Voices from the Field: How a Blended Workforce Gets the Job Done

Bill Tribble, A British UX designer, has been working for an American university for the past seven months. Nothing unusual there, except that he has been doing so from Japan.

Tribble’s wife is Japanese, and he wanted the family to move to Japan while their son was still young. The only tricky part was finding a job. “As a newcomer to Japan, there weren’t many options,” he says. “There are a few international companies, but it wasn’t really that appealing work-wise.” So Tribble joined Toptal, an agency that matches highly skilled freelancers with employers.

Though he doesn’t receive the benefits and tacit assurances of long-term employment that full-time workers enjoy, Tribble gets full-time hours and pay. He also avoids office politics and has more control of his schedule than a typical full-timer. “You can work where you want, when you want,” he says. “Today my phone was damaged, so I went and got it fixed in the middle of the working day and I caught up on stuff this evening and it’s totally fine. That’s a really big change.”

Freelance workers like Tribble are becoming a more common fixture of the modern workplace. In 2016, freelancers made up 35 percent of the US workforce, according to a study from the Freelancers Union. By 2020, the figure is expected to hit 40 percent. Though there are many factors driving this so-called blended workforce of full-timers and freelancers, technology is a huge enabler, making a physical presence unnecessary and allowing for collaboration across time zones.

What’s in it for businesses

While the upside of this arrangement for workers like Tribble is clear, what about employers? Michael Solomon, founder of 10X Management, an agency that matches top programmers with businesses, rattled off several scenarios in which a freelancer made sense. A small company might realize it has good data, for instance, but doesn’t have the budget for a full-time data scientist. “You can bring in an expert for a short time who knows exactly what they’re doing and gain incredibly valuable insights without the overhead of a full-time person,” he says. Another scenario is that there’s a full-time vacancy but you need someone right away to fill in while you hunt for a new full-timer, a process that can take six months or more.

Economics is also a concern. Freelancers don’t get benefits, which account for an average of 31.6 percent of a full-timer’s salary, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Even though you’re making $160,000 per year instead of $150,000, you may be actually costing the company less,” says Damien Filiatrault, CEO of Scalable Path, another firm that provides skilled freelance employees to businesses.

Agility and responsiveness

Another major trend driving the blended workforce is the rapid speed businesses require in today’s market. “The pace of change in technology is always increasing, so the race has to be run more quickly every year,” said Michael Kearns, CEO of Toptal. “You need more of an ability to try different things and flexibly to build teams and then scale them down.”

Kearns compared the blended workforce to cloud computing, which also allows companies to scale quickly and take an experimental approach. Only in this case, the variable is human resources. “There’s this amazing untapped human potential out there of people all over the world.” Kearns says that in the past it’s been hard to gain access to such workers, but now it’s possible to work with anyone, anywhere.

Tools that drive global collaboration

Platforms like videoconferencing, chat, messaging platforms, and project management tools make such blended workplace scenarios possible. Still, the human factor is important, Filiatrault says, “You’ve got to talk to them every day. You’ve got to have a daily meeting with them.”

For videoconferencing, he recommends giving each participant a screen rather than having a group in the home office share one. “Everyone should join the virtual meeting as equals,” he says, noting that otherwise freelancers can feel like second-class citizens.

The value of a blended workforce

Combining full-timers with contract employees can allow everyone to get the best of both worlds. Freelancers get autonomy and the chance to make more money than they might as a full-timer. Businesses get access to highly skilled workers and the option to quickly scale their workforce up or down.

Tribble, for one, said it would be hard for him to consider going back to a traditional full-time job now. “There’s so many benefits to not having a commute and the boredom and stress associated with offices,” he said. “It’s just gone. I don’t have to deal with any of that.”