Tag

contingent workforce

FlexTal
In Strategy & Business

Budget Season Is a Capacity Question

to depict the flex layer of a budget, it is an illustration of a piggy bank with a coin dropping into it. Behind the piggy bank is an icon symbolizing a budget spreadsheet.

Somewhere right now, a finance partner is sending a calendar invite titled “FY27 Planning: Quick Sync.” It will not be quick; it won’t result in synchronicity. By the end of that meeting, most leaders will have picked a side in the oldest argument in budgeting: add the headcount or hold the line. Both sides tend to skip the line item that lets a plan survive contact with March. It’s the center of flexible workforce planning, and it’s refreshingly simple. Set aside money for capacity you can’t name yet, and decide in advance what releases it.

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FlexTal
In Workplace Trends

Workslop: It Looks Done. It Isn’t.

photograph showing the concept of workslop. A business woman presents to coworkers with a slide presentation displayed behind her that has typos and gibberish.

It’s probably happened to you – maybe even this week. A coworker sent you a presentation for review. When you opened the deck, it looked finished – clean formatting, confident bullet points, a chart that appeared to prove something. Ten minutes later, you still can’t say what it’s proving, let alone what it’s arguing. Neither can the person who sent it. Researchers at Stanford and the workplace coaching platform BetterUp gave this rising trend a name last year: workslop. It’s AI-generated work that looks complete on the surface and falls apart the moment someone actually tries to use it.

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Chris Koens
In The Back Burner

If There’s a Tire in Your Cup

open palm leadership represented by an illustration of a tire; from the title "tire in your cup"

If you’ve been following this feed, you know how this goes by now: CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly talk, one local creative, one theme shared with hundreds of chapters around the world, no pitch, no agenda. I show up most months, notebook in hand, ready to get talked out of whatever I thought I understood walking in. This month did that within the first five minutes – and the speaker had me thinking about something I’m going to call open palm leadership.

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FlexTal
In The Future of Work

Job Stacking Isn’t the Problem. Rigid Jobs Are.

illustration of 3 buildings stacked on top of one another - depicting the topic: Job Stacking

Somewhere right now, a marketing manager is muting one virtual meeting to sit quietly through another. She’s not slacking off. She’s job stacking – holding down two full-time roles at once, both paying full salary, neither one aware the other exists. A few years ago this would have sounded like fraud. Today it’s common enough to have its own vocabulary, its own subreddit, and its own acronym: OE, for overemployed.

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FlexTal
In Workplace Trends

The Job Hugging Problem: Not the Warm Fuzzy Kind

line drawing of blue chair on top of stop sign; referring to the practice of job hugging

Your turnover dashboard looks great this quarter. Nobody quit. Nobody got poached by a competitor with a nicer parking lot. HR isn’t scrambling to backfill three roles before the holidays hit. By every traditional metric, retention is a win. You might think it’s time for some job hugging… but that’s not quite the same thing as team high-fives. And if you aren’t sure what it is, it’s time to dig in.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy, Strategy & Business, The Future of Work

The Headcount Trap

an illustration of an empty chair symbolizing the headcount trap. the chair is blue line-art on a field of bright green.

There is a number that has quietly run a lot of hiring decisions for a long time. Not a budget number. Not a productivity metric. Just a headcount. How many people are on the team. Are there vacant cubicles? Whether the org chart looks the way the org chart was designed to look – it becomes a headcount trap.

It’s a reasonable thing to track. It becomes a problem when it starts standing in for something it was never designed to measure: whether the business actually has the capability it needs to do what it’s trying to do.

Those are different things. And the gap between them has gotten wider.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy, The Future of Work

Expertise Is Out There, You Just Need to Access It

Illustration of key - symbolizing access to expertise. The key is bright green on a dark blue background.

Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment: when a business stalls, what actually went wrong?

The most common answers tend to involve the usual suspects – cash flow, market timing, leadership. And sure, those things matter. But there’s a subtler failure mode that doesn’t make the autopsy report as often as it should. It’s not that the talent didn’t exist. It’s that you didn’t have access to expertise – the right expertise – when you needed it most.

That’s a meaningful distinction. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy

Scope First, Hire Second: Why Vague Work Descriptions Are Costing You More Than You Think

photographic image of birthday cake with toy turtle on top of it. Symbolizes the importance of scoping first and hiring second. Birthday cake has light blue frosting, turtle is light green with brown shell on its back. Four pre-teen boys are playing in the background in a room decorated for a birthday party.

A week before his birthday, Nathan sat down to enjoy breakfast and nonchalantly mentioned, “I really like the turtles.”

That was it. That was his whole story. It wasn’t a masterclass in project scoping for freelancers, but it was his proclamation for the day.

To be fair, he’s not quite ten years old and was about to scarf down a short stack of pancakes before running to catch the bus to school. You can’t really hold the quality of his project brief against him.

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FlexTal
In Remote Work

Discipline Despite Distance

digital illustration of a notepad. It connects with the blog's concepts of discipline and remote work productivity. The image is a light blue notepad on a field of dark blue.

Everyone has that aunt. You know the one. She still has a rotary phone hanging on her kitchen wall – not ironically, not as décor, just because it works. And right next to it, a notepad. Notes from long friendly phone conversations. Who she should call back. Errands she needs to run. People she wants to send a letter – yes, a letter, with an envelope and a stamp. Everything written down, orderly, a list with no real order, but crossed off when done. She’s not particularly tech-savvy. She’s not type-A. She just figured out a long time ago that a good day doesn’t happen on its own. It has to be organized into existence.

She has never worked remotely. She has never managed a distributed team. But if she had, she would have been very good at it. Not that she would tell you so, you just know it.

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FlexTal
In Contingent Workforce, Remote Work

Busywork: the Job You Never Applied For

digital illustration depicting busywork in the freelance hiring process by showing a snake in a circle with its head eating its own tail. In the middle of the circle created by the snake is the word "busywork". The image is a light blue snake on a field of dark blue with the word in orange.

It’s Tuesday evening, and your actual work is waiting. The kind that has your name on it, the kind that moves things forward. But instead of doing that work, you’re rewriting a job description for a freelance project manager you need next month. You’ve already rewritten it twice. You’re not sure it’s right. You post it anyway, to three different places, because that’s what the freelance hiring process has become: yours to manage, yours to run, yours to finish when everything’s done. So you do.

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