I wanted to introduce a concept which I think is starting to gain more momentum and will continue to do so over the coming years, especially as the freelancer economy continues to grow. It’s this concept of the drag and drop employee. If you have ever used any type of marketing automation software before, you will know that a lot of the functionality is about drag and drop. When you want something to happen you simply drag and drop the action into a sequence. Here’s a screenshot from marketing automation software provider, Infusionsoft, (which I use) so you can see what I’m talking about.
What if this same concept was applied to our organizations. For example, let’s say you were a part of a marketing team and needed some design support and market research assistance. What if you could simply open up a blank canvas like this, search for the right people to fill the job, filter them based on ratings, and then drag and drop them into your project? Then they would automatically be sent all the necessary documents, initial meetings can be scheduled, and within a few hours or a few days you would have the necessary support you needed literally by dragging and dropping team members into a team or project canvas. Better yet, what if a piece of smart software or AI inside of your organization was able to do this for you?
Right now this is just a concept since the technologies don’t yet exist to make this happen, but I think they will in the next few years. I also see something like this being far more applicable for organizations that are working with freelancers through external networks versus strictly with full time employees. Some organizations around the world like Cisco and Valve are testing their own internal like freelancer environments the drag and drop employee can also make sense there as well.
Our concept of employees and employment is changing and is becoming much more fluid, liquid, and open. This is why I think the idea of the drag and drop employee is something that we will see much more of in the near future. I’m also quite interested to see how vendors will address this with their technology solutions. Many organizations today don’t even know how many freelancers they are currently working with and the process if hiring then and getting them up to speed on the right project can be time consuming and tedious. If we are able to create full marketing automation sequences with drag and drop functionality then I think it would be quite interesting to simply our organizations with this concept of the drag and drop employee. I’ll explore this more in future posts but for now I’d be curious to hear what you think.
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. You can invite Jacob to keynote your next conference, subscribe to his videos on Youtube, check out his podcast, or subscribe to his newsletter!
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