The Human Cloud Is A Staple Of Doing Business - 1273 Words

Over the last decade, the â€Å"human cloud† has become a staple of doing business. Companies from main street to wall street can quickly find extremely talented subcontractors online, from anywhere in the world, at a very reasonable price. For this reason, it has become increasingly difficult to trade competitively without â€Å"crowdsourcing,† or accessing the human cloud. The â€Å"human cloud,† a term used to describe the online, talentsourcing ecosystem that has emerged over the last decade or so, revolves around online middlemen, such as Upwork , that engage a virtual pool of workers from around the world that can be tapped, on demand, to provide a broad range of services to any interested buyer (Kaganer, 2012). â€Å"As the world becomes more global,†¦show more content†¦2). All these advantages notwithstanding, the challenges of leveraging the human cloud should not be taken lightly. Perhaps the most notable downside to international trade would be the sophistication of communication required to manage cloud workers. Virtual organizations can speed up cycle time, but they pose new challenges for managers on how to manage remote workers. Communications technologies and the Web let employees work from anywhere—around the corner or around the world—and require special attention to managing communication (Carpenter, 2009, p. 62). For the uninitiated, differences in culture, language and cross time zone coordination make the managerial task formidable indeed. Given this challenge, we wonder if there exists a set of principles for successfully leveraging the human cloud? Here are three principles that managers of a distributed workforce can rely on to successfully leverage the human cloud. Principle #1: Inspire Most workers want to be a part of an enterprise that matters. Current research suggests that in the United States, the millennials generation, specifically, has a preference for social enterprises (FerriReed, J., 2014). As the global workforce ages, the advantage in