Workstyle Freestyle 31 - 'Freelancers'

Hello Hoxbies! Welcome to Workstyle Freestyle, with me, Alex Hirst. And with me, Lizzie Penny. Hello, hello! So today we are talking about how many freelancers make up the working world - and people don't always know about them - and how they should be treated differently. So, there was another brilliant article by Jon Younger on Forbes.com last week, that looks at the fact, that for example, over half, well over half, of Google's workforce is what they call 'alternative' which is either contract or freelance. That's actually more than half of one biggest companies in the world being run on this type of resource. It's amazing, isn't it? It's almost unspoken, in a way. I think freelance resource has traditionally been kind-of kept for supplementary need, so fringe resource to cope with ups and downs - Christmas Whereas now I think the shift is to thinking about how freelance can drive better performance actually so access to specialists in certain areas of the business. So how organisations are structured now is moving much more towards leveraging freelance expertise for improved business performance. Which is exciting, and obviously a transition we firmly believe in too. And it's also, we think, the future. So we think freelance models will increasingly underpin the most efficient businesses and there will be a choice. But as a consequence, we think businesses have a way to go in improving their own structure and culture particularly, but also their own purpose in order to make sure that they are fully catering for those freelancers and engaging them in the right way and so we think there are certain models that can be adopted, or should be adopted when structuring organisations in that way whereas all too often in big organisations, like Google because it is still predominantly perceived as an 'employee-focused' structure, a lot of the culture and other elements they have set up, are based on that. It's something that we feel very passionately about and are always looking at in great detail. Absolutely, I mean the big thing with freelancers of course is that they can choose the companies that they work with, and in a way that puts pressure on the companies to make sure that they are a destination that's appealing to a freelance workforce. Which means giving them a great deal of trust, autonomy and empowerment to operate and deliver outputs which we think are all things that are not only brilliant for engaging freelancer workers, but are also naturally brilliant for engaging with traditionally employed workers too. So, lots that we could talk about in terms of how that's done, but for now we will leave you with that information and more to follow. Thanks for tuning in. - We think it's the future. See you next time! Bye!