Wether you call them contingent workers, freelancers, 1099 workers, or anything else, it appears that organizations around the world are thinking of ways to tap into this new workforce. While the size of this group is still not known (reports vary quite a bit) all of the business leaders I have been speaking with are thinking of ways to spend more money and resources investing in this area. In fact, I have yet to meet a business leader at an organization that isn’t thinking of the freelancer economy and what it means to their respective organization. Right now there are perhaps more questions about the freelancer than there are answers. How can companies work with freelancers at scale? What impact will government rules and regulations have? How is this new breed of worker actually classified? What does this mean for full-time employment? How large is the freelancer economy? These are just a few of the things that I hear business leaders thinking about.
Regardless of how you chose to look at this space it’s amazing that companies can now tap into top talent regardless of where they are in the world. What’s especially fascinating to me is how many large companies around the world are already working with freelancers yet they don’t share that information with the public! Still, looking at various companies there appears to be a kind of segmentation that starts to emerge and I’m seeing organizations work with freelancers in one of six ways as depicted below.
All full-time employees (#1)
This is group is quite self-explanatory and consists of organizations that are yet to work with freelancers or contingent labor of any kind. These organizations still rely on the traditional full-time employee as a way to get work done. Yes, these companies still do exist.
Mostly full-time with freelancers as support (#2)
The natural first step for most organizations is to work with a few freelancers on mainly support driven activities such as writing, administrative work, perhaps some accounting and invoicing, cold-calling, email handling, and customer service. In most situations these are functions that aren’t core to how the business operates as seen in the second image above. Most companies start here because it’s easy, low risk, and doesn’t require much effort. Oftentimes some employees at the organization are overwhelmed with work or the skills necessary to complete something are just in short supply which forces the organization to look outside. This scenario has proven to be effective for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Mostly full-time with freelancers as core and support (#3)
Oftentimes (but not always) the organization starts to integrate freelancers into more core driven activities such as marketing programs, product development and management, sales leadership roles, and the like. I’m amazed at how many times I’ve corresponded with a senior level marketing person just to notice in their email signature or address that it says “contractor” or lists the agency they are a part of. What I have seen here is that employees see success with #2 above and they say, “well it worked with support why don’t we try to get help with more crucial activities?” Eventually this starts to scale. This has also shown to be effective for every type of company.
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