A couple of days ago, a friend IM’d me to tell me that he might be quitting his job.  “Have you found something new?” I asked him.  He told me that he hadn’t.  He’s single and only financially responsible for himself, but the car payments and student loan bills will keep coming.  And this decision comes from the same person who had previously mentioned to me that he prefers money over unemployment… which, as a side note, might be one of the closest universally true statements of our economic condition I’ve heard in a while.  But here’s what my friend said:

“… handing in my two weeks today.  Looks like I will have some time to do some freelance soon.”

Has the economic climate spawned a new mindset? I feel this type of thinking has been a long time coming, most noticeably with current college students and recent graduates.  But the difficulty to find and keep jobs is like an incubator for freelancers to hatch out of everywhere.  Both employers and employees are reconsidering what work means.

Employers are realizing that they can’t afford full-time help for small projects.  Sites like Elance and oDesk are making it practical for small businesses to quickly connect with freelancers and get small projects done.  Less money and less time.  Companies are also outsourcing high quantity, small projects through services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the iPhone-friendly JoeMetric.  Tasks varying from translation to marketing research are disbursed to an instantly available mass of registered people.  I’ve even considered using Mechanical Turk to help test the development site for Telesaur.com.

Outsourcing by phone

Drake Bennett, at the Boston Globe, writes that Kenya’s largest employer has 10,000 people working for it.  The company, txteagle, sends small jobs like translating a phrase into a local dialect or verifying search engine results straight to its employees’ cell phones.  There’s no office space or time clock to punch in or out.  People don’t even get interviewed.  They just start working.  And this approach seems to be a great fit for Kenya’s current conditions.  Cell phones are prevalent too, which makes this the communication medium of choice.  And talk about a mobile workforce!  Bennett says,

“The workers can be anyone with a cellphone – a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed.”

Each job is short and takes seconds, or at most, minutes to complete, and people are paid in mobile money (mPesa) or airtime.  Besides the brilliant social entrepreneurship, txteagle is just a great example of what work is becoming.

With the stability of jobs in question, the traditional approach to work is in the hot seat.  Do cubicle jobs still bundle the benefits they used to offer?  From the looks of things, I’d say today’s generation is unbundling those benefits before we can answer the question.  If you give Bennett’s article a read, he goes into detail about how “guilds” are forming to provide things like insurance to freelancers.  Law reformations are starting to take the new definition of work into consideration as well, addressing health coverage, taxes, and retirement for these brave soloists.

Does this mean the end of full-time employment? I’m going to guess no.  There are parts of business that will be dramatically changed because of how practical it is to accomplish certain jobs this way.  On the other hand, there will always be a need to have highly skilled people on hand.  For instance, even in the midst of the outsourcing growth, companies are realizing that the cost savings aren’t always worth the additional costs created (ie. call centers are being home-shored rather than off-shored).  Employees can also start adapting their skills to be mobile and flexible.

Even if your company doesn’t start sending its work through cell phones to Kenya, there’s something important to learn here.  Decentralization.  The ability to dispurse your team and lessen, or eliminate, costs of a headquarters is an advantage.  Is telework necessary for you right now?  Maybe not.  But I bet if your competition starts teleworking, its going to become an uphill drive to and from your office.

Interested in learning more about txteagle? Here’s a 40 minute video with Nathan Eagle, co-founder of txteagle: