GigWork – Building your Business Resilience

As organizations globally strive hard to build their new 'future-of-work' models, the standard options on the table include

1. When to return to offices
2. What work can be done permanently from home 
3. Cluster-of-Offices enabling near-home models and as many companies are considering 
4. Hybrid work models that enable and offer staff varying degrees of office presence.

These are all appropriate strategies for managing the current challenges and finding a reasonable way out of this uneasy and anxious situation from both the employer's and the employee's perspectives.

As corporate leaders, we are all missing a massive opportunity if we limit our thinking to these choices. The pandemic has given us a chance to change the way we think. We need to think beyond what and where the work can be done and focus on how effectively work can be done, and resources are engaged meaningfully.

It is time to think seriously about GigWork now! We missed a trick in the heydays of business growth, but a real trigger has awakened us now. GigWork enables building greater resilience in your business. We have all heard of the powerful analogy of how brakes in a car help not just in stopping the car, but in real terms enable the car to speed as it provides the confidence and capability to the driver to stop it at will. Similarly, GigWork, through building resilient capabilities, must be seen as providing shock absorbers to your business to navigate through the inevitable 'bumps in the roads' over your growth journey. Shock absorbers are an interesting metaphor, for enterprises that need to contract and compress their staffing during difficult times and, most importantly, expand quickly and strongly as the green shoots of recovery emerge.

Building your talent force through a thought-through hybrid model of permanent staff and gig staff provides your business a potent competitive and resilient edge. It enables enterprises to manage staffing costs prudently, hire the needed workforce just in time, and, as importantly, build specialist capability from a talent pool across the country and even across the globe! Today's technologies provide all the capabilities to support your business with the Gig-resilience needed. Communication and collaboration tools have been there for a long but have not been exploited quite as much as in times now. They have proven capable, and effective and have even helped enhance productivity to newer levels! Adopting GigWork into hiring models can enable businesses to absorb shocks and help in reconfiguring staffing resources, achieving greater agility, and helping the organization adapt to newer challenges with greater confidence and flexibility.

The time to pivot is now!