HBS Managing the Future of Work

For some families online learning is a rocky road. For others it’s a dead end. To address the uneven distribution of digital infrastructure, public-private partnership EdConnect provides students in underserved areas with broadband. Tennessee’s Superintendent of the Year, Dr. Bryan Johnson and CO.LAB startup accelerator CEO, Marcus Shaw talk about how, working with municipal utility EPB, they rallied stakeholders to deliver funding, resources, and access.

The US is facing a tsunami of demand for skills training and job placement. Its 1,100 community and technical colleges offer the best institutional infrastructure and student support for the task, but key reforms are needed. So argues The Indispensable Institution: Reimagining Community College, a June 2020 report from nonprofit Opportunity America. The group’s president, Tamar Jacoby, discusses the report’s findings, which stress the need for better workforce development.

In confronting the economic and social crises roiling the US in late 2020, it helps to have deep roots in local communities. San Antonio’s Project Quest brings to the task decades of success in advancing upward mobility in underserved areas. The nonprofit’s savvy, resilience, and willingness to learn from experience yield lasting improvements in the prospects of its participants. President & CEO David Zammiello explains how the group partners with employers and community colleges and provides the “wraparound” support services individuals need to gain skills and secure good jobs.  

What's in store for the gig economy and how will Covid-19 change the nature of work? Managing the Future of Work project co-chair and podcast co-host Joe Fuller was the inaugural guest on The Way Work Should Work, the new podcast produced by Braintrust. We present the "away" half of the home-and-away pair of episodes that saw Joe interview the freelance platform's co-founders, Adam Jackson and Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, in Episode 18.    

Can neuroscience and AI improve on traditional approaches to hiring and evaluating workers? Pymetrics’ co-founder and CEO, Frida Polli, argues that the combination is necessary to overcome inherently biased human judgement and to bring empirical rigor to the task of matching talent to fast-changing job categories. The neuroscientist-turned-Harvard MBA shares her journey and explains how her company helps the likes of Unilever, LinkedIn, and Accenture factor workers’ cognitive, social, and emotional aptitudes in their personnel decisions.        

Managing the Future of Work co-chair and podcast co-host, Joe Fuller, is a close observer of the care economy. He recently appeared as a guest on Behind Bundle, the podcast produced by employee benefits startup Bundle. The concierge service, which combines care and education coverage, was founded by HBS graduate Kayla Lebovits. Fittingly, we’re posting this episode the week of National Working Parents Day.

Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have focused attention on disparities in economic opportunity between Black and white America. This has added urgency to efforts to bolster Black students' access to higher education. It's a pivotal moment for UNCF, founded at the end of WWII as the United Negro College Fund. The organization supports historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). President and CEO, Dr. Michael Lomax, discusses the role of HBCUs in fostering economic opportunity and civic engagement and how changes in philanthropic activity and public policy can make a difference. 

The pandemic has unsurprisingly produced a sustained surge in streaming video, with consumer and enterprise use doubling year-over-year during the second quarter of 2020. Viewing on mobile devices has skyrocketed. Brightcove’s software platform is a key component of the online video infrastructure.   CEO Jeff Ray discusses video’s “evolutionary moment,” as remote work and virtual events become the norm and organizations build their video talent capacity internally and externally. He also notes the overall jump in school use, where the digital divide persists and threatens to widen achievement gaps.

While adapting to the limitations imposed by the pandemic, fast food chain Chipotle is looking to emerge stronger by maintaining commitments to its workforce. As Chipotle’s chief diversity, inclusion, and people officer, Marissa Andrada, explains, the company anticipates long-term returns on its investment in employee education benefits and its flexible scheduling for shift workers.   

Braintrust’s gig model gives freelancers the opportunity to keep more of what they earn and to have a say in running the platform. The not-for-profit aims to upend the status quo by replacing the typical gig middleman and assigning governing rights to users. The marketplace, which connects highly skilled tech talent with enterprise clients, uses blockchain tokens to grant users who help build the platform voting rights in strategy and policy decisions. Co-founders Adam Jackson and Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski discuss their experiment in realigning incentives.