The companies’ digital transformation comes with a historical rise of “freelancing”. A survey analyses how working with freelancers deeply changes management.

The transformation of the companies’ economic models questions the classic entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as the role of company leaders. This mutation comes with an increase of demand for freelancers at all levels of companies.

According to Eurostats, a country like France counts no fewer than 830,000 freelancers which means a 126% increase in only ten years. A recent survey explains how professionals transform the companies and the management. The companies that rely on the services of freelancers on a regular basis give different reasons for their trust in those independent talents.

First of all, they suffer from a shortage of specialised profiles and are aware of their loss of attractiveness towards candidates. Then, the companies that already tested the “freelancing” on one-time projects progressively transformed their habits to make a habit of it.

According to experts, these companies are now ahead of their competitors as far as agility and ability to innovate are concerned.

Five reasons to choose freelancers for your company:

1. Younger workers are always more interested in start-ups and freelancing. Big companies become less attractive.
2.  The digital transformation imposes a greater coordination between internal and external resources to fill in the teams according to the demand or the periods of the year.
3. The companies need to rethink their work organisation because a freelancer working for them today might take on a mission in a concurrent company tomorrow and therefore bring a certain work culture, methods and a personal feeling towards hierarchy.
4. The companies must rethink their management of the human capital because they’re aware they’ll have to adapt themselves to freelance work.
5. The Companies also have to rethink their time and space notions. During their missions, the “freelance” managers bring a different relationship towards time and space. They integrate a team at the workplace with their work schedule for the time of a mission.

In conclusion, good and long-term trust based relationships with freelancers have become a growingly important task of human resources departments across companies. Even though this phenomenon is still largely underestimated.