California plans to fully open it’s economy June 15th, followed by New York City on July 1st. 

Re-opening presents a once in a generation opportunity to reinvent your organization, serve your customers, and build the engine that will propel your positioning for the next 50 years.

It also presents a once in a generation challenge for retaining your top talent. As Michael Solomon, Author of Game Changer and CEO of 10x Management told me, “We’re about to see job churn like never before”.

It sounds contradictory, but the solution to innovation and retention isn’t within your four walls. It’s remote freelancers in the Human Cloud.

Covid Accelerated The Shift To The Human Cloud

Leaders from Fortune 50 companies to 50 person startups have already leaned into the human cloud. According to Harvard Business School’s Report Building The On-Demand Workforce, 90% of business leaders reported flexible talent would be somewhat or very important to their organization’s future competitive advantage. Brand names like Microsoft, General Electric, Intel, BBC Worldwide, Hollister, GoPro, Kaplan are just a few publicly acknowledging their hiring of freelancers.

Covid simply increased this growing trend as 73 percent of managers who see the value in remote work are engaging independent professionals.

The Human Cloud Is Your Engine For Access To Talent, Retention of Talent and Innovation

1: Combating The Talent Shortage and Wage Escalation

42% of business owners had openings that couldn’t be filled in March according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses. As Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center put it, “They have made it to this point and they’ve adjusted their business operations to get through the worst of the pandemic and now they are saddled with not being able to increase business operations when they find the opportunities”. This isn’t new to the pandemic. Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., President and CEO of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said in 2018, "We now have more jobs than people to do them, which means our labor [shortages] are going to get worse".

There’s also rising wage escalation. As the President of a leading Technology Consulting Firm told me, “the pandemic has led to significant wage escalation for tech talent as companies in most industries transitioned to digital-first organizations.”

But both talent ‘shortage’ and wage ‘escalation’ is misleading.

There isn’t a talent shortage. Over 1 billion global freelancers are ready to help, they just don’t want to be employees as 51% of freelancers say no amount of money would entice them to take a full time job.

There doesn’t need to be wage escalation. Freelancers can and usually prefer project-based work. Take Dani Ifrim, full stack designer whose helped clients through web design, brand design, and even an online shopping center to help small businesses interact with their customers.

Instead of a salary, Dani works on a project basis, with a sample of his exact projects below.

2: Retaining Top Employees Through Empowerment

Your top performers present a contradiction. They want increasing responsibility, yet burnt-out employees are 2.6 times more likely to be actively seeking a new job.

How can you prevent these top performers from actively seeking a new job? Give them budget to hire freelancers since freelancers empower employees to produce more, cover a wider scope of work, yet balance burnout by having help. As said in The Human Cloud, “what would you do if you had a world of experts in your pocket? Think five-star designers, developers, data scientists.”

Or as said by Liane Scult, Microsoft’s first ever freelance program manager, “Engaging freelancers can help augment full time employees. Whether project managers having designers to help with their diagrams, or video producers having script writers, hiring freelancers increases the potential for every one of our employees to create more.”

Here are example use cases of how freelancers can amplify your employees:

• What if your product marketing manager had a designer to help A/B test landing pages?
• What if your product manager had a content writer to help optimize the website copy?
• What if your sales reps had a researcher to inform their meetings or have up to date competitor information?

3: Enabling Speed and Experimentation

Most likely you need to pivot, create new offerings, or scale. Freelancers are ideal for this environment as they provide hyper specialization, speed and cost efficiency. 

According to Prasannaa Ganesan, Chief Operating Officer at Corel Corporation, “As we continue to drive innovation across our product lines, we need to ensure we have the right talent at the right time to meet changing business requirements.”

After completing nearly 150 projects per month across 10 different categories, Corel reported:

• average fill rate of 88% of jobs posted (industry average is around 50%)
• 4.87 out of 5 success ratings
• time savings of over 100 hours per month

Likewise at Microsoft, Liane Scult told me, “We launched our Gig Economy pilot in 2017 to deliver for our customers, increase the speed of innovation, and provide different resource models to allow us to scale with speed, agility, and specialized expertise – online and on-demand.” 

After completing over 2,000 freelance projects spanning 25 internal teams and hundreds of employees, Microsoft reported:

• Reducing time to engage talent from 20 to 5.4 days
• 4.9/5 freelancer star rating

According to Microsoft, these results “led us to develop the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, which combines our leading enterprise productivity apps with curated tools, templates, and best practices to address the specific needs of enterprise freelance programs.”

Next week we’ll learn how to hire and work with top freelancers. Stay tuned!