Do gig workers make sense for my business?
Gig workers offer benefits – stay longer, work harder & offer better ROI over co-located employees.
Businesses have understood the fact that in order to remain competitive, it is significant to embrace today’s flexible labor market, recruiting a mix of full-time, part-time and gig workers. Hence, the gig economy!
Gig workers are now and ever the big and huge chunk of the American workforce, with nearly 60 million people being a part of the gig economy. As projected by Statista, in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States and will make up 50.9 percent of the total U.S. workforce.
The gigging world has offered numerous benefits to the independent workforce. According to the first State of Remote Work report for 2018, 90% of remote workers plan on working remotely for the rest of their careers.
While contingent workforce (or freelancer revolution, as it is commonly known as) has huge benefits for independent workers, the phenomenon immensely benefits businesses. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of the gig economy for employers.
- Improved customer experience: By investing in the gig economy, businesses can provide more authentic user experiences and in turn better user engagements. For instance, gig workers are highly motivated to resolve customer issues quickly, firstly because they are paid on the basis of how many queries/issues they’ve resolved, and secondly, to get good customer ratings that’ll impact their future gig.
- Wider Access: By embracing the gig economy businesses can gain access to a new and probably a wider market. To explain it further, giggers are typically not location confined, they can be located anywhere. In simple terms, they work remotely and generally depend on mobile devices to stay connected. They are mostly willing to travel distance to deliver a service. For instance, delivery boys of e-commerce brands. This gives businesses an opportunity to augment their customer/user-base and penetrate into the markets that they couldn’t earlier.
- Get more in less investment – One of the many significant benefits of gig economy is that it provides small businesses that opportunity to work as a large corporation without paying full-time salary and office overhead costs. Small or mid-size companies can try out highly-skilled workforce without hiring them on a full-time basis. This way businesses can compare talent and retain those high performing ones, for full-time work, if required. A temporary recruitment agency can hire can deal with the fluctuating need for the best resource of their client by delivering on-demand talent.
Will Gig Workers make sense for your business?
While there are ample benefit of gig economy to businesses, reduced cost and hiring time are two of the primary and most important benefits of this phenomenon. Gig economy is for all, small medium and large enterprises. During Christmas 2017, Amazon hired more than 120,000 (most of them were temporary), workers. In fact, a large number of other retailers too added gig workers during the peak seasons to help them fill orders. Even other U.S. retailers including Macy’s Inc and Kohl’s Corp has scaled up hiring seasonal workers to man their distribution centers that support online operations. Being able to call on workers during a significant increase in orders who already understand what’s needed is invaluable.
Gig economy can be an excellent choice for startups with less cash, where the company has to pay only for the work done, and not having to pay a fixed amount that is due every two weeks whether or not you have made sales.
If you are planning to go the gig way, look for a seasoned staffing company offering comprehensive temporary staffing services.
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