BCG & HBS Future of Work Study Insights
The freelance economy is growing, but how should companies and freelancers work together? A recent report by the Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business School called, “Building the On-Demand Workforce” addressed this very question. Here’s what you need to know as a freelancer.
First, what is a “freelancer”?
It may seem strange to be asking this question on a blog that’s named “The Accidental Freelancer,” but freelancing is one of those words that means different things to different people. The freelance economy is separate from the gig economy and overlaps with the creator economy. It may or may not be related to The Passion Economy (currently reading, will report back). With all these terms floating about, the market for freelancers has become increasingly complex. Here is what the landscape looks like now, in terms of buckets of freelance work and platforms where freelancers are finding them. The rest of this post will focus on the top right quadrant:
Fuller, J., Raman, M., Bailey A., Vaduganathan N., et al., Building the on-demand workforce, figure 2, p. 7.
Why are people freelancing?
This question has befuddled me for years. Freelancing was not a career path I heard about in school or saw at a job fair. When I started, I didn’t know anyone else who did it. This made dinner parties awkward because I had no idea how to describe what I did for a living and why I didn’t have a “real” job.
Now, we have more information. Here are the reasons the study identified for why people are freelancing:
Building the on-demand workforce, figure 3, p. 9.
It turns out, there are two key trends. One is that workers want flexibility, autonomy, and purpose from our jobs. This makes sense given the economic environment in which younger people joined the workforce. Between crippling student debt, multiple black swan events, widening inequality, and stagnant wage growth, the idea of retiring one day can sometimes sound like a pipe dream. The other is that technological innovation is changing the type of work that needs to be done. Between the two of these, the way we work is becoming increasingly fractionalized.
What is the future of work?
Here is the report’s best guess of what the future of work might look like given these trends. Based on this survey of 673 non-freelancers, working in full-time jobs, there is a strong belief that the day job is not going away:
Building the on-demand workforce, figure 15, p. 19.
That said, the forces driving the trend toward freelancing likely won’t let up any time soon. I suspect there are a lot of exciting developments ahead in how we think about work and social contracts, fractionalizing tasks and integrating the diverse aspects of our own identities going forward. More individuals will be drawn to freelancing, and cost considerations will encourage companies to take advantage of that.
What this means for freelancers
The relationship between freelancers and full-time employees is going to change. Right now, about a third of the American workforce freelances. This means freelancers tend to work with corporate clients who have not freelanced themselves. As a result, there are some critical gaps separating freelancers and their clients.
To use freelance talent effectively, companies need to train their employees about:
Recognizing value of the freelance workforce
Breaking work into its component parts to subcontract out
Communicating team expectations to short-term hires
Tracking progress in a transparent way
As freelancers, recognizing that these processes will vary from client to client means that we also need to get sharper about:
Articulating our value propositions
Scoping our clients’ problems into freelance-friendly solutions
Asking questions around team expectations and adapting our work style as needed
Communicating our progress
Stay tuned for more tips on how to do so!
