Welcome to 2022, the year of New Work.
Since the start of a global pandemic in early 2020, the current landscape of work has become uncertain, digitalized, and decentralized. In a pre-pandemic world, the daily schedule for the vast majority of workers was formatted into regular 9–5 hours. Full-time positions were headquartered in large office buildings with expensive rent, rigid breaks, and strict timelines. Workers needed to be ‘in sight’ and ‘in mind’ in order to qualify for competitive positions in overly saturated markets.
Covid imposed a dire need for long-distance communication while still managing to achieve team objectives, work-life balance, and financial progress. But this monumental moment has forced us to reconcile with key fundamental questions around our purpose, the values we support, and the future world we want to create.
Around this time you might have asked :
What do I actually want to do with my career?
Is what I am doing now aligned with my future career goals?
How could I change what I am doing to align more with my values?
Work Meets Freedom and Autonomy
Guess what, you are not the only one to be asking yourself those questions. Three key work formats that challenge the status quo are on the rise with the power to overtake the traditional workplace by storm. These concepts aren’t necessarily new but have been increasing in popularity for those who have begun to ask themselves the above questions.
Remote Work
Sixty-four per cent of the Gen Z demographic wants the freedom to work from anywhere (HBR). That means coordinating from coffee shops, across different time zones, and flexible hours. For traditional employers, this can seem like a coordination nightmare.
But with the rise of web3, blockchain, and modular tools like Notion, Telegram, and Discord, this new type of work becomes possible.
Entrepreneurship
People started over 440 thousand businesses in June 2021. The sixteen-month period from March 2020 to June 2021 marks a record high for business startups (NPR).
What is the cause of this influx? In some cases, the pandemic allowed those with ideas additional time to develop and set up their companies, funded with stipend government checks.
In this new digitally native world, Web3 has become a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to build their businesses and leverage tools such as the blockchain, to offer new mechanisms for crowdfunding and financing. Web3 offers entrepreneurs direct-to-consumer or community-driven opportunities to grow their businesses and seek feedback on products before release.
In 2021 the crowdfunding market size is estimated at $13.5 billion (GNW). In 2022, $30.3 billion was raised through 1199 token funding rounds (Cointelegraph).
Freelancing
Current predictions map that the freelancer economy will be $455B in size by 2023. The top freelancing domains are IT, administrative, finance, customer service, software development, and project management (FC). Freelancing requires knowledge of client acquisition, billing, tax declarations, and project management. It allows freedom of choice but rarely stability, especially in difficult economic times.
Each of the above requires a certain level of autonomy, responsibility, and independent coordination between clients and teams. Without a clear direction and set of expectations, those working in this way may face challenges continuing on the path to success.
Now Enter, New Work
What is New Work?
New Work is not just a career pathway, it is a new way of thinking.
Lomads defines New Work as the autonomous way to work and coordinate achievements in order to receive corresponding value according to contribution using Web3 tools.
This new type of professional (or leisure) focused coordination allows for flexible participation and the ability to collect funds into a single wallet. Whether you are interested in starting a graphic design agency among fellow freelancers or simply want to start a cause-backed fund between friends, New Work can be the solution for you.
First off, a basic knowledge of setting up a Metamask and using crypto is needed to get started to set up your collective. From there, we suggest setting out and writing out as a group as to what will be done with the funds, what is the collective mission, and what is needed to get started.
The Lomads Solution
Lomads is building the primary dashboard to facilitate New Work. We start by asking the following questions :
Context: How do you provide contributors with sufficient context to do their jobs well?
Access: How do you manage access across different tools (Notion, Github, Google Workspace etc.) that the contributors will use?
Credibility: How do you gauge the credibility of individual contributors?
Want to hear our answers to those questions and more? Join us for our upcoming open community discussion on Twitter Spaces on October 20th.
