Pioneer Profile: Anessa Fike
Meet Anessa Fike, Flexa Pioneer Award winner and bestselling author of The Revolution of Work. Anessa shares insights from her career journey, her passion for reshaping the workplace, and her vision for a future where work is more fulfilling, inclusive, and adaptable for everyone.
12th Nov 2024
• 5 minutes
It’s time that we recognise the people behind the evolving world of work. Our working lives have shifted to being more inclusive, more people-centric, more flexible, and just plain better for both employees and companies.
These changes didn’t just happen: they were put into place and upheld by individuals and teams working to create a better working future for everyone.
So we’re finally putting the spotlight on the people who make great companies great: the people-people.
People-people are crucial to the success of every company. They find you the talent that drives you forwards, and they’ve taken on an increasingly strategic role in the past few years – often taking on responsibility for mental health, diversity and inclusion, culture, EVPs, Employer Branding and team happiness.
Read more about the Pioneers List and go behind the scenes to understand how and why we’ve selected our Pioneers.
We were lucky enough to speak with Anessa Fike, bestselling author of The Revolution of Work about her career and her hopes for the future of work.Tell us a little bit about your career history, and how you got to where you are now. What were the key milestones?
I completely fell into People/Culture/HR work. I actually never set out to be in this work because it wasn’t something in my early 20s that people talked about a lot. For so long, HR was traditional HR, focusing mostly on compliance and paperwork. But then I found myself at an organisation that thought about People and Culture differently than I had ever seen or heard, and they were, at that time, at the bleeding edge of progressive People practices. When I started at that organisation, I came in as an Executive Assistant to a few executives, including the Chief People Officer and President. After 6 months with the organisation, I was offered two jobs internally as a promotion opportunity - one that dealt more with the overall business strategy and one that was on the People team. I chose the People team role and never looked back. After being with that organisation for almost 4 years, I decided to head out on my own and start my own business. And that same organisation was my first client. For the last 11+ years, I’ve been a Fractional People Leader, and I’ve worked with more than 125+ organisations in 30+ countries. And when I started out, I didn’t want to do things the same way everyone else was doing them. I didn’t want to be a talent agency or a staffing firm. I didn’t want to work at an hourly rate. So I created what worked for me and had a reimagined business model for the HR space - and I’ve helped build up the Fractional HR space to what it is today.When did you become interested in the future of work?
I’ve always been interested in what was next and how we could do things better. The thing I’ve asked people my entire career is, “Why do we do it this way?” And what I’ve found is that too many people don’t have an answer to the question when I ask it. So then we go into what we are trying to achieve and think through other, more innovative and creative ways to do it. The way we have worked hasn’t changed since the 1950s, and it needs to because so much else has evolved and changed. Our high disengagement in the workforce has shown for a while that we need a change. Yet there are so many people that want to keep it the same because it benefits them. We need the future of work - and I call it the Revolution of Work - because we need work to stop overwhelmingly benefiting one group of people over all others. We need work to work for everyone. The future - or the Revolution - can do that.