My future of work

I want to talk about new ways of working. Not yet another take on working from home though, you’ll be relieved to hear. This comes from a more personal perspective. 

I’ve been a full-time freelancer since 2016 and haven’t worked full-time for one employer since about 2013, and yes, it provides all the things it promises: autonomy, flexibility, variety, freedom from office politics and terrible bosses. It would be fair to say I’d find going back to being a full-time employee something of a challenge. 

But on the flipside, it’s hard to build much as a freelancer, apart from your reputation and some decent relationships with clients. Some of these relationships last years, and can be friendly and fruitful, but you’re never truly part of a team. You miss out on the social and intellectual positives of working with others on a daily basis, the chance to build a mission or an organisation, to really think strategically.

Your impact as a lone freelancer is limited, both in terms of the work you do and your influence on the world you operate in, and most of the time you’re delivering work that, however interesting, is someone else’s idea. And yes, some of this is about ego, but if your work is driven by the desire to make an impact on social issues, I believe it’s inherent to want to maximise the outcome of your time and energy. 

I don’t miss appraisals (receiving or delivering), but I do miss the chats where you just bounce things around with your colleagues, where you’re not pitching anything, just seeing where an idea takes you. And there are some practical challenges; it’s tough to get your message out as a lone freelancer, and even harder to find ways to fund your own projects. 

Thinking about it from the other side, I can see organisations missing out on a whole load of capacity and skills that exist in the freelance pool, but that aren’t easily packaged up or commissioned on a day rate. 

So for a while I’ve been looking for something in between, in a space that doesn’t really seem to exist, where I can retain my freedom but also build some more solid connections. 

Maybe it’s a portfolio career? This is most often characterised as a part-time job and something alongside, perhaps freelance work or a small business in a different field, like a part-time lawyer who also has a creative business. But part-time jobs at my level in my field are few and far between, so this hasn’t proved to be a viable option. Incidentally, I also have a hunch that portfolio careers have a disproportionate number of articles written about them compared to the number of people that actually have one. 

So I’ve concluded that I might need to build something myself: a space for individuals and small organisations interested in all aspects of a fair and inclusive economy to come together, to be greater than the sum of their parts, to have a bigger platform, to share, amplify, bounce ideas around, and collaborate in more fluid and creative ways.

I’m still very much working on the details, and would love to talk to anyone that recognises any of these challenges or ambitions. It’s not a think tank, I won’t be advertising any jobs, and it’s not just a quarterly zoom chat. I think it’s something in between all these things - if you’d like to help me figure it out, please get in touch!