Turning Employees Into Freelancers Inside The Organization
In our personal lives we play many roles. We look after our homes, we make time for friends, we play sports, have hobbies, play some sort of family role, and much more. In other words we aren’t just one thing or one type of person. Unfortunately, many of our organizations are structured in a way that only allows employees to have one type of role and one type of function. Whether you are in marketing, sales, R&D, IT, or other function, oftentimes you get pigeonholed and tend to get stuck doing the same tasks for the same team. Over time employees get bored or burned out. This is not how humans are wired, in fact this is the perfect scenario for a robot! It’s also important to keep in mind that the employee-employer relationship has fundamentally changed. Pensions are virtually non-existent, tenure for employees it not what it used to be, technology makes it easy to poach employees, the overall war for talent is rather brutal, and talent professionals have to consider the freelancer economy. So overall we are working at quite literally a very different world. As a result organizations are not only forced to think of ways to update how work gets done but they must think of entirely new concepts and ideas that can be applied to the workplace. One area that I believe we will see significant adoption of is the freelancer economy, but perhaps not in the way that most people think.
Some of the benefits of actually being a freelancer are that people have complete flexibility around what they work on, when they work on it, how many projects they want to take on, and how much they make. What if there was a way to take some of these themes and concepts from the freelancer economy and apply them inside of our organizations for employees as a way to attract and retain top talent? Some of these ideas already exist in some shape or form within certain organizations. Consider Valve, the popular gaming company where employees can select the projects they want to work on based on looking at a project list. When one project is completed employees can select the next project that they want to work on. If employees want to start their own project then it’s up to them to put together the specifications, get funding, and generate enough interest so that others will want to join the project.
In the near future we are going to see this concept of the freelancer marketplace brought inside of organizations. Think of a freelance marketplace such as Upwork but inside of an organization where employees look for gigs they want to take on where they can get rated, negotiate rates, showcase a portfolio, and build up an internal client roster. Cisco has already experimented with this a little by “posting” certain projects that teams need help with along with a dollar amount for what that team perceives the project to be worth. Employees can then decide if that’s something they want to take on. There is no reason why employees need to have one role or reside within one function of the organization, why can’t they take on multiple roles or sit within more than one part of the company? Bringing in some of the perks of being a freelancer inside of the organization will benefit everyone. Employees will be able to earn extra income while working on projects they decide to work on and the organization will keep valuable employees engaged while filling in skills and project gaps.
I’ll explore some frameworks and concepts around this in the near future but for now I wanted to introduce what I think is going to be an exciting initiative for some organizations. I don’t expect this concept to become mainstream in the near future but the progressive organizations will definitely be looking at applying the concept of freelancing inside of their organizations.
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. To have Jacob speak at your event, see his videos, podcasts and articles, or to subscribe to his newsletter visit TheFutureOrganization.
