The return to the office, let’s just admit it, has been a mess.
COVID variants have spoiled the in-person party again and again. Management has called for on-site work, and workers have pushed back. Keeping track of staff has become a daily guessing game.
But a growing number of workforce experts say that’s the wrong way to look at work in 2022. Whether this person is in that building is not the issue. The real question is: Where can the company find the skills it needs right now? And that is a pressing issue in an industry facing layoffs and sinking stocks.
The answer often may be that companies need highly skilled remote workers both inside and outside the organization who can plunge in to address pressing needs.
“Liquid workers” who flow where they are needed, project by project, are about to transform a tech industry where layoffs have brought a new demand for efficiency, multiple researchers believe.
“We see companies changing basic management practices around how they access, engage and develop workers; we see leaders adapting to a changing workforce where they have more contributors but less control. In some cases, we see upwards of 30%–50% of an organization composed of contingent workers, and organizations increasingly relying on third parties to deliver some of their most essential services.”
In a report titled “The fluid workforce revolution,” the industry think tank Capgemini Research Institute found, “With the COVID-19 situation, organizations are questioning the composition of the workforce, and not just from a virtual vs. on-premise perspective, but also from fluid vs. fixed workers. The search for talent has indeed become fluid.”
And in a research paper titled “The Emerging Liquid IT Workforce,” University of Sydney tech analysts in Australia found “new types of ‘on-demand by choice’ IT workforce are constantly emerging, including crowdsourced workers, digital nomadic workers; and, as discussed here, liquid workers.”
Capgemini defines the fluid workforce as “freelancers, independent, gig, or paid-crowdsourced workers. In other words, individuals who work on a temporary basis with organizations.”
A combination of remote workers and Generation Z workers who sometimes prefer short-term work makes this a robust talent pool. They may be riding to the rescue of a workforce that has been through two and a half years of historic change.
First there was the great migration home for remote work during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by all accounts, the workers nailed it. Productivity soared; cybersecurity held; Amazon and Doordash and Netflix sustained a homebound nation.
Then came hybrid work, an awkward in-between period of stops and starts punctuated by COVID variants. Each company, perhaps even each worker, seemed to be navigating their own crooked path back to the office, part time. By most accounts, no one nailed it.
Now, tech is in a recession — even if the rest of the economy is not there yet and may never get there at all. More than 24,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector have been laid off in 2022, according to the tech industry analytics company Crunchbase. Yet tech’s longtime “talent gap” persists. Job postings for software engineers on the employment website Indeed are 114% above their pre-pandemic levels.
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“There is a paradox,” says AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at Indeed. “People are trying to understand. How do you square this?”
Simply put, here’s what happened:
Speculative parts of tech, like cryptocurrency and the “metasphere” of online communities, hired too fast in an effort to develop those emerging technologies. Recession fears were sparked by inflation, the war in Ukraine and ongoing supply chain issues. That caused investors and stockholders in Web3 companies to pull back. Tech stocks plunged as a result.
Now there is a new buzz word in tech: Efficiency. Startups need to show investors an effective path to profitability. Public companies need to show stockholders sustained growth.
That’s where a fluid workforce comes in. It focuses on addressing immediate needs with a variety of different kinds of workers.
“It’s about smartly understanding all the tools in a company’s toolbox,” says Katy Tynan, a principal analyst at Forrester. “Many organizations over-indexed in ‘buying talent’ by hiring long-term. Now they need to shift to ‘borrowing talent’ from an on-demand workforce.”
What should workers do? Stay flexible, and pick up new skills, like familiarity with a widely used platform such as Salesforce, or the rudiments of project management.
“If you have skills and are in the jobs market, you may have leverage,” says Tynan. “I don’t think it’s a bad time to be an employee.”
Workplace designer Primo Orpilla, co-founder of the San Francisco design firm Studio O+A, has worked with some of the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft, Yelp, Slack and Uber.
“I started my career in Sunnyvale and Mountain View before Google,” Orpilla says. “So I’ve seen so many different workplace strategies.”
The combination of remote work, a Generation Z worker pool, and tech companies that need to be efficient may be a powerful combination for a fluid workforce, he says.
“It makes sense to use contractors because they can be highly trained specifically for a task. It takes time to hire and train employees, and that’s hard to do in hybrid work. A fluid workforce can get up to speed quicker.”
But a rocky economy is another challenge for workforces in the 2020s, he says. “To be honest, I think a lot of companies are still just trying to figure things out.”