Workstyle Freestyle 31 - 'Freelancers'
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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!