Context

Your Business is looking for ways and means to cut costs while not relinquishing control & efficiency, and as I have mentioned earlier in a previous post, there are several approaches that can be leveraged.

The Resource Engagement model strategy is definitely one that holds a lot of promise for Cost takeout coupled with Efficiency improvement, with better ability to support a rollback.

Other strategies typically offer just a way forward, and retreats in case of a breakdown would be far too expensive; whereas the Resource Engagement model strategy can be tested in pilots before you commit to the strategy, and any gaps can be bridged by adding or replacing resources. Moreover, costs for recovery are far lesser for the Resource Engagement model strategy when compared to any other strategy.

But, as with any new strategy, you need to do your brainstorming & research to gather inputs & constraints on your specific context, before you move forward to execution.

So, how do you decide what’s right & how much is right for your business? I have created here a framework for this – Keep reading !

This post shall be published in 3 parts.

Resource Engagement Models in Organizations

To start with, I would like to suggest that you read an earlier article “How to drive up effectiveness & cost takeouts in Organizations — A comparison of Staff Engagement Models”, to gain an understanding on what are the various models available to you, what their Value propositions are, and what are their relative benefits & challenges.

As per the World Economic Forum, “The future of work could lie in Freelancing”.

In their article titled “A Labor market that works: Connecting Talent with opportunity in the Digital age”, McKinsey Global Institute states that: Labor markets around the world have not kept pace with rapid shifts in the global economy, and their inefficiencies take a heavy toll. Millions of people cannot find work, yet sectors from technology to health care cannot find people to fill open positions. Many who do work feel overqualified or underutilized. Online talent platforms can ease a number of these dysfunctions by more effectively connecting individuals with work opportunities.

Further, in the article titled “Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the Gig Economy”, McKinsey Global Institute proposes that: For companies and other organizations, hiring independent workers requires careful consideration. If properly managed, this shift can allow companies to become more agile, efficient, and productive; it can also allow them to add new capabilities and undertake projects that would not otherwise be feasible. But companies cannot make this change lightly. They need to consider the trade-offs, including the possibility of greater churn. It can be unwieldy to manage someone’s work externally and riskier to entrust the worker with confidential or high-profile projects.

So it is clear that Independent work (most typically Freelancing) is here to stay, and is a viable option of the future for Resource Engagement.

What are the possible roadblocks to significantly increasing the Freelanced portion of your work streams ?

Not all of your work stream can be freelanced — that’s a fact. Online Freelancing can support work streams that are digital in nature, but does not support work artifacts that are tangible. So depending on your industry, domain, and business contexts, this is the first filter that can be applied to increasing of freelanced work streams.

Progressing beyond that first filter, the roadblocks to increasing your Freelancing footprint may be categorized at a high level into:

  • Internal to your business — meaning that your Business has to design & execute the actions needed to address these issues & their impacts to your Business, AND
  • External to your business — meaning that the potential resolution of such issues may typically lie outside your business. Hence your Business would require additional steps to be put in place to ensure that the Business is covered from a control & efficiency perspective.

The next part (2 of 3) of this article is here: Internal & External factors for assessing your preparedness for Freelancing adoption increases (Link).

You may also find this related article interesting: How to drive more value from Freelancing: An Evolution of Freelancing models (Link).