From CIO, Tam Harbert discusses the effect of the gig economy on companies managing a tech workforce. Tam writes:
A world of open talent
As a recent Deloitte report, “The Open Talent Economy,” explains, “The evolving workforce is a mixture of employees, contractors and freelancers, and — increasingly — people with no formal ties to your enterprise at all.” The consultancy defines open talent as “a collaborative, transparent, technology-enabled, rapid-cycle way of doing business. What the open source model did for software, the open talent economy is doing for work,” the report says, concluding, “In this new economy, access to talent is more important than ownership of talent.”
Are employers ready to accommodate this new flexible workforce? “Some organizations are preparing for it, some are just talking about it, and some are not even thinking about it,” says Alisia Genzler, executive vice president at staffing and recruitment firm Randstad Technologies.
IT departments are often the first part of the company to acknowledge the move towards freelancing and try to accommodate it, says Deloitte’s Liakopoulos. When they do, many questions typically arise: How do employers plan their workforce when a significant part of it may be freelance? How should the freelancers be compensated? How much training should an employer provide to a freelancer?
“All these different types of talent are turning the corporate talent management model on its head,” Liakopoulos sums up. “Companies are going to have to change.”
Read the full story at How the ‘gig economy’ is changing enterprise IT
