Sustainability and Collaboration in the Freelance Era with Laura Hunter

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork Podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and today I have joining us from London, Laura Hunter. So Laura is the founder of The Now Work, and we've just been having a great conversation about sustainability and particularly how teams in the future are going to organize to deliver massive scale transformation, so this is going to be a fun conversation. Welcome, Laura.

Laura Hunter: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Dane Groeneveld: So, your space intrigues me as I was sharing before. My brother works in sustainability. I've spent a lot of my career working in oil and gas, and my father was in mining, so I've kind of seen a lot of the larger industries and the way that they've driven change and driven impact in our world, and what you're now doing is really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got into this space and where you're starting to see the opportunities to build this massive scale transformation through communities?

Laura Hunter: Good question. So, how did I get into this space? I think it's a great question, and I think my path wasn't necessarily straightforward, so I don't have a environmental science degree. I actually studied English literature and history, so come from the kind of humanities space. But had since graduating knew that I wanted to put my career in service of something that was much bigger than myself, and was very lucky to land my first role in the nonprofit sector, actually, and then essentially transitioned over to working in sustainability consultancy. So, that's where I spent most of my career. So working with huge industries from fashion to food and tech, the creative industries, so kind of spanning lots of different sectors, I guess, thinking about how can these industries use their enormous power and influence for good, and as you say, to accelerate these massive scale transformations that we need. So yeah, not the normal route, I guess, through humanities and then into sustainability, but this is where I am and I love it here.

Dane Groeneveld: It makes some sense, because you're talking about fashion, food, tech, so these are industries that have more daily iterative interaction with consumers. So coming from humanities and thinking about messaging and communications, I can see where there's a tie in there.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, definitely. I definitely sit a little bit more in that creative side of sustainability.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, I'm not one of the clever folks who can do all the carbon footprinting and all the nitty- gritty scientific stuff. I work with brilliant people who do that, but I sit much more on, yeah, I guess how do you bring people in? How do you use the power of messaging, of storytelling, of narrative, of culture to create, I guess, the conditions within which some of these industries can start to move.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, I think that's really cool. You and I were talking a little bit about the theme of some of our recent shows around storytelling, and this whole focus on creativity being human and being important to getting people to think about new ways of doing things, because we kind of get stuck in going to buy the product that we buy or driving the car that we drive, because it's what we've always done. So, I think the creativity of storytelling, it's going to be important to get people to move at a global level.

Laura Hunter: Totally. Yeah, you're thinking about culture is one of the most important. It defines our behaviors, the way that we see the world. I did a really fascinating piece of work a few years back with BAFTA-

Dane Groeneveld: Oh yeah, the awards. Yeah, yeah.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, in the film and TV industry looking at how can storytellers who reach billions of people through TV and film programming, how can they use the power of storytelling to articulate the climate story?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I think that's interesting. I always talk about The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway. I just listen to it most days I drive to work, and he was doing this interesting piece recently on how we as humans that are suffering with lots of anxieties at work, at home, whether it's financial pressure or whatever it might be, we escape to Netflix or whatever our streaming service of choice is, but we're escaping to these digital environments of content. When you think about the amount of people, particularly in the communities that we live in that are in those spaces, it is a huge platform to start educating and informing and influencing.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I hadn't thought about it in that way from a sustainability standpoint.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a very, very powerful lever for sure.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. So, that brings me onto a question around teams. How are you seeing teams particularly in this sustainability sphere come together? There's consultancies, you talked about sustainability consultancies. I would imagine there's advertising agencies, economists, engineers, you're bringing people from all sorts of functions together. Where have been some good examples of where you've seen some lift from these teams and how have they come about?

Laura Hunter: I think that's a really good question, because oftentimes I would say a sustainability team within a business, it's tiny in comparison to its other teams. So I'm sure if you compare a sustainability team to a marketing team, the bench on the marketing team is going to massively outweigh the sustainability team.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So I think a lot of time, particularly in in- house roles let's say in sustainability roles, a lot of the time I think the job for those teams is to enable everyone outside their sustainability team. So I think that when you're thinking about teamwork, yeah, it's not working in tiny siloed teams, it's actually how do you take this knowledge and the action plans and how do you get the whole business working on it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Laura Hunter: I had an amazing conversation today with a woman, she's a little bit more on the commercial team, but very much from a sustainability point of view, and she was telling me about all these programs that they have going on. I was like, " Oh my gosh, your to- do list, it must be massive. How big's your team?" She's like, " We have five people." I was like, " How are you doing it?" She said, " We've got to work with everyone else." So I think collaboration for sure particularly in business is just massive, it's a massive part of the job. Then yes, as you say, there's traditional, I guess, sustainability consultancies, and then creative agencies now I guess I've seen over the last 10 years move much more into this space, because as you outlined, it's a communications challenge as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: When we have brilliant creatives who can set social norms, they can cut through, they know how to shape desire and behavior-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Creatives have a massive role to play. Traditionally, creative agencies have kind of pedaled consumerism and that selling more stuff, and now I think hopefully there's some great stuff going on in the creative industries where they're starting to recognize their own impact.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat. I guess the industry's come under a little bit of fire, particularly the more traditional larger businesses that are having economic impact, heavy carbon footprints coming under fire for greenwashing, because they're only doing the creative work. " Oh yeah, we're offsetting or we believe strongly in reducing our paper usage," or whatever some of those simple messages are, but they're not really changing the story. How do you find the best companies are tackling that in the creative sphere so it's not just lip service, so they're actually going in and driving some of those changes so that there is real science, there are real metrics behind the new path forwards?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, you're right. Greenwashing is just a massive, massive problem right now. I think sometimes greenwashing is done accidentally, and sometimes it can be used as a real deceptive tool.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, using communications to gloss over and hide very, very poor behavior and a bad reputation. So I think to guard against that, I don't know, I think my take on that is if you are using the power of creativity in service of getting some of this stuff done and these transitions made rather than just talking about how great you are, that is a very good place to start.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I really like that, I'm going to write that down. So, power of creativity to get stuff done.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I've seen get stuff done, GSD, as an acronym where the S is replaced with another word, but-

Laura Hunter: Yeah, I mean, I did stop myself from saying that.

Dane Groeneveld: I'd never heard that acronym before and now it's coming up all the time. Maybe people are starting to get fed up and really leaning into that bias for action too.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So, let's talk a little bit more then about The Now Work. So, you founded this new business. What was it that brought you to say we need to create better access, better connectivity for these sustainability professionals to connect on projects? Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how you're doing that.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, for sure. So, I'm trying to think where to start with this so I don't tell you a really long- winded story, but I guess what I was noticing was that more folks were moving into independent work.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So I was one of those great resignation statistics, so a year ago, and I was like, " Oh, I'm going to take some time off and try and figure out..." Which I know is a completely privileged thing to do, take some time out of work and try and go and figure out what you want to do next. But I did that not for too long, and then went freelance and started to work more independently.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Laura Hunter: Then I met a million, not a million, but I met many of the freelancers working in this space, and I noticed that the way that I was able to access projects was through my personal networks, which is great if you have those networks, but if you don't, I was like, " Oh, that feels a little bit-

Dane Groeneveld: That's another privilege problem.

Laura Hunter: Yeah-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It's like I'm getting work because I've managed to find my way into this space, which I love. I love working in this space-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: But then was finding that I was just getting work through personal networks. Then I thought back often to the way that I used... when I was working in consultancy, often when you're servicing your own projects, you're like, " Ah, I need a person to have support on this, or I need these type of people," and you're picking up the phone to those that you know. Then I was like, " Oh, that's such a shortsighted way to connect people to work."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So seeing vast amounts of people wanting to move into more independent work, organizations that need those skills and those brains and those perspectives. So, really what we're setting out to do is take out the friction of people finding-

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, the challenges.

Dane Groeneveld: With that really niche focus on sustainability professionals. Is it more in the creative sphere of sustainability where you've been, or are you looking across the wider skillsets?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, there's a lot very wide skillsets. So we have very, well, I would say technical folks, so deep subject matter experts.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: The people who can get into the nitty- gritty of lifecycle assessments, materiality, looking at the carbon footprints and digging the numbers, net- zero road mapping.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: I would say in the middle we have a lot more systems thinkers, so broader sets of knowledge, can connect the dots across multiple issues. Then yeah, more creative folks, so storytellers, creatives, copywriters, art directors, filmmakers who only want to work in this space. So pretty broad skillset, but niche in sustainability, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really neat. Just bouncing back to that privilege piece, privilege can be a triggering word for a lot of people. A lot of people feel guilty or ashamed that they have some privilege, but I like to turn it on its head sometimes and say, how can we make that privilege more available to others? It sounds like that's what you're doing with The Now Work. You're starting to say, well, if you don't have the network already, we can plug you in. If you don't have the time to think about how you might start your own freelancer business, well, we can give you some early ideas, access while you're still doing your day job before you make the jump.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So, it sounds like you are actually harnessing, leveraging it and making it more accessible.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, I mean, it's one of our things, like increasing access to this type of work.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: There's a lot of studies been done by brilliant organizations like diversity in sustainability looking at the state of diversity in this space.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It's very wide, it's very middle class, people tend to have studied to a certain level. It is a problem, because actually we'd need divergent thinking to solve some of these wicked challenges, and you don't get that if the group is homogenous. Now, that is changing for sure, so there's demographic shifts in younger folks coming into this space-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: But yeah, it is an issue, but access is the thing that we want to kind of support.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, I think that's huge. I love the work that you're doing to create that, and it's a part of some of the projects that we've been working on. Sometimes it's not can you stop work, or can you-

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: It's just can you find three or four hours a week where you could bounce some ideas around with some other people? You can start in a pretty small way too.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, totally. Yeah, for sure.

Dane Groeneveld: What was it that attracted you, Laura, to the idea of being independent, being a freelancer? Because you touched on the fact that you're seeing more and more people choose to become independent freelancers. Was it anything in particular?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, I think for me personally, it was a little bit more like trying to find a way to work that also worked with life-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So having a little bit more control and flexibility was really important to me.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Then taking on projects that I was really fired up about on the issues that-

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, so I think that in its best form, independent work can enable you to do that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. There's a business that I followed years ago, a good friend of mine, Jason Falchuk, was running it, and they were helping with bringing new drugs to market up in Boston in that sort of biotech pharma market. Where they found that they were bringing freelancers to play is the people that didn't want to get caught up in the politics and the administration bureaucracy of managing large teams, they just wanted to be doing the work they were passionate about. Whether it was a therapeutic that really caught their eye because a family member had suffered from an illness, or whether they just really loved the hardcore technical work of this stage of a project and didn't want to have to follow the whole project through its cycle.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So projects that you're fired up about, that's a good way for a lot of people to be thinking about where they're taking the team that they're going to choose to be a part of and their time that they can be putting into work.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, I agree. I think that before we launched the business, obviously we did lots of user research, spoke to many different people who were either currently freelance, thinking about it and tried to get to what are some of the motivators. For a lot of people it is around that. It's around actually having more control in the work that you are doing, and being able to, as you say, plug in and play in the areas that you are uniquely placed, and where your strengths are, where your passion is, where your skills are. So, I think it can definitely offer that.

Dane Groeneveld: I also imagine that historically... I've been in this contingent workforce, contract workforce space for 20 something years, and historically the argument was it's always people that have already got the experience and they're just plugging in to help the company, because there's not a lot of career development or growth that comes with it. But I don't think that's true anymore. I'm sensing that, you even said it, younger people are going freelance earlier in their careers. It feels like maybe choosing those projects that you're fired up about, teams that you want to be a part of and learn from, it's a bit more like pick your own adventure as far as how you're going to grow your career.

Laura Hunter: Totally. Yeah, I think that is so true. The days of having a job for life I think have-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, long gone.

Laura Hunter: Gone, yeah. I feel that's a little bit sad on some days. But yeah, they're not here anymore, and people are looking at their portfolio career actually thinking about how do I build a career out of all of these many different projects that I do?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: I was reading, I think it was a study in Harvard Business School looking at their rise and doing a landscape review of the flexible talent platforms that are out there right now for knowledge- based workers.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: By 2027, half of the US labor market is going to be freelance though they say.

Dane Groeneveld: It's wild, yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, it's just like a complete reconfiguration of the role that work plays in our lives, I guess, is what's happening here at a meta level.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, which is cool, and it means that you can have... which it should be. Thinking about sustainability, thinking about the sharing economy, the circular economy, whatever framework you want to consider, if you've got a brilliant person, why lock them up in one job in one company? Because you said at the very beginning, how do we drive massive scale transformation? Well, we need to take the best thinkers and the best storytellers, and we need to help spread them around between more projects. There isn't just going to be one winning project, there's going to be thousands of projects that interconnect to make that change.

Laura Hunter: Totally, totally. I think that interconnection thing is really interesting, because with that, you get a cross- pollination of ideas.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Again, going back to that massive scale transformation that we need, that's a very, very useful thing, is if you can have cross- pollination of ideas, because you get to more surprising, interesting, radical ideas, I guess.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Embrace the radical, I like that.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: When you think about these freelancers coming on platform, particularly your platform, The Now Work, are they having to come on full- time or can it be a side hustle while they have a day job? How are you seeing that take shape?

Laura Hunter: That's a good question. So I think most of the folks that we've got are what I would call career or full- time freelance, but actually what we also have is people who are maybe working part- time, so four days a week. With their other day, they're looking to do something with that to explore projects outside of their four- day week.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So yeah, I would say on the most part, we're getting more folks who have made the decision to do this full- time and a smaller proportion who are looking at supplementing existing work with projects.

Dane Groeneveld: Okay, that's neat. When you think about full- time in your platform, is that full- time with one client and project, or are they full- time fractional, they're on three projects concurrently?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, full- time fractional. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Full- time fractional, cool. Yeah, I think the future is fractional. I think going back to that point about cross- pollination, it's going to be more exciting, people pick their hot projects. Let's be honest, certain projects, certain companies can't move so fast as to warrant having that person full- time, so just having them three or four or 10 or 20 hours a week in the early phases means that they actually get their project out of the ground and then they can bring on the other disciplines.

Laura Hunter: Totally. This is what I was talking about earlier with the woman who I mentioned who's got tiny team, you don't have a deep bench.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: The science, the context around sustainability is shifting all the time, so you can never build, I don't think, maybe you can, a full- time to cover every single issue that you might need to cover.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's-

Laura Hunter: So I think that's where that fractional piece comes in, that you can tap into expertise when you need it.

Dane Groeneveld: But that's an interesting point, particularly for our listeners out there that are running large talent acquisition organizations or they're chief people officer, or even they're running their own business, is that as you think about teams and you think about that vastly changing landscape of what's happening with science, with customer preferences, with technology, maybe you can't build that team that's going to last 10 years or 20 years anymore, and you need to bring in more of that fractional bench even into industries that traditionally have been a little bit more static and steady.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, potentially. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: It's interesting. My father's a mining engineer, so he worked for a large mining company. My uncle was a software developer who built a software product, and they would always have interesting conversations around the dinner table. My dad would be like, " Well, it's easy. You build the job description, you look at what they need to do, and you go and find that person, you hire them and you're good." My uncle with the software business was like, " Well, it's not that easy, because I need these tasks done this week or this month or this year, and next year I'm going to have a totally different set of tasks to tackle, so I can't find a person who can do this year's work and next year's work."

Laura Hunter: Yeah, totally. It's all unknown, isn't it, the future?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Dane Groeneveld: Which I think's fun for the teams as well, because we had Nick Smoot on the podcast that we just published, and he made a great point about how somehow, whether it's through technology or whether it's through task specialization, and you and I were talking about it before, Laura, or on how a lot of management thinking's derived out of the industrial revolution and manufacturing environments. Once you get so task- oriented, you take the fun out of work anyway.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So, I think it may also be creating a more fun environment for people to be working in if they're bouncing off some different people and some different skillsets, experiences, divergent thoughts.

Laura Hunter: Exactly. I really agree with that, and yeah, that's where the magic happens.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: I think a big thing for me in starting The Now Work was really about how can we enable brilliant humans to... how do we create the conditions for brilliant humans to-

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I like that.

Laura Hunter: Do world- changing work?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I saw that on your website, world- changing people, world- changing work, I like that connection.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: And it takes brilliant humans. That's cool.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, it does.

Dane Groeneveld: Where do you see technology playing in that? Obviously, you're a technology platform that helps connect these people. Is the technology only a part of the connection, or are you using technology in other ways within the work that's being done?

Laura Hunter: It's definitely more of an enabler for us than a... I would say we're super high touch in terms of the work that we're doing, because sustainability, it's very nuanced, so you can't really do that thing of separating tasks and having a very clear thing, and da, da, da, da, da.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: You can't really systematize it as much as that.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting.

Laura Hunter: So for us, the tech that we use is an enabler to enable us to work a little bit more seamlessly, but ultimately we're very, very human, very high touch in terms of what we do. Because when a challenge or brief comes into us from a client-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: A lot of the time what we're doing is helping craft that brief more.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting.

Laura Hunter: So we're not just getting a brief, throwing it into an algorithm and then spitting it out, and here's some people who can do it is really not what we're doing. What we're doing is consulting a little bit on the briefs that come in, so actually helping our clients figure out what's the challenge that they really want to solve? What's the best use of the budget that they've got? And what's the best approach to tip over that challenge, I guess? Then once we've crafted that, we then can start to identify the talent or teams that we'll build to solve that challenge. So yeah, for us, as I say, yeah, technology's definitely an enabler versus any kind of decision- maker for us.

Dane Groeneveld: Which it's really important. I like that framework that you just laid out. What's the challenge? What's the budget? We've got to tackle a challenge. How does our approach then inform the team that we pulled together? Because one of the biggest things that's broken in my mind right now for teams around the world is we're still operating off these 40 hour a week job descriptions that were set and have been dusty on a shelf for years. So, when we say, " Oh, we've got a sustainability project, we need a creative. Well, let's go and get a copyright, a job description and hire for that." You're not really thinking about why are we bringing the person in? What type of experience should they have in the past? Who might they have worked with and who might they be connected with? So, it's a little bit static.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So, I like the fact that you're... I love that word craft. You're crafting the brief and really putting the human elements into how are we going to build a team and what kind of work are they going to do.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, totally. Then that allows us to also... we like to say we see the full person, because CVs are useful in some ways, but also not that useful. Just entries on a CV, there's so much more nuance to a person than their last job title. So what we want to do is see the full human being, so look at what brings you joy? So, some of the questions that we ask when people are onboarding with us is what's a dream impact brief for you?

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, cool.

Laura Hunter: What would you love to work on? Is there anyone you absolutely would never want to work with? What's brought you joy?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: When's the last time you lost track of time when you were doing something related to work? So, then we can get a little bit more to what do people love when it comes to work-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: And we think that that makes for more impactful work.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it does. I wonder, I don't know if you ask the question, do you ask people who do they like to work with? Who have they worked successfully with before? Are you trying to bring teams from other projects through your approach?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, definitely. I think we're always careful in that we don't... again, that cross- pollination of ideas.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: I think often with freelance, what can happen is you get very good at doing something. For example, someone on our platform is a brilliant strategist-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: And that's what they do, and they get paid for it. Because you're selling your service essentially, you perfect it, but then sometimes it doesn't let you get out of that.

Dane Groeneveld: So, people can get stuck.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, and I think that that can be a downside of this type of work.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It's like, how do you enable? If you're in an organization, you might have a little bit more bandwidth, depending on the type of organization, I guess, but a little bit more bandwidth to go, "Ooh, I actually want to do a secondment in that team and figure out what they're doing. I want to do a little bit more work with..." You have a bit of freedom to do that. Whereas I think freelance, you can go get in a lane and you can stay there. So, we're trying to understand from our talent, what do you want to be doing as well? If there's an industry you haven't worked in yet, but would love to, tell us why.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's cool.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, we trust people, because if someone's like, " I'm fascinated by this. I don't have huge amounts of it, I've not really worked in that industry, but I'm fascinated by it." They can bring other experience to bear-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Rather than just being like, " I do fashion and sustainability and that's it."

Dane Groeneveld: The other thing is, and we're seeing this in all teams, is that if you're responding to what someone's passionate about, they're going to show up in a whole different way at work.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Whereas if you're just saying, " Hey, I think it would be a good idea for you to go and work in this industry." They turn up saying, " Well, Laura told me it was a good idea, but I actually don't like fashion or I don't like this."

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Then that's not going to be good either. So they're kind of pointing where they want to go, and you're just laying down the tracks for them to get there.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. Are you doing anything, or do you envisage in the future doing something around that forward orientation of, well, maybe you need to do some training, or maybe we can capture that you did this type of work in your profile now so you get picked up for it in the future? Are you starting to be part of that job crafting, resume building process for these individual freelancers?

Laura Hunter: So in some ways, I wouldn't say we are there at all. A little bit baby steps for us as we're such a new business, but one thing that we are doing is something called skills shares.

Dane Groeneveld: Okay.

Laura Hunter: So it's essentially training, but from the community.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, that's cool.

Laura Hunter: So, we had a brilliant one the other week by a sustainability strategist called Richard Johnson, author of a brilliant book called Mission Lit, looking at how purposeful businesses are in their profit blinkered competitors for lunch, essentially.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Laura Hunter: He kind of talked us through the theory and his tools and practices, so we're trying to facilitate trading in that way.

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Laura Hunter: But yeah, in terms of crafting resumes and thinking through, I mean, we'll always have a conversation about development with our talent for sure, and thinking through where are areas of interest and how might you be able to get there. So we kind of do it on a very one- to- one level, and then sometimes with the group community- based training, it allows people just go, " Oh, I didn't even know I was interested in that and now I am."

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's really powerful, because that's what a lot of these other platforms haven't done, or even just small organizations that are managing freelancers, they haven't really created that community and that learning opportunity from within their community, but that's big. I would imagine it ties into what you shared earlier on being able to connect into your next job,'cause if you're on a training skill share there with Richard and you saw someone else in the platform, and you said, " Hey, we live local, let's have a coffee, or let's do a Zoom meeting," you just start to build on that connectivity too.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, that's neat. So, there's been some really good themes here. I love the you can never build the entire team, so with sustainability, you need to be able to flex outside resources and bring the right people in for the right tasks. I really like that whole power of creativity to get stuff done.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: As you start thinking about those couple of themes, where are you hoping to see more impact? Where are you starting maybe even to see more impact? Are there particular industries where you think sustainability professionals are being bought in to really make that change?

Laura Hunter: That's a good question. Maybe I have a recency bias, because I've just been doing some reading on fashion, but I've done a lot of work in the fashion industry throughout my career. We were talking just before about how we need to see these massive scale transformations. An industry like fashion is both a creative and cultural powerhouse, but the business model has traditionally historically been built on extraction of value.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So extracting huge amounts of natural resources, designing products in a way that waste these resources, and then doing that by paying people, particularly women, very, very poorly to the point where they're not able to live well. So I think as an industry, it represents this tension, I guess, of huge opportunity to use its creativity and cultural power for good-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Laura Hunter: But we can't underestimate the fact that its business model has historically been based on these very value- extracting practices. But I'm seeing a lot of work going on in the fashion industry, which brings me great hope that things are starting to move and change, or at least there's a recognition of the power that it has to do so.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: I think a lot of work is happening in the creative industries, so particularly around creative agencies actually reckoning with their own power. So, brilliant organizations like Purpose Disruptors and Clean Creatives. Clean Creatives are an organization based in the US, but have a footprint in Europe as well-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Actually calling out the creative agencies that are working with fossil fuel clients and saying, " Hey, you can't be talking about your office's cup recycling when you're servicing-

Dane Groeneveld: That's the greenwashing.

Laura Hunter: Yeah. So, I think there's great conversations going on in that industry as well-

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting.

Laura Hunter: In terms of actually reckoning with its power.

Dane Groeneveld: In that fashion space, I mean, everyone naturally goes to Patagonia as a sustainable fashion brand, but not all fashion brands are going to become Patagonia, because it doesn't align with what their consumers like them for. What are some of the emerging focuses for fashion businesses that are thinking sustainability? Is it as simple as fair wages, or is it thinking differently about materials and the procurement and recycle of materials in their process? Where do you see teams doing great work at a more granular level in fashion?

Laura Hunter: Yeah, so materials is a good place to start for sure, but it doesn't really get to the root of some of the issues.

Dane Groeneveld: Right.

Laura Hunter: So living wage is a very difficult issue-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So when you said just paying fair wages, I wish it was as easy as that.

Dane Groeneveld: But it's not.

Laura Hunter: inaudible. I think where the conversations, again, in fashion, which is fascinating, is towards de- growth. So, looking at how do you-

Dane Groeneveld: Oh.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, so actually how do you... again, the model is built on sell, sell, sell, more, more, more, more production. So you can replace the production, I guess, with better materials, but you're unfortunately not tackling that business model.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, I think there is-

Dane Groeneveld: So no more fast fashion, which is all about just selling more products year- on-year, selling more SKUs.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: It's more high quality scarcity, but bringing a product that's going to carry good margin and allow the living wages and good use of materials.

Laura Hunter: Yeah. Yeah, and you're essentially getting into some very big... not issues, but ideas here around consumption. How do we relieve ourselves of that desire to consume endlessly inaudible

Dane Groeneveld: That's an interesting one. I think about my kids when we go to Target, and they always want the next shiny plastic cheap toy that's going to be in the trash can in three months. Maybe there's other ways to tackle that desire. Even though that's not in fashion, it's a consumer problem.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It is, yeah. But these businesses have often... I'm sure your kids just didn't wake up and become radical consumers-

Dane Groeneveld: They're being smart in their advertising and product placement and everything else-

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: And research.

Laura Hunter: I think that de-growth is a really interesting area, which is starting to... I mean, obviously it's a theory that's been around for many, many years, but now is starting to get some resonance in industry, which I think is fascinating and-

Dane Groeneveld: That is fascinating. So given my origins in industry, it would be remiss of me not to dig into the fossil fuels. You just touched on some of the agencies that have been called out for working with the fossil fuel providers. But as you see teams come together and work in the fringes, which is where the creativity, the radical ideas, the innovation really comes from, what would your hopes be for The Now Work in bringing sustainability professionals to bear in meaningful projects, whether it's fossil fuels or other large extractive industries?

Laura Hunter: So my dad was also a coal miner, I should have said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I know your dad was an engineer-

Dane Groeneveld: He worked in coal too.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, I'm from a kind of former mining village in the north of England.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: Yeah, it's a tricky one. I've got to be real, I think, unless... Ørsted, I guess, are a different example of a company that's transitioned into renewables, but I think what history has told us is that many of these companies are not great actors. They're not good actors, and they have plans to continue extraction at rates that are unsustainable and are having us shoot towards three degrees of warming.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, I don't necessarily think that-

Dane Groeneveld: There's no silver bullet out there.

Laura Hunter: Yeah. There isn't, no. Although, I guess in terms of extractive industries, so let's take fashion. My hope is really coming back to your question on work and what my hope is for the people in the teams that we put together is that this work is really hard, because it's really hard, it's really challenging, and it's hard on two points. It's hard practically, because you're essentially trying to redesign a system from within, and that system is set up for you not to redesign it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So practically it's really challenging to do that, and it's very emotionally taxing at times, because once you engage with the subject matter, the literature, the expertise, the-

Dane Groeneveld: It's scary.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It's like you can't unsee that, you can't unknow that, you can't forget that. This is having an impact on people and lives and culture and our ways of life and nature right now. This isn't happening 30 years away, it's now.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So, that makes it very difficult work. It can often lead to burnout for many, because you're like, "Oh, I can't stop because I'm exhausted, but I need to keep going, because I need to do it. I believe in it and I want to make a difference." On the other hand, I don't want to give sustainability work a bad wrap.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: It is the best possible work you can do, because at the same time, it is the most creative, innovative, intellectually stimulating work out there in my opinion. So, what we're trying to do is navigate... there's a tension there between it being very, very hard and amazing, and how did we enable people to exist within that tension with more ease?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that.

Laura Hunter: So, that's what we're trying to play a small part in doing.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's really neat. That reminds me of Pink's work on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. You're bringing these people together, these freelancers to work on these really purposeful projects to master their skills, and to have some autonomy in terms of who they choose to work with on what particular projects. As much as there's tension there, it's extremely rewarding.

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, that's neat. I mean, there's so many other questions I'd love to ask Laura, but I know we're up on time here. One thing that I just put out there as a soundbite is I loved on your website how you talked about supporting startups too. When you say things like it's hard to practically redesign from the inside, it does say that the future is going to be the small guys taking on the big guys. Starting from scratch is way easier than redesigning, so-

Laura Hunter: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I'm sure a lot of startups out there would love to be connecting with you and thinking on how they bring these sustainability principles and talent into their new way of tackling a market, a product, a service. So, how might those and other listeners find you and connect with The Now Work?

Laura Hunter: So, you can just Google thenowwork.com and find us there. I'm also on LinkedIn as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Laura Hunter: So yeah, The Now Work on LinkedIn. Obviously, my name's Laura Hunter. Would love to hear from anyone who's interested in this very exciting adventure of building a better world.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's neat. Well, I'm sure you'll get a lot of interest, and thanks for all of the impactful work that you're doing with this new venture.

Laura Hunter: Thank you so much.