Our Story

The Future of Work Is Our Purpose

The Future of Work demands reinvented workplaces, redefined job roles, hyper-learning, and unshakable trust. A2K Partners believes and lives in The Future of Work.

Our company culture and operating structure is strategically positioned to support accelerated change and to advance the game of our customers who are becoming more aware of the reality that The Future of Work is here.

Yes, it’s right now.

Recent unnatural forces have even the most forward-thinking leaders in the world rethinking the way they do business from the ground up. The Future of Work has been suddenly accelerated for everyone. Everything analysts and business-leaders have predicted about The Future of Work is now unfolding for companies overnight.

We are a purpose-built, led and driven company that stands for bringing immediate solutions to our customers that solve their “right now problems”. We further help them make big shifts needed to be more adaptable, resilient and evolve in ways that enable them become more future-proof.

Our intimate understanding of what creates long-term value for our company, our customers and the customers they serve is reflected in our ten purpose principles.

 

Digital nomads are workers who are location-independent and use technology to perform their job. They work remotely, telecommuting rather than being physically present at a company’s headquarters or office.

As the demographic of the workforce rapidly shifts — from Baby Boomers and Gen-X to Millennials and Gen-Y — remote workers, contractors, gig workers, temporary staffing, contingent workforces, and coworking etc. are now viewed as the new normal.

Remote work lifestyle is expected.

Our customers come to us because they want their people to have a work experience that supports this model and allows them the freedom to work and be productive anywhere, anytime.

The benefits of distributed people and teams working from home or from a remote location on a regular basis has been proven to increase job satisfaction, reduce stress and have a better balance between life and work responsibilities in this modern age of working.

Our customers realize it is absolutely critical for them to adapt to this way of work so they can attract the right people to innovate, disrupt and win in their markets. So do we.

A liquid workforce is built from of a mixture of traditional permanent employees and an adaptable mix of non-employee workers combined with work automation technology..

In 2016, Accenture publicly predicted a “people trend”— that by 2026 there would be a “fully liquid enterprise” Global 2000 company operating with no full-time employees outside of the C-suite.

Freelance is the future. We were already there.

Traditional resourcing methods will not keep up with the shift and forces of creative destruction and change in this digital age. This workforce strategy is intentional and is a major competitive advantage.

Liquid resourcing models are paramount to quality, flexibility, making sense of uncertainty, and executing new ideas immediately. Creativity and innovation are at the core of their mindset and working method.

The talent pool trend is already here, and our forward-thinking customers want ways to begin making that happen for them right now. Our company was founded and operates on a liquid resourcing mindset. We are already far along on our way and leading the way forward for them.

Smart companies turn to “external contractors” and “virtual staff” that can be hired or laid-off on short notice) as a way to make their usual fixed cost of employee staffing more variable.

Why?

Because with tremendous forces and shifts in the marketplace comes an equally tremendous need for businesses to be highly adaptable so they can avoid disruption and maintain competitive advantages in their market.

Temporary and contingent labor has historically been proven massively successful for hyperscaling-up resourcing for periods of peak demand and down on demand for valleys. Talent pools of variable resource talent are extremely valuable and critical to servicing our customers who need deep subject-matter expertise and more brainpower on-demand.

The growing freelance mindset has disrupted old-school methods of managing teams and introduced an almost forced need to locate, manage and retain distributed groups of independents and employees.

None of this is new to our leadership team. Their experience with successfully developing and executing variable resourcing models stems back to the 1990’s, building services businesses to $1billion in revenue and delivering product and services to the most renown brands in the world — and to their customers.

This “elastic” people model equips us with powerful market differentiator and competitive advantage by remaining nimble with maximum ability to shift as new business challenges and markets evolve every day.

Our customers expect this in the modern business world to optimize their costs, increase their revenue, and stay ahead of their competitors. We expect to be their model of success. This is how momentum and abundance happens.

We have a global variable workforce of over 200 strong — smart, agile and energetic people with specialized skills to deliver Future of Work solutions in future thinking ways to solve the big problems of what’s going on for our customers today and ensuring they are ready for tomorrow.

Engaged companies and their people focus on their strengths and seek ways to always operate at their best. Engagement is a crucial part of how we execute.

We are intentional and driven about engagement. We are engagement-creating.

We believe being fully engaged and highly proactive is a personal and company responsibility. Engaging mindsets and behaviors are a valuable outcome of people and relationships that we always carefully tend to.

When we are highly engaged, our customers feel more confident about engaging. When we are proactive, our customers reflect proactiveness back to us and on to their customers.

Empowering people and relationships create the behaviors of proactive engagement and high performance. We are invested in empowering our workers and customers to take accountability, focus on strengths, eliminate perceived weakness, overcome ambiguity, and proactively improve their engagement to strive and thrive today and tomorrow.

Technology use to support or enable business strategy. Those days are now long gone. IT and technology services must shift from an order-taker to a business-shaper to compete and deliver on innovation and disruption promises in this digital era.

Every resource we rely on must first rely on themselves — acting and doing as the “CEO of their service”. Our people must know their customers and be of the operational mindset that if their customers don’t buy from them, they’ll be out of business.

This makes our people behave like winning business leaders. They are commissioned to intimately understand our customer’s business domain, so they can translate and deliver the winning connection between people, business processes, and systems to make business needs, objectives, and goals a winning reality.

Our people think and talk in terms of realizing accelerated business functions, benefits and value first. Technology is simply the means of bringing those benefits and value to life in consumer-like ways.

This is what our customers demand. This is how we deliver.

All human beings have a basic need to know that they are contributing, creating value and can make a difference to effect change. People crave the feelings of pride, accomplishment, fulfillment, growth and worth. Doing a good job feels amazing.

So, we think of ourselves as the “Chief Happiness Officer”. It is our job to make sure our people and our customers feel like they are always performing at their very best. And when they don’t, we figure out how to immediately change that for the better.

Of all the little things that boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday are most important to make progress and enjoy meaningful work. This is what makes the difference in how people feel and perform.

Our structure, resources, skillsets and support mechanisms are intentionally designed to make that happen for every moment of work. We make sure our people and our customers get great results and experience wonderful feelings about their results.

We live in an era of transparency. So, what people think and say about our company is our most important principle. We do not feel uncomfortable hearing about the reality of what we can do differently or better. We are committed to learning and doing. This is the foundation of what excites and drives us and our customers forward.

Many people and companies find themselves consumed with “commitment drift”. Critical promises are missed under growing pressures of quotas, targets and deadlines due to the forces of constant change.

Commitment drift is a downward spiral. It is dangerous. It is deadly.

Our people and customers are making serious personal commitments. They must maintain growing capabilities, strengthen customer relationships, retain employees, execute strategies, and pursue innovations to deliver on those enormous commitments. We believe that commitments add up to promises kept.

Delivered promises create massive value. They create confidence that enables leaders to lead, employees to engage, customers to demand, shareholders to invest, and the public to trust.

Doing what we say is how we enable our customers to create an upward spiral of winning results and long-standing trust so they can ultimately stand by and do what they say.

There is nothing more powerful than being yourself and real. The old guard in suits and corporate speak was unapproachable and made people feel intimidated. Modern lifestyles and technologies have now created virtual work environments where doing billion-dollar transactions on a webcam from home with kids running around is the status quo.

Part of our secret sauce is very simple and natural. Genuinely expressing what we do and how we do it in an informal setting and way, enables our people and customers to feel more intimately connected.

We stand for demystifying corporate hyperbole and cutting through the BS. People are crazy busy.

We make time valuable again with a no-nonsense — let’s get right down to solving your immediate business problem — way of approaching everything. We ask questions about the real stuff, like “What do you want to get more done of?” “What eats up all your bandwidth?” “What frustrates and distracts you during your workday?” “What is slowing down your ability to transact?” “What low-value work can we take off your plate so you can do more of critical things that matters most?”

We are all about easy-going and open communication, remote collaboration, feeling included and getting right down to the root.

This mantra fuels a solid sense of belonging, communication and acceptance. In a time of uncertainty, disruption, confusion, chaos in the business world, we love doing business in a way that makes everyone feel calm, safe and secure.

We want to see everyone we come in contact with, reap the benefits of business investment and value as quickly as possible. Our backbone for delivering solutions is “Rapid Time to Initial Value”.

What the heck exactly does that mean?

The best ideas in the world don’t always produce solid business value – there will be a percentage that don’t. We aim to make sure that doesn’t happen for our customers.

That’s why we stay focused on delivering what makes the most sense, with the most value to the most people in your business first.

Our ability to get things in the hands of our customers as fast as possible determines whether it will add value or not faster. It used to take large armies of people months and years to start delivering something that could be validated for value. We now make those things happen in a few weeks or days so customers can start to see their return on investment immediately.

The words “make my life easy” are pure gold to us. In fact, we often hear something more along the lines of “please, please make my life easier”. People really are desperate for more easiness. It’s a fact.

Regardless of what our customers want to do or offer — simple to complex — we constantly strive to make everything easier and easier for them to do business with us and their customers to enjoy a customer experience of greatness.

There is nothing more aggravating than digging through websites, looking for a number to call and trying to get a human being to respond. No one wants to listen to “dial an extension by number” and leave voicemails anymore. People want to take immediate action and get immediate action.

People are sick and tired of overstuffed inboxes. Mobile, FaceTime, social text, and videoconferencing are how people want to stay informed and get stuff done.
Poor user experiences, multi-application overload, digital distraction, notification noise, heavy documents, and operational hassle have reached an all-time high for everyone. Nothing about that experience feels good. It repels customers. It disables businesses.

Go to any big company website and try to engage with them? No thanks. (Click away, search next)

Our basic vocabulary and the way we do business are built on fundamental ideas like being easily approachable, hyper-responsive, text me, no more heaving lifting, you don’t need any people to do it, we’ve got this, and done for you.

At the end of the day, we thrive on hearing customers say things like “That’s all I need to do?” “That’s it?” “I don’t anymore resources?” “You mean I don’t have to…?” “OMG, that seems way too easy!”

Why?

Because this is how The Future of Work, works.

A2K Partners