Workout: freelance future as companies shun fill-time staff

COMPANIES are shifting towards hiring freelancers and white-collar project workers rather than full-time staff.

Expert360 chief executive Bridget Loudon.

BUSINESS management consultancy firm Expert360 has found companies are shifting towards hiring freelancers and white-collar project workers rather than full-time staff.

Expert360’s Working Trends 2015 surveyed a cross-section of 4500 businesses, employees and freelancers and found 31 per cent of small to medium-sized business hires were freelancers, compared with 25 per cent in 2011. Expert360 predicts freelancers will grow to 40 per cent of the workforce by 2018, with none of the companies surveyed planning to reduce the number of freelancers they were hiring.

Chief executive Bridget Loudon says the modern workplace has been evolving over the past five years, with freelance trends emerging across the world.

“No longer is the default position to hire full-time equivalent staff. It’s time-consuming and expensive,” Loudon says.

“It takes 29 days for small organisations and 43 days for large organisations to hire the average full-time staff versus three days on an online platform. It’s often the case that when the person is hired and a particular job has been completed — there’s no ongoing work for that person and the employer is left in an awkward position.”

She says freelancing can be cost-effective for businesses and lucrative for workers, with freelancers who leave full-time work to chase lucrative short-term professional contracts on average earning up to 275 per cent more.

The study found the key drivers of the move to a freelance workforce have been access to skills, greater savings, speed of hiring and ease of recruitment.

Big data winners

A TEAM of students from the Australian campus of Carnegie Mellon University has won the grand prize at the Hilti Global Big Data competition, demonstrating business intelligence and data-analysis skills.

Big data is increasingly being seen as a huge employment growth industry. To increase industry participation, schools and universities are trying to increase enrolments in maths, science and engineering courses to meet growing interest and demand.

As the need for data analysts and communication technologies grows, the international competition aims to challenge talented students moving into the field.

Teams from Malaysia, China, Canada, Australia and The Netherlands engaged in a two-day battle to develop a plan to enhance the online business experience in Kuala Lumpur.

Engaging success

INTERNATIONAL survey and consulting firm Insync Surveys has found that engaged employees are more likely to commit to improving productivity than those who do not like their jobs.

The Insync survey also found that engaged workers are almost five times more likely than those who are disengaged to say their company is committed to bringing innovative products and services to the marketplace.

Chief executive Nicholas Barnett says if organisations fail to innovate, change and become more competitive at a faster rate than their average competitors, they will lose profitability and they will become exposed, instead of becoming more competitive, differentiated and adding extra value.

The latest Insync Surveys research is based on the views of more than 100,000 employees from 150 organisations. It shows highly engaged employees are six times more likely than disengaged employees to agree their work group uses challenging goals to improve performance, and seven times more likely to agree their senior leadership team encourages innovation and creativity.