Digital continues to drive major disruption and accelerate change across financial services, fintech and payments industries. As organizations are under increasing pressure to adapt more quickly and to drive new growth, they must race to assemble, reorganize, and dissolve teams at an ever faster pace.
The pandemic has exacerbated this challenge by completely reframing the workplace. Top digital talent is now demanding much more flexible work lifestyles and arrangements; 89% of digital workers have flexibility to work remotely and 77% say that they would be willing to work remotely full-time.
Most innovative and forward-thinking companies are realizing that traditional talent models can’t keep pace with this rate and type of change.
This is especially true for growth and innovation work. By definition, companies don’t know which ideas will thrive and which ones won’t. In turn these companies can’t accurately project how much talent and what type of talent they need and when.
The traditional full-time “get married” approach won’t suffice for this scenario because it requires companies and employees to make a high commitment to work that inherently contains too many unknowns. Growth and innovation initiatives change so quickly in direction and scope that companies struggle to develop full-time staffing plans that are coherent and that don't go out of date within the same fiscal year or even quarter.
Many large firms have learned this lesson the hard way during the pandemic. During a period of rapid change, firms hired thousands of new full-time workers in 2020-2021 only to lay off thousands of workers a few months or quarters later.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the low commitment “gig” economy also doesn’t work. Gig work is too short-term to attract the right caliber of talent that is needed to drive more complex and strategic growth initiatives. Also, heavily regulated and scrutinized firms aren’t willing to hire new, unknown talent by pushing a button on a website; they need a more trusted and curated approach.
Finally, consulting firms and contractors can help to supplement teams, but these firms often don’t have the right mix of entrepreneurial talent who are best suited to drive new growth initiatives. These organizations also struggle with their own full-time employee dilemmas where the mix of their staff can’t keep pace with the rapidly changing demands of their engagements, which in turn forces them to prioritize staff utilization over ensuring the best possible fit.
An innovative shared commitment approach is needed where companies can attract top talent teams to explore new growth initiatives, and at the same time allow them the flexibility to change their talent mix as needed. New approaches are also needed for companies to evolve their own talent and organizational models, both by bringing new talent into the organization and also by enabling their existing talent to “learn by doing” through these same growth initiatives.
We created Dreamteams to address these growing and urgent needs. We help innovative firms curate top performing teams and shared-commitment, 6-12 month engagements that we call Dreamteams Expeditions. These engagements focus on specific growth and innovation objectives, and they provide an applied pathway for companies to attract top talent, evolve their talent and organizational models, and retain their top employees by offering them new and exciting growth opportunities.
If you need to accelerate growth and are looking for ways to connect with top digital talent, we would love to meet you and explore how we can help.