A New Era of Freelancer Flexibility: Redefining the Rules of Remote Work
What is workplace flexibility, and how is it changing? Why are freelancers going back to full-time traditional employment?
Earlier this year, I co-authored an article titled “The Great Realization: Online Freelancers and the Meaning of Flexibility” (Dunn, Munoz, O’Neil, Sawyer). The paper, slated for publication in the Research in the Sociology of Work, explores how digital freelancers define remote work, workplace flexibility, and employment expectations. In this post, I provide an overview of our article, including insight into how freelancers make sense of their “flexible” work arrangements.
Freelancing and Flexibility Redefined
Workplace flexibility was first redefined with the exponential growth of the online labor market. In 2018, there were an estimated 56 million online freelancers worldwide, a 50% increase from 2015. The growth of the digital gig work market never slowed down: the onset of the pandemic in 2020 led to a further surge in the number of people doing online freelance.
While the pandemic led to the expansion of digital labor markets, COVID-19 prompted other important social and financial transformations, resulting in the wide workforce’s reconsideration of what flexibility entails. The pandemic impacted traditional full-time workers: almost 70% of white-collar employees worked remotely in some capacity.
This increase in digital work (both freelance and full-time) means the workforce’s expectations of flexibility have shifted dramatically, redefining what a “typical” work arrangement looks like. Changing employment circumstances caused workers to reassess their career paths. Over 25% of the workforce left their jobs, demonstrating a significant change of heart within the labor market.
The old-school definition of employment flexibility focused on a worker’s ability to choose when they work. The rise of remote work has cast doubt upon this definition, and insights from our panel study further challenge this conventional interpretation. Many people engaged in online gig work for its flexibility are not concerned with controlling their work hours, per the traditional definition.
What We Learned: Facets of Flexibility
Our research team conducted a panel study with 95 online freelancers across three annual rounds of data collection (2019 to 2022). We analyzed each round, compiling 186 interviews and 200 surveys to explore themes and patterns related to flexibility.
We learned that online freelancers consider three aspects of flexibility:
Task flexibility: control over what projects to work on
Spatial flexibility: control over where to work
Scheduling flexibility: control over when to work
Below are three key findings we discussed in our article, each highlighting freelancer flexibility preferences as work arrangements evolve and job prospects emerge.
1. People prefer the stability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as virtual options.
While the freelancers we follow value the flexibility of online work, they also prioritize the stability of their job arrangements. Our participants secure gigs based on their family’s needs and financial situation, placing great importance on maintaining a stable workload and income. The flood of new freelancers in recent years has led to increased competition in digital labor markets, making it much harder to secure contracts and maintain clients.
Freelancers reevaluated their career paths and strategies as they experienced a decreased freelance income while seeing the increased availability of remote full-time jobs. Even the workers who initially pursued online gig work for its “flexibility” are transitioning to arguably less “flexible” work arrangements.
In 2021–2022, 16 of the 50 workers we interviewed in Round 3 (32%) transitioned to remote full-time jobs.
Our data demonstrates that many gig workers prefer the stability of a traditional full-time job over full or part-time freelancing when both arrangements are available remotely, especially when online freelancing is a worker’s primary or secondary source of income. Formal employment may not be their ideal arrangement, but a financial necessity, and some workers expressed a desire to return to a higher volume of freelance work in the future.
Data demonstrated that control over where they work (spatial flexibility) rather than when they work (scheduling flexibility) has become increasingly important for online freelancers. When the workers we follow found remote full-time jobs, they willingly gave up control over their schedules in exchange for a predictable income and the ability to maintain control over where they work. For our participants, controlling their work environment is crucial. Many of the freelancers we follow initially pursued online freelancing to be able to work from home, citing reasons such as childcare responsibilities or a travel-heavy lifestyle.
2. These workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements.
Freelancers in our study who secured full-time employment often continued freelancing to some extent, leaving their freelance profiles active as a backup option. Participants commonly left their accounts visible even if they weren’t taking on freelance projects. Whether or not a worker pursues online gig work after transitioning to a traditional full-time job, our participants want potential employers to have the ability to directly inquire about their services, demonstrating the importance of sustained client relationships.
Moreover, when a worker chooses to continue freelancing after getting a remote full-time job, it can make their transition to traditional employment less stressful. Our participants want to keep their options open — and freelancing is a path workers aren’t ready to give up on, both as a career strategy and a financial decision. An active freelance profile means a worker can easily shift back to online gig work if their full-time arrangement changes or no longer aligns with their lifestyle.
Deleting or deactivating an account results in the loss of profile metrics (ratings, scores, reviews, badges). Freelancers consider this platform-specific capital essential for securing contracts and higher wages. To keep their options open for the future, workers preserve their platform capital regardless of their current involvement in online gig work. This way, if they decide to return to digital freelancing, they still have their profile and its capital.
3. Full-time remote employment increases workers’ freelancing control/flexibility.
Our data demonstrated that workers who leave their freelancer profile active once transitioning to remote full-time employment have greater agency over their gig work. Despite reduced control over when they complete work, the stable income and benefits of full-time employment allow workers who continue to freelance to be more selective in what gig work they complete. For our participants, having a remote full-time job decreases their scheduling flexibility while increasing their task flexibility.
Freelancers can’t control what online work is available — market forces dictate the number of open gigs, which constantly fluctuates within each career field. When freelancing is a worker’s sole form of income, they might have to take on unfavorable jobs if only few gigs are available. The steady income of traditional employment means workers are less financially reliant on freelancing. They can avoid taking on gigs that do not align with their needs and goals. When workers find remote full-time work, they can achieve financial stability and therefore task flexibility, making their freelancing efforts much less precarious.
The Future of Freelance
As working arrangements are redefined, career and job expectations will continue to change, and flexibility will remain a relevant topic when thinking about the future of work. The growing availability of task-based employment implies a higher demand for freelancers, but our study has allowed us to identify a paradoxical response among many online gig-workers. Despite the increase in available gig-work arrangements, we have witnessed many of our participants express a preference for the stability and flexibility that come with full-time employment.
Our findings demonstrate that online freelance workers often take on remote full-time jobs even if they have been committed to a gig work arrangement for a while. If organizations continue to seek independent, contract-based workers, employment arrangements must include social policies for workers (access to benefits and other workplace protections). Suppose organizations do not redefine their gig-work structures. In that case, this shift to full-time remote employment we have witnessed among our participants may continue to grow.
This growing desire for full-time remote work indicates that the current in-person workplace culture does not currently meet the needs of 21st-century workers. The Great Resignation, defined as the mass departure of workers from their jobs, confirmed this misalignment between the workplace culture and workers’ needs. Given the reality of the Great Resignation and what we have learned through our panel study about working arrangement preferences, it is no surprise that companies still focusing on in-person work have problems hiring and retaining experienced workers. If what we’ve heard from our online freelancers reflects a more significant trend, then the Great Resignation reflects a great realization: spatial flexibility (control over where to work) is the essential attribute of the online freelancer work arrangement.
Written by Clea O’Neil. A special thanks to Heba Salman and Isabel Munoz for their contributions.
