ABSTRACT
Organizations are increasingly using people who are not employees to perform the work required . . . producing things, providing services and creating new products/services. The practitioner literature has heralded this trend as the arrival of the “gig economy.” Numerous estimates suggest that 40–50% of work in the U.S. will be performed by people who are not employees by 2020. This dramatic change raises workforce management issues. The utilization of contractors and consultants has been common in organizations that do major projects requiring skills and knowledge not available in their workforces for a long time. Entire functions have been outsourced. And volunteers have been widely used by non-profit and charitable organizations. So work being performed by outsiders is not new. But the nature of work is changing rapidly, with more being done in the form of large and complex projects. This magnitude of change raises questions about the approaches that have been used to do workforce planning, staffing, development, performance management and rewards management.
