The Flexible Workforce and the Gig Economy

The Gig Economy

The ‘Gig Economy’ describes an economy based on performing tasks and projects, generally today offered through a digital platform. This emerging contingent workforce is progressively replacing regular full-time employment and, in the U.S. is expected to be the majority of employment by 2027.

The Gig Economy is GROWING.  It’s important to your business because it re-defines the make-up and economy of workforces.  Companies like Uber and Deliveroo have become the poster boys of this new form of employment relationship. They were quick to adopt Zero Hours Contracts and hire contractors to deliver their customers or produce. But these Standard-bearer brands represent the visible tip of a huge iceberg that is changing the employment market.

Re-thinking how work gets done 

We’re all accustomed to identifying work that needs to be done and hiring someone on a full-time contract to do it. But work packages can be broken down in more ways than one, and approaches fashioned by victorian-era industrialists into hierarchical organizational designs might not be the most appropriate for the digital era!

As time moves forward, we’re seeing work packages becoming more fragmented into smaller and smaller packages. Consider:

1. Job Role Descriptions

Aggregating a series of ‘work to be done’ activities into a job role description is the most common way people have traditionally been hired. The benefit of this is the hiring manager is able to flex the activities within the scope of the role, and it gives the employee an indication of what’s expected of them.

They may be the most common form of work packaging but job descriptions have a HUGE downside:

They distort recruitments. Recruitments focus on finding individuals with the broad skills-set required to fulfil the combination of work built into the ’work package’ as interpreted by the hiring manager. But hiring managers are not organizational designers. This interpretation of work package might not best serve the organization.

They blur contributor performance because it’s not clear how contributors are fulfilling their time, and how well they’re being managed.

2. Discipline or Activity-Led Hiring Briefs

Another form of job description, but with an important nuance:  When hiring managers look to hire temp or contingent workers, they will focus contractual requirements (yes, in the form of a job description) more on the fulfilment of a specific discipline or activity, less on ‘and everything else’ departmental needs. This makes it easier for the company, hiring manager and contractor to measure their performance. It also means the contractor is able to focus on the type of work they like and want to do, not end up a dogs body for a department manager trying to make ‘department budget’ ends meet.

3. Statement(s)-of-Work

A statement of work contract allows a hiring manager to articulate work packages based on project milestones and outcomes. Aligning contractor payment rewards with project outcomes makes a lot of sense. It means workers are incentivised to deliver outcomes, not just turn up.  SOWs are proving a great way for hiring managers to make sure they get the quality of work they demand from contractors.

4. Work Tasks 

In the gig economy, one of the fastest growing forms of work packages are work tasks. These are normally published on a marketplace portal of tasks that contractors can bid for. This means departmental managers can segment work into tiny packages and pay for results—think of it as a microscopic version of a statement of work! Of course, robots are getting much faster at working through tasks than humans. We can therefore expect more and more work to be distilled into tiny ‘noughts and ones’ tasks in the future, with robots fulfilling more of them than humans!

Smarter resourcing of work at departmental level

Most work allocation happens at a departmental level within an organization and it’s important therefore to re-educate departmental managers on the viability of the various ways of getting a job done; equipping them with the encouragement and knowledge to question ‘norms of behavior’ that may not be in the best interests of the organization (or the payroll budget!).

Ask most CxE’s today, and most believe that the majority of their work activities are performed by full-time employees. In reality, an increasing amount of jobs are being fulfilled by machines (computers, software robots, algorithms, chatbots etc.) and a significant proportion of remaining work tasks are fulfilled by outsourcing firms and members of the gig economy. Knowledge portals and crowdsourcing platforms also win their fair share of work.

When jobs need to be performed, department heads today have more options to consider. This is causing HR and recruitment professionals to encourage a joined-up ‘Total Talent Management’ approach to sourcing work, starting with a thoughtful triage approach that questions hiring norms of behavior that may be founded on ignorance, or the outmoded belief that hiring someone on a full-time contract is always the best solution.