The future belongs to businesses that can evolve with an adaptive workforce

The changes that are occurring in the last two years are irreversible and survival relies on businesses’ ability to adapt to the reshaped workforce, Micha Kaufman founder and CEO of freelance work platform Fiverr says. 

In the United States alone, 37.4 million Americans expected to call it quits in 2022, according to consulting firm Gartner, and a majority of the workforce projected to work freelance by 2027. This said, 11 million jobs remain unfilled.

According to recent surveys, the resignation phenomenon, labor shortage and skills gap hinder companies’ growth. 

Corporate culture

“To attract and retain talent, employers must certainly have a strong culture and a well-developed corporate purpose. In my experience, freelancers, like full-time workers, will also increasingly be attracted to companies when there’s a strong alignment of values.” Kauffman says. 

He says news business models must integrate, organize, and optimize independent talent at scale in more agile ways, enabling businesses to draw from a diverse set of workers who will increasingly seek to engage on their own terms.

Companies are now facing a tremendous skills gap. Across 7.5 million job postings in IT, finance, and sales studied by Gartner Group, for example, 29% of the skills listed in 2018 vacancies may no longer be needed this year, even as the average number of skills required in postings jumped from 17 to 21. In a dynamic economy, businesses need to fundamentally rethink how they acquire, maintain, and advance essential but fast-changing skills

With near-flat productivity growth in Western economies, projects–not operations–are the engine of innovation and value creation. In 2017, the Project Management Institute forecast that project-related activity would be worth $20 trillion in 2027, up from $12 trillion at the time.

Fluid project-based “roles” could replace “jobs” as an organizing principle of work and a source of professional meaning, opening up new possibilities for the integration of independent talent.

In the new world of work, it’s no longer enough to simply overlay a hybrid model on an existing workforce strategy that was conceived for another era–nor is it sufficient to treat freelancers as an afterthought.

We are living in a dynamic, rapidly evolving business environment. Companies must rise to the challenge by marshaling talent in fundamentally novel and innovative ways.

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