The Future of Work & Managing the Employee Lifecycle
What is the Future of Work?
When we tell folks that our startup accelerator and emerging venture fund are focused on the Future of Work, we get a variety of reactions.
Is the future of work that we all stay home and wear VR headsets, using the metaverse for meetings? Is it that ChatGPT answers all our emails and Slack messages? Is it that humanoid robots tend to our every logistical need?
We don’t doubt that VR, ChatGPT, and robotics have a role to play in the future, but our eyes are elsewhere for now.
The Source of Our Inspiration
The 500+ Workbox members that have stepped through the doors of our five locations teach us incredible things about what life is like in their future of work. Although all have their own unique motivations and interests, each have “opted in” to the idea that the future of work involves a balance of increased flexibility alongside some purposeful in-person connection. No doubt many of our members count themselves amongst the 60% of employees who want a long-term hybrid work arrangement (source: Gallup).
We ask them about their successes. Their challenges. Their balance of remote vs in-person work. Their approach to recruiting. To collaboration. To retention. To onboarding and offboarding. To customer conversations. And “wow” do they share, about how these (and more) have changed in the hybrid work era. And about the challenges that remain unsolved.
The Employee Lifecycle
The exclamation point on the conversation, is that there is virtually no pre-COVID process, tool, or tradition works “now”, that worked “then”.
Hiring only for individuals who can engage in every interview step in-person? Good luck. Doing on-the-job training only in times where employees can sit side-by-side together? Too limiting. Offering benefits and perks that are skewed towards the central location that used to be the center of gravity for the company? Not useful.
Teams on the leading edge of the distributed and hybrid trend are reinventing every aspect of the employee lifecycle from job posting through offboarding, and are thirsty for traditions, solutions, and tools that enable them to do so.
Workbox Accelerator x Future of Work
At Workbox, we’ve got a front row seat to these members deep in the journey of building high performing distributed/hybrid teams, and their success is our success. That’s a big part of why it made sense to launch an accelerator program that is specifically focused on the Future of Work challenges that these hybrid/distributed teams face.
Know any budding entrepreneurs that are pre-seed or seed-stage, and want to immerse themselves in a Future of Work community by way of an accelerator program tuned specifically to their space? We’re all ears.