Melissa Waters, Chief Marketing Officer of global freelance platform Upwork, joins ChedHER to discuss Upwork's latest campaign that's all about embracing the new way of work, how she's redefining the role of CMO, and how business leaders can better understand the next generation of professionals coming into the workforce.

How to Understand the Next Generation of Professionals

And joining us now is Melissa Waters, chief marketing officer of global freelance platform up work. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit more about upwards latest campaign, that's all about how we work now. Thanks so much for having me, I'm glad to be here. Yes, this is how we work now as a humorous take on the reality that the old way of working is dead and what better way to illustrate the old and the new than to bring on board a talking dead guy as our hero in our advertisement. Um but really in all seriousness, it's a call to action for business leaders to remind us all that the old way of working is long gone and that the future of work is here. According to our recent future workforce report, 72% of hiring managers said that the pandemic accelerated their interest in working with freelance talent and two thirds of businesses are looking to hire freelance talent and augment their talent solutions over the next couple of years. So the reality is that the future of work is here and if you're not already working in this way you're behind, I love this campaign and also this message and we're gonna dig into it just a little bit more. But first I want to pivot and focus on you for just a moment before this, you were at meta as the global vice president of marketing at instagram. I'm curious what lessons you learned from your background there in the tech industry that you bring with you today. Absolutely. Um you know, I've been in the tech industry for a number of years. And the thing about the tech industry is that it's an industry full of innovation, whether you're a company that is trying new things, bringing new things to market, um, you know, both doing that and also being a consumer of those new things, both companies and the folks who consume new technology. It requires a certain amount of bravery. You have to try new things fail fast um, and be able to kind of take on new new horizons. So the biggest thing that I've learned is to embrace innovation and not be shy about new modes of doing things like the future of work that we're talking about here today. So when I think about up work, I think about exactly that, that we're ushering in a new way of work and a new way for both talent to thrive and businesses to thrive. And really this is meaningful for people's lives. It's a shift, it's a, it's a major shift that's happening in society. Um, it gives talent the opportunity to think about where they wanna live, how they wanna work, where they want to work, um, what they want to work on and having more agency and making those decisions and it gives businesses the opportunity to kind of shed the old way of doing things and say, oh no, there's new ways of doing things, I I can expand my horizons of the way that I've, I've done my work in the past and this is a trend that's been long on the rise. It's been something that, you know, has been accelerating over the last couple of decades. But the pandemic really caused it to, you know, materially shift because we were all put in a situation where um, you know, we were forced into thinking about new things. So when you think about that kind of theme of innovation, uh innovation can sometimes be slow where we baby step our way into new behaviors and then sometimes it can be really fast where we're just forced in a time of crisis like the pandemic to take on new ways of doing things. So really we're here at this intersection of, of a business that's been around for over 20 Years and has been a pioneer and a champion of this way of working. 2 3rd of our workforce is augmented hybrid workforce and we've been living this for a long time and now we're able to really usher in this behavior for others and help help folks shed the light on a new way of doing work. Yeah, I really appreciate this mindset because it truly is the only way that businesses can evolve and grow moving forward and speaking of that evolution, we know this next generation of employees moving into the workplace. What is your advice for business leaders right now on how they can better understand this next generation and also the cultural shifts that come with it. Oh, it's such a hot topic, I think we're all wrestling with that. Um you know, what does the next generation need and desire in the way that they work and what we see from studying this and the folks that we work with is that younger generations just demand more flexibility when it comes to how and where they work. And the reality is that location depend network, you know, the way that we've, you know, kind of constructed work as we know it today, um is born out of, you know, an industrial era relic. It was it was born out of, You know, the age of assembly lines and the 40 hour work week and um in person work and the reality is that we built all those rules back, in you know, many decades ago and since then an enormous amount of technology has entered our lives, we have the ability to do things very differently, but the quick are we going to behave differently even if we've got those tools at our disposal? So what we've learned is that, you know, we've got this kind of bridge that's happening where younger generations are saying, hey, we know how to work differently and older generations are saying yes, but we want to really hang on to the way that we used to work and then old norms were used to, so despite that gap, I think not everyone is kind of waking up to that paradigm shift, and what that means is that people need to be flexible and brave in the way that they're thinking about change. It really is so fascinating when you put it in that scope. That's Melissa Waters, chief marketing officer at work. Thank you so much for joining us.