Given Wripple’s focus on powering the modern marketing workforce, McKinsey’s recent research “The State of Organizations 2023: Ten Shifts Transforming Organizations” especially hit home. All ten shifts either directly or indirectly tie to an organization’s most essential asset… the talented people that make up its workforce. An overview of their ten notable shifts is provided here.

In many ways, Wripple’s on-demand talent platform was created to help marketing teams address these ten shifts. By enabling organizations to source, curate, and manage an on-demand talent pool of independent professionals, Wripple’s tech + human touch helps marketers build fit-for-purpose teams to achieve greater speed, efficiency, and flexibility.    

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The 11th Shift: The Rise of Blended Teams

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These teams will define the successful modern workforce and represent a potential eleventh shift: from rigid traditional team structures to agile blended teams of on-demand talent and full-time employees that team up seamlessly to achieve desired outcomes. As Tara Heptinstall, Theta’s Head of Marketing and Wripple client, says, this model of freelancers blended with full-time employees allows you to lever what you need when you need it and does not overburden the organization. These teams will lose the hard mental distinction between inside and outside talent and prevail through a team-first mindset. A mindset that embodies the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  

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Overcoming Old-world Constraints

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This shift to a modern workforce of blended teams entails a talent strategy that busts through old-world constraints including company walls, geography, and entrenched ways of working.  What’s required are three essential capabilities:    

1. On-demand Talent Sourcing that provides the ability to form, in close to real-time, teams with the right talent, from inside and outside company walls. This takes a dynamic platform approach that also accounts for category nuance (relevant roles, skills etc.), values craft, and ensures fairness and transparency.  
2. On-demand Talent Ops that enable a seamless, compliant, and overall positive experience for talent. Operational capabilities for the modern marketing workforce will be integrated across HR, Legal, Finance, and Delivery, resulting in vastly reduced friction for teams from formation to onboarding and execution.
3. Blended Teams Management & Planning that enables organizations to activate a dynamic talent pool of full-time and on-demand talent optimized based on changing needs, team performance, and other organizational priorities. This talent pool’s value will be defined by its cross-discipline expertise mapped to the organization’s needs, not by siloed department lines and over-engineered performance management processes.    

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Embracing the Shift to Blended Teams

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In their recent study, Future of the Workforce, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte found that 33% of work was being performed by external workers and 86% of global business leaders said the effective management of external contributors was critical to their organization’s overall performance. The key to effective management of external workers will require the three capabilities above and the balancing of tech with a human-centered team mindset.  

It goes without saying that technology, which impacts how we connect and create (hello AI), will play a huge role in fueling this eleventh shift. With all the benefits technology brings it also alters how traditional teams interrelate.  If we let it, this can often have an adverse impact on the joy teams find in achieving a common goal together. As a result, it’s essential for teams to maintain team-first values that keep the humanity of work at the center of teams. Openness, transparency, kindness, inventiveness, and a commitment to having each other’s backs cannot get lost in the transformation to the new team model.

In this eleventh shift, teams will have boundless possibilities in how to team up and get meaningful work done. That’s a shift worth making because in the end (blended) teamwork makes the dream work.

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