[LINK] Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce
Brilliant article from the folks at HBR:
In this era of chronic skills shortages, rapid automation, and digital transformation, companies are confronting a growing talent problem, one that has the potential to become a strategic bottleneck. How can they find people with the right skills to do the right work at just the right time? The half-life of skills is shrinking fast, and many jobs now come and go in a matter of years. Not only that, but major demographic changes are under way: Boomers are aging out of the workforce, and Millennials and Gen Z are taking over, bringing with them very different priorities about who should do what work—and where, when, and how it should get done.
To help companies address these challenges, a new generation of talent platforms—such as Catalant, InnoCentive, Kaggle, Toptal, and Upwork—has emerged. In contrast to Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and TaskRabbit, these platforms offer on-demand access to highly skilled workers, and our research shows that their number has risen substantially since 2009, from roughly 80 to more than 330. Much of that growth took place during the past five years alone. Today almost all Fortune 500 companies use one or more of them.
I've been watching the developments of the on-demand workforce lately and I fully believe it is going to be the next big thing in business. I read the Gig Mindset earlier this year and the book was weak in explaining how companies can take advantage of gig workers. This HBR article fills a lot of the gaps in the book.
Today we have departments inside companies dabbling and experimenting with on-demand workforce. I think, soon, on-demand workforce will be a key component in the enterprise strategy. We already have the drivers in place:
- Greater need to innovate while facing difficulty in finding talents to do it
- Fluctuations in headcount needs because the nature of innovation projects are “experiment and fail-fast”
- Increased comfort level of working with remote workers due to Covid-19
And finally, on-demand workforce is how startups and small businesses can compete against big companies. Without a large HR department and a budget to lure talents with high salaries, startups and small businesses will use gig platforms like Toptal, Clarity, and Catalant.