How the Gig Economy is Changing the Future of Work
An introduction to the Gig economy
‘Gig economy’ is among the widely used terms in the business world today. It is an economy that operates flexibly, involving the use of labour and resources through digital platforms. Here, the work doesn’t involve a systematic schedule and is allocated on a temporary basis hence It deals with hiring independent contractors and freelancers. It produces cheaper, more efficient and flexible services. Taxi services like Ola, Uber, food delivery services like Swiggy and Zomato and home cleaning services like Urban Company are some examples.
Opportunities
The traditional workforce setup has caused enterprises to face multiple challenges in getting their work done. Barriers range from no guarantee of measurable outputs despite paying fixed salaries to monthly incremental costs that come with constant rehiring, retraining, and administration. Simply put, the costs involved in having a traditional workforce have forced the companies to make the transition toward gig work.
The gig ecosystem offers operational benefits by providing organisations with an opportunity to scale up and down as per their requirements. The onset of the pandemic has offered more agility to this kind of ecosystem.
The gig ecosystem is finding more prominence, especially with the start-ups. Distinguished by their fast pace and low expenditure, a start-up’s appetite for experimentation is higher, thus establishing themselves as start-ups refer themselves as ‘early adopters' because of their fast pace and low expenditure and appetite for experimentation is higher.
Areas such as HR, customer service, operations processing, marketing and sales, software development, IT support, graphic design, and so on, as opposed to just blue-collar occupations, are showing enormous potential for having a gig labour force.
Cost Benefits
Saving money is among the most common objects that any kind of business has. Capitalising on the surge of gig workers, businesses that hire off-site workers eliminate the need to have or maintain expensive workspaces. In addition to that, by employing gig workforce, the company also saves more from offering the benefits and perks that it would offer otherwise.
In particular, seasonal businesses benefit the most from the gig economy. Previously, companies utilised existing agencies that provide temporary workers, however, these services charge fees that can be expensive, especially for small businesses. Hiring a freelancer can prove to be an easier and much more practical way to procure speciality services from professionals without having to pay additional fees to different agencies. Alternatively, the gig economy comes up with a network of workers that creates a direct commitment between the company and the freelancer. This removes the hassle of dealing with middlemen throughout the entire business process, and makes it easy for companies to find self-employed contractors to complete any job.
While saving on the cost, employee engagement is made in the following simple ways;
• Monetary incentives paying more than originally agreed upon for services provided, as a reward for a job well done.
• Swag such as water bottles, coffee mugs and mouse pads that bear the company logo.
• Care packages containing food and goodies
• Access to company training to help gig workers develop themselves.
• Discounts on company products and services.
Operational Benefits
Employers, employees, and the economy as a whole benefit from the gig economy, which goes beyond traditional conceptions of convenience and on-demand availability and flexibility. This is due to the underlying economic factors that platform-enabled gig work addresses at scale, as well as the collateral advantages it can provide, potentially resulting in a virtuous expansion cycle. These include;
1. Enhancing the efficiency of large-scale discovery and fulfilment for labour and services
2. Aligning the economic incentives across employers and workers, thereby increasing earnings for workers while reducing ‘fixed’ costs for employers
3. Catalysing economic recovery by providing labour on-demand even if employers remain tentative about hiring workers full-time
4. Driving overall improvement in productivity by reducing idle and unproductive time
Conclusion
The gig economy is creating a wave of change in the modern workforce. Driven by flexibility in sort of work and work schedule, there exists a network of self-employed independent contractors that provide an answer to almost all types of businesses. The type of work and work schedule magnified by the global pandemic and the impact that COVID-19 has had on the global economy has created a need for this new workforce.
Here at Job Booster India, we find ways to tap into this new workforce to capitalise on the network of skilled workers looking for jobs, and maximise outputs.
