Oh, No: Nearly 1 in 2 Business Leaders See Contract Workers as More Productive Than Full-Time Employees

Imagine you’ve worked in IT at ACME Industries for ten years. You work hard. You care. You’re loyal. You’re a company gal or guy.

And then you find out your boss thinks the contractor she hired to install that new man-machine interface is more skilled and more productive than you are.

How would that feel?

While you might think that sounds impossible, think again. In findings just released in Work Market’s 2016 Workforce Productivity Report, 83% of business leaders believe that contract workers are considered more or equally as productive as full-time employees. (Work Market is the leading on-demand workforce management platform.)

And from your perspective, especially if your goal is to someday retire from ACME Industries, it gets even worse: 78% of business leaders believe it is possible that in the near future a Fortune 2000 company will only have full-time employees in the C-suite — the rest will be either part-time or contractor workers.

“The lack of workers with specialized skills and the inability to find the right worker at the right time were cited as two of the top barriers to productivity–so it comes as no surprise that more employers are turning to a workforce model that supplements full-time employees with experienced professionals available on demand,” says Stephen DeWitt, the CEO of Work Market. “Our research also shows that business leaders value the drive, motivation, speed and efficiency of contract workers.”

On one level that makes sense. Most companies bring in contract workers to fill a tactical hole: Their job is to perform a specific task and deliver a measurable outcome. Although you certainly can argue that delivering a measurable outcome is the job of every full-time employee as well — if you aren’t delivering an outcome, why are you there?

(Speaking of productivity, here’s a finding from the survey that makes very little sense: 82% of business leaders agree that productivity is one of the top indicators of financial success, yet only 49% of CEOs and presidents are involved in discussions about driving productivity.)

That could be why contract workers are seen as more productive.

But effectively deploying contract workers — and workers in general — so they are as productive as possible isn’t always easy.

The key is to bring information to bear in a more dynamic and useful fashion. Uber is a great example; Uber couldn’t exist without the tech infrastructure that coordinates the thousands of drivers and customers. Uber’s technology factors all the variables in real-time to make decisions on how work should best be provisioned — automatically.

And that’s why many companies are working to find ways to, in effect, Uber-fy their operations. Improving productivity means improving the use of labor by automating the process of assignment and deployment, whether those workers are contract, part-time, full-time… or, most likely, a combination of all three types — but one that increasingly includes a smaller percentage of full-time employees.

That’s bad news if you’re hoping to retire from ACME Industries, but good news if you’re an entrepreneur.

“The reality of today,” DeWitt says,” is that if you can envision it, the skills necessary to deliver it are at your fingertips. That’s the opportunity and the challenge for small businesses moving forward: you can compete against the largest brands because the big companies no longer have a monopoly on labor. You can build clouds of labor against any business metaphor you envision. The tools are emerging now and will be perfected over the next few years.

“That’s true for us as well,” Stephen continues. “The whole reason we started our company was to create a frictionless exchange between any worker, any enterprise, and any task. Now any small business can take the power of a completely connected society and harness the tools to tap into the mosaic of labor to drive greater productivity. The tools are at your fingertips. You just have to use them.”

That might be bad news for some of the folks at ACME, but it could be very good news for every entrepreneur who has a great idea and needs to find the right skills to help bring it to life.