‘Non-employees’ to power companies, says survey

MUMBAI: The use of nonemployee talent, or employees not on the rolls of organisations, is expected to grow dramatically in India over the next three years, according to the findings of a survey by global advisory firm Willis Towers Watson.At the same time, full-time employees’ share of the total workforce is expected to drop 3.3 percentage points in India and 4.1 percentage points globally over the next three years, stated ‘The 2019 Pathways to Digital Enablement Survey’.“There are two things increasingly happening in work. First is work is increasingly being pulled out of the organisation and being done elsewhere and then being brought in. The second is the growing plurality of means of getting work done,” Willis Towers Watson managing director Ravin Jesuthasan said. “Today, business leaders have a lot of choices on how they get work done. Automation is just one of the different options for them. The various other options could include sending work to talent marketplace, tapping gig workers, using volunteers, etc.,” he added.72233872 The non-employee workforce in India that is seen growing in the next three years includes free agent workers (15%), parttime reduced hour (32%), worker on loan from other organisation (3%) and free agents on talent platforms (230%), the survey said.Several large companies as well as mid- and small-sized companies including startups in India are increasingly using contingent workers to get a lot of their work done, led by specialised time-bound projects that need specific skillsets and urgent delivery.“20-22% of our customers have shifted their payrolls to gig payrolls (hourly or monthly basis payrolls),” said Pankaj Bansal, a co-founder of HR technology and solutions company PeopleStrong. “These include companies across sectors such as manufacturing, IT, IT services, financial services, professional services firms, etc.,” he added.“Enterprises in India do not want to mix hundreds and thousands of people and put them on the payroll; instead they want quality talent to get the work done without having to manage them by themselves,” said Annanya Sarthak, a co-founder at Awign, a technology platform to get work done through gig workforce, which works with companies across sectors such as FMCG, consumer durables, food and beverages, hospitality, banking and financial services, construction and allied services. “We bill the client on the basis of deliverables, not manpower,” said Sarthak, whose company has grown nearly 20 times in turnover since January 2018.A large number of the Indian organisations studied as part of the Willis Towers Watson survey said increasing digitisation was enabling them to use more nonemployee talent and they saw the trend catching up over the next three years. However, the survey also showed that organisations in India struggle to integrate contingent workers and automation.This year’s survey includes responses of more than 6,000 workers from 1,000 organisations globally and 45 organisations in India, across a range of industries.“Business leaders today have various options of getting work done and curating the optimal set of experiences from every human being is one of the biggest leadership challenges,” said Jesuthasan.For Indian organisations, the changes that are happening today due to digitisation include improving collaboration and information sharing, and increasing work flexibility.The areas that, according to Indian companies, would change rapidly in the next three years due to automation and digitisation include the way companies design jobs so they can only be done by employees with more skills and the need to have fewer employees, enabling them to use more nonemployee talent.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2XMafvi