Tips for Getting the Most Out of Gig Economy Workers

Gig workers now account for nearly one-third of the global workforce and provide significant cost savings to companies that know how to use them effectively.

The gig economy is booming, forcing human resource professionals to consider how their companies use gig workers and take steps to ensure the workers are as productive as can be, with the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

Globally, 65% of HR professionals say they use gig workers and they make up 31% of the global workforce, according to a recent survey of 2,100 talent managers by the staffing firm Kelly Services. “Nearly two-thirds (65%) of talent managers think the gig economy is becoming the new normal for how businesses organize work and almost three quarters (73%) believe a much more flexible and fluid workforce will emerge as a way to navigate an increasingly dynamic, global business climate,” the Kelly report says.

Hiring gig workers helps the bottom line, the study shows. Forty-three percent of organizations that employ gig workers say they’re getting at least a 20% labor cost savings and 72% say the strategy provides a competitive advantage.

Getting the most out of this onslaught of contract workers, however, requires understanding their job function and ensuring they’re set up properly to perform it. Having been a gig worker myself since long before the term was coined, following are a few do’s and don’ts to help.

Understand the Connectivity Requirements

Many gig workers work at home or in a remote office, not on your premises. That means you need a fast and secure way to let them communicate with your company and deliver work product. The means to that end will vary greatly depending on what the worker’s function is.

The two most common uses for gig workers in the Kelly study were IT (41%) and marketing (23%). Their varying requirements illustrate the point.

IT workers are more likely to work on-site at a company location and will need high-performance computers. They’ll also need to be set up in whatever authentication system the company uses to ensure they can access the IT systems they need to access—although only those systems. But they’re also likely to want to work at least part of the time somewhere else, so will need secure remote access as well, such as via a virtual private network.

On the other hand, gig workers who help out the marketing department, such as by writing content for blogs or the website, need little more than email to send in their finished documents. Depending on the extent to which the company uses freelance help, however, you may need to set the gig workers up in your content management system (CMS) so they can add their contributions to the mix.

A word of caution on that, however. If you have gig workers who are under exclusive contract with your company, then asking them to deal with your CMS is not out of line. But most gig workers do jobs for many different clients and may balk at being asked to deal with potentially different CMSs for each one.

Allow for Collaboration

As use of gig workers increases, companies may find they have teams of permanent and gig employees working on the same projects from different locations. This requires strong project management to ensure projects stay on track and everyone understands how their contributions fit into the whole.

That may mean using a project management or collaboration tool, such as Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Wrike or dozens of others. Make sure you use a tool that’s appropriate for the job at hand.

IT tends to have its own go-to project management and issue tracking tools, for example, including Jira and ServiceNow. Others, including those named above, are more general-purpose.

As with the CMS, however, whether you can expect gig workers to work with your project management tool will depend on how deeply embedded they are with your company. Projects where clients have multiple means of tracking the same project, including Google Docs and cloud-based tools just waste everyone’s time.

The same goes for expecting gig workers to attend weekly project status meetings. Unless they really need to understand the status of other team members’ work, such meetings again just waste the freelancer’s time.

There’s also risk involved in the practice, according to Rebecca Cenni-Leventhal, founder and CEO of staffing and recruitment firm Atrium.

“Having [gig workers] participate in regular team meetings or asking them for regular updates and reporting is not wise,” Cenni-Leventhal tells the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), as that may cause them to be viewed as employees rather than independent contractors.

If having freelancers attend regular meetings is a requirement in your organization, expect to pay accordingly for it. For gig workers, time is money.