One of the main assets that can make or break businesses and companies is the level of their overall productivity. This productivity, whilst the result of many collaborative features within such organisations, is largely down its employees and the standards of work they produce.
Therefore, in order for such organisations to thrive, careful consideration must be placed in the hiring of staff, ensuring the best possible levels of efficiency and productivity for the work they yield, and further resulting in the making, (rather than breaking!) of businesses and companies alike.
Also important to consider is the speciality of the freelancers a business chooses to contract to work with. A key benefit of freelance and contract workers is that as a business you can specify the areas of expertise in which they are required to specialise in. This can be anything, from content creators to help create a podcast (source: 4DC), to anything else.
One method that has frequently been used in an attempt to increase the standards of a workforce is the hiring of freelancers and contract workers; an integral and rapidly growing asset within the UK labour market that is frequently defined as the “gig” economy.
These types of employees, although temporary in nature, have been shown to provide businesses and companies with tremendously efficient standards of work, further building on their overall levels of productivity in multiple different areas or an organisation.
Freelancers and contract workers can therefore be a useful tool that organisations can use to reap an abundant variety of benefits from, and with its increasing popularity are also becoming a growing necessity for any business or company wanting to keep up with competing organisations.
Why Do Organisations Need Freelancers and Contract Workers?
There is a wide variety of benefits that businesses and companies can gain from using freelancers and contract workers, making them a vital component to any lucrative organisation wanting to not only match up to its various competitors using this tool, but also to progress its business further.
Some of the main elements of such work that companies can benefit from are as follows:
Less commitment – one of the many pros of working with freelancers and contract workers is that no long-term commitment is required of either the company or the worker.
This means companies can hire such highly skilled workers for specific projects that need an extra set of skilled hands, without having to continue their employment in quieter working periods as is required with full-time employees.
This can be an excellent method to increase the cost effectiveness within an organisation, only paying out for a larger workforce when required in the busier times of the year.
Short notice period – following on from this last point, as freelancers and contract workers are only typically hired for specific projects within a company or business, if such projects or other various tasks they’ve been assigned to finish sooner than expected, employers are not required to maintain their contract, meaning these types of workers can be given shorter periods of notice for the end of their employment.
For example, there may be a virtual event that requires specific technical staff and once their jobs are complete the contract ends (source: Through The I). In such cases, it may be feasible and even preferable to be able to invoke a short notice period for short term workers and freelancers.
This being, again, unlike hiring full-time employment staff, in which companies and businesses are usually contractually bound to give an extended period of notice and to validate this with reasons that often need to be more than a simply going through a quiet period.
Another benefit of hiring such type of work is therefore that such businesses and companies have more control over their workforce, able to make greater adjustments to their staff dependent on the fluctuating levels of workloads throughout the year.
More secure hiring decisions – by hiring workers with potential for permanent employment on an initially contractual basis can allow employers the chance of a more thorough assessment of how well they fit into a business or company.
This trial run of the freelancer or contract worker provides a significantly greater assessment of how well they would fit into the specified organisation compared to the standard interview process that is done when finding new staff to employ, without having to make a long-term commitment if it is decided they aren’t a good fit.
This also allows companies to plan head and more robustly when it comes to funding hiring processes. It can help businesses avoid the need to have to borrow money instantly at higher interest rates, allowing them to plan ahead and budget better.
Better workers – when hiring full-time employment within a business, it is quite common for workers to get a little too comfortable in their roles and to coast along doing the bare minimum required and just about enough to not get fired.
The beauty in freelancers and contract workers is that if they are not providing an outstanding quality of work they will simply not be hired by that company or business again, and would subsequently damage their reputation for other future potential employers of their services.
Therefore, hiring these types of workers will typically yield a greater quality of work in comparison to the coasting, all-to-comfortable full-time employee, and further increasing the overall productivity and success of an organisation.
Freelancers and contract workers can therefore be seen as a vital component to making any business or company thrive, typically offering work of a more flexible, efficient, better quality and more cost-effective nature, and becoming a growing necessity to any business or company looking to progress successfully.
