Today's rise of the "flexible workforce"?

Today's rise of the "flexible workforce"

The work world is changing. Between COVID-19 and potentially the biggest financial crisis many of us will have experienced in our adult lifetimes, times are changing. 

This feels like a pivotal moment in time. 

The way we work has changed beyond recognition for most people. Many companies have extended their working from home policy until the end of the year meaning the flexible and remote working debate remains front of mind. For flexible working advocates like myself, this feels like the precipice - the tipping point into which flexible working could become the new and improved way of life. 

There’s more than that though. The current circumstances are leaving businesses questioning the construction and composition of their workforce - how they use human capital, when they need them and how they contract with them. 

What’s happening right now

Many organisations will be using this unprecedented time to live-test this new way of working. They will be asking questions, like how will we cope without offices? How do we maintain our company culture when people are separated? How do our managers, manage? How do we communicate effectively? And, most significantly, how are we performing against our objectives?

We are in a period of analysis, re-forecasting and learning. The analysts will be deep in their spreadsheets, re-assessing and re-calculating. Zoom will be busy with suits giving executive summaries.

There are some big decisions to make.

With the wage bill almost always being a business’ biggest expenditure, it’s the first to be questioned and reviewed when the profit line starts to waiver. We are already seeing redundancies being announced by some of the countries’ biggest companies and unfortunately, despite the Chancellor’s best efforts, this is likely to continue. 

With fewer people employed and more than ever working from home, our cities are empty. The streets are quiet and the pavements are bare. So many more people are impacted than just the office folk - food vendors, cafe owners, office space landlords, transport systems, local services - our whole community is feeling it. 

It’s not the prettiest picture.  

Cost saving leads to loss of skills

Having led more “cost saving initiatives” in my corporate life than I care to remember, there is no doubt in my mind that daily conversations between Exec teams, PR and HR are happening across numerous big organisations.   

The way these decisions are made often begin with a paper based skills reviews followed by conversations with the “head’s of”. The conversation goes something like “Who can you afford to lose? You need to cut by 25% - be brutally honest and give us more if you can.” 

The manager that volunteers 30% is guaranteed a shot at the next promotion. 

Challenges are made, forecasts agreed and plans put in place. 

Cue lots of heartache, guilt and tears as these huge emotional traumas are imposed on everyone involved. Just last week I was speaking to a friend who was making 300 people redundant - running team meetings, individual meetings and handing out letters. It destroys friendships, culture, reputations and lives for so much longer than anyone foresees. 

But, as I used to tell myself, if you don’t do this to some, then everyone ends up going, which is even worse.

One often overlooked outcome of such programmes is the loss of skills. Not just the big skills that businesses make decisions about but the smaller ones that aren’t needed all the time. The marketing person who does a bit of copy writing. All good to lose them until they need an advert writing in a couple of months time. The data specialist who cleanses data for a client. Forgotten about until it’s needed next month. These are often discounted and jobs become more difficult for the people left. It adds to the ill feeling.

Plugging the gap

The reality of course is that you cannot maintain a whole FTE (full time equivalent member of staff) to do a small or irregular task. But these things still need to be done. 

Organisations often find themselves in a loop of hiring and firing for the same skills, cyclically. Making a redundancy only to rehire to cover a gap “because we need to do more of that” a year or two later. Sometimes a part time role will be created, leading to expense and an overhead that isn’t always needed. 

In the meantime, there are definite gaps. And this latest crisis is likely to last longer than your average dip, recruiting for such skills is unlikely to take place again any time soon. 

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Enter...the flexible workforce.

For a long time, marketing agencies, in particular, have used flexible and freelance resources to top up their permanent bank of employees. They use freelancers for the specific skills they need to fulfil a certain project or client need. This has meant they can flex and shrink according to their growth needs and in response to client changes.

 Isn’t this something that can work for everyone?

The rise of the flexible workforce

If like us, you’re in your early days of forming a business, then it’s more than likely you use freelance and retained relationships to supplement your business. We need skills like design, copy writing, paid search and other services that there is no way we could use a whole person each for. At this point, we couldn’t even predict our workload beyond the next few weeks, so we use what we refer to as a flexible workforce.

We often discuss employment versus freelance agreements and our long term plans for our workforce. But for most of the roles in our organisation, we can see very few advantages to full time employed status. 

Many will use the loyalty and security arguments as to why people should be employed, but this is nothing that can’t be achieved with the right service agreement. In fact, a service agreement can actually prompt you to think more about expectations in performance, and the client/provider relationship is often a far more balanced one than employer/employee.

This often under-utilised arrangement can work really well for both parties. The freelancer benefits from a flexible and more varied workload, and the business is afforded the flexibility they need both from a time and cost perspective. 

But these advantages are not limited to the small business community. Large organisations have used the ‘contractor’ approach on and off for years. Often until the CFO takes a look at cost-cutting opportunities and decides to ban contractors across the organisation altogether, further propagating the cycle of employment and redundancy - as the need for these people and skills in a non-full-time form remains. 

If more large businesses were open to the model of a flexible workforce, their overheads would shrink and grow in line with their business activity. A reliable pool of freelancers, vetted for use and available at the click of a button, provides a faster, cheaper and more effective way to deliver what they need.

This is the future

This time feels different. In a country where 5 million people are now self employed (the highest rate since records began in 1971, source IPSE Women in Self Employment), freelancers are multi-skilled in so many disciplines, and we can access them in more ways than ever before. Changing family dynamics, highest numbers of women in work ever and technological advancements mean that we have access to the broadest range of skills and people to date. 

That, coupled with individuals’ expectations to have control over their time and their lives means that there is no reason to be tied to one organisation, particularly given the employment-redundancy cycle so many of us have been personally affected by. 

People think nothing now of using resources across the globe, (whom they may never meet in person), giving them potential competitive advantage and most certainly making them more efficient and dynamic. We’re not waiting for face-to-face meetings and lengthy employee vetting procedures to fill a 35 hour week. 

We’re finding the people we need, when we need them, and not committing to wasteful and ultimately inefficient full time contracts. We have access to networking tools, platforms and relationships to provide us with exactly what we need, in the moment. 

A flexible workforce is at our fingertips, more than ever before. 

And it is my prediction that the smartest organisations will realise this and use it wisely. 

Jessica Heagren is CEO and Co Founder of That Works For Me, which brings businesses the skill and experience they need, when they need it without long term commitments to cost.

That Works For Me membership is made up of UK-based freelancers who are also parents, grandparents and other people who need flexibility in their work. Monthly membership gives you complete access to our highly experienced members as soon as you join. Connect now to find out more.

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