitive market take hold. We must increase our minimum wage, across all types of employment, to ensure our workers earn enough to live comfortably in today’s America. We must also create a federally mandated paid parental leave policy for all mothers and fathers to ensure diversity in our workforce and care for our next generation. (The US is one of only a few countries that do not provide paid parental leave. The others include Papua New Guinea, Lesotho, Swaziland and Liberia). Finally, this new structure of work must have an updated retirement savings program that all workers can use, directly and with contributions from employers, regardless of employment status. We should do this because our economy is fundamentally changing and we must support all of our workers in this new paradigm. We should also do this because it makes good economic and business sense. When workers have basic needs for health, family, and retirement met, they are freer to be members of families and local communities, start companies, switch jobs, use their skills in the economy, and learn new skills. This creates a flywheel of healthy communities, economic growth and job creation, benefiting everyone.

Expanded community college and apprenticeships. As we’ve discussed in this book, skills are the currency of today’s economy. The talent mobility era will be characterized by lifelong learning, starting after high school, as workers continually develop skills to use across projects. To ensure everyone has the opportunity to develop skills for all parts of our economy, we should both bolster our community college system to ensure that everyone has the right to higher education and the opportunity to pursue lifelong learning throughout a career. We should consider funding structured as a forgivable loan tied to successfully completing a course—if successful, students do not need to pay for the course. As part of this program, we should also incentivize public-private technology partnerships to enhance virtual learning programs, expanding access to courses throughout America, reducing overhead costs for running community colleges, and helping students develop the digital fluency that is a hallmark of the talent mobility era. A part of this should be a program to loan laptops to students who may not be able to afford them. Expanded community college gives everyone the right to an education and helps workers continually develop skills for the new economy. At the same time, we should accelerate vocational programs and apprenticeships in partnerships with our unions, supporting learning and employment opportunities across trades. This is good for workers and good for economic growth.

Expanded early education. As the workforce becomes more diverse, we must invest in education and childcare for our next generation. We should expand our current kindergarten system to include pre-K, helping children develop critical skills early, creating new teaching jobs, and supporting diversity across the workforce. Over time, we should look to expand this to also include subsidized early childcare and nursery school. (The maternal employment rate is negatively impacted by the lack of affordable daycare. The average cost of full-time daycare for a child age four or younger is approximately $10,000 per year.)^* The United States now ranks third to last among OECD countries on public spending on family benefits.^† (Note that Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, a universal childcare bill with bipartisan support, before President Richard Nixon vetoed it.) Expanded early education gives working families the opportunity for both parents to participate in the new economy. This is sound economic policy that spurs economic output, small business creation, and job growth.

Distributed hiring incentives. If you spend time in any of America’s large coastal cities today, you won’t go far without hearing business leaders complain that they can’t find skilled workers. From San Francisco to Seattle to New York, companies frequently talk about worker shortages. At the same time, many other parts of America—from rural California to the rust belt to Appalachia—are filled with workers with both the skills and work ethic these companies need. There are three ways to solve this problem: move workers to jobs, move jobs to workers, or embrace distributed work supporting remote work from hometowns and travel to company offices when needed. Many people do not want to move away from their local communities, and the high cost of living in urban coastal cities can make moving prohibitive. Similarly, it can be difficult and expensive for communities to attract companies to set up local offices and create local jobs. The solution sits with companies leveraging the distributed work and frequent travel of the talent mobility era to hire workers from all over America and bring them to offices when needed. We should economically incentivize companies, often based in low-unemployment coastal hubs, to hire remote workers from other parts of America where unemployment may be high. This brings jobs to workers and allows people to live in their own communities, where they can continue to contribute to their local economy. Similar to incentivizing companies to hire remote workers from other parts of America, we should incentivize knowledge workers to stay or return to rural parts of America and work remotely from there. (In 2019, Vermont launched a “Remote Worker Grant Program” that pays workers up to $5,000 per year to live in Vermont and work for a company outside the state.)^* This is sound economic policy that spreads gains from America’s companies to workers and communities throughout the country.

Small business and entrepreneur incentives. As our economy shifts, freelance and remote work will become a larger part of work. At the same time, continued job growth and innovation—including solutions to many of our largest challenges—will continue to come from the ingenuity of America’s private sector. We should increase incentives to support and accelerate entrepreneurship and small business creation in America—from the microentrepreneurs of the freelance economy, to those starting local businesses—often the backbone of our local economies, to the technologists solving intractable problems. We should provide tax breaks for freelancers on the first portion of their income, recognizing the risks that these workers take, the value they provide companies, and the fact that many people use freelance work to pay for expenses that they can’t afford to cover from regular wages. We should make it easier to start and manage small and growing businesses, from subsidized small business loans to more efficient tax policy. Finally, we should recognize that the solutions to some of the most critical challenges of our time—from clean energy to high-risk home insurance to cybersecurity will come from the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs. We must incentivize and direct our entrepreneurs and investors to tackle these intractable challenges for our society.

The new contract for work will unleash a Flat, Fluid, and Fast economy across our nation. This will accelerate economic growth, ensure American competitiveness, and support all workers through the transition to the new world of work. We must make this shift to stimulate our future economy and ensure our companies, workers, and nation are all helped, not hurt, by the forces of globalization, automation, and demographic change. In the early years of globalization, we left many workers behind. Today, we have the opportunity to ensure that everyone benefits from talent mobility.

The Talent Mobility Revolution is upon us. Driven by the seismic and converging forces of globalization, automation, and demographic change, the talent mobility era brings frequent disruptions and opportunities to companies and workers. This book has provided a nine-step playbook for companies and business leaders to transform in the face of the Talent Mobility Revolution—to drive employee engagement, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth. Companies today must transform to be agile—unlocking project-based work and continuous movement across geographies, jobs, locations, and employment. The companies that do this successfully will be the winners of the twenty-first century. Those that do not will be left behind and lose out to their more agile competitors.

But the Talent Mobility Revolution is not only for large companies. It will touch all parts of our economy—from multinational leaders to small businesses to teams to start-ups to individual workers to government policy. By following the principles in this book, we can all benefit from becoming Flat, Fluid, and Fast.

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^* https://www.workingmother.com/this-is-what-day-care-looks-like-aroundworld#page-3.

^† https://newrepublic.com/article/113009/child-care-america-was-very-closeuniversal-day-care.

^* https://www.thinkvermont.com/remote-worker-grant-program/.