MIT and Deloitte recently released Orchestrating Workforce Ecosystems, which is the 3rd year in their ongoing study of how corporations are managing work across organizational boundaries. Key quote on the project:
"This research finds that as organizations increasingly rely on both internal and external contributors, successful leaders are recognizing the complexity of these workforce ecosystems and adapting their management practices to support these new systems."
In other words, organizations are figuring out how to build and manage teams that increasingly include nonemployee participants, such as freelancers, independent contractors, and other forms of nonemployee labor.
MIT and Deloitte identify the most advanced firms at managing workforce ecosystems of employee and nonemployee labor as "Intentional Orchestrators."
As the report chart below shows (click to enlarge), Intentional Orchestrators comprise 22% of the firms sampled in this study.
According to the report, Intentional Orchestrators have five common characteristics. They are far more likely than other organizations to:
- Closely coordinate cross-functional management of internal and external workers.
- Hire and engage the internal and external talent they need.
- Support managers seeking to hire external workers.
- Have leadership that understands how to allocate work for internal and external contributors.
- Align their workforce approach with their business strategy.
Our big takeaway from this study is that the debate around whether or not nonemployee labor is an important and growing component of corporate workforces is over.
As the chart above shows, only 18% of organizations surveyed aren't taking steps to improve how they integrate and manage external talent as part of their workforces.
The vast majority of Organizations (82%) are now focused on effectively building and managing workforces combining traditional employees and external talent.
