The Changing Role of Contingent Workers

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies like Amazon, Uber, and Microsoft have announced plans to financially support certain contingent workers whose jobs have been affected by the outbreak. The COVID-19 crisis reveals just how much our current economy and workforce is built around contingent and gig workers — from the Amazon warehouse workers packaging and shipping us our essential items to the app-based delivery workers bringing our groceries to the telecom workers shoring up our increasingly taxed networking infrastructure.

But in a moment where we have never depended on contingent workers more, it’s also apparent how far companies still have to go to fully embrace their role in an agile organisation and digital-ready teams. Roughly 15% of the total workforce are contractors. Reliance on gig workers has increased across all industries and especially in IT roles.

But these workers are often more vulnerable to market downturns and economic instability, and companies often fail to fully integrate contingent workers in their workforce planning and development efforts. We found that less than half of organizations (42%) plan to use contingent workers as part of their future talent strategy in our Organizational Digital Readiness survey. With contingent workers playing an increasingly integral role in the workforce, employers need to do a better job ensuring that they are positioned to maximize their value to the company.

Here’s how employers can integrate gig workers into their workforce of the future.

Integrating Gig Workers Into Digital-Ready Teams

Contingent workers may make up an increasingly larger percentage of the overall workforce, but when it comes to supporting an agile organisation or digital-ready teams, many organizations don’t fully integrate gig workers. Team readiness for digital transformation specifically depends on two abilities – working in a virtual environment and working flexibly.

Most organizations need to improve how they support their virtual teams overall. Our Digital Readiness survey found that 54% don’t know how teams need to be set up to be successful in a digital environment.

Meanwhile, teams working in a virtual environment need to engage others and understand their needs through digital channels compellingly. But only 25% have teams that operate flexibly. The degree of flexibility varies by industry, with technology and telecom companies being significantly more likely to have teams that work flexibly than companies in financial services or transportation and logistics.

Supporting digital-ready teams requires integrating contingent workers smoothly into the team workflow and ensuring that the virtual environment functions for both full-time and contingent workers. And while flexibility in teams is essential for a digital-ready workforce, that flexibility is also necessary for contingent workers to be able to adapt to changing company needs quickly and pivot more easily to roles where they can provide the most value. Siloing them in their contingent role can mean losing out on valuable talent and skills across the organisation.

Enhancing Career Mobility for Gig Workers

Employers often overlook providing career opportunities and mobility for contingent workers within their organization. But, contingent workers are often an important part of an organisation’s talent pipeline. Creating an agile organisation and fostering digital-ready teams includes understanding how careers are evolving for all workers. The business environment is constantly changing, and organizations simply can’t offer employees a one-dimensional upward career progression anymore. The employee is taking on an ever-greater role in shaping their own careers and how we set up our job architecture in turn is crucial to account for greater flexibility in the determination of their own careers – and that needs to include our gig workers.

For contingent workers who often feel overlooked and more vulnerable than traditional employees, moving on to seek better career opportunities can be the norm. But, offering career transparency and mobility can help you retain your best contingent and gig workers and possibly integrate these easily long-term. If your company doesn’t offer career mobility for these workers, the impact to the business can be substantial as their unique skillsets that brought them to our businesses in the first place can be hard to replace. Our research finds that in the U.S. technology industry, employees are three times more likely to quit working for their organizations than moving laterally across job families or functions within the same organization.

More flexibility in our job architecture and career progressions enhances mobility. Putting employees in charge of their own careers, allowing them to choose their own working model and to move toward their version of career success will drive your journey to becoming an agile organisation and your future success in an ever-changing world.

Are you interested in knowing more about the Future of Work? We asked over 1,500 HR leaders how they are dealing with it - read our report here.