Building the On-Demand Workforce
12 Jun 2022
CIOs, CTOs, HR, and business leaders need to consider different approaches and strategies to address the growing war for tech talent.
Accenture predicts that by 2026 Fortune 2000 companies in the future will have no full-time employees outside the C-suite as some of today’s biggest companies move to a more flexible and elastic workforce. Accenture
Much leading IT talent is freelance and wants to stay that way, finding ways to engage this distributed talent and retain the flexibility to deliver the business needs is critical moving forward.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, 75% of organisations that exploit distributed enterprise benefits will realise revenue growth 25% faster than competitors. Gartner
A report published by HBS and BCG details how companies can transform both their talent model and business strategy by using digital talent platforms to access highly skilled workers. Key highlights are:
Increase competitive advantage in an era of technological change, demographic shifts, and economic uncertainty by building a flexible work model
Leading companies are changing their approach to finding and using talent by embracing flexible workforce models to expand or contract access to workers with specialised skills as and when needed
The proliferation of digital technology platforms allows companies to create an on-demand workforce model
Covid-19 has accelerated the move away from traditional, pre-digital-era talent models toward on-demand workforce models and is being adopted as a strategic business approach and is prevalent across all types of functions in companies
40% of users reported that accessing highly skilled workers through new digital talent platforms helped improve speed to market, boost productivity, and increase innovation.
60% of businesses reported it was “highly” or “somewhat” possible that their core workforce in the future would be much smaller
60% of businesses expected they would increasingly prefer to “rent,” “borrow,” or “share” talent with other companies
Key take-aways
On-demand workforce models allow companies to find top talent for hard-to-fill positions
For highly skilled workers, these arrangements allow talent to find a way to stay productive and in the workforce while also managing their work-life priorities
To build a remote, on-demand workforce model companies need to:
Remake the culture of the organisation, changing the definition of success to focus on attaining outcomes over output
Rethink the employee value proposition, helping employees understand how they can benefit from arrangements made with new talent platforms
Redefine work into discrete components that can be tackled by internal or external contributors
Rewire organisational policies and processes, smoothing the path for teams to work differently
As leaders in the future of work, Distributed are increasingly recognised as piloting the way with a fully remote-first approach using Elastic Teams to deliver significant benefits for customers.
