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Meet the Experts on the flexible future of work

Hear insights from work-life experts Annie Auerbach, Melanie Cook, and Kate Lister on how a more flexible way of working—which includes not only where and when but also how to build a more collaborative company culture—can lead to better business results and personal happiness.

Annie Auerbach

Annie Auerbach is the author of Flex: Reinventing Work for a Smarter, Happier Life. She is a speaker, consultant, brand strategist, and the co-founder of trends agency Starling, which specializes in helping brands understand cultural change in order to stay relevant. Starling's clients include Pepsico, Nike, Google and Unilever. Annie is proud to be named a 2019 Timewise Power Founder alongside a range of flex working trailblazers who are changing the future of work. She has worked flexibly for 20 years in many different guises – part-time, remote working, freelancing, through a portfolio career and returning to work after having her two daughters.

 

starlingstrategy.co.uk
Twitter @annieauerbach

Annie Auerbach, Author of Flex: Reinventing Work for a Smarter, Happier Life

In order for flex to work it needs to have hard edges and hard boundaries. In other words, flexibility sounds like a very soft and pliable word, but in order for it to really work, we need to think about switching off… If we’ve negotiated different times that we work, or different days that we work, we need to be able to stick to that.

Annie Auerbach
Flex Reinventing Work for a Smarter. Happier Life by Annie Auerbach

Flex: Reinventing Work for a Smarter Happier Life

FLEX is a handbook for living and working on your own terms from trends forecaster and consultant Annie Auerbach. Reject the 9 to 5, reinvent the rules and rewrite your career.

Read an extract

Melanie Cook

Managing Director 
Hyper Island - Asia Pacific

Melanie Cook is a futurist who considers herself an educator, systems thinker and a tech humanitas. “Humanitas?” you wonder. Humanitas is a Latin word that encapsulates loving what makes us human with education and hope. She has deep debates with others about the operational impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, and true to her DNA, focuses on the workplace of tomorrow and what we should be doing about it today.

Starting in data management in London, the majority of her career has been shaped by the imagination and innovation of digital technologies. Swiftly navigating the rapidly-evolving terrains of data management and digital marketing, she has anchored herself in the technological bay that is digital business transbobulation (the reality of digital transformation) with creative business school, Hyper Island.

Melanie Cook, Managing Director, Hyper Island APAC

There, she has the privilege of being part of every student's learning journey across a range of industries facing extraordinary disruption, from financial services to luxury goods to tech start-ups. Tapping experiences from working with organisations such as GSK, MetLife, Moët Hennessy, Standard Chartered and Unilever, she lends her expertise to empower each learner to flourish in their own environment and beyond.

Founder of the #OpenLeadershipProject - which uses AI to surface the voice of the workforce so that leaders can better themselves for their followers - she is also a highly sought after speaker who has been invited to the stages of DMEXCO, SXSW, SXSWEdu and TEDx.

hyperisland.com
Twitter @constant_garden

We need to employ our ‘slow thinking’….giving yourself the time to really plan your career and really plan some experiments. The optimistic point-of-view is that humanity has an incredible resilience. They can adapt, they can adapt, they can adapt.

Melanie Cook

Kate Lister

Kate Lister is president of Global Workplace Analytics (GWA), a research and consulting firm that helps employers understand and prepare for the future of work. Her expertise is focused on workplace, workforce, technology, and other trends that are changing the who, what, when, where, and how of work. She has been helping public and private sector employers implement telecommuting and flexible work strategies for more than a decade. 

Kate is a highly regarded speaker and writer. She has written or co-authored five business books, numerous white papers, and scores of articles for major media outlets. Her firm’s research has been cited by hundreds of publications including the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many others. She is a member of the strategic advisory board and leadership team of Workplace Evolutionaries (WE), a global group of leading workplace thinkers and doers who are dedicated to "changing the world one workplace at a time.” 

Further Reading 
globalworkplaceanalytics.com/whitepapers
Twitter @FutureWorkforce

Kate Lister, President of Global Workplace Analytics

We’ve known that people are best managed when they’re given the goals and tools to meet those goals, and then they’re given the autonomy to do their job. We’ve known that since the 50s, but that’s not how we’ve been operating…. if people get their job done, if they’re being measured by results and they’re succeeding, then what do you care when they work?

Kate Lister

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