What if we designed work around projects, not the nine to five?
With Giselle Gonzalez, founder of Equal Reach
Giselle Gonzalez started documenting displacement on Lesbos in 2015. She now runs Equal Reach, a marketplace that sends project work to vetted teams of refugee and local talent, and she has a view of the job market that most of us only see from the top: what happens to work when the first rung on the ladder is a digital task, and whether that's a problem or the beginning of something better.
Who this is for first
There are over 120 million forcibly displaced people in the world, Giselle told us, more than half of them young, and the average time spent displaced is twenty years. Many can't legally work where they've landed. Small digital tasks are often the only door, and the good ones slide: tasks into freelancing, freelancing into a team, a team into a business that hires other people. When she first routed a project this way from inside a big tech company, accuracy went from 33 percent to 95, retention was 100 percent, and the work paid four to six times the local wage.
The ladder, and what AI is doing to it
Giselle thinks about job creation as a ladder: task work at the bottom, then freelancing, then part-time and full-time employment, then entrepreneurship at the top. Her worry is at both ends. "What I'm seeing happening with AI is it's not only eating that bottom rung, but it's also compressing that top part of the ladder as well." The squeeze pushes everyone towards the freelancing middle, which is exactly where most of the people she works with already are.
Outcomes, not seats
The shift she sees in what companies want is the one that gives the episode its question. "What companies need and what those roles are are changing so much that it becomes much more, can you deliver this outcome? Not can you just stay with this company for the sake of having a person in a seat." A job designed around a project has an end, which sounds like insecurity until you've watched a job designed around a seat disappear overnight.
Feast or famine, together
The part of the conversation that made Alice say "you're looking at it right now" was about collectives: small groups who take on work together rather than alone. "Rather than feast or famine individually, it becomes feast or famine as a whole," Giselle says. "We can either be alone in this, which is terrifying, or we can join together." Her own best learning, she adds, came "on a team when I was the youngest, dumbest one on the team".
Her advice, which travels
Start something, test it and let it fail on the side of whatever pays the bills, and do it with other people so the lean months are shared. In her words: "start and test and fail on the side of your nine to five, or start and test a couple of different ideas until you find something that sticks." And: "find your tribe, don't go at it alone."
A note for our American listeners
Giselle, a fellow American, started her business in the UK partly because the safety net made the leap affordable. Health insurance welded to an employer is, she suggests, one of the quieter reasons project-based careers are harder to start in the States.
About Giselle Gonzalez
Giselle Gonzalez is the founder of Equal Reach, a marketplace connecting businesses with vetted teams of refugee and local talent for digital project work, from websites and content to AI agents. She began her career documenting displacement in Greece in 2015 and has since worked inside big tech on inclusive sourcing.
Links and an offer
Equal Reach: equalreach.io. Type "work is weird now" where it asks how you heard about them for 10 percent off a first project or the first three months of a retainer. It’s the first discount code this podcast has ever been given!
The CEDAR Review on refugee entrepreneurship, launched in Parliament this autumn, which puts the economic contribution of letting refugees work as entrepreneurs in the UK at over £2 billion. [link]
Giselle on LinkedIn
