For those who have implemented an internal gig marketplace for short-term assignments / projects: what successes and challenges have you faced in adoption and impact?
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Major successes are seen in pockets of the organization where the system has had full buy in. One main challenge I see is that we still tend to handle these gigs in a non-systemic way by tapping those who we already know and are capable vs. utilizing the system to grow and work with talent in which we are not as familiar with.
Thanks Kelsie! We're piloting with our own organization since we've seen a need for years, and to your point the buy-in has helped adoption and hopefully for continuation and curation of the program. I hope that as we scale out we'll really begin to tap others who we're not familiar with.
One major challenge is to have managers be fully onboard and enabling talent mobility. Said another way, managers should not hoard talent, but need to advocate for their team members to take on gigs with other leaders and move on to jos that may be in other departments.
Thanks Eric! Agreed and I think we'll face that the talent hoarders challenge as we scale out our program.
We have implemented 'gigs' and the reception from employees has been very positive as it aids development in a way that drives demonstrable skills with the experience. The biggest challenge has been identifying what a successful 'gig' looks like. We are currently looking to enhance this process by educating prospective 'gig owners' on how to scope and describe the 'gig'.
Thanks for the response Christine! We're a few weeks into your pilot and to your point, I think we'll need to figure out what success looks like. We've been lucky in that a few employees who've taken on gigs have been vocal that sharing their (positive) experience, but it'll be key that we have some empirical data on this as well.
Great for development , popular with career orientated employees , spreads skills and overall business understanding. I suspect it does stop some people from leaving but no statistical evidence as yet on that.
The issue
Don't underestimate the political wrangling over budgets
It does generate more movement ( from the backfill of assignments)
We did get a Manager try to split out a whole job into gigs and it was unmanageable and affected performance of the whole team
Really have your tracking system sorted out
Hey Peter, thanks for the response and as we've piloted we've discussed the risk in your 3rd point about managers potentially abusing this to split out whole jobs. We've indicated this as a no-no in ground rules but we'll definitely keep watchful eye.
Hi everyone, thanks for your response and just wanted to provide a quick update that we began a gigs pilot a few weeks ago and have already seen success at filling half of the gigs we posted.
We made a point to keep our intake mechanism simple (using workflows and lists on Slack) and put the gig owners in the driver's seat to sort out through the talent intake. Since I'm the project owner I designed to keep the admin and curation burden light on my side.
One thing that has surprised me so far is that the gigs perceived as more challenging seem to be more popular. I'm a gig owner myself and positioned some of my gigs with minimal effort etc. but they don't seem to be taking off as much as those with a bit more scope and complexity.