Your Employees Are Burned Out: Freelancers Can Help

Change is gushing over the workforce in so many ways. And two of the big developments we’ve seen are very often thought of and described as antagonistic to one another.

The first of these is, of course, the rise of freelancing. The increased reliance of organizations on freelancers is well-known: freelancers provide a fast turnaround on the skills needed to close critical talent gaps, access expertise that is unavailable internally, or augment the resourcing of mission critical project teams. Its been regularly reported that over 90% of large corporates utilize freelancers, and over 80% have chosen to increase the work of freelancers while the company pauses fulltime hires.

The second development is a more emphatic corporate focus on the employee experience, in many cases following a layoff or RIFF. A measure of the importance of employee experience in retaining and engaging employees is a recent “HX of Work Summit” virtual conference. Organized by Elliott Nelson of HXWize, this community of experience professionals, attended by 600 participants, heard cases on experience research and design from Disney, McDonalds, Credit Suisse, AkzoNobel, Sanofi, Nestlé, Swiss Re, Kraft Heinz, Roche, and other companies.

Many assume incorrectly that freelancing is no friend to fulltime employment or the employee experience. Freelancing is often portrayed as complicating a positive employee experience by implying that freelancers may threaten the jobs of employees. But that description is incomplete and short-sighted.

There is another way to think about the relationship between freelancing and traditional employment roles: offering a positive synergy that enables organizations to provide a better employee experience overall by utilizing independent experts to augment resources and meet current and future staffing needs.

There are a variety of reasons why freelancers support a better experience for fulltime employees. This article offers 10 of the many ways that employees benefit experientially – and grow professionally - when working together with or alongside freelancers.

• Reducing employee burnout. With so many fulltime roles open and unfilled these days, current employees are working harder and longer hours, which impacts satisfaction, quality, and even loss time accidents. 41% of workers complain of burnout. Add the additional burden of taking on the work of employees who were laid off. GE Work Out showed that fewer employees doesn’t mean less work. Freelancers provide a pressure relief valve that helps organizations add or reduce support to meet the challenges they face.
• Access to unexpectedly required expertise. Most organizations staff to meet expected requirements. But when there is a significant and sudden change in the force, like Uber or Tesla, teams need to adapt more quickly than is possible with traditional hires. Freelancing makes it possible to staff existential initiatives far more quickly. Where work can be done remotely, freelance experts are found in global marketplaces, and ready to work.
• Keeping families together. Post-pandemic, we already see signs of more business travel, and more relocation of executives and professional staff. New markets open, and products, processes, tech and support must be rolled out globally. Local freelancers make it possible for corporate staff to be home more, on the road less, and still get the job done.
• A diversity boost: the chance to work with people from all over. Is freelancing part of your DEI strategy? It should be. Freelancers offer organizations the chance to work with external experts from anywhere and everywhere, and video apps create the opportunity to build relationships with distant freelancers. Freelancing offers the most diverse, global, staffing environment.
• Mentored by outstanding talent. Working with expert freelancers provides a double payoff if the organization also uses them as teachers and mentors to internal staff. Imagine contracting your freelancers for an additional hour per week as mentors, coaches or educators. A recent report found that 76% think mentors are important, but only 37% have one.
• Supporting employees’ “challenge” and “innovation” projects. Many companies like Google support employees undertaking innovation projects with a percentage of their time. According to Professor Clay Christensen, 95% of product innovations fail. Freelancers help in two ways. First, they are accessible experts. And second, they have a broader external view of what companies are doing and prioritizing.
• Benchmarking and staying up to date. Building on the last benefit, attracting the right freelancers, and seeking their advice and counsel, offers a rich perspective on what other organizations are doing in the areas of interest. They are a window into the client’s industry, direct and emerging competition, coming technologies, and emerging change drivers. Your freelancers can be a tremendous source of benchmarking intelligence.
• Assisting employees to expand their professional networks. When your employees work with freelancers, they have the opportunity to build new relationships outside their organization. Working together with freelancers inevitably leads to the chance to meet others and become part of your freelancers’ networks. A growing professional network that spills beyond your organization’s borders is a source of real value – in learning, in work offers, career opportunity, and much more.
• Attracting new talent to our organization. Working with freelancers is sometimes more than project or fractional work. Sometimes it leads to a job interview. Freelancers often take on freelancing to find a better fulltime job, and others side-gig in other industries and discover that they find the work engaging and satisfying. Approximately 20% of freelancers – give or take – are looking for attractive fulltime employment.
• Helpful feedback on improvement. Not always, of course. But, in general, freelancers are more likely to be an eager source of feedback on how the organization might improve. That’s important because company leaders generally say they don’t do a great job of learning from experience and past mistakes. While internal staff may have a deep knowledge of company systems and practices, freelancers are more able, and often more willing, to complement internals’ insights with what other organizations are doing.

Finally, it is increasingly the case that many employees are freelancers themselves. Of the 60 million individuals who claim freelancing in the US, 40 million are fulltime employees who currently moonlight part-time or on weekends, or have a side-gig in addition to their fulltime job. We call these individuals freelance lite. They are not fearful of freelancers. They are freelancers. And they represent a larger and larger pool of talent that is changing the future of work and workforce.

Viva la Revolution!