This week we speak with one of the Guild’s co-heads, Brian Turk. Brian is Envario’s co-founder, and a seasoned HR expert himself. In our conversation, we discuss 1. Web3 from an HR perspective, 2. what area of HR has the most room for growth in web3, and 3. also what he’s working on at the moment.
D: How did you get into Web3? And what excites you about the space? What has prompted you to do this research?
B: The philosophy behind it. Thinking back, my career path took a lot of twists and turns to navigate because the methods of matching people within traditional organizational structures aren’t optimal. Web3 offers a way to change that. To change how work is governed, how people are matched with work, and to standardize the process of providing equity as a form of compensation. It gives freelancers the opportunities for wealth, in turn transferring more power over the evolution of their career to them. Simply put, it better positions their professional lives to be based on the quality of the work, rather than the quantity. While I heard about blockchains through Bitcoin, it was two years ago when I heard about the business applications of blockchain — particularly smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Decentralized, Autonomous — those qualities really appealed to me. It translates to accountability and eliminates dependencies on individual actors being ethical and approaching business from a win-win perspective. It removes the failings of hierarchies — though hierarchies of course have their place. Additionally, the notion of composability, not technically, but in terms of the ability for people to use and build on someone else’s work, while the creator still receives residual rewards — that’s so exciting to me. It means that we now have a way for people to be rewarded based on relevance rather than amount of time they spend. True meritocracy.
D: For our case studies, we split HR into three categories — sourcing, benefits, and payroll. Which do you feel still has the most room for growth?
B: Benefits, certainly. There are a couple of solutions out there which are filling in gaps. But I think they’re still sort of in progress in terms of scope and breadth of offerings. While Opolis does well in covering independent workers in the U.S., and WorkDAO is making progress on the global front, there’s room for more. It’s not all plug and play yet for everyone and in every location. What we’re working towards is that somebody who just wants to go work as a contributor for one or multiple DAOs can be their own business entity, without trading off the benefits offerings that they’d get from traditional employment — full stop.
D: From an HR perspective, what area of crypto most excites you and why? This can be either a specific piece of technology yet to be developed or that is in development but not yet mainstream.
B: Reputation management. I like the vision of operating as a pseudonym, though background checks need to be delicately handled. There needs to be a way for you to know if somebody that you’re transacting with has had any objectively knowable, unethical, or legally compromising behavior in their past. We don’t want to hire somebody unethical to be responsible with some area involving finances where they could do harm. We also don’t want somebody not being able to get work because someone else who’s ethically compromised decided to give them a bad review or rating. I’d like a way to prove the positive and say we know for certain this person can do this work and do it really well, while being able to trust that we’re not dealing with a bad actor. So how do you do that perfectly? I don’t know. But I think blockchain offers interesting ways of tackling that problem.
D: What are you working on right now, Brian?
B: Well, I would love to say that I’m all in on Web3, but it’s currently a smaller percentage of my focus and Envario’s focus overall. We’re a consulting collective for HR technology, and HR and talent management advisory more broadly. We do most of our work with the more traditional enterprises and organizations, steering them toward a web3-mentality. So that sort of Web 2.5 space is more where we operate, getting traditional organizations to engage with a collective independence and freelancers versus having to have the traditional corporate hierarchy and organizational structure. We are, however, doing some work with some Web3 companies. I’m certainly interested in doing more work with web3 organizations, DAOs, and organizations aspiring to be DAOs.
