The Drivers of Contingent Workforce Use by Enterprises

We attended Upwork's Work Without Limits Executive Summit last week. This event was focused on the future of work and targeted at large enterprises.

    

The attendees were senior HR, procurement and business unit leaders from major corporations.

The summit sessions and informal conversations provided an excellent opportunity to hear from a variety of corporate executives on why they are increasing their use of contingent labor, especially through the use of online talent marketplaces like Upwork.

Three key drivers were consistently cited:

1. The need for speed: Pretty much all the participants agreed that their organizations needed to move faster. They also agreed that the use of outside talent often resulted in the faster delivery of results than other alternatives. They felt this particularly true if the required deliverable was a discrete, specialized task - which brings us to driver #2.

2. Work is shifting from jobs to tasks: Companies are chopping up jobs into bite-size tasks and giving them to the best person available. That person could be could be a traditional employee, or it could be a outside contractor. Increasingly, it's an outside contractor.

This is due to the outside contractor having specialized skills, or simply being available. With organizations choosing to run lean, often internal employees don't have the bandwidth to take on new tasks. This means the fastest way to get the work done (driver #1) is to use outside talent.

3. The need for external teams: This may seem paradoxical given driver #2, but it's not. Firms are increasingly looking to outside contractors to provide completed projects. These projects often require a team of people with specialized skills to complete a variety of tasks.

This is leading to more independent workers to create either formal or ad hoc teams that can bid on larger and more complex projects.

Often these projects are sub-projects in a broader task. For example, building a marketing app as part of a new product roll-out. This task requires a team to accomplish, but is simply one of many tasks required to complete the entire project.

Interestingly, none of these drivers are new.

But technology - and especially technology for managing distributed workers and teams - has reached the point where these these shifts are happening at an accelerating rate.

Also interesting is how corporations are reacting to these drivers.

As with any major change, they are starting small.

Most of the firms attending the event are still in the experimental stage, building pilots and developing high ROI use cases. 

But it was clear from our conversations that these firms are seeing strong results from their pilots. Most are already moving beyond experimentation into broader deployment, or planning to do so quickly. 

Upwork announced their new Talent Services Division at the event. They describe this as "the world's largest talent agency". This initiative has features that help corporations with all 3 drivers discussed above.

Spend Matters analyst Andrew Karpie's article Upwork Launches Talent Services Division to Enable Enterprise Use of Online Freelance Workforce provides an excellent analysis of this new effort. Please refer to Andrew's article for more details.

from Small Business Labs http://ift.tt/2weq55J
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT