Meet the Chief Freelance Officer.
Ensuring that there’s someone who has taken the time to design the way in which your teams find, onboard, integrate, support and build relationships with your external talent, is critical as more businesses move towards flexible work forces.
Depending on which research you read, remote workers will outweigh on-site employees by 2030, and over half of the workforce will be self-employed by the same year.
Whilst I think we’ve got a little longer to go than ten years for self-employment to be the norm (the UK is currently at 15%), within certain sectors, this number is already significantly high enough to take attention, and increasing numbers of businesses are relying more upon freelance and external talent.
Within the creative industries, many agencies use freelancers are a core part of their workforce and ability to deliver for their clients. Some agencies are upwards of 40% freelance, flexing the size of their teams for specific projects and times of the year. Some agencies are building their entire business model on having no employees, using on-demand talent to fit the briefs that come in.
Regardless of your model — there’s no denying that modern teams currently and will continue to combine internal and external people, working together. Yet, more often than not, there is no individual who take responsibility for designing the experience which freelancers have, or making sure that teams are integrating new and temporary talent effectively.
This lack of design leads to three major problems:
Teams run at a cost to your business if not designed well.
When you’re hiring an external member of your team, you’re usually paying a price-premium. This premium is often because a) you’re accessing a specialist and b) you’re accessing them on demand, and let’s face it c) you’re not having to invest in their development, support, growth and wellbeing.
Research suggests that over 70% of teams are ineffective, which directly leads to cost impact — some estimates put that cost at over £8000 per employee every year due to ineffective teams.
Without appropriate on boarding, support and integration — you’re paying a premium on someone being less effective than they could be. We’ve heard stories of people waiting around in reception, not being able to access the network, waiting to be briefed. Literally hours of paying for someone to ‘wait’ to get started, and that’s before they’ve even begun.
Teams create poorer results if not designed well.
Just throwing people at a problem rarely works, so why do we expect it work when freelancers are involved?
Without a good briefing, on-project support, codification around how your working culture behaves and what is expected, time is going to be wasted by not working in an effective manner — perhaps outputs need to be reworked, or there’s miscommunication over what was required, or simply the work done is not what as impactful as it could have been.
This problem is often masked — most talented freelancers will work harder to fix things, and ensure that the quality of work is to the standard they hold themselves to — yet this leads to stress on both the freelancer and the client, and more often than not, squashed timescales to deliver the work.
Talent become less available if you don’t create the right environment.
If we are increasingly reliant upon external talent — which we believe is a good thing (access to specialist talent on-demand and access to meaningful work for people who want to work on projects) — and you’re not creating the best possible experience for your people (no matter the employment contract), you will not be able to attract talent.
You won’t be able to access the people you need — at best, you’ll only hire people you can find quickly, at worst, you’ll be boycotted as a bad employer. Creating environments and best practise for engaging with your future workforce means your future work is sustainable.
But, this doesn’t need to be the case, and I believe that there’s increasingly a need for a new role within agencies.
Introducing the Chief Freelance Officer.
The Chief Freelance Officer is responsible for the design of the experience and effectiveness of external talent within your business.
+ They’re accountable for ensuring that your business is investing well in specialist and temporary talent, that you’re getting the most from the people you work with, and giving them what’s needed to do a great job.
+ They ensure your network of relationships with external individuals is strong, so you’re able to find the people you need in a timely fashion.
+ They’re responsible for ensuring the project team integrates the external member effectively, and they’re supported throughout, and [probably most importantly for many freelancers] that invoices are paid on-time.
+ They know what your business is spending on external talent, how many people you’ve worked with recently, and where to find others.
+ They’re responsible for ensuring contracts and legal process exists to support both you and the individual, without being overly onerous.
+ They’re responsible for shifting the mindset from freelancers being “on-demand overflow” to accessing brilliant specialist talent when the time is right, and ensuring that your business is creating a sustainable pipeline of people, who you invest in and care about.
Whether or not, this is an individual role or not — the responsibility for ensuring that external people are well on-boarded, supported and able to do good work is critical, and requires a different approach to working with internal teams.
If the future of work is more independent, mission-based and autonomous, we need to design for how people and businesses work in partnership. The Chief Freelance Officer is a key new role in the modern work place.
I work with businesses who
want to ensure they’re
working brilliantly with others.
I’m collecting thoughts on the Chief Freelance Officer at chieffreelanceofficer.co.uk.
Using techniques and tools developed from over fifteen years of designing hybrid temporary teams, as well as a consultative approach, I can help you design better ways of working when creating teams that combine freelancers and internal members of staff.
If you’d like to understand more about implementing this role, to audit how you’re currently doing, or want to work together to create better experiences for freelancers, drop me a note.
y+x — work better with others.
